Cognition, Part II

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“… I have defined the cognitive system as consisting of the separate specialized mechanisms of the central assembly: perception, the motoric, and memory… they all process information in one or another of several different ways….”

— Silvan Tomkins, 1992 (p. 13)

“… nothing deserves certainty, and so one ought always to hold all one’s beliefs with a certain element of doubt and one ought to be able to act vigorously in spite of the doubt… there’s no shortcut to knowledge.”

— Bertrand Russell, 1960 (pp. 17, 19)

For several months, we have been exploring the three keys to human development:

• Emotions
• Language
• Cognition

Last month, we discussed "Cognition Part I: Relatedness—and Cognition," or the importance of the infant or child’s relationships in enhancing cognitive development.

This month, we will examine how smart infants and young children are, and how important it is to maintain that trajectory by supporting their interest and curiosity.

Cognition Part II: Infants and Young Children Are Smarter Than We Think: Recent Studies of Cognitive Development

Here we will emphasize some recent directions in cognitive issues while realizing their integration with emotions, language, and relatedness. Dr. Alison Gopnik is at the center of helping us understand how babies and young children think and learn. “Even the youngest children know, experience, and learn far more than scientists ever thought possible,” she notes (2010, p. 76). Gopnik, with her co-authors Andrew Meltzoff and Patricia Kuhl, wrote an engaging book on these issues titled The Scientist in the Crib: Minds, Brains, and How Children Learn. The authors discuss a variety of studies that they and their colleagues have conducted over the years to show what goes on in the minds of infants and small children.

For instance, they found that: 18-month-olds can understand preferences in other people which differ from their own (“I might want one thing, whereas you want another,” aka the beginnings of empathy); babies understand the relation between a statistical sample and a population; and young children use statistical evidence and experiments to determine cause and effect. Or, as Daniel Stern notes, “From birth on, there appears to be a central tendency to form and test hypotheses about what is occurring in the world. Infants are constantly ‘evaluating,’ in the sense of asking, is this different from or the same as that?” (1985, p. 42).

Let’s take a look at some of these experiments. For example, Gopnik and her colleagues wondered if 18-month-olds (toddlers) could understand that “I might want one thing, whereas you want another” (2010, p. 78).

Here’s what they did:

An experimenter showed … 18-month-olds a bowl of raw broccoli and a bowl of Goldfish crackers and then tasted some of each, making either a disgusted face or a happy face. Then she put her hand out and asked, “Could you give me some?” The 18-month-olds gave her broccoli when she acted as if she liked it, even though they would not choose it for themselves (p. 78).

This would suggest the toddlers had the capacity to understand another person’s perspective. Gopnik also studied 14-month-olds, and these younger children always gave the experimenter the Goldfish crackers! This suggests a developmental change as the child gets older.

Babies also seem to understand the relation between a statistical sample and a population. In one study, an experimenter:

Showed eight-month-old … babies a box full of mixed-up Ping-Pong balls: for instance, 80 percent white and 20 percent red. The experimenter would then take out five balls, seemingly at random. The babies were more surprised (that is, they looked longer and more intently at the scene) when the experimenter pulled four red balls and one white out of the box—an improbable outcome—than when she pulled out four white balls and one red one.

Other experiments showed how preschoolers used probabilities to see how a machine worked.

We repeatedly put one of two blocks on the machine. The machine lit up two out of three times with the yellow block but only two out of six times for the blue one. Then we gave the children the blocks and asked them to light up the machine. These children, who could not yet add or subtract, were more likely to put the high-probability yellow block on the machine (p. 79).

Interestingly, in some studies, children were actually better than adults in considering unusual possibilities and correctly finding the causal patterns. Gopnik and her colleagues showed four-year-olds and adults a machine:

That worked in an odd way, requiring two blocks on it together to make it go. The four-year-olds were better than the adults at grasping this unusual causal structure. The adults seemed to rely more on their prior knowledge that things usually do not work that way, even though the evidence implied otherwise for the machine in front of them (p. 80).

Cognition Essential Reads

The Psychology of Seeing Faces in the Clouds

Language Can Be a Powerful Tool in Our Healing

Disorders of Cognition

It is useful to consider how cognition can be compromised. Optical illusions are only the easiest example. Mistakes in perception and memory can readily compromise cognition and reality processing. As we saw previously, emotional problems and inhibition of interest or curiosity can interfere with early cognitive opportunities and processes. John Gedo, M.D., was a prominent psychoanalyst who died just recently. He wrote a brief, rather technical, summary of disorders of cognition:

Disorders of cognition are discussed in chapter 12. The most common forms encountered in psychoanalysis are magical thinking and obsessionality, which may occur together or separately. Delusions may temporarily appear as aspects of deep therapeutic regression in occasional analytic cases. A wide variety of more focal defects in cognition, such as lack of a sense of humor, inability to grasp the implications of human transactions or mistrust of one’s sense of reality, generally result from specific early childhood deprivations (2005, p. xiii).

Summary

As we saw in the section on feelings, the effect of interest is an innate motivator for our learning and exploratory activities. What Gopnik, Stern, and others document are the remarkable capacities young children possess for exploring their world. They investigate biology, physics, psychology, and other sciences, and they use hypothesis testing, probability theory, and empathy in their research and learning. What a contrast to the “passive, autistic blobs” young children were thought to be! (The October 2016-January 2017 Newsletters explore interest and curiosity in further detail.)

All the more reason to focus on the feeling of interest or curiosity and allow these explorations to go forward. This is the root of creativity.

• Can we enhance rather than inhibit interest or curiosity?
• Can we elicit interests rather than impose limits?

Charles Darwin was known for his limitless curiosity (Browne, 1995, 2002). And Albert Einstein once noted, “I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious” (1952).

Next month:

We will begin to explore the important interactions and synergy between the three keys of development: emotions, cognition, and language.