Baby comes into this world with 5 talents already at birth

Published 05.06.2024 | By Йосиф

Amazing: Baby comes into this world with 5 talents already at birth

Your baby is smarter than you think. For many generations, the slow development of his motor systems led psychologists to believe that the young child’s mental activity was very primitive.

The mental abilities of a baby who has not yet learned to walk and talk cannot be measured using methods designed to test adults. But over the past few decades, scientists have discovered better ways to get information from babies. Armed with these new tools, researchers have shown that babies’ minds are very complex.

Brain development of a child aged 3 months to one year

Every brain, young or old, has certain abilities that help its owner navigate life successfully. If you look closely, you can recognize many of these talents in your baby. Although young children lack knowledge, they are born with certain instincts that allow them to organize and respond to incoming information.

They are predisposed to seek out and use experiences that allow them to adapt their growing brains to a particular environment. Simply put, your baby’s brain naturally knows what it needs to get from the world around it. For this reason, brain development in most cases only requires a “good enough” environment that includes a relatively competent, if not ideal, caregiver – after all, a child is raised not necessarily by a classic pair of parents, but also by single fathers or other relatives, as well as from adoptive parents of both sexes.

What do babies know and when do they learn it?

They can’t explain it in words, yet researchers ask them questions and get complex answers that testify to their cognitive abilities. Some simple, nonverbal ways of tapping into the minds of infants and even newborns have revolutionized the field of behavioral psychology and allowed psychologists to discover what very young children are thinking and feeling.

Your baby still has little control over his body, but he can breastfeed immediately after birth. Soon after, it learns to turn its head and follow interesting objects or events. These two abilities can be used to find out what catches his attention. For example, if the baby likes the sensation of sucking on the breast and wants to do it again, he will suckle more vigorously. It does this when it hears a recording of its mother’s voice, but sucks less vigorously when it hears another female’s voice. So we know that babies can distinguish their mother’s voice from birth.

Just as adults and babies can get tired

After looking at something for a while, the baby turns and looks at something more interesting. The researchers measured how long it looked at a certain scene. If a scene contains something surprising to him, he will watch longer. This reaction allows us to know if the child sees the difference between two things. For example, if you show your baby several pictures of cats, the appearance of a dog will cause him to focus on that picture. This means it can tell a cat from a dog.

Such simple tools allowed researchers to identify five abilities that babies possess long before they turn one.

First ability: Children can distinguish how often specific events occur

For example, the first step in learning a language is recognizing the syllables that make up a word. However, when speaking, people usually do not pause between words. A well-designed experiment showed that children, as a rule, do think this way. The researchers created three nonsense words, such as “bidaku,” each consisting of three syllables. They then presented these words to 8-month-old infants in different sequences, with no pauses between words. As the infants became familiar with these new words, the researchers began saying either one of the nonsense words or a new word consisting of initial syllables (e.g., “cudabee”). They then allowed the children to control the duration of the words by looking in the direction of the dynamics.

The researchers found that it took the children significantly longer to listen to new words, even if they had the same syllables. Because the infants had already heard all the syllables individually, the researchers concluded that they perceived the initial grouping of syllables as familiar.

Second ability: Babies use coincidences to make “inferences” about cause and effect

Once language skills are developed, 2.5-year-olds are known to be able to make causal statements such as “he went to the fridge because he was hungry”. But babies seem to begin to recognize these same cause-and-effect relationships long before that age.

In one experiment, a movable toy was suspended above the crib of a 3-month-old infant and attached on with a ribbon to one of the baby’s legs. When he kicks his foot, the toy moves. Babies are fascinated by this new entertainment. They smiled more and looked at the moving toy more often than when the same toy was out of their reach.
After only a few minutes of training, they started kicking their leg more often. Three days later, they still did so when they saw the toy, even though it was no longer tied to their leg.

Because kicking the leg was a specific response to the movement of the toy, the children clearly learned the basic relationship between cause and effect. Using co-occurrences to determine their possible cause is a key part of our ability to discern the workings of the world around us. A baby can tell a cat from a dog, a task that is still difficult to program into a computer.

Myth: If something goes wrong, it’s mom’s fault

Sigmund Freud has a lot to be responsible for. His ideas were largely speculative and eventually further research disproved some of them. But Freud’s ideas have left a deep imprint on our culture. One of the obsessions is that the child’s relationship with his mother serves as a model for all subsequent relationships in his life. This idea has led many people to conclude that a mother’s behavior has an incredibly strong influence on what kind of person her child will later become. Out of this belief has grown a culture where complete strangers feel a moral obligation to intervene if they see a pregnant woman sipping wine or a mother yelling at her young son.

