What do babies think?

Understanding how children think is important to all of us as a species as it helps us create an environment where we can favor optimal development. Although there are many ways to look at this concern, this paper will focalize on relating ideas from Alison gopnik’s “What do babies think?” TEDtalk presentation with more in depth knowledge about the topic. Alison raises the very interesting relation that exists between the length of childhood and intelligence across different species. She explains this by comparing crows to chickens and linking it with what we can observe in humans (Gopnik, 2011). In fact humans are the most intelligent specie because they have the longest childhood comparatively and therefor spend more time on development. Because our development is so vital to our intelligence it ultimately also makes childhood a period where we are more vulnerable and suggestive to what is in our environment. The development period is very important in shaping an individual. Experiences will greatly influence the personality and wellbeing of a person. Relating back to Alison Gopnik, this raises the importance of development and of helping children learn properly as she implies that they are research and development whilst adults are production and marketing (Gopnik, 2011). The belief being that if research and marketing are improved then with time production and marketing will follow. In conjunction with the results of Harlow’s monkey experiment, we can see the importance of parental care in development. Improving development in children is a nice goal but to properly discuss this an understanding of thinking in children is necessary. Young children are born with a world to discover. Children possess unique learning capabilities to help with this. It allows them to notice the smallest details. Research has shown that babies were able to distinguish faces of different very similar monkeys where professionals of monkeys wouldn’t be able to (BBC, 2009). This display of fine attention to detail is what provides them with their impressive learning capabilities. Alison Gopnik wanted to prove that despite babies appearing to be less knowledgeable than us in comparison they actually learned very complicated things. Alison described this by comparing 15 months old babies with 18 months old babies. With her broccoli and cracker experiment she demonstrates that children do learn a lot. Children not only show that they have understood that other people are different by 18 months of age, they also seem to want to help the other person get what they want (Gopnik, 2011). Her beliefs line up with Rousseau’s belief of learning in children according to which babies are moral beings that become altered by the experiences they face in the world (Doyle & Smith, 2007). Alison Gopnik presents a research by Cristine Legare that examined the thinking process a four year old went through to reach a final conclusion. Results from this research showed that when it came to finding unlikely, improbable statistics, children were better at finding the solution (Legare, 2012). These results suggest that young children use the Bayes probability model of thinking (Gopnik, 2011). This model is good as it allows faster understanding. However, it is also flawed as it requires full understanding to yield any results (Rieber, 1969). This highlights the clear change that occurs in our thinking as we move further along our development.

