How Babies Think * by Alison Gopnik, and others, Phoenix, £7.99, ISBN 075381417X Reviewed by Alun Anderson
PACKED with the oddest experiments with the deepest meaning. If a moving object vanishes behind an obstruction and doesn’t reappear where it ought, at what age would you expect a baby to be surprised? How about if the object – a yellow duck – emerges as a blue bird? Small babies can’t tell you what they think so researchers have to be very clever to find out what they know about the world around them. Alison Gopnik, Andrew Meltzoff and Patricia Kuhl are the leaders in the field and their account of babies’ intuitive physics, their emerging theory of mind and more is fascinating, readable and extraordinarily important for understanding who we are.