In the past, psychiatrists have even blamed mothers for their children’s autism or schizophrenia, even though these disorders are mostly due to genetic mutations. Time for mom to calm down. Now that you know that children are actively involved in their development, it should be clear that parents don’t have to and can’t be perfect in everything. Not that we recommend yelling at your kids. Mostly because it’s an ineffective way to influence your child’s behavior. And not because your bad mood from time to time can cause serious and lasting damage to his psyche.

One way or another, parenting style has a much less profound impact on personality than most of us think. We would like to see parents who are happy for their children instead of worrying about any aspect of their growth.

A third ability: young babies distinguish objects from active forces and relate to them in a completely different way

Babies, like other people, understand that objects have coherence (the parts of each object are related to each other). They have density (nothing else can pass through the object). They have continuity (all parts of the object are connected to other parts of it) and only move when someone touches them.

For a long time, it was thought that babies under a year and a half did not understand the concept of object permanence. Long before his first birthday, the infant gazes longer at an object that lacks the properties of coherence, density, continuity, or permanence over time. In one experiment with five-month-old infants, a toy car was shown rolling down a slide, the middle of which was hidden behind a screen. When a box-like obstacle was placed on a slide behind a screen, five-month-old infants appeared to expect it to stop the car. How did we find out about it? When the researchers surreptitiously removed the obstacle through the hatch below and the car successfully slid down, the child looked longer at the screen, as if surprised that the box turned out to be permeable. With this assessment method, children already at the age of 3.5 months showed that they have an idea of objects that are hidden behind other objects.

Like adults, young children tend to attribute conscious properties to things that are not actually alive. While watching a movie in which a geometric figure, a circle, “chases” another circle, one-year-olds look more closely if the second circle moves away from the pursuer than if it stays put.

Fourth Ability: Babies organize information into categories and people into groups

If a three-month-old baby is shown a series of only male faces, he spends less and less time on each new face, possibly because he gets tired of seeing only men. When a female face appears, it looks longer. This happens even if facial hair is not visible. This means that children clearly consider facial features, not hairstyles, to distinguish males from females. These categories are directly related to the child’s daily life.

Most babies prefer to look at female rather than male faces. Unless the baby’s primary caregiver is male, in which case the baby has male preferences. Broad categories such as “animals” and “furniture” appear very early, while others appear later. The boundaries of many categories, from phonemes to facial expressions, are formed through experience. But no one has ever taught a baby that categorizing things is a good strategy – it’s just hardwired into their brains.

This strategy provides a primitive basis for category construction in adulthood, allowing us to associate new objects or people with existing experiences. This strategy also serves as a source of stereotypes, but also some prejudices.

Fifth Ability: Children pay attention to relevant information while ignoring most of what is going on around them

You may have noticed that children are much less selective in their attention than adults, but they still have clear automatic preferences. From a very early age, babies pay special attention to human voices, faces and moving objects. Babies begin to show a preference for human faces within half an hour of birth, and two days later they also show a preference for human voices.

At three months of age, they notice objects that are distinctly different from their surroundings, such as a red circle among black circles. From an early age, the closest people begin to attract the child’s attention. A baby can follow an adult’s gaze as early as 4 months of age. And after he turns one, he is able to direct his attention and point with his finger where another is pointing.

The ability to direct and maintain attention greatly increases the brain’s ability to recognize specific things at any age. In computer models of brain functioning, innate prioritization of information is a powerful mechanism for mastering certain tasks. For example, a child’s innate interest in sounds helps him learn language. All these abilities ensure the development of the brain of “dandelion children”, requiring only the daily summation of accumulated experience, which adults do almost instinctively.

In adults, these five faculties form the basis of their brain function. In fact, most of us have them in a hyperactive state. When we perceive our computers or cars as if they were endowed with their own goals and intentions (usually the opposite of our own), our natural tendency to distinguish active forces from passive objects clearly fails.

The fact that many of our examples so far refer specifically to 3-month-old babies has a simple explanation. Younger children are more difficult to test. Based on our experience, we believe that these abilities are present from birth, at least in a primitive form. It’s true that in the end it doesn’t really matter whether babies are born with these abilities or learn them soon after birth. In one way or another, all normal children acquire the skills described at a very early stage in their lives. They rely on them from early childhood and continue to do so after that.

On the other hand, these cognitive abilities are just the beginning. As we age, they all become significantly more complex.

Author: Sandra Aamod, from The Secret of Your Child’s Brain, source econet

https://woman.bg/article/2024052709211206843