CRITICAL ANALYSIS

An evolutionary perspective on learning in children can help understand how the length of our childhood is ultimately responsible for our higher intelligence. To show this, Gopnik looks at the relation between intelligence and the duration of the developmental period across different species. She takes a comparative approach to children’s learning by viewing how animals growth occurs in different species. Chickens are fully mature within months whilst crows get fed by their mothers for two years (Gopnik, 2012). Chicken aren’t very smart and they are at the bottom of the chain. They don’t need to do much else but see grains and peck them out. To develop those skills it does not take long and so they become independent rather quickly. Crows are a lot smarter and they can do a lot more than chickens. And so, Gopnik argues, a longer childhood across species predicts a more intelligent race that has its period of learning prolonged because it has more to learn. Humans children are dependent for the longest period of time comparatively to any other animal. Humans also have the biggest brain to body ratio. This gives us an intelligence beyond borders that allow us to adapt to any environment and survive everywhere (Gopnik, 2012). Although we are smarter, we also need more time to develop into a being that can properly cope with the world. And so, negative events in childhood can have a more lasting effect on a person’s development and ultimately reflects the vulnerability that we face as children. Harlow’s controversial monkey experiment shows to what point parental care is important in a child’s development. In his experiment, he observes the behavior of a monkey when he is thrown into a strange room with new things inside of it. He looks at how the baby reacts when he is alone in the room and when the artificial mother is present. When he is thrown in alone he does not adventure and is scared. When the artificial mother is there, the baby monkey would be startled at first and seek comfort from the artificial furry mother. Once it got its dose of comfort it began adventuring and behaving like a normal happy curious baby. For positive response patterns to appear the baby monkey needed comfort from his maternal figure (Harlow, 2012). If we take this onto humans then it shows how for proper learning to occur in children and for them to take on challenging situations they must receive appropriate care from their parental figures. If the child does not receive sufficient care than his learning will be halted as he will lack the comfort to broaden his knowledge and to take on the unknown. This ultimately underlines the importance of development in children especially in our specie where limits to growth seem to be endless. Alison Gopnik describes children thinking as being characterized by broader attention whilst adult’s thinking is more focused towards a purpose or driven by intention. Children are great at taking in information from multiple sources but have more trouble narrowing down on one thing (Gopnik, 2012). This makes them great learners as they are constantly reevaluating and assessing everything around them. It provides them with a greater openness to the world and allows them to see the true uniqueness of all things and beings. This is better described in a research shown in a BBC coverage. The research takes on two groups; one with babies over six months of age and one with babies under six month. Pictures of different lemurs were shown to the two groups. The group of babies over six months of age were interested by the first picture of a lemur and the picture was changed once they showed habituation calculated by boredom. When the following pictures of different lemurs were shown the babies displayed habituation thus indicating they did not see a difference in the pictures and thought it was the same lemur. Babies under six months of age would however kept displaying interest when pictures of different lemurs were shown. This indicates that they could notice the small differences across different lemurs. This is a very impressive ability as even adult professionals who work with lemurs for a living cannot differentiate these animals faces but babies can (BBC, 2009). On the other hand, this is not a very useful ability as we live in a world of humans and so babies lose this ability so they can focus on other abilities. Synaptic pruning refers to the elimination of synapses based on use. A synapse is where neurotransmitters are released from the axon which is responsible for post synaptic potential. If a synapse dies then the ability created by the postsynaptic potential disappears (Purves & Fitzgerald, ). To counter the synaptic pruning that occurs, the ability must be used. If an ability is not used it is eliminated so that there is more place for the abilities that are used to flourish and grow. This accounts for our impressive ability to adapt as it reveals that we begin life being able to take in anything and slowly lose what unnecessary abilities so that those we need can be refined. If you use a synapse like the one allowing you to say certain phonetics in english, you will keep that synapse. But if you don’t use it then it dies out. An example of this we viewed in class is the two “Da” sounds in indian. Babies in english environments differentiate the two sounds despite never hearing them whilst the english adults don’t. It is normal that as we specialize and attempt to focus our efforts in directing our life in a particular direction we lose the abilities that are unnecessary to us. By puberty more than half of our synapses have died out. The detail to attention diminishes but at the same type we gain the ability to focus on what really matters to us and our intentions. This is necessary as well as it is this ability to tune out things that are not relevant to our immediate actions that allows us to focus on one particular task or problem. But, by tuning out certain details that we feel are not relevant than we ultimately miss out potential factors that could ultimately lead to a better understanding such as the one children have. Now although young children might have a brain that allows them to capture more of what is happening around them, their mind learns things in a “all or nothing” fashion. In an experiment, Morton Rieber found that when given a task to understand, children who did not learn the task in the allotted number of trials would not display any form of learning or gradual understanding of the task (Rieber, 1969). This means that the rule practice makes perfect doesn’t apply as well to children as to adults where it is more of a understanding makes perfect. Kids are open to learning everything and have the ability to do it optimally. Adults have large amounts of knowledge in the areas that are relevant to their lives but have less receptiveness to what surrounds them then children. Alison conducted an experiment using broccoli, crackers and deception. She had a bool of crackers and broccoli in front of a child. She ate from both and pretended to like the broccoli and not the crackers and vice versa for the other half of the time. The 15months old babies gave her crackers as it was what they liked. The 18 months old babies gave her the item she seemed to prefer. Alison demonstrated that at 15 months of age babies do not understand that what other people want and like is different from what they view but that at 18 months of age they understood this (Gopnik, 1997). This proves that in 3 months time they had learnt the profound fact of life that people are different. Now when we think about what a complicated fact that is and how much learning it actually reflects, we can better imagine how much learning children truly do.It also showed that the baby wanted to help the person get what they want as they gave the experimenter the broccoli if she seemed to like it even though the baby didn’t. Babies can be viewed as inherently good with this in mind thus supporting Rousseau’s view of development (Doyle & Smith, 2007). Alison invoked Tomas Bayes description of thinking in babies which describe it as a constant revision of probabilities paired with complicated calculations in an attempt to understand the world. To support this she described results of the blicket detector experiment where she used boxes that would light up two out of three times when waving an object on top rather than two out of six times when placing the object on top of the box. She found that children were quicker at catching onto the first improbable statistic than adults (Gopnik, 2012). She also showed a video of Cristine Legare’s blicket box experiment where we see a four year old boy go through five hypothesis to determine that one box lit up with two objects on top whilst the other needed four objects on top. The experiment highlighted well the probabilistic theory revising that children us to process the world. The child did not constrict the hypothesis to the norms of common sense and showed a more outside the box approach to solve the problem (Gopnik, 2012). Thinking in children is focused on discovery without any expectations. Thinking in adults uses preexisting knowledge to push understanding of new situations. Thinking in children will address improbable possibilities whilst thinking in adults will be able to go more directly into a topic as it will be able to use preexisting knowledge to find a solution. One way of thinking about it is not necessarily better but depending on the outcome you are looking for, one way might be more convenient than the other. And so, in some situations children thinking will be better and in others adults thinking will be better. In relation to Alison Gopnik’s views Children’s thinking is better for research and development better whilst adults thinking is more effective for production and marketing.

CONCLUSION

Looking at humans from an evolutionary point of view allows us to understand at what point our developmental stage is important. Our intelligence, the size of our brains and the lengthy childhood we endure all imply that we will encounter and process vast amount of information to become part of the world. This highlights the importance of our experiences to our development and our learning abilities usefulness early in life. If we have so much to learn, the argument can be made that we need to be able to learn very fast and have a very broad attention if we don’t want it to take forever. And so we are ... At first. But our brain operates differently at different stages of life. Babies thinking is ultimately characterized by a broader focus, a deeper attention to detail and a probabilistic way of seeing the world. This thinking although great for learning and development hinders the ability to focus on what is important in the moment and can be overwhelming. Adults thinking is great for a more narrow view of things and allows for previous knowledge to improve the ability to cope with the unknown. However, what we gain by being able to operate in this fashion, we lose through synaptic pruning. To improve what we need in our lives we need to makes space in the brain by letting go of what we don’t use. I do not agree with Alison Gopnik’s opinion of adults needing to be more like children. I believe that evolution has made us perfectly balanced in a way as we have a greater ability to learn as a child when we need it and a greater ability to apply our knowledge as a grown up when we need it. And so, to feel better about what we lose through synaptic pruning we should focus on improving the experiences that do shape us. We need to stop underestimating children and respect their ability to learn but we do not need to be more like them. I believe we need to respect their learning abilities better and let children shape their development more.. Seeing as their learning potential is unimaginable to us, how would the world be if we let children chose what they want to learn at school rather than imposing it on them?

Written by: Soufiane Bouhmouch

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