Cognition, infant

In the past thirty years developmental psychologists have developed techniques for investigating the cognitive resources of infants. These techniques show that an infant's initial representation of the world is richer and more abstract than traditional empiricists supposed. For instance, infants seem to have at least some understanding of distance, of the continued existence of objects which are out of sight, and of the mental states of others. Such results have led philosophers to reconsider the idea - to be found in Plato - that there may be innate constraints on the way we view the world, and to examine the extent to which innate ‘knowledge' may be revised as a result of learning. How do we ask prelinguistic infants what they know? Infants' behaviour may initially look random and confused, but with closer observation, and particularly with the aid of videotape, we have discovered that it is quite systematic and structured. Very young infants show distinct emotional expressions. They act on objects in distinct and appropriate ways.