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9 - Infant Categorization

from Subpart II.1 - Infancy: The Roots of Human Thinking

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2022

Olivier Houdé
Affiliation:
Université de Paris V
Grégoire Borst
Affiliation:
Université de Paris V
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Summary

William James once famously wrote in his Principles of Psychology (1890 [2013]) that the infant “assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion.” According to James, infants are overwhelmed by the bombardment of information available to the senses, and consequently their ability to perceive and learn is limited in the first months of life. This perspective remained dominant in the early days of developmental psychology – perhaps reified by Piaget’s (1952) claim that infants’ rely on their senses and motor skills until two years of age – but the last forty years of research on this issue has revealed a startlingly different picture of infants’ perceptual and cognitive abilities. For example, experimental work has demonstrated purportedly that infants in the first year of life can compute simple addition and subtraction (Wynn, 1992), have a basic grasp of certain physical principles (Baillargeon, 1987), perceive launching events as causal (Oakes & Cohen, 1990), have expectations about how animates – people and animals – engage in motion (Spelke et al., 1995), and interact with other animates (Hamlin et al., 2007), among other things.

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