Studying babies' minds: From logical thinking to language acquisition

By Daniela Avila-Varela

For a long period of time, it was considered that children arrive in this world without possessing previous knowledge. However, nowadays thanks to technological and scientific advances we know that such an assumption is not true. When we are born, we are ready to successfully interact with the environment that surrounds us, because we possess the cognitive, motor, social and emotional skills (among others) that allow us to do so. Through development and experience, we improve, change, lose those skills and we acquire new ones.

In our talk, we described the techniques to perform infant research that we implement in our baby lab. We walked through the different discoveries that help us to understand better how the infant mind works. We covered the principal findings on basic logical thinking, reasoning, social preferences and language acquisition in early infancy, all those processes that make babies big scientists!

The talk was held by the PhD candidates Konstantina Zacharaki, Gonzalo García de Castro and Daniela Avila-Varela at the primary health centre Numancia (Barcelona, Spain) the 10th July 2019.