Question

Alison Gopnik

One of the many books published by Alison Gopnik is entitled: The Scientist in the Crib. First: Explain why this title is so accurate in describing infants (young children). How are they like scientist? Second: Provide an example from the Gopnik videos and/or other course sources indicating how they are like scientists. Lastly, state why this long period of immaturity in the human offspring.( Need cite)

Answer 1

Alison Gopnik understands babies and children as the R&D division of humanity.According to this title The Scientist in the Crib is very much accurateBabies are not born with clean slates. Human beings come into the world with a number of behavior patterns. Babies are born with an evolutionary past that gives them ideas about how the world will work. They also learn from others, which transforms the innate structures that they are born with.This is made his profound contribution to our understanding of human nature. He suggested that nurture, how we are changed by others, is part of our nature.Social input is incredibly important for behavioral, cognitive, and emotional change. That is where imitation and observational learning come in. Children, even babies, are using us as role models. They watch carefully what we do and try to incorporate that into their behavior.Play is vitally important for children. That is why we should not be obsessed with trying to provide extra stimulation for babies by putting them on a regimen of listening to Mozart tapes or watching flash cards so that they get ahead of the child next door.

  When we can get the scientists and the educators together to connect learning from 0 to 3 with learning from 3 and beyond, then we will really be getting somewhere. The window for learning does not slam shut when a child gets to be 3. That contradicts the everyday experience of parents and educators. Learning is a lifelong enterprise. The surprise is that it begins so early, but the enduring truth is that it continues into adulthood. Human beings have a natural drive to learn and experience a pleasure in finding things out. This applies to teachers, scientists, and even our youngest children.

Take language, for example. When babies are born and in the first six months of life, they can discriminate all the speech sounds used in all the world's languages, even though they have not heard them yet. For instance, Japanese adults do not make the distinction between R and L; the sounds are not phonemic in their language. Six-month-old Japanese babies do make the distinction between R and L. Babies are, as we say, born citizens of the world.

A very interesting developmental change occurs in language. Children actually lose some of the distinctions that they had as infants. By as early as 10 or 12 months of age, the Japanese babies become more like the adults. They become culture-bound language listeners and they now have lost the ability to distinguish R from L. The same thing happens with English, Spanish, and other languages around the world. Babies are born with the ability to distinguish all the speech sounds and then they lose some of that ability as they learn their own specific language. What they lose in universality, they gain in speed and depth of processing for their own specific language.

The long period of immaturity in the human spring is

The first 1000 days – the period from conception to 2 years of age – represents a critical window of early childhood growth and development. This prenatal and early postnatal period is defined by rapid maturation of metabolic, endocrine, neural, and immune pathways, which strongly influence and support child growth and development. These pathways develop in tandem and are highly interdependent, with a complex program of assembly reliant on internal and external cues. When these developmental pathways are challenged by adverse environmental insults, such as infection or suboptimal feeding, the trajectory of child growth can be perturbed, leading to malnutrition, which can manifest as overnutrition (overweight or obesity) or as undernutrition – stunting  or wasting. An emerging perspective of human developmental biology includes the trillions of microbes (microbiota) and their genes (microbiome) that reside within the human body, and which assemble and stabilize during the first 2 years of life [

1 Emerging evidence suggests that the colonization of microbes in the human body during early life plays a critical role in the establishment and maturation of developmental pathways that disruption of this optimal microbial succession may contribute to lifelong and intergenerational deficits in growth and development