What are scientists finding today that builds on this foundation?
Cognitive developmental psychologists are now actually looking into the crib to study the development of the mind early on, even before children develop language. And what we find there is very interesting. We find a little scientist peering back at us—a child who is desperately interested in making sense of the people, the objects, and the language around him or her, a child doing mini-experiments to try to sort everything out. When we think of scientists, we think of methodical approaches to solving problems. How is that approach similar to what young children do cognitively? There seems to be a deep kinship between adults doing science and children learning. Some of the principles are the same: forming hypotheses, making predictions, doing experiments to test ideas. Even babies have theories of the world, very simple theories, but cognitive structures about how people, things, and language work. When a child goes through stages of development, he or she abandons an old theory and ad
