What Do Babies Know?

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important ability to recognize categories. This was once thought to require language—how can the unnameable be identified?—but babies apparently can organize perceptions without a word. Psychologist Elizabeth Spelke of the University of Pennsylvania showed four-month-old babies a pair of films in which two toys bounced around on a surface in different ways, each with a corresponding sound track. She then played one sound track, and the babies were able to match the correct film to its sound. From the babies' "highly differentiated ability" to decide what goes with what, Spelke went on to deduce that children are born with an innate ability to divide their experiences into categories. Says she: "Obviously, in order to make sense of anything that you're confronted with, you have to bring to bear certain conceptions about the world. Our hope is that we'll learn something about what those initial conceptions are."

It is a puzzle, for babies repeatedly demonstrate a variety of skills and actions that seem to have no basis in their previous experience. Examples:

> Bradley Feige, age 11½ months, is sitting on a glass table at U.C.L.A.'s Child Study Laboratory. "Come here, Bradley, come here," his mother coaxes from the other side of the table, about six feet away. At her end, the cloth material under the glass top suddenly drops away to create the illusion that Bradley may plunge several feet if he does what his mother asks. At eight months, and again at ten months, Bradley ignored the illusion of peril and crawled across the table. Now he refuses to budge past the illusionary end of the table, not even when his mother holds out a toy as a lure. "We know that this response is not related to the experiences they've had," says Psychologist Nancy Rader, "but we've found that it relates to the age at which the baby starts crawling, and we're trying to find out why."

> At Harvard's Center for Cognitive Studies, infants as young as two weeks were confronted with a cube (or sometimes only the shadow of a cube) that began moving slowly toward them. When it seemed about to hit them, they showed what psychologists call "a strong avoidance-reaction pattern." They turned aside and squirmed and tried to avoid being struck, though they had no previous experience that would make them think that the approaching object would hit them. When such a cube or its shadow approached the babies on an angled path that would miss them, however, the babies followed its motion with their eyes but showed no sign of anxiety. "The consummate skill of these infants in predicting the path of the moving object is astonishing," says Psychologist Jane Flannery Jackson, "and their evident wish to avoid objects on a collision course is even more so."

> At the University of Edinburgh, T.G.R. Bower and his associates have been conducting about 1,000 experiments a year on various infant abilities. One of their most startling claims is that babies can tell the gender of other infants they are looking at, and they prefer to look at those of their own sex. Bower made films of an infant boy and girl making various movements, and then deleted from the film a11 apparent signs of gender and even swapped their clothes. Some adult viewers had difficulty telling them apart, but

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