The Child's Discovery of the Mind

"This book is part of Harvard University Press’s excellent series, The Developing Child . I could have really chosen any of the books in the series. They asked developmental scientists to write very simple versions of the research that they were doing for a lay audience. This particular book is about one of the most interesting areas of research in the past 30 years, which is our understanding of how children themselves come to understand the minds of the people around them. Again, the traditional wisdom is that children are egocentric and have a hard time taking the perspective of other people, and they don’t understand the difference between the mind and the body. All this comes from Piaget, and in fact what Janet Astington does in this book is to summarise a whole lot of studies that show how sophisticated even young children are in their understanding of the mind. Well, you can see between the ages of three and four that children start to understand that people could think differently about the same thing. So, for instance, if I showed you a closed-up box of candy, and it turned out to have pencils inside it, but you could only see the closed-up version, I might think that there were pencils inside, but you would think that there were candies inside. And that seems to be something that children are developing and understanding between three and four. These very young children are learning this very deep thing about how different people can have different perspectives on the world. Yes. In fact, some of the studies she describes are studies that I took part in back in the 1980s. This is one of those cases in which a whole lot of scientists started working on the same sort of problems at the same time and came up with very interesting kinds of results. And the work is still ongoing, and shows remarkable abilities in younger and younger children. Part of the reason is that we started getting new techniques for testing them. We’ve discovered that, by looking at what children do as well as what they say, we can understand more about the way their minds work – even with pre-linguistic infants. And, even with preschoolers, we’ve discovered that by asking them very focused questions instead of just looking at everything that they say we can get a better picture of what is going on. What I argue in my most recent book is that there is a trade-off. If you look at lots of different animals across different species, you see a correlation between how immature and how hopeless the young are and how sophisticated the adults are. Crows, for example, are much cleverer than chickens, but they are dependent fledglings for much longer. The idea seems to be that you need a protective period where you can do the learning before you can put it all to use, which is something that we see especially vividly with humans. Children are incredibly good at learning, but not so good at getting on in the world. They can learn everything, but they can’t tie their shoes or put on their trousers or get themselves to school in the morning. Yes – that is another argument that I have made. I often say that it is not that children are little scientists so much as that scientists are big children!"