Into the Minds of Babies

Cild Development examining babies and childrens fabulous capacity to learn

Imagine a toddler, perhaps 10 months old, sitting in a high chair in a kitchen, watching and listening as her parents prepare a meal and, in the process, speak to each other and to the child. Even such a seemingly simple, everyday event presents this small child with an enormous amount of information to interpret. Her parents move rapidly from place to place, handling many different objects that they manipulate in diverse ways, all the while maintaining a steady stream of conversation with one another. Despite the complexity of her environment, in the coming months and years this child will somehow find ways to make sense of the flow of language and action. She will accurately link words to thousands of objects and actions, and thus add rich levels of meaning to her furiously expanding capacity for knowledge.

Psychologist Dare Baldwin's research is dedicated to solving the riddle of what she calls humans' "phenomenal ability to acquire knowledge." A recipient of an NSF Young Investigator Award, which is designed to support the work of outstanding young faculty in science and engineering, Baldwin has been focusing much of her attention on how young children, and even infants, can amass and synthesize as much information as they do. Baldwin's studies to date suggest that even at a very young age, infants and children possess a remarkable ability to accumulate knowledge by inference, from seemingly subtle clues, as activity and language swirls around them.

On a larger scale, Baldwin says, "I would like to understand all the different sorts of mechanisms that children can recruit for the purpose of acquiring knowledge, and in turn learn how knowledge acquisition affects children's performance across a variety of domains." Baldwin, who has also been awarded the Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology by the American Psychological Association, recently has been involved in a number of NSF-funded studies related to knowledge-acquisition: