24 JUL 2011 by ideonexus
The Word Explosion in Infants
Babies first bridge the gap between sounds and meaning as early as nine or ten months of age. They learn the names of family members and pets, the meaning of no! and perhaps a few general labels like shoe and cookie. By his first birthday, the average child understands around seventy words, mostly nouns like people's names and terms for objects, but also certain social expressions, like hi and bye-bye. Of course, he cannot say nearly that many. The median number of words spoken by a one-year-... 1 
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notesWhen children learn about four-dozen words, they suddenly begin to learn many more at an accelerated pace.
08 JUL 2011 by ideonexus
Babies are Scientists
Babies start out believing that there are profound similarities between their own mind and the minds of others. That belief gives them a jump start in solving the Other Minds problem. But during the first three years they also observe the differences in what people do and say. Those differences stem from the fact that all minds aren't actually entirely alike. Babies and young children watch and listen with careful focused interest as their mother refuses to let them touch the lamp cord or as ... 1 notes
notesTheir drive to play is a drive to explore, they are equipped with the cognitive and physical tools to explore their world and feed their curiosity about it.
08 JUL 2011 by ideonexus
Nature VS Nurture in Child Development
When a three-month-old, a one-year-old, and a four-year-old look at the same event, they seem to have very different thoughts about it. They seem to transform the light waves and sound waves into different representations, and they use different rules to manipulate those representations. Children don't have just a single, fixed program that gets from input to output. Instead, they seem to switch spontaneously from using one program to using another, more powerful program. That makes babies an... 1 notes
notesAre babies programmed to go through their cognitive developments or are they the natural result of their reaching a certain critical mass of understanding?
07 JUL 2011 by ideonexus
Babies Look to Mothers for Cues on How to React to the World
Other experiments also show that one-year-olds have a radically new understanding of people. What happens when you show a baby something new, something a little strange, maybe wonderful, maybe dangerous—say, a walking toy robot? The baby looks over at Mom quizzically and checks her out. What does she think? Is there a reassuring smile or an expression of shocked horror? One-year-olds will modify their own reactions accordingly. If there's a smile, they'll crawl forward to investigate; if th... 1 notes
notesWhen presented with an unknown, the infant will look to the mother's expression to understand how it should react and if it should engage.
