Babies' brains are more sophisticated than we ever believed
In the past 30 years we’ve learnt more about babies and young children than in the preceding 2,500 years and that has given us new ideas about human nature itself — about knowledge and imagination, truth and consciousness. Thirty years ago most psychologists and philosophers thought that babies and young children were basically defective adults — irrational and egocentric, unable to think logically, take another person’s perspective or reason causally.
This was evident in three very recent experiments. First Professor Fei Xu, of the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, took a group of one-year-old babies and showed them a box full of mixed-up ping-pong balls — 80 per cent white and 20 per cent red. The babies were more surprised, and looked more intently at the researcher when she pulled four red balls in a row out of the box, a statistically unlikely though possible...