COVER STORY
What Do Babies Know?
More than many realize, and much earlier, according to new research
Fantastic!" says Michael Lewis, a small, spry man with a gray-flecked beard. "This is great!"
What inspires such glee in Lewis is that two small and curly-haired sisters named Danielle and Stacy, ages twelve and 14 months, are starting to cry. The sound is heartrending, but not to Lewis.
"Exactly what we expected," he says cheerily as the girls' parents arrive to comfort them. The wailing soon subsides. Lewis, 46, is not a sadistic Scrooge; on the contrary, he is an eminent and kind-hearted psychologist who presides over the Institute for the Study of Child Development at Rutgers Medical School in New Brunswick, NJ. His laboratory is a friendly place filled with dolls and Teddy bears and jigsaw puzzles; blue-red-and-yellow rainbows streak across the walls. Along one of those walls runs a ten-foot-long two-way mirror so that Lewis can study children unobserved and record their activities on two videotape cameras.
Danielle's parents had adopted Stacy. Lewis wanted to observe how two sisters of similar age and upbringing, but totally different genes, would interact with their parents. All four started by playing with toys and puzzles in front of Lewis' mirror. The parents left, first individually, then together. The girls resorted to playing with each other. Then a stranger entered, and that seemed to make the girls more sharply aware of their parents' absence and their own aloneness—hence the outburst of tears. But why is that "great" or "fantastic"? "We're trying to determine exactly what normal behavior is," says Lewis, who sees the large in the small, "in this case the child's developing sense of self, the sense that it is separate from other people."
In a 17th century brick building on Paris' Boulevard de Port-Royal, once the abbey where the Mathematician Blaise Pascal underwent religious conversion, a quite different kind of experiment is taking place. Into a small room of the Baudelocque Maternity Hospital marches a nurse bearing a tiny, wrinkled infant named Gery. He is four days old and weighs 6 lbs. 6 oz. The nurse carefully deposits Gery in a waist-high steel bassinet that stands next to a computer. The computer is attached to an empty nipple. The question to be tested: Exactly what sounds can young Gery recognize?
The nurse pops the nipple into Gery's mouth and then turns on a nearby loudspeaker. A recorded male voice begins to recite a random series of similar syllables: "Bee, see, lee, see, mee, lee, bee, see, lee, mee." Gery's infant fingers clutch at the orange base of the nipple. Whenever he hears a new sound he sucks harder, and his heart beats faster. When he gets used to these sounds, his attention fades, and his sucking slows down. The computer tirelessly counts the number of sucks per minute.
"Da," the loudspeaker suddenly says. Gery sucks harder, then begins to cry. He is hungry, and the empty nipple brings him no food. The nurse comforts him. Even at the age of four days, the lessons of life can be hard.
All across the U.S., all over the world, medical and behavioral experiments like these are under way. Each by itself is a small and seemingly inconsequential affair; the