Psychologists at the University of Manchester are trying to learn about how babies acquire knowledge. For babies the adult world is a complicated collection of sights, sounds and smells.
Hence research is going on as to understand how they cope up with it. Lead investigator Dr Sylvain Sirois said that BabyLab are set to investigate how babies learn and also about their neurological development.He says that learning and development is seen as a series of universal changes affecting children over long time-frames. But these ideas do not describe about the mechanisms behind them, which are of fundamental importance.
The researcher said that their main aim of the study is to understand learning and development as distinct processes, and how they work together to produce change. He said that an important developmental change takes place in the brain in the first year of life, which shifts control of babies' behavior to the cortex.
Then when the baby grows a lot happens between five and six months of age. In this period they want to further analyze everything from babies' perceptual learning to their temperament.
In the experiment the babies will be shown two patterns of simple shapes on a video screen, some remaining the same while others change. Dr Sirois explained that the babies get bored when they are shown the same monotonous sequence but show renewed interest when events change.
Hence further research is necessary to manipulate what they see and distinguish as different and monitor how this ability develops.
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