Psychologists in general, and developmental psychologists in particular, suffer from a special dilemma. All human beings have intuitive ideas about minds, including their children’s minds. Scientific psychology is measured against this intuitive psychology – and often seems either obvious or absurd as result. Both sciences, furthermore, are afflicted by anxiety about being a “soft” rather than “hard” science. In reaction to these dilemmas and anxieties, developmental psychologists often divorce their science from their lives. We say that studying children is just a means to an end – that we’re more interested in answering the deepest questions in cognitive science than in children themselves.
But all great scientists start out by being captivated by the subjects they study, and all the great developmentalists start from a sense of wonder at children’s everyday lives. Cognitive development began, after all, with Jean and Valentine Piaget’s amazingly rich observations of their own children. Parents and children live, feel, think and act together in rich, complex and enormously significant ways. How does the science of developmental psychology interact with the everyday experience of caring for children?
Charles Ferneyhough’s The Baby in the Mirror and Vasudevi Reddy’s How Infants Know Minds raise this question in different ways. Ferneyhough’s book is a memoir of his daughter’s early childhood, interspersed with information about developmental psychology. Reddy’s book is essentially academic. She explicitly argues that we should reject the idea of an objective developmental science in favour of a more engaged “second-person” approach. Both books provide exceptionally sensitive, careful and thoughtful descriptions of the everyday lives of babies, particularly the authors’ own babies. Reddy’s book is full of eloquent and informative descriptions of the playful way that even young infants tease, act coy, and generally muck about with their parents. Ferneyhough is primarily a novelist, and his book is an elegantly written, warm, thoughtful, novelistic account of his first three years with his daughter Athena.
Childhood is central to many memoirs and novels, but good descriptions of very early childhood, good stories about babies, are surprisingly rare. Perhaps it is because becoming a parent is so emotionally overwhelming that it undermines the detachment that is necessary for either literature or science. Both Reddy and, especially, Ferneyhough do a lovely job of conveying what life with a baby is like. Neither book, however, is very effective at conveying what the science of cognitive development is like.
Cognitive development, like the rest of cognitive science, relies on a general theoretical framework. That framework assumes that the mind performs computations and the brain implements them. Developmental cognitive science asks, and answers, some of the most important questions about those computations. Where do they come from? Are they innate, or the result of simple associations? Or are they derived from experience by some kind of rational inference? How much do they depend on social interaction, maturation, perception and action? Cognitive development has actually been the most cognitive branch of cognitive psychology. While most cognitive psychology asks what representations are like, or how they are stored, manipulated and used, cognitive development asks where those representations come from and how they allow us to know about the real world.
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