What do babies know?

　　As Daniel Haworth is settled into a high chair and wheeled behind a black screen, a sudden look of worry furrows his 9-month-old brow. His dark blue eyes dart left and right in search of the familiar reassurance of his mother's face. She calls his name and makes soothing noises, but Daniel senses something unusual is happening. He sucks his fingers for comfort, but, finding no solace, his mouth crumples, his body stiffens, and he lets rip an almighty shriek of distress. Mom picks him up, reassures him, and two minutes later, a chortling and alert Daniel returns to the darkened booth behind the screen and submits himself to Babylab, a unit set up in 2005 at the University of Manchester in northwest England to investigate how babies think.
　　Watching infants piece life together, seeing their senses, emotions and motor skills take shape, is a source of mystery and endless fascination-at least to parents and developmental psychologists. We can decode their signals of distress or read a million messages into their first smile. But how much do we really know about what's going on behind those wide, innocent eyes? How much of their understanding of and response to the world comes preloaded at birth? How much is built from scratch by experience? Such are the questions being explored at Babylab. Though the facility is just 18 months old and has tested only 100 infants, it's already challenging current thinking on what babies know and how they come to know it.
　　Daniel is now engrossed in watching video clips of a red toy train on a circular track. The train disappears into a tunnel and emerges on the other side. A hidden device above the screen is tracking Daniel's eyes as they follow the train and measuring the diameter of his pupils 50 times a second. As the child gets bored-or "habituated", as psychologists call the process-his attention level steadily drops. But it picks up a little whenever some novelty is introduced. The train might be green, or it might be blue. And sometimes an impossible thing happens-the train goes into the tunnel one color and comes out another.
　　Variations of experiments like this one, examining infant attention, have been a standard tool of developmental psychology ever since the Swiss pioneer of the field, Jean Piaget, started experimenting on his children in the 1920s. Piaget's work led him to conclude that infants younger than 9 months have no innate knowledge of how the world works or any sense of "object permanence" (that people and things still exist even when they're not seen). Instead, babies must gradually construct this knowledge from experience. Piaget's "constructivist" theories were massively influential on postwar educators and psychologists, but over the past 20 years or so they have been largely set aside by a new generation of "nativist" psychologists and cognitive scientists whose more sophisticated experiments led them to theorize that infants arrive already equipped with some knowledge of the physical world and even rudimentary programming for math and language. Babylab director Sylvain Sirois has been putting these smart-baby theories through a rigorous set of tests. His conclusions so far tend to be more Piagetian: "Babies," he says, "know squat."

　　参考译文：

　　婴儿知道什么？

　　当九个月大小的Daniel Haworth被放置在一个黑色的屏幕后的一个有轮的高高的椅子里的时候，他的小眉头微微皱起，表情忧虑。他深蓝色的眼睛迅速的左顾右盼，想寻找他所熟悉的妈妈的面孔。小丹尼尔的妈妈呼唤他的名字，并且，发出一些哄他平静下来的声音，但是，小丹尼尔感觉有什么不寻常的事情正在发生。他吸吮他的手指寻求安慰，但是这毫无用处，他开始瘪嘴，身体变得僵硬，然后，他发出一阵拼尽全力的表达难过的尖叫。丹尼尔的妈妈抱起他，安抚他，两分钟后，他开始咯咯地笑，并且对屏幕后面那个黑色平台保有戒备，但是还是顺从了婴儿实验室，这个实验机构2005年在英国西北部的曼彻斯特大学成立，负责调查研究婴儿是如何思考的。
　　把对婴儿的零散的生活的观察合在一起，你会发现，他们的思维、情绪和动机正在形成，这是一件提示神秘的根源和发现无数的令人着迷东西的事情--至少对于他们的父母，还有发展心理学家们是如此。我们能够明白他们表现出的什么样的信号表示不高兴，能够从他们的第一次微笑读出无数信息。但是，在他们大大的、天真的眼睛后面隐藏着些什么样的思维过程，我们对此又真正了解多少呢？他们对这个在他们出生前就存在的世界，有着什么样的理解又会作出什么样的反映呢？在完全空白的基础上，有多少理解是通过经验建立起来的？这些都是婴儿研究室正在研究的问题。虽然研究的对象只有18个月大，并且，他们仅仅只以100个婴儿为对象做了试验，但是，所得出的结论已经对现存的对于婴儿的思维以及他们是怎么样思维的观点提出了怀疑。
　　小丹尼尔现在正在全神贯注的看一个红色的玩具火车在轨道上行使的录像剪辑。火车在隧道里消失，又从另一端出现。在屏幕上方有一个隐藏的装置，在小丹尼尔的眼睛跟随火车的运动时，跟踪他的眼睛，并且在一秒钟内，测量了他的瞳孔的直径50次。 当这个孩子感到厌烦，或者说，习惯时--这也就是心理学家称作的推移--他们的注意力水平会稳步下降。但是，有一点点新奇出现的时候，他们的注意力又会上升一点，比如，火车也许会变成绿色或者蓝色，有时候火车进入隧道的时候是一种颜色，从另一端出来的时候，却是另一种颜色。
　　自从二十世纪二十年代，婴儿的意识研究这个领域的先驱瑞士的皮亚杰开始在他自己的孩子们中进行实验以来，像这种类似的各种各样旨在检测婴儿的注意力的试验已经成为发展心理学研究的标准手段。皮亚杰的实验使他得出了这样的结论：小于9个月大的婴儿对于这个世界是什么样子以及永久事物意识还没有本能的认识。而婴儿应当是在经验中逐渐建立起这种认识。皮亚杰的建构主义理论对战后的教育家和心理学家影响非常深远，但是，在过去的20多年中，他们大部分被新产生的一代先天论心理学家和认识科学家推翻。这新生的一代先天论者通过更加成熟的实验得出的结论是：婴儿天生就对自然界有一定的认识，甚至，对数学和语言有一定的基本的解读。婴儿实验研究室的主任Sylvain Sirois已经在使这些"聪明宝宝理论"通过一系列严格的测试。他的结论越来越倾向皮亚杰理论。婴儿知道占有。Sylvain Sirois表示。