CHAPTER 2
How Curiosity Begins
If you were deciding which of the world’s neighbourhoods scores highest for epistemic curiosity, Bloomsbury in London would be a strong candidate. At its heart is the British Museum, a global hub of enquiry and intellectual exchange for over 250 years. Stroll down streets lined with elegant Georgian townhouses and mansion blocks, and your eye is caught by blue plaques denoting the former residences and workplaces of some of the modern world’s most influential thinkers: Charles Darwin, Bertrand Russell, Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes. Today those streets are thronged by the students and faculty of the University of London and its associated institutions.
Push through the door of an anonymous-looking building just off Russell Square, and you find yourself at the entrance to a brightly coloured playroom full of toys. It’s not a crèche, but the reception area for Babylab, where the mysteries of infant minds are studied. Babylab was created as part of Birkbeck College’s drive to become a globally renowned centre for the study of early cognitive development. Every week, dozens of tiny research subjects arrive, accompanied by their parent or carer, to play games in the name of science, enabling Birkbeck’s researchers to get a little closer to understanding what’s going on inside the newly minted human brain.
On a February afternoon at Babylab I meet two psychologists who are investigating the origins of epistemic curiosity: Teodora Gliga and Katarina Begus (Begus is studying for her PhD, Gliga is her supervisor). Gliga and Begus introduce me to their new research subject. Guiu, whose mother is from Barcelona, is nine months old. He is given a toy phone to play with while Katarina deftly slips a net of electrodes over his head. He is then carried into a small room with a camera in it, where, with the help of his mother, Katarina straps him into a chair facing a TV screen.
For the next five minutes a succession of toys of varying shapes and sizes are handed to Guiu by Katarina, while his mother stands by. Just outside the room, Teodora and I can view Guiu’s reactions to the toys on two screens. One is a video feed, which will later be studied to assess how interested Guiu was in what was in front of him — how long he played with each toy, and where his gaze were directed. The other screen shows a series of wobbly parallel lines that spike unpredictably; this shows us roughly what’s going on in Guiu’s brain, as measured by the electrical activity detected by his electrode hairnet.
It’s easy to imagine that infants are in a permanent state of curiosity. Books on parenting, popular science accounts, and our incorrigibly sentimental view of children all conspire to suggest that babies spend every waking second lost in wonder. But although they are avidly inquisitive creatures, the curiosity of babies wanes and waxes, just as ours does. Sometimes babies are primed and ready to learn; other times they are bored, or lost to imaginings, or just sleepy. Crucially, their level of curiosity is acutely responsive to what’s around them — to their physical environment, and, above all, to their adult carers. Infant curiosity is co-dependent.
Gliga and Begus are trying to find a reliable way of measuring the extent of a baby’s curiosity at any one moment. They have been running experiments, like the one I am witnessing today, to see if they can identify the particular state of the infant brain in the moment of epistemic curiosity. Their hypothesis, which they are still exploring (working with babies, like parenting, requires immense patience), is that there is a particular neurological state, identifiable via a particular brain wave, which represents the moment when a baby is most willing and able to acquire knowledge.
Once Guiu has been presented with all the toys in Katarina’s box, his attention is captured by some colourful imagery on the TV screen in front of him. A series of images of the toys that he was just playing with is played back. Next to each is an image of a toy that bears a strong resemblance to it but is subtly different. When Gliga and Begus study the data from this experiment they will look to see if there is any correlation between the amount of time and energy Guiu spends looking at the slightly different version of a particular toy and the amount of interest he previously showed in the original toy. Their reasoning is that if Guiu looks harder at the similar-but-different image of a toy it’s because he was interested in the original toy and is now eager to learn more about it.
His curiosity has been piqued.
Imagine a group of parents from different species getting together for a coffee and discussing the progress of their offspring. The foal’s father would be boasting that his son virtually walked out of the womb; the sheep’s mother would be complaining about her young daughter’s choice of sexual partner. Everyone would feel sorry for the human parents. Three years old, and barely able to feed itself.
As a species, we are embarrassingly slow to mature. Foals are tottering around the paddock within half an hour of leaving the maternal womb; babies aren’t toddling until they are about eighteen months old. Birds are evicted from the nest by their mothers within a couple of months; humans move back into the parental home after college. Chimps go straight from weaning to puberty, while humans take another decade or so. Alison Gopnik points out that, ‘No creature spends more time dependent on others for its very existence than a human baby, and no creature takes on the burden of that dependence so long and so readily as a human adult.’ We call this protracted period of dependence on adults ‘childhood’.
