Editing Developmental psychology (section)

====Recent findings in infant cognition====
In the 1980s and 1990s, researchers developed new methods of assessing infants' understanding of the world with far more precision and subtlety than Piaget was able to do in his time. Since then, many studies based on these methods suggest that young infants understand far more about the world than first thought.

Based on recent findings, some researchers (such as [[Elizabeth Spelke]] and [[Renee Baillargeon]]) have proposed that an understanding of object permanence is not learned at all, but rather comprises part of the innate cognitive capacities of our species.

According to Jean Piaget's developmental psychology, object permanence, or the awareness that objects exist even when they are no longer visible, was thought to emerge gradually between the ages of 8 and 12 months. However, experts such as Elizabeth Spelke and Renee Baillargeon have questioned this notion. They studied infants' comprehension of object permanence at a young age using novel experimental approaches such as violation-of-expectation paradigms. These findings imply that children as young as 3 to 4 months old may have an innate awareness of object permanence. Baillargeon's "drawbridge" experiment, for example, showed that infants were surprised when they saw occurrences that contradicted object permanence expectations. This proposition has important consequences for our understanding of infant cognition, implying that infants may be born with core cognitive abilities rather than developing them via experience and learning.<ref>{{cite book |doi=10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199692972.003.0002 |chapter=Learning about the mind from evidence |title=Understanding Other Minds |date=2013 |last1=Meltzoff |first1=Andrew N. |last2=Gopnik |first2=Alison |pages=19–34 |isbn=978-0-19-969297-2 }}</ref>

Other research has suggested that young infants in their first six months of life may possess an understanding of numerous aspects of the world around them, including:
* an early [[numerical cognition]], that is, an ability to represent number and even compute the outcomes of addition and subtraction operations;<ref>{{cite journal | vauthors = Wynn K | title = Addition and subtraction by human infants | journal = Nature | volume = 358 | issue = 6389 | pages = 749–750 | date = August 1992 | pmid = 1508269 | doi = 10.1038/358749a0 | bibcode = 1992Natur.358..749W | author-link1 = Karen Wynn }}</ref>
* an ability to infer the goals of people in their environment;<ref>{{cite journal | vauthors = Woodward AL | title = Infants selectively encode the goal object of an actor's reach | journal = Cognition | volume = 69 | issue = 1 | pages = 1–34 | date = November 1998 | pmid = 9871370 | doi = 10.1016/S0010-0277(98)00058-4 }}</ref>
* an ability to engage in simple causal reasoning.<ref>{{cite journal | vauthors = Leslie AM, Keeble S | title = Do six-month-old infants perceive causality? | journal = Cognition | volume = 25 | issue = 3 | pages = 265–288 | date = April 1987 | pmid = 3581732 | doi = 10.1016/S0010-0277(87)80006-9 }}</ref>