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Human children are arguably the most capable learners on earth: In a few short years, they learn their native language, the actions, customs, and relationships among the people in their social world, the spatial layout of their environment, and the forms and functions of myriad objects. Children learn these things even in cultures in which people rarely speak to them until they can speak competently themselves. Their learning far outpaces that of their household pets, who inhabit the same environment. Since core knowledge is shared by infants and animals alike, these observations suggest that some uniquely human talent or penchant carries children beyond core knowledge. Here the author hypothesizes that a new learning process emerges at the end of the first year, as infants use their growing knowledge of language to gain new insights into their own and others’ mental states. Infants come to view people as social agents whose mental states are both phenomenal and intentional, and who engage with one another so as to share their actions and their experiences of things and events. By sharing with other people, construed as social agents, children may gain a uniquely human capacity for fast and flexible learning.

To understand what goes on around us, we must perceive the surrounding layout in which things appear and events happen. Vision is the richest source of information about objects and events, and research on its nature and origins constitutes one of the oldest and most successful fields of developmental cognitive science. This chapter takes a historical approach to the research of scientists, from Rene Descartes to Hermann von Helmholtz, Eleanor J. Gibson, Richard Held, and David Marr, who turned philosophical questions concerning the nature and origins of visual perception of the surrounding layout into a vibrant area of science. Their research sheds light on what infants see and provides many of the methods and concepts that have allowed later investigators to probe what infants know.

Like adults, infants are sensitive to number, and they represent number abstractly, matching the number of objects in a visible array to the number of events in an accompanying sequence of sounds. Infants also compare visual arrays based on their numerical magnitude, whether the arrays remain in view or are hidden, and they combine and divide arrays in accord with the operations of elementary arithmetic. Nevertheless, infants’ numerical representations are limited: They are inexact and compressed: They view 4 and 8 as far more different than 14 and 18. Like representations of objects and places, core representations of number are formed automatically and unconsciously in adults, but only when we apply our limited powers of attention to the entities we enumerate. Despite these limits, the core number system contributes to our uniquely human talents for learning and reasoning about formal mathematics.

Although the world of an infant is replete with living, animate beings, a subset of those beings has special importance for infants: the members of their own social world, who engage with them and with one another. From birth, infants engage with people who look into their eyes while speaking, expressing emotions, or gesturing. Very young infants imitate these movements, and they are predisposed to attend to others who imitate them. Infants also attend to the social interactions of other people whom they observe as third parties, expecting people to affiliate with the people with whom they have engaged. Based on these findings, the author hypothesizes that infants are endowed with a core system for representing their social partners as beings who experience states of attention and emotion like their own, and who share their experiences with the infant, and with one another, in states of social engagement.

Research on infants’ knowledge of objects, places, and number provides evidence for core cognitive systems that capture abstract, interconnected concepts and are early-emerging, present throughout life, innate, and supportive of learning. These systems also are ancient (they are shared by a wide range of other animals), sharply limited, unconscious, automatically activated, and dependent on our limited attentional resources. Here the author suggests that these properties collectively form a natural kind: a cognitive system with some of these properties will likely have all of them. Notably, a cognitive system shared by diverse, distantly related animals will gain a primordial blessing of abstraction: For example, the core place system will represent only the abstract geometric properties that apply to all the environments of the navigating animals that possess it, including terrestrial rats, flying birds, and aquatic fish. In the coming chapters, the author uses these arguments to propose three more systems of core knowledge.

Although infants do not begin to speak intelligibly until the end of the first year, they begin to learn their native language before birth. Throughout the first year, language learning progresses at multiple levels in parallel: Infants learn not only to identify the sounds of their language but to distinguish the content words that refer to things and events from the function words that convey the relationships between things and events: relationships captured by the grammar of their language. Well before infants have confidently mastered the meanings of any content words, they make considerable progress in deciphering the forms, functions, and ordering of elements in their native language. They appear to do so, in part, by mapping function words to representations from core knowledge.

Infants’ survival depends on the actions of the people around them. What do infants know about people and their actions? Infants endow people and other animate beings with the capacity to act: They cause their own motion, interact with objects on contact, detect objects and obstacles at a distance, direct their actions to distant objects, and act efficiently. Even before infants begin to reach for objects, pick them up, or manipulate them, they view other people’s actions on objects as causal, costly, and goal-directed. Based on these findings, the author hypothesizes that infants have an early-emerging system of core knowledge of people as agents. This system supports infants’ learning about other people’s actions and mental states, as well as the development of their own motor skills and action plans.

