For you parents out there have you seen anything that explains how infant think?
The confusing part for me is, as an adult, most of my thoughts are verbal. I.E. “Oh crap I have to take the garbage out”. Obviously and infant has no such language skills but also obviously has thoughs like…“Mmmmm boob…lunch!”
So do infants simply think in “pictures”, I.E. associating pictures with emotions and action, like Boob=Food=Taste=Full tummy? or is something else going on?
~Matt
You beat me to it.
The fact that they don’t think like we do because they don’t have language is a cool concept. If you look at children they love life and express themselves truly. The look at adults who know of things like “bad” “wrong” and look how we act!
This is a fascinating issue that I have thought about in the past. (Same for animals too). I think Chomsky has written about this but don’t remember what he concluded. On a similar note, I have wondered how much harder it would be to think of some vary abstract concepts without words for them.
Cool question. While no one knows for sure, the behavioral data would suggest that infants don’t “think” as you or I do. Simply put, they haven’t developed verbal behavior as complex as adolescents or adults. It should be noted, however, that infants begin to acquire strong contingencies very quickly. For instance, the young child learns readily that if it cries, someone will come. So to begin, the child cries when hungry, dirty, etc. Eventually, attention becomes the function of some cries. Or, a young child won’t move out of the way when a object comes quickly at them. The studies done on this topic are really interesting too. Basically over time, as parents feed, hold, and interact with their child, the child learns that an object quickly growing in size in their visual field is coming physically closer. Once children have learned this relation, the same experiment with an object coming quickly towards them will cause crying and fairly extreme physical movement.
“Thinking” and “sense of self” (from a behavioral perspective) are byproducts of verbal behavior. If you’re interested, I can recommend some really great reading materials that may strike your interest on this topic.