In the last of this series of posts, I want to talk about some contemporary research in developmental psychology which offers clues to the experience of a small child. Last time, I mentioned how the Maurers had made good use of scientific knowledge about infant perception in their imagining of the world of the newborn. With further advances in knowledge since the time the Maurers were writing in the late 1980s, we now have a detailed picture of these perceptual capacities. We know that babies' visual acuity (the clarity of their vision) starts off pretty poor and improves quickly, so that by about eight months it is close to that of an adult. Babies' colour vision is very similar to an adult's by around four months, and newborns show many of the same perceptual constancies that adults do. (To see an example of a perceptual constancy in action, try holding a book in front of you at an angle. The actual shape that hits your eyes will be something like a parallelogram, but you will perceive it as a rectangle. Essentially, your brain makes adjustments to the distortion of the shape caused by the angling.) All of these facts give us important clues for imagining what the world looks like to an infant, and this body of knowledge is being added to all the time.
We also have a rapidly changing picture of the social world of infants. Those asocial blobs described by past psychological theories are now seen as having complex and sophisticated social lives. We now know that babies are attuned to their social partners from the very first days of life, and that in turn helps us to imagine how the world must look to them. For example, a study by Farroni and colleagues showed that newborn babies, despite rather terrible visual acuity, could tell the difference between a face that was looking at them directly and one whose eyes were averted. The babies preferred looking at the face with the direct gaze, suggesting sensitivity to this important social cue from right after birth. In my book, I speculate on what this might mean for the infant's view of the world.
Modern technology has also played its part in developing our picture of a baby's experience. Recent advances in camera technology have led to the development of head-mounted video cameras and eye-tracking equipment which could only have been dreamed of by previous generations of researchers. The result has been a clearer understanding than ever of where babies and toddlers look and how they construct a visual scene. Such studies have shown that young children don't attend to a small group of objects, as we would typically do, but rather bring them into their zone of attention (often with conspicuous, whole-body movements) one at a time. Analysis of footage taken by head-mounted video cameras shows lots of interest in people's hands (the baby's own, and those of the parents).
Finally, the growth of developmental cognitive neuroscience, whose proponents try to map developing psychological capacities onto changes in brain function, has given us a whole new way of thinking about the mental world of the baby. In her forthcoming book, The Philosophical Baby, the cognitive scientist Alison Gopnik argues that the study of brain activation in adults, combined with what we know about how a baby's brain is wired up, gives us an important clue to what consciousness is like for small children. Babies lack crucial inhibitory circuits which shut down certain irrelevant parts of the brain while attention is focused on a particular task. Because they are neurologically incapable of focusing their attention like we can, babies remain open to all the experiences around them. Rather than being a tightly focused spotlight, infant consciousness is like a lantern, ready to shine its light on everything around it. Gopnik's intriguing conclusion is that babies, barely credited with proper awareness by scientists of the past, are in some ways more conscious than we are4.
Works Cited
For an overview of research on perceptual development in infancy, see Philip J. Kellman and Martha E. Arterberry, The cradle of knowledge: Development of perception in infancy, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998.
Teresa Farroni et al., "Eye contact detection in humans from birth", PNAS, 9th July 2002, pp. 9602-9605
Yoshida, H., & Smith, L. B. (2008). What's in view for toddlers? Using a head camera to study visual experience. Infancy, 13, 229-248.
For more on Gopnik's ideas, see Jonah Lehrer's piece in the Boston Globe.
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