Giorgio Bertini
Director at Learning Change Project – Research on society, culture, art, neuroscience, cognition, critical thinking, intelligence, creativity, autopoiesis, self-organization, rhizomes, complexity, systems, networks, leadership, sustainability, thinkers, futures ++
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Tag Archives: infants
Infants’ Instincts to Help, Share, and Comfort
Moral growth is promoted when we allow little ones to act on their instincts. An all-too-common belief in our culture —often held implicitly rather than explicitly — is that babies come into the world as either asocial (the “blank slate” … Continue reading
Infants ask for help when they know they don’t know
Although many animals have been shown to monitor their own uncertainty, only humans seem to have the ability to explicitly communicate their uncertainty to others. It remains unknown whether this ability is present early in development, or whether it only … Continue reading
Costly rejection of Wrongdoers by Infants and Children
How unappealing are individuals who behave badly towards others? We show here that children and even infants, although motivated by material rewards, are nonetheless willing to incur costs to avoid “doing business” with a wrongdoer. When given the choice to … Continue reading
Posted in Children, Cognitive development, Cooperation, Infants, Social cognition
Tagged children, cognitive development, cooperation, infants, social cognition
Fairness Expectations and Altruistic Sharing in 15-Month-Old Infants
Human cooperation is a key driving force behind the evolutionary success of our hominin lineage. At the proximate level, biologists and social scientists have identified other-regarding preferences – such as fairness based on egalitarian motives, and altruism – as likely … Continue reading
Posted in Altruism, Children, Cooperation, Fairness, Infants
Tagged altruism, children, cooperation, fairness, infants
Two-year-old Children differentiate Test Questions from Genuine Questions
Children are frequently confronted with so-called ‘ test questions’. While genuine questions are requests for missing information, test questions ask for information obviously already known to the questioner. In this study we explored whether two-year-old children respond differentially to one … Continue reading
Posted in Children, Infants, Questions, Relational
Tagged children, infants, questions, relational
21-Month-Olds Understand the Cooperative Logic of Requests
Human communication rests on a basic assumption of partner cooperativeness, including even requesting. In the current study, an adult made an ambiguous request for an object to 21-month-old infants, with one potential referent being right in front of her and … Continue reading
Posted in Children, Cooperation, Infants, Logic, Thinking
Tagged children, cooperation, infants, logic, thinking
The Surprisingly Logical Minds of Babies
In particular, in my lab in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, I have spent the past decade trying to understand the mystery of how children learn so much from so little so quickly. Because, it turns … Continue reading
Noam Chomsky on how Kids Acquire Language & Ideas
Noam Chomsky became internationally famous for proposing a novel solution to an age-old question: what does a baby know? After years of research, Chomsky proposed that newborns have a hard-wired ability to understand grammar. Language acquisition is as elemental to … Continue reading
Infants Learning Words from Pictures
This experiment was designed to clarify the referential status of infants’ newly learned words. We introduced 15- and 17-month-olds to a novel noun, presented in conjunction with pictures of two whisks that differed in color. We asked whether infants would … Continue reading
Infants are Big Thinkers
Psychologists at Harvard University have found that infants younger than a year old understand social dominance and use relative size to predict who will prevail when two individuals’ goals conflict. Lead author Lotte Thomsen says the work suggests that we … Continue reading
