Just Babies Read Online Free Page A

collaborator Karen Wynn is giving a public talk about conducting research with baby subjects, she puts up a picture of a slug for comparison.
    You might think that psychologists scan babies’ brains, and, indeed, some researchers have made a promising start at this. But the brain-imaging methods designed for use with adults often are not suitable for babies because they are too dangerous or because the subjects must remain awake but still for a long period of time. Certain specialtechniques, such as near-infrared spectroscopy, can be more easily used with babies, and might lead to important discoveries in the future. But at this point, the data they yield—about changes in blood oxygenation in parts of the brain—tell us little about the specifics of mental life. If you want to know where in the baby’s brain some cognitive process is taking place, these methods are the cat’s pajamas. But they are typically too insensitive to answer more precise questions about how babies think and what they know.
    Fortunately, we have better methods. In the 1980s, psychologists began making use of one of the few behaviors that young babies can control: the movement of their eyes. These really are windows into the baby’s soul. How long babies stare at an object or a person—their “looking time”—can tell you a lot about their understanding.
    One specific looking-time method is habituation. Like adults, if babies see the same thing over and over again, they’ll get bored and look away. Boredom—or “habituation”—is a response to sameness, so this method reveals what babies see as similar and as different. Suppose you were interested in whether babies can tell dogs from cats. Show them pictures of cats over and over again, until they get bored with cats. Then show them a picture of a dog. If they perk up, they can detect a difference; if they are still bored, then they can’t—for them, cat, cat, dog is the same as cat, cat, cat.
    More generally, looking-time methods can help assess what someone finds to be new, interesting, or unexpected. Such methods are particularly well suited for babies.The psychologist Alison Gopnik points out that adult attentioncan be captured by external events—we will instinctively turn if someone calls our name, say—but we usually have control over what to attend to. By sheer will, we can choose to think about our left foot, visualize what we had for breakfast, and so on. But babies are largely at the mercy of the environment. The part of the brain responsible for inhibition and control, the prefrontal cortex, is among the last to develop. Gopnik compares baby consciousness to that of an adult dumped into the middle of a foreign city, totally overwhelmed, constantly turning to see new things, struggling to make sense of it all. Things are even worse for a baby, actually, because even the most stressed-out adult can choose to think of something else: we can look forward to getting back to the hotel; imagine how we would describe our trip to friends; fantasize, daydream, or pray. The baby just is , trapped in the here and now. No wonder babies are often so fussy. Luckily for researchers, their lack of internal control means that they are vulnerable to our methods.
    Looking-time studies are difficult to construct, in part because one has to be careful to make sure that babies are responding to the right thing. For example, many studies find that babies distinguish two objects from three objects. If you bore the babies by showing them a series of pictures of two objects—two dogs, two chairs, two shoes, et cetera—and then show them a picture of three objects, they will look longer, suggesting that they can tell the difference between two and three. But a skeptic will point out that two objects typically take up less space than three, so perhaps babies are responding to the space that the objectsfill up—less versus more. One can try to address this by contrasting two bigger objects and three