How Kids Learn
Babies are quick studies-and parents are cramming them with Mozart and French lessons
There is increasing evidence that babies also come equipped with an astounding set of rules about how the world works. On a colorfully painted puppet-show stage, psychologist Renee Baillargeon of the University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign times how long 2- to 15-month-old babies look at simple magic tricks, such as a toy bear that disappears after being lowered into a box. Like adults at a magic show, babies will stare longer when their expectations aren't met. At 2 1/2 months, babies are surprised by the bear's disappearance and will look longer than at a show where the bear remains in the box. She has concluded that even infants understand that objects should be permanent in time and space.
Baby logic. At the same time, Baillargeon is gaining insight into what babies don't understand. Before 3 months, for example, they seem to believe that as long as one object is touching another, the two should stick together. By that principle, a pen placed on the wall should not fall. "This is probably why babies' chairs are surrounded by 92 things on the floor," Baillargeon says.
By 8 months, the neurons in the hippocampus, which plays a critical role in memory, have developed to the point where babies can remember specific items and events. Research by the University of Minnesota's Nelson has shown that by that age, babies can distinguish the picture of a wooden toy they were allowed to feel, but not see, from pictures of other toys. By the age of 1 year, babies have gained so many skills-toddling, prattling, feeding themselves-that they seem more akin to adults than to the helpless sleepers they were a few short months earlier. This sudden maturity stems from a combination of new experiences and new synaptic connections in the brain, particularly in the prefrontal cortex, which lies just behind the forehead. Like a conductor in an orchestra, the prefrontal cortex keeps track of what's going on in time and space, and it coordinates everything from problem solving and creativity to self-awareness. Thanks to this, 18-month-olds can learn to do tasks such as pushing a button, even if the adult demonstrating the task tries, but deliberately fails, to push it.
By the time they're 2, babies are able to navigate their world. At Temple University's Infant Lab, outside Philadelphia, researchers bury a toy in a round sandbox in a stark, white room while a toddler watches. Then the child is turned around several times with his eyes covered. With just a chair against the wall to orient him, the child has to find the toy. Psychologist Nora Newcombe has found that those under 21 months are baffled by the test, because spatial skills require more brainpower than verbal skills. But at 21 months, as the right hemisphere of the cerebral cortex develops, the children become remarkably adept at what the experts call spatial coding-using cues from the environment to get their bearings.
With more-sophisticated brain wiring and a growing understanding of how the world works, children in the second year of life start to develop social and emotional skills, which help in learning academic skills such as reading and math. "Emotions are responsible for generating ideas," says Stanley Greenspan, who teaches psychiatry at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. After all, he says, the desire to eat or open a door is the motivation for developing language and communicating concepts to others.
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