YOUR DEVELOPMENTthat the senses start off cross-wired, so babies might well hear sights
and see noises.
What about the infant’s mind? One striking characteristic that differs
from a mature mind is the baby’s attentional focus. Whereas an adult
surveys the world with the selective focus of a spotlight, the mind of a
baby or young child is wider – in the words of developmental psycholo-
gist Alison Gopnik, it’s more like a “lantern”. Gopnik likens this state of
mind to the experience of a first visit to a foreign city where every exotic
sight and sound grabs your interest. By adult standards, the infant or
child, like the tourist, might well appear woefully distractible and unfo-
cused, but given the main goal of early life is to learn, the baby’s mental
openness is ideal.
You can demonstrate the advantage of lantern-style attention using a
simple task in which you challenge children and adults to remember the
left-hand card in a series of card pairs. As you might expect, compared
with adults, children will usually perform less well at remembering the
left-hand cards. However, given an unexpected test on one of the earlier
right-hand cards, youngsters will typically outperform the adults. We’re
better at zooming in, but kids, it seems, are superior at processing the
bigger picture.
Look this way
Psychologists who choose to conduct research with babies need to
be extremely patient, as the little bundles of joy aren’t always the
most cooperative research participants. They can’t be interviewed,
fill out questionnaires or follow instructions. That’s why psychologists
often deploy a technique known as the “preferential-looking time”
procedure. It draws on a reliable feature of infant behaviour, which
is that they get bored when things don’t change and look longer at
things that surprise them. Show a baby a display with sixteen dots
until they’re bored, for example, then reduce the dots by half and
they’ll start looking again, thus suggesting they can tell the difference
between quantities. The technique can also reveal preferences, for
instance that babies prefer the sight of their mother’s face to that of a
stranger. And it can be used to test babies’ expectations. They’ll tend
to look longer if you set up a mini-illusion in which a ball appears to
roll through a solid object, thus suggesting they’re born with an innate,
(or rapidly acquired) sense of physics. A variation on the preferential-
looking time procedure is the “high-amplitude sucking-preference
procedure”, which capitalizes on the fact that babies suck harder from
a nipple when they’re more interested in something.