Infant Cognition Quotes

A sympathetic parent might see the spark of consciousness in a baby's large eyes and eagerly accept the popular claim that babies are wonderful learners, but it is hard to avoid the impression that they begin as ignorant as bread loaves.

Almost nobody believes anymore that infants are insensate blobs. It seems both mad and evil to deny experience and feeling to a laughing, gurgling creature.

Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.

To ask at what time a man has first any ideas is to ask when he begins to perceive; having ideas and perception being the same thing.

If you were to open up a baby's head - and I am not for a moment suggesting that you should - you would find nothing but an enormous drool gland.

A small boy puts his hand on the wall, and looks down intently as he wriggles his toes. The birth of thought?

I no longer remember when I started speaking to Raffi in Russian. I didn't speak to him in Russian when he was in his mother's womb, though I've since learned that this is when babies first start recognizing sound patterns.

Babies aren't savages. Toddlers understand language long before they can talk.

During the earliest stages the child perceives things like a solipsist who is unaware of himself as subject and is familiar only with his own actions.

You know, whether it be humans or animals. So even humans - before we can speak or we can understand a baby's cognition - they're already showing us signs that they want choice.

It seems to me obvious that infants and many animals that do not in any ordinary sense have a language or perform speech acts nonetheless have Intentional states. Only someone in the grip of a philosophical theory would deny that small babies can literally be said to want milk and that dogs want to be let out or believe that their master is at the door.

Babies are thinking and attracting before they are speaking. Even though you are only months old in your physical body, you are a very old and wise Creator, focused in that baby's body.

If a baby really has no awareness of himself and is totally thing-directed and at the same time all his states of mind are projected onto things, our second paradox makes sense: on the one hand, thought in babies can be viewed as pure accommodation or exploratory movements, but on the other this very same thought is only one, long, completely autistic waking dream.