of infants as interacting with the world, actively taking in information, and constructing their own thinking. However, most researchers no longer agree with Piaget’s belief that all knowledge begins with sensorimotor activity. Instead, infants are thought to have some innate, or inborn, cognitive capacities. Conservative theorists believe that infants are born with limited learning capacities such as a set of perceptual biases that cause them to attend to features of the environment that will help them to learn quickly (Bremner, Slater, & Johnson, 2015). Alternatively, the core knowledge theory proposes that infants are born with several innate knowledge systems, or core domains of thought, that promote early rapid learning and adaptation (Spelke, 2016).
According to core knowledge theorists, infants learn so quickly and encounter such a great amount of sensory information that some prewired evolutionary understanding, including the early ability to learn rules, must be at work (Spelke, 2016). Using the violation-of-expectation method, core knowledge researchers have found that young infants have a grasp of the physical properties of objects, including the knowledge that objects do not disappear out of existence (permanence), cannot pass through another object (solidity), and will fall without support (gravity; Baillargeon, Scott, & Bian, 2016). Infants also display early knowledge that liquids are nonsolid substances able to pass through grids (Hespos, Ferry, Anderson, Hollenbeck, & Rips, 2016).
Infants are also thought to have early knowledge of numbers (Spelke, 2017). Five-month-old infants can discriminate between small and large numbers of items (Christodoulou, Lac, & Moore, 2017). Even newborns are sensitive to large differences in number, distinguishing nine items from three, for example, but newborns show difficulty distinguishing small numbers from each other (two vs. three items) (Coubart, Izard, Spelke, Marie, & Streri, 2014). Comparative research has shown that animals display these systems of knowledge early in life and without much experience (Piantadosi & Cantlon, 2017), suggesting that it is possibl—and perhaps evolutionarily adaptiv—for infants to quickly yet naturally construct an understanding of the world (Bjorklund, 2018). Increasingly, infants are viewed as statistical learners, able to quickly identify patterns in the world around them (Saffran & Kirkham, 2018).
Much core knowledge research employs the same looking paradigms described earlier, in which infants’ visual preferences are measured as indictors of what they know, and this approach has come under criticism. Critics argue that it is unclear whether we can interpret looking in the same way in infants as in adults. Such measures demonstrate discrimination—that young infants can tell the difference between stimuli—yet perceiving the difference between two stimuli does not necessarily mean that infants understand how the two stimuli differ (Bremner et al., 2015). Others have suggested that infants are not detecting differences in number but rather differences in area (Mix, Huttenlocher, & Levine, 2002). For example, it may be that the infant differentiates nine items from three not because of the change in number but simply because nine items take up more space than three. More recent research has shown that 7-month-old infants can differentiate changes in number and area, are more sensitive to changes in number than area, and prefer to look at number changes than area changes (Libertus, Starr, & Brannon, 2014). Infants apply basic inferential mechanisms to quickly yet naturally construct an understanding of the world (Xu & Kushnir, 2013).
Overall, Piaget’s theory has had a profound influence on how we view cognitive development. However, infants and toddlers are more cognitively competent than Piaget imagined, showing signs of representational ability and conceptual thought that he believed were not possible. Developmental scientists agree with Piaget that immature forms of cognition give way to more mature forms, that the individual is active in development, and that interaction with the environment is critical for cognitive growth. Today, electronic media are an important part of almost everyone’s environment. Do infants interact with electronic media? The Lives in Context feature examines whether infants can learn from electronic media.
Lives in Context
Baby Videos and Infant Learning
Infants and toddlers learn more from interaction with their parents and other caregivers than they do watching infant-directed educational content.
iStock/LucaLorenzelli
Infants and toddlers spend 1 to 2 hours a day engaged with screen media, including television and tablets, and are exposed to over 5 hours daily of background television intended for adults (Courage, 2017). Infant-directed videos and programming, which offer educational content embedded in an engaging video format, are often advertised as aids to babies’ brain development, intelligence, and learning (Fenstermacher et al., 2010; Vaala & LaPierre, 2014). Most parents believe that age-appropriate videos can have a positive impact on early child development while providing good entertainment for babies and convenience for parents (Robb, Richert, & Wartella, 2009). Certainly, even very young infants attend to video material, as its movement, color, and rapid scene changes are attractive (Courage, 2017).
But do baby videos really aid development? Brain-building claims made by baby media manufacturers are not supported by longitudinal studies, which offer no evidence of long-term benefits of media use in early childhood (American Academy of Pediatrics Council on Communications and Media, 2016; Courage & Howe, 2010; Ferguson & Donnellan, 2014). For example, one study tested a popular DVD program that claims to help young infants learn to read. Ten- to 18-month-old infants who regularly watched the program for 7 months did not differ from other infants in intelligence, cognitive skills, reading skill, or word knowledge (Neuman, Kaefer, Pinkham, & Strouse, 2014). Baby videos are often advertised as aiding language development, yet several studies found that children under 2 years of age showed no learning of target words after viewing a language-learning DVD up to 20 times (DeLoache et al., 2010; Ferguson & Donnellan, 2014).
Infants learn more readily from people than from TV, a finding known as the video deficit effect (Anderson & Pempek, 2005). For example, when 12- to 18-month-old infants watched a best-selling DVD that labels household objects, the infants learned very little from it compared with what they learned though interaction with parents (DeLoache et al., 2010). Recently, the video deficit effect has been relabeled as a transfer deficit because infants are less able to transfer what they see on the screen to their own behavior than to transfer what they learn in active interactions with adults (Barr, 2010). The transfer deficit is reduced somewhat for older infants when their memory capacities are taken into account, that is, when content is repeated and verbal cues are added (Barr, 2013). When parents watch videos along with their infants and talk to them about the content, the infants spend more time looking at the screen, learn more from the media, and show greater knowledge of language as toddlers (Linebarger & Vaala, 2010). However, it is not clear that parent coviewing of media provides a better alternative to learning than parent–infant interaction by itself (Courage, 2017).
Infants learn from contingent interactions with others—and baby videos do not provide contingent stimulation. Infants can, however, can learn from screens when contingent interactions with people are involved (McClure, Chentsova-Dutton, Holochwost, Parrott, & Barr, 2018). For example, 12- to 25-month-olds were presented with on-screen partners who taught novel words, actions, and patterns via real-time FaceTime conversations or prerecorded videos (Myers, LeWitt, Gallo, & Maselli, 2017). All of the infants were attentive and responsive, but only children in the FaceTime group responded to the partner in a time-synchronized manner. One week later, the children in the FaceTime group preferred and recognized their partner, learned more novel patterns, and (among the older infants) learned more novel words. Although baby media will not transform babies into geniuses or even guarantee learning, babies can learn from real-time interactions with others—in person or on screen.
What Do You Think?
