Understanding Early Cognitive Development in Infants

From the day we are born, we are already able to form abstract, sophisticated representations. Although it sounds far-fetched, babies have notions of mathematics, language, morality, and even scientific and social reasoning. This creates a repertoire of innate intuitions that structure what they will learn – what we all learned – in social, educational and family spaces, over the years of childhood.

We, as adults, often draw babies poorly because we don’t realize that their body proportions are completely different from ours. Their arms, for example, are barely the size of their heads. Our difficulty in seeing them as they are serves as a morphological metaphor for understanding what is most difficult to sense in the cognitive sphere: babies are not miniature adults.

Cognitive development begins on the surface with sensory experience, and, then, with the development of language, it acquires the nuances that explain the deeper and more sophisticated aspects of human thought: love, religion, morality, friendship and democracy.

Most of the world thinks that the past is behind us and the future is forward. But that is arbitrary. For example, the Aymara, a people from the Andean region of South America, conceive of the association between time and space differently. In Aymara, the word “nayra’ means past but also means in front, in view. And the word ‘quipa’, which means future, also indicates behind. Which is to say that in the Aymaran language the past is ahead and the future behind. While on the face of it this may seem strange, when they explain it, it seems so reasonable that we feel tempted to change our own way of envisioning it; they say that the past is the only thing we know – what our eyes see – and therefore it is in front of us. The future is the unknown – what our eyes do not know – and thus it is at our backs.

Our representation of time is random and fickle. The phrase Christmas is fast approaching is strange. Approaching from where? Does it come from the south, the north, the west? Actually, Christmas isn’t located anywhere. It is in time. This phrase, or the analogous one, ‘were getting close to the end of the year’, reveals something of how our minds organize our thoughts. We do it in our bodies. Which is why we talk of the head of government, of someone’s right-hand man, the armpit of the world and many other metaphors* that reflect how we organize thought in a template defined by our own bodies.

Each one of mirror neurons codifies specific gestures, like moving an arm or opening up a hand, but it does so whether or not the action is our own or someone else’s. Just as the brain has a mechanism that spontaneously amalgamates information from different sensory modes, the mirror system allows – also spontaneously – our actions and others’ actions to be brought together. Lifting your arm and watching someone else do it are very different processes, since one is done by you and the other is not. As such, one is visual and the other is motor. However, from a conceptual standpoint, they are quite similar. They both correspond to the same gesture in the abstract world.

The network in the frontal cortex that organizes the executive system defines us as social beings. Let’s give a small example. When we grab a hot plate, the natural reflex would be to drop it immediately. But an adult, generally, will inhibit that reflex while quickly evaluating if there is a nearby place to set it down and avoid breaking the plate.

The executive system governs, controls and administers all these processes. It establishes plans, resolves conflicts, manages our attention focus, and inhibits some reflexes and habits. Therefore the ability to govern our actions depends on the reliability of the executive function system.* If it does not work properly, we drop the hot plate, burp at the table, and gamble away all our money at the roulette wheel.

‘The frontal cortex is very immature in the early months of life and it develops slowly, much more so than other brain regions. Because of this, babies can only express very rudimentary versions of the executive functions.

Newborns that hear a series of three beeps expect there then to be three objects and are surprised when that is not the case. Which is to say, babies assume a correspondence of amounts between the auditory experience and the visual one, and if that abstract rule is not followed through, their gaze is more persist-ent. These newborns have only been out of the womb for a matter of hours yet already have the foundations of mathematics in their mental apparatus.

Cognitive faculties do not develop homogeneously. Some, like the ability to form concepts, are innate. Others, like the executive functions, are barely sketched in the first months of life. The most clear and concise example of this is the development of the attentional net-work. Attention, in cognitive neuroscience, refers to a mechanism that allows us to selectively focus on one particular aspect of information and ignore other concurrent elements.

Source : The Secret Life of the Mind: How Your Brain Thinks, Feels, and Decides by Mariano Sigman

Goodreads : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32498119-the-secret-life-of-the-mind