What is it like to be a small child? I

In my last post, I talked about my search through the world of fiction for clues about the experience of a small child. I suggested that we can probably learn more from scientists on this topic than we can from fiction-writers (although, as a novelist myself, I feel that I'm rather letting the side down by saying that). In this post, I want to mention three main problems that face us in attempting imaginative reconstructions of the consciousness of an infant or toddler.

The first obstacle in our path is memory. The problem of infantile amnesia, as it is known, is one that fascinated Sigmund Freud, causing him to note that not enough attention is paid to the loss of our early years from memory1. A century on, we know much more about the circumstances under which people can and cannot remember events from their early years, although we still do not have an explanation that satisfies everyone. One question that is currently interesting researchers is whether there is a sensitive period for the laying down of memories from infancy which, if it is not taken advantage of, leads to those memories being lost forever. I have recently written on this topic on my other blog, and so won't go into it further here. The main point is that none of us can remember what it is like to be a small child; if we think we can, then our memories are probably deceiving us.

The second obstacle is a language barrier. Although children become experts in their native languages amazingly quickly, a child's early experiences will not always be matched for richness by the language she can use to express them in. Most two- and three-year-olds are not linguistically competent enough to give detailed accounts of their experience. Novelists find it hard enough to put a consciousness into words; asking a toddler to do anything remotely similar is simply asking too much.

A third problem relates to the changing nature of consciousness itself. It may come as a surprise to some parents, but not everyone believes that infants and toddlers are conscious in quite the same way that we are. This is a true can of worms, and to do the arguments justice would take much more space than I have here. Let's just say that consciousness must depend on a certain degree of cognitive and neurological sophistication, and that this is just one more reason why we cannot assume that the subjective experience of a toddler will be qualitatively like our own. There is one school of thought, for example, which sees consciousness emerging gradually in childhood, on a schedule constrained by gradually developing neurological sophistication2.

So much for the problems; what about the solutions? Next time I'll look at some of the attempts to reconstruct young children's experience that have taken scientific research as their inspiration.

1Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 15 (translated and edited by James Strachey), p. 200, London: Penguin, 1963.

2Philip David Zelazo, Helena Hong Gao and Rebecca Todd, "The development of consciousness in ontogeny", in Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness (edited by P. D. Zelazo, M. Moscovitch and E. Thompson), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

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