Until recent times, human survival depended on our ability to identify and categorize the living kinds that provided our food and shelter, as well as those who threatened us with poisoning or predation. Most children who are alive today, in contrast, get their food from packages in stores and kitchens, and most research on infants’ knowledge of object kinds focuses on their learning about artifacts. Here the author focuses on research probing the shape properties by which infants categorize objects and learn their functions. She suggests that infants are endowed with core knowledge of the abstract forms and functions shared by all living kinds. Equipped with this knowledge, infants are prepared to learn about the forms and functions of the particular living kinds that surround them, through cautious exploration and observation of other people’s actions. These learning processes also allow infants living in industrialized cultures to begin learning about the forms and functions of factory-produced artifacts, but core knowledge captures these objects poorly. Learning about artifacts begins to accelerate later in childhood.

Any animal that moves from one place to another also knows where it is and how to get to other places. Although human infants do not move on their own for many months, the spatial representations and navigation processes found in animals develop spontaneously in infants and young children. These findings provide evidence for a second system of core knowledge, focused on places. Like the object system, the place system builds on perceptual representations of the environment but goes beyond them, bringing knowledge of places that are not in view. The place system also is unitary, early-emerging, present throughout life, and supportive of children’s learning of the geometric structure of their navigable environment. In adults, and children, this system operates automatically and unconsciously, and it calls on the same brain systems and cognitive processes that other animals use when they navigate. These findings converge to reveal a cognitive system with deep evolutionary origins at the foundations of human knowledge.

As we perceive and act, we automatically organize our surroundings into objects. This organization occurs so immediately and effortlessly that it feels like a perceptual capacity. At the heart of our knowledge of objects, however, is a cognitive system for representing interconnected, abstract properties of objects: properties beyond the limits of any perceptual system. Before infants learn what the objects around them look like or how they can be acted on, infants appreciate that objects are solid and cannot interpenetrate, that objects interact on contact but not at a distance, and that objects exist and move continuously whether they are visible or hidden. These abilities testify to a cognitive system that takes its inputs from our perceptual systems and provides infants with an early, abstract, commonsense understanding of the physical world that remains with us throughout our lives.

What do infants know, and 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, commonsense 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 thoughts and actions as adults. To share these insights, the author distills the findings from research in developmental, comparative, and cognitive psychology, with excursions into studies of animal cognition in psychology and in systems and cognitive neuroscience, and studies in the computational cognitive sciences. Weaving across these disciplines, she paints a picture of what young infants know, and what they quickly come to learn, about objects, places, number, geometry, and people’s actions, social engagements, and mental states.

We propose that developmental cognitive science should invest in an online CRADLE, a Collaboration for Reproducible and Distributed Large-Scale Experiments that crowdsources data from families participating on the internet. Here, we discuss how the field can work together to further expand and unify current prototypes for the benefit of researchers, science, and society.

Do infants and toddlers prefer actors who help others achieve their goals? To address this question, we focused on a developmental change in early action understanding. Eight-month-old infants and 15-month-old toddlers (n = 72, 44% female, 68% White) differently evaluated two agents who engaged in the same actions, showing opposite preferences, consistent with their developing means-end understanding. Moreover, 8-month-old infants (n = 64, 43% female, 63% White) correctly inferred an individual’s goal and valued the agent who fostered it when the means-end action was replaced by a superficially similar direct action. These findings, from experiments that controlled all social cues (including imitation, synchrony, and positive affect), show that infants’ evaluations depend, in part, on their understanding of goal-directed behavior.

Humans possess a tendency to rapidly and consistently make character evaluations from mere facial appearance. Recent work shows that this tendency emerges surprisingly early: children as young as 3-years-old provide adult-like assessments of others on character attributes such as "nice," "strong," and "smart" based only on subtle variations in targets' face shape and physiognomy (i.e., latent face-traits). The present research examined the behavioral consequences of children's face-trait judgments by asking whether, and if so when in development, the appearance of face-traits also (a) shapes children's judgments of targets' behaviors and (b) guides children's behavior toward targets. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that, by 3 years of age, children used facial features in character evaluations but not in judgments of targets' behavior, whereas by 5 years of age, children reliably made both character and behavior judgments from face-traits. Age-related change in behavior judgments was also observed in children's own behaviors toward targets: Experiments 3 and 4 showed that, by age 5 (but not earlier), children were more likely to give gifts to targets with trustworthy and submissive-looking faces (Experiment 3) and showed concordance between their character evaluations and gift-giving behaviors (Experiment 4). These findings newly suggest that, although children may rapidly make character evaluations from face-trait appearance, predicting and performing social behaviors based on face-traits may require more developed and specific understanding of traits and their relationships to behaviors. Nevertheless, by kindergarten, even relatively arbitrary and subtle face-traits appear to have meaningful consequences in shaping children's social judgments and interactions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Author(s): Woo, Brandon Matthew; Spelke, Elizabeth | Abstract: Research provides evidence that infants infer what others can and cannot see from their differing perspectives, but do infants appreciate that their own perspective on an object can differ from that of a person who views the same object from a different direction? First, infants were shown two faces with screens in front of or behind them. Infants correctly inferred that a face that was visible to them was occluded to a person sitting across from them. Then two experiments presented infants with two unscreened faces: one upright and one inverted. Infants attributed their own perspective on those faces to the other person: They did not appreciate that faces that were upright to them were inverted to the other person. Thus, infants appreciate that others may see things that they do not, but they fail to grasp not that others may experience the same visible objects differently than they do.

