From: The Washington Post
Your baby is doing little physics experiments all the time, according to a new study
The Washington Post:
When an infant sees an object behave in a surprising way, she does everything she can to learn more about its mysteries, and the initial surprise ends up helping her learn. A new study suggests that a baby can identify an unusual object as being more worthwhile than a typical one, and she can run simple “experiments” on it to help her understand it. So your baby is basically a tiny scientific genius, which is worth remembering the next time she coats the walls in spaghetti. She’s probably just doing science, dad.
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According to her research, it may be that surprise acts as a learning aid, spurring a baby to test the unusual properties they’ve just seen in an object.
When Stahl and her co-author Lisa Feigenson, a professor of psychology and brain science at Hopkins, showed 11-month-old babies these “surprising” events, they seemed primed to learn more about the objects involved.
Read the whole story: The Washington Post
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