THE ROUGH GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGYHe sat children in front of two large cookies or marshmallows and told
them that they could have one now if they wanted, but if they waited
five minutes for the researcher to return they could have both. Chil-
dren younger than three couldn’t resist the immediate temptation, but
between the ages of three and five, reflecting the maturation of the pre-
frontal cortex, the children’s ability to defer gratification improved. The
older children even began using neat strategies to distract themselves
from the temptation, such as covering their eyes or singing.
The role of the imagination provides a final insight into early child-
hood development. Babies are like little scientists (see box on p.113),
but from about one year old, they’re also like little novelists and film
directors: personifying objects, role-playing, pretending and talking to
imaginary friends. You could say these behaviours are laying the ground-
work for what makes us distinctly human – the ability to consider other
possible worlds, to think about what might be. The precociousness of
the imagination is remarkable. One-year-olds already seem to grasp
when someone is feigning surprise or rage. Two-year-olds know how
to play along if an adult is pretending to be a bear and yet on another
level they know that this isn’t really the case. Three-year-olds understand
that different fantasy worlds are separate – for example, that Batman can
Precocious talents
Infants and young kids aren’t just great learners, they also come with
a range of mental abilities that are either inbuilt or emerge extremely
early on in life. An ability that parents can’t fail to notice is that of
mimicry. Classic studies in the 1970s showed that newborns are able
to copy sticking out a tongue, lip-pursing, mouth opening, and even
simple sequences of finger movements. Curiously, these abilities,
like many others including face recognition, can briefly disappear or
deteriorate before reappearing again – a sign that development isn’t
always linear, and that sometimes old tricks are later performed in new
ways by a more mature mind.
Another great example of infant precociousness comes from
research on the psychology of music. Ross Flom and his co-workers
at Brigham Young University played a video and music to babies aged
either three or nine months. The video showed a man or woman’s
face with a neutral expression and the babies soon grew bored of it.
However, when the researchers switched the mood of the music, either
from happy to sad or vice versa, the older babies became interested in
the video again, suggesting that even at their tender age they could
already hear the difference between happy jingles and mournful dirges.