Numeracy is of critical importance for scholastic success and modern-day living, but the precise mechanisms that drive its development are poorly understood. Here we used novel experimental training methods to begin to investigate the role of symbols in the development of numeracy in preschool-aged children. We assigned pre-school children in the U.S. and Italy (N = 215; Mean age = 49.15 months) to play one of five versions of a computer-based numerical comparison game for two weeks. The different versions of the game were equated on basic features of gameplay and demands but systematically varied in numerical content. Critically, some versions included non-symbolic numerical comparisons only, while others combined non-symbolic numerical comparison with symbolic aids of various types. Before and after training we assessed four components of early numeracy: counting proficiency, non-symbolic numerical comparison, one-to-one correspondence, and arithmetic set transformation. We found that overall children showed improvement in most of these components after completing these short trainings. However, children trained on numerical comparisons with symbolic aids made larger gains on assessments of one-to-one correspondence and arithmetic transformation compared to children whose training involved non-symbolic numerical comparison only. Further exploratory analyses suggested that, although there were no major differences between children trained with verbal symbols (e.g., verbal counting) and non-verbal visuo-spatial symbols (i.e., abacus counting), the gains in one-to-one correspondence may have been driven by abacus training, while the gains in non-verbal arithmetic transformations may have been driven by verbal training. These results provide initial evidence that the introduction of symbols may contribute to the emergence of numeracy by enhancing the capacity for thinking about exact equality and the numerical effects of set transformations. More broadly, this study provides an empirical basis to motivate further focused study of the processes by which children’s mastery of symbols influences children’s developing mastery of numeracy.

Music is universally prevalent in human society and is a salient component of the lives of young families. Here, we studied the frequency of singing and playing recorded music in the home using surveys of parents with infants ( N = 945). We found that most parents sing to their infant on a daily basis and the frequency of infant-directed singing is unrelated to parents’ income or ethnicity. Two reliable individual differences emerged, however: (i) fathers sing less than mothers and (ii) as infants grow older, parents sing less. Moreover, the latter effect of child age was specific to singing and was not reflected in reports of the frequency of playing recorded music. Last, we meta-analysed reports of the frequency of infant-directed singing and found little change in its frequency over the past 30 years, despite substantial changes in the technological environment in the home. These findings, consistent with theories of the psychological functions of music, in general, and infant-directed singing, in particular, demonstrate the everyday nature of music in infancy. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Voice modulation: from origin and mechanism to social impact (Part I)’.

As infants, children are sensitive to geometry when recognizing objects or navigating through rooms; however, explicit knowledge of geometry develops slowly and may be unstable even in adults. How can geometric concepts be both so accessible and so elusive? To examine how implicit and explicit geometric concepts develop, the current study assessed, in 132 children (3–8 years old) while they played a simple geometric judgment task, three distinctive channels: children’s choices during the game as well as the language and gestures they used to justify and accompany their choices. Results showed that, for certain geometric properties, children chose the correct card even if they could not express with words (or gestures) why they had made this choice. Furthermore, other geometric concepts were expressed and supported by gestures prior to their articulation in either choices or speech. These findings reveal that gestures and behavioral choices may reflect implicit knowledge and serve as a foundation for the development of geometric reasoning. Altogether, our results suggest that language alone might not be enough for expressing and organizing geometric concepts and that children pursue multiple paths to overcome its limitations, a finding with potential implications for primary education in mathematics.

The origins and development of our geometric intuitions have been debated for millennia. The present study links children's developing intuitions about the properties of planar triangles to their developing abilities to read purely geometric maps. Six-year-old children are limited when navigating by maps that depict only the sides of a triangle in an environment composed of only the triangle's corners and vice versa. Six-year-old children also incorrectly judge how the angle size of the third corner of a triangle varies with changes to the other two corners. These limitations in map reading and in judgments about triangles are attenuated, respectively, by 10 and 12 years of age. Moreover, as children get older, their map reading predicts their geometric judgments on the triangle task. Map reading thus undergoes developmental changes that parallel an emerging capacity to reason explicitly about the distance and angle relations essential to euclidean geometry. (PsycINFO Database Record