ABSTRACT
OVER THE COURSE of the last two chapters, we have seen that the capacity for learning (and thus the ability to form representations) develops before birth and that newborn babies make good use of these abilities. Indeed, infants acquire knowledge about their world at an amazing rate. We have also come to the conclusion that the representations of young infants can only be accessed by recognition, which means that direct perceptual input is needed to trigger an automatic behavioural response. The mental representations of young infants are therefore implicit and unavailable to consciousness and, as such, we cannot claim that they think in the way that we, as adults, do most of the time (although that’s not to say that we don’t store representations at a procedural level). Young infants do not represent information mentally; no mental images of objects or events are created and stored in their minds. When we can say that an infant is capable of storing representations so that they are accessible in the absence of direct perceptual input we would have evidence that a mental representation has been formed. We would need to see evidence of the ability to remember and recall information when required to be able to reach such a conclusion.
