2. Learning about the outside world

Abstract

‘Learning about the outside world’ looks at the nature versus nurture debate and asks: how do infants and toddlers learn about their world? Babies learn a vast amount from observation. Research shows that the observations that babies make are organized mentally into certain types of knowledge. ‘Naive psychology’ is about how they learn how to behave. Observing objects teachers babies how the external world works. This is ‘naive physics’. ‘Naive biology’ refers to how they learn about the natural world. Studies have shown that although babies appear to be fairly unaware of the world around them, both memory and attention function from an early age.