Class Make up

What do babies think? The TED Talk was about how do we know what babies are thinking. Many years ago people believed that babies were very egocentric and we unable to put themselves in other shoes and take on someone’s perspective. Alison Gopnik conducted a study with 15-18 month old babies. They gave each baby one bowl of goldfish crackers and one bowl of raw broccoli. Then the researcher would pretend to either like the broccoli or the crackers while disliking the other. When she would ask the baby to give her some the baby would hand her the food she expressed that she liked even if it was t=not the food that the baby had liked and chosen. This occurred with the 18 month old babies, however the 15-month-old babies did not do this they handed the researcher what they liked which was typically the goldfish crackers. This was a very interesting TED talk. Gopnik’s work draws on psychological, neuroscientific, and philosophical developments in child development research to understand how the human mind learns, how and why we love, our ability to innovate. This talk just reminded me that children are brilliant and it is important as an educator to remember this.