Reading Reflection on "What every baby knows"

1.) Inferential learning mechanisms are the learning tools that baby's are believed to be born with. They allow the baby to have initial "theories" about the world it has been brought into, and they allow them to change and rework those theories based on experience. Additionally, these inferential learning mechanisms give the baby the learning capacity necessary to build upon its theories.

2.) According to this article, as a child gets older, it has many changes made to these inferential learning mechanisms. When a baby is just born, it is able to recognize and imitate facial expressions, even though it can't recognize its own face in a mirror. It even begins to recognize and prefer voices. One-year-olds have the ability to understand peoples' actions and emotions; they see how other people react and feel about things and believe that they should feel similarly. They also see how others handle and interact with certain objects, and know that they should do the same. 14-month-olds don't have the ability, however, to understand that people may desire different things, like 18-month-olds can. So even with a 4 month difference there is a still a huge gap in mental development. Although, children don't have the ability to understand that people can believe different things until about 4 years old, which is when they actually begin to understand their own mind and the minds of others. All of this is different in the case of children with autism, as their learning progression is significantly stunted.

3.) There is a quote from the article that basically sums it up, "Babies are like little scientists continually overthrowing theories that no longer fit the evidence." Their theories about the world that stem from their inferential learning mechanisms are like scientific theories: they are changed and rewritten as more about the world is learned and experienced. They analyze the world as scientists do, and by changing and rewriting their own theories they become more intelligent about the world as time passes. Psychologists have learned an unbelievable amount about babies in these past 30 years, and we've learned that they're smarter than we think.