ABSTRACT
Psychology.—Capturing the mental states of infants and how they evolve and fluctuate, and knowing what part of adult conceptions infants share at a given time in development (→COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT)—these are some of the main driving forces of research on infant cognition. We owe the discovery of infant learning abilities (→LEARNING) to a paradigm shift more than anything else. Contrary to Jean Piaget’s theory, it seems that infants learn more through information about the outside world captured by their perceptual systems (→PERCEPTION) than through motor skill development (→ACTION). Infant cognition studies look at both the capacity to interpret sensory data and the faculty for understanding and reasoning about complex events (→REASONING AND RATIONALITY). However, the extent of the knowledge infants can acquire is limited by their neural maturation speed and motor ineptitude.
