Who has never asked himself this question at the sight of a baby who is not yet speaking, what is happening “up there”? It's true after all, how do babies think? Are they really aware of the world around them? Are they so immature, so incompetent? So what are their real abilities?

1. Young children's communication

These questions have long been and still are a real headache for researchers, and not only that! All early childhood professionals, all parents face these questions every day: “But what do you want to tell me? Why do you react like that? What do you really want? Why don't you understand? ”.

Indeed, it is not easy to obtain precise answers, when a child has little or no command of speech. Moreover, over the past decades, researchers have used numerous devices, often very inventive, to discover how our babies think or reason! But lately, a revolution is on the horizon. Science seems to finally lift the veil of what is happening “up there”. Indeed, the study of our brain, and in particular the developing one, is one of the major revolutions of the 21st century.^th century! These numerous questions, which have remained unanswered for far too long, are beginning to emerge an increasingly precise vision of the brain, which is being developed thanks in particular to neuroimaging techniques. These machines allow us to better understand, for example, how our neurons give rise to thoughts or reasoning. Or again, and this is what will interest us the most in our future articles: How does our brain develop and learn from the world around it?

2. The real skills of young children

Yes, we have never made so much progress in understanding our brain function in recent decades! We need this in particular Advances in neuroscience, in particular cognitive neuroscience. Many questions addressed by cognitive psychology allow us to go even further and provide additional answers to these famous questions about the development of our babies. But what are the challenges in the world of early childhood? Why does this knowledge in cognitive neuroscience apply so much to our teaching practices? And finally, Why, is it time to take into account research and science data in general, which are all too often isolated in laboratories, to put them back at the heart of our practices?

Our babies' cognitive skills have all too often been associated with the image of their motor skills, unable to move (too much) and therefore to perceive, observe or reason. These observations on the pre-verbal child have long misled us in many respects and some may have for too long reduced the baby's abilities to a low-level, poorly developed and very primary functioning. A bit like the famous “reptilian brain”, a concept that is now obsolete and could make us think of a level of development similar to that of an animal.

3. The secrets of baby brains through the lens of neuroscience

The last few years have been decidedly marked by fantastic discoveries about the brain of babies. We have made great strides in understanding early learning mechanisms and, above all, discovered how baby brains are very far from being so “immature” and therefore so poorly functional. Science shows us that the opposite is true!

Let's put behind us these old concepts that no longer have their place and let's discover together what babies are really capable of doing, understanding or even analyzing. Let's no longer confuse immaturity with incapacity! Let's take a closer look at their incredible skills, which allow them to learn very high level concepts in a very short time! Let's learn to discover these fabulous skills through the prism of cognitive neuroscience in order to develop a new perspective on young children. Let's develop, refine our observations on the skills of our babies, using tools from science who will be able to better enable us to adapt and live their first years of life with peace of mind.

References

1. Abboub, N., Nazzi, T., & Gervain, J. (2016). Prosodic grouping at birth. Brain and Language, 162, 46-59
2. Bouchon, C. Abboub, N., & Gervain, J (2013) NIRS (Near Infrared Spectroscopy): General principles of this new neuroimaging technique and contribution to research on the origins of language. The audition notebooks, No. 3, 7-14
3. Dubois, J., Dehaene-Lambertz, G., G., Kulikova, S., Kulikova, S., S., Poupon, C., Hüppi, P. S., & Hertz-Pannier, L. (2014). The early development of brain white matter: a review of imaging studies in fetuses, newborns and infants. neuroscience, 276, 48-71.

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