9 Infancy (0 – 2 years)
Dr Jay Seitz
Any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development.
- Jerome Bruner (1915-2016, Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies)
TABLE OF CONTENTS (TOC)
- Conceptual primitives
- Biological foundations
- Brain development
- The external and internal (i.e., proprioception) senses
- Means for exploring the world
- The embodied mind
- Perceptual, motor, and physical development
- Becoming self-aware: Theory of mind
- Language, thought, creativity, and freedom
- The emergence of language and thought
- Language development
- Development of gesture
- Numerical understanding and development
- The roots of consciousness
- Infant temperament
- Development of affect
- Sensorimotor development
- Using symbols: The symbolic stage
- Neurodevelopmental disorders
- Emerging sociality: Development of the attachment bond
- Prenatal, Perinatal, and Postnatal Development
Infancy (0 – 2 years)
Elizabeth Spelke’s research at Harvard comprises understanding the core cognitive capacities or “core knowledge” of human beings arising in infancy: Dr. Elizabeth Spelke.
She focuses on the origins and development of infant’s understanding of:
- Objects (“naive physics”)
- Actions (“agent-action relations”)
- People (“folk psychology”)
- Places (“incipient navigational abilities”)
- Number (“subitization” and counting)
- Geometry (“forms,” “intuitive geometry”)
These are also referred to as “conceptual primitives.” Essentially, she is asking what are the basic cognitive capacities that every human being the world over is born with, excepting severe pathology.
As Professor Spelke elucidates in her book (below), what do human infants know when they first encounter the world before learning begins? That is, what knowledge is innate in humans and how do they learn about this world of objects, actions, people, places, numbers, and geometry? The second volume of her book, How Children Learn, yet to be published, examines how and what children learn in the second year of life and beyond.
And importantly, are there the same core cognitive capacities that exist in all human cultures the world over that empower a newborn infant to acquire a native language and the unique values, skills, and concepts of the culture and society in which s/he was born?
Core Knowledge in Human Infants (2022)
What do infants know? How does the knowledge that they begin with prepare them for learning about the particular physical, cultural, and social world in which they live? Answers to this question shed light not only on infants but on children and adults in all cultures because the core knowledge possessed by infants never goes away. Instead, it underlies the unspoken, common sense knowledge of people of all ages, in all societies. By studying babies, researchers gain insights into infants themselves, into older children’s prodigious capacities for learning, and into some of the unconscious assumptions that guide our