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A Time magazine article, "Study Shows Infants Understand More Than We Think" reports that...

"Researchers recently tested 20-month-old babies and found that these infants are already capable of practicing a sophisticated form of thinking called metacognition.  According to Dr. Sid Kouider, one of the authors of the study, metacognition is best described as a 'gut feeling' about your knowledge, or lack thereof.  It's something we adult humans do on a regular basis — we realize when we face a problem that is too complex for us to answer. It was previously assumed that children develop this skill later in life.  But, says Kouider, he and his colleagues found that even at this young age, 'infants already know when they don't know something, and they are able to signal this fact to their caregivers' in order to get help solving problems.  Their understanding of the workings of their environment, and of their own place within that environment, is much more sophisticated than parents and educators ever imagined."

Contributed by Zvia Dover

In the last decade there has been a revolution in our understanding of the minds of infants and young children. We used to believe that babies were irrational, and that their thinking and experience were limited. Now Alison Gopnik — a leading psychologist and philosopher, as well as a mother — explains the cutting-edge scientific and psychological research that has revealed that babies learn more, create more, care more, and experience more than we could ever have imagined.

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