This book is aimed at parents. It is an excellent and accessible overview of many of the important results in developmental psychology. Anyone with young children may find it hard to put down. Why? Not because it tells us how to teach our children to be brilliant, nor because the experiments it describes are good ones to try at home. Rather, it is because parents become fascinated with what children are like and what they do. However, the book will also be of interest to non-parents who want to find out how the adult mind works. Experiments on children give us some tantalizing clues, although exactly what they demonstrate is open, and subject to vigorous debate. For either camp, the book is short, easy to read and a great way into the subject.

Those who know the data already — psychologists, philosophers and cognitive scientists — will value such a clear overview, making a pleasant break from the dry scientific papers on which it is based. It will renew your enthusiasm to revisit the details of the papers, which are carefully referenced in an appendix listing all the studies mentioned on each page of the text.

Despite being called The Scientist in the Crib the book does not advance the debate on whether children learn by testing tacit theories, like scientists, or by some other mechanism. Although the authors assert the former point of view, they do not make much effort to argue for it or to marshal evidence in support. The British title How Babies Think is a more accurate name, although still too ambitious. Rather, it gives some hints about this secret world. Its merit lies not in expounding theories, but in an engaging presentation of the breadth of the data. Too often theories are built on just a few studies. For example, children’s understanding of other minds is often modeled using only their failure to perform false belief tasks until aged about 4. The authors show that children can track others’ desires much sooner. 14 month olds who give the experimenter the child’s preferred food (e.g., crackers) when asked for something nice develop into 18 month olds who give the food which the experimenter has shown she preferred (e.g., broccoli).

The overall picture the authors present is of children born with some knowledge and abilities, developing lots of abilities to learn as they grow, together with a very strong motivation to learn. It would seem that, at least for children growing up in the care of adults, the dangers of exploring are offset by the benefits of what is learned. Innate abilities underpinning learning include the tacit assumption that a new object on the scene is what is being named by a new word, and the assumption that a new word is the name of the object which the speaker, not the child, is looking at. The authors also emphasize the importance of the adults in the child’s environment in helping him to learn. For example, through exposure to speech the child learns to discriminate only the phonemes of its native language. He starts by being able to tell all phonemes apart, but soon loses the ability to discern differences which are irrelevant in his own language, like r/l in Japanese.

Indeed, on the issue of the role of parents the authors begin to preach. Having at the outset disclaimed a desire to deliver advice, they do slip into homilies on the importance of interacting with children ‘as nature intended’. The tone is slightly off-putting, but is just a symptom of the enthusiasm which does a good job of carrying the reader through the book. Nor is it clear that they have evidence for their claims, either that adults have innate child teaching skills, or that what we Western adults feel like doing with our kids will always be the ideal thing for their cognitive development. For example, the evidence is equivocal as to whether simplified ‘motherese’ helps children learn language. Their motivation for this advice though is good, and is likely to be sound: that it is better to be relaxed as a parent than to become stressed in attempting to follow the advice of hundreds of contradictory and untested theories in the books which are vying for parents’ cash.

The Scientist in the Crib gives a feel for how developmental psychology can give us clues to the nature of cognition. Who knows how the experiments reported in this book should inform theories about the mind, but they are clearly essential background for theorists. For new parents they are just plain fascinating. And for those, like the current reviewer, in both camps, this book is unmissable.

© Nicholas Shea, 2001

Nicholas Shea is a Ph.D. student in philosophy of psychology at King’s College, London.

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