Babies can be rational without being goal-oriented

Alison Gopnik sharing some of the latest research on the neurological development of babies in Your Baby is Smarter Than You Think in the August 16, 2009 New York Times. Read the whole thing.
A couple of key observations:

But babies' intelligence, the research shows, is very different from that of adults and from the kind of intelligence we usually cultivate in school. Schoolwork revolves around focus and planning. We set objectives and goals for children, with an emphasis on skills they should acquire or information they should know. Children take tests to prove that they have absorbed a specific set of skills and facts and have not been distracted by other possibilities.

This approach may work for children over the age of 5 or so. But babies and very young children are terrible at planning and aiming for precise goals. When we say that preschoolers can’t pay attention, we really mean that they can't not pay attention: they have trouble focusing on just one event and shutting out all the rest. This has led us to underestimate babies in the past. But the new research tells us that babies can be rational without being goal-oriented.

[snip]

Adults focus on objects that will be most useful to them. But as the lever study demonstrated, children play with the objects that will teach them the most. In our study, 4-year-olds imagined new possibilities based on just a little data. Adults rely more on what they already know. Babies aren’t trying to learn one particular skill or set of facts; instead, they are drawn to anything new, unexpected or informative.

Part of the explanation for these differing approaches can be found in the brain. The young brain is remarkably plastic and flexible. Brains work because neurons are connected to one another, allowing them to communicate. Baby brains have many more neural connections than adult brains. But they are much less efficient. Over time, we prune away the connections we don't use, and the remaining ones become faster and more automatic. Moreover, the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that controls the directed, planned, focused kind of intelligence, is exceptionally late to mature, and may not take its final shape until our early 20s.

In fact, our mature brain seems to be programmed by our childhood experiences - we plan based on what we've learned as children. Very young children imagine and explore a vast array of possibilities. As they grow older and absorb more evidence, certain possibilities become much more likely and more useful. They then make decisions based on this selective information and become increasingly reluctant to give those ideas up and try something new. Computer scientists talk about the difference between exploring and exploiting - a system will learn more if it explores many possibilities, but it will be more effective if it simply acts on the most likely one. Babies explore; adults exploit.

These observations tie together several strands of research - E.D Hirsch's emphasis on the importance of a framework of knowledge, James Heckman's revealing research on non-cognitive skills, Hart and Risley's discovery about the importance of early word volumes, Gerald Weinberg's Used Car Law (from General Systems Thinking) - as well as the importance of variety and balance between volume and quality, imagination and facts, action and description, etc.

As with so many things to do with reading, the name of the game is balance and nuance. What is right for this child at this moment may be more imaginative works than concrete; two months from now it might be the reverse. Just as in life there is always the effort to harmonize the trade-offs between efficiency and effectiveness.