Our extended infancy has a hidden upside — it bequeaths the mature human a child’s capacity to love, learn and wonder why. Childhood means not having to commit to particular courses of action, because adults are taking care of our survival. We can hang back, watch, question, and learn what works best for us before deciding which paths to take. Ultimately it’s this that make Homo sapiens so adaptable and inventive (no wonder we find the fable of the tortoise and the hare so appealing). Without the necessity to fend for ourselves in those first ten or twenty years, we can focus on learning about the niche into which we have been born, and form our own ideas about it.
That involves getting to know our physical environment, whether that be an igloo on the ice or a house in Islington. It also means learning to navigate our cultural environment — the world of gesture, symbol, and technology in which we find ourselves. John Locke, the seventeenth-century English philosopher, famously conceived of the infant mind as a tabula rasa or blank slate. We now know that this is not literally true; scientists believe that babies are born with certain fundamental abilities: to imitate, to recognise faces, to discern basic causal relationships. But Locke’s insight, born from his revulsion at the violent intolerance that had seen England degenerate into a civil war between Catholics and Protestants, endures.
Nobody is born Catholic or Protestant, Eskimo or Bedouin. Your sense of identity, of being a person, is formed by the cultural knowledge you learn, first from your parents and then from others. If culture is the citadel that keeps us safe and allows us to thrive (or sets us against one another), babies use curiosity like a rope to pull themselves over its battlements — and adults throw the rope down to them.
Children are agents of their own learning. Rather than simply taking in information from their environment or following genetic instructions, babies make it their own business to find out about the world. Put a baby down anywhere and it will start stroking, licking, picking things up and putting them in its mouth, and later, crawling, walking and running.
Scientists at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development in Maryland recently discovered something extraordinary — the more actively a baby explores his or her environment, the more likely it is that he or she will go on to achieve academic success as an adolescent. The researchers measured the propensity of 374 five-month-old babies to crawl and probe and fiddle, and then tracked their progress over the following fourteen years. They found that the ones doing best at school aged fourteen were the ones who had been the most energetically exploratory babies.
But it is in the social world, and the cultures in which our social worlds exist, that babies and toddlers really exert and build their cognitive muscles. Any parent of a young child will know that small children love to run psychological tests on adults, testing their limits. The naughtiness of infants is experimental, a method of data collection. When a mother tells her son not to eat dirt he immediately wonders what will happen if he does, and how his mother will react. The child who pushes over his elder sister’s carefully constructed tower of play blocks is doing so not just to watch the structure collapse, but to see his sister explode.
At first, children hypothesise that there is no difference between what others are thinking and what they are thinking; that everyone is thinking the same thing. Then they notice that the theory doesn’t hold — different people seem to say and want different things, becoming upset when they don’t get them or happy when they do. That’s when children become interested in what’s going on in those other minds — when empathic curiosity begins. Before even this stage, children are sophisticated mimics, imitating adult behaviour even when they don’t know why they’re doing so, yet quite capable of discriminating between the adults worth imitating and those best ignored.
All this time, they are gathering cultural information — learning how to express themselves, about right and wrong, about what’s considered acceptable behaviour and unacceptable behaviour. One of the most important things they learn about is whether it’s good to learn.
Right from the beginning, curiosity is a joint venture.
Begus and Gliga are seeking to unlock one of the mysteries of child development — why some babies grow into highly curious children, and others don’t. Their working hypothesis is that there are two factors involved: first, the child’s basic cognitive ability, or intelligence, and second, the responses children receive to their nascent enquiries from parents and carers in those first years.
One of Begus and Gliga’s experiments centres on a deceptively simple action — pointing. Most babies start to gesture towards things sometime around their first birthday, and soon they are doing so with their index finger. When a child points, she is initiating what psychologists call ‘joint attention’ — getting you to pay attention to what she’s paying attention to. Pointing is crucial to childhood development; the frequency with which a child points correlates to the speed with which she acquires language. Children who don’t point tend to have difficulties in learning language, following social cues and learning from others.
It’s impossible to know for sure why babies point, because they can’t tell us. But we can make good guesses; for instance, that they are pointing to things they want, or simply to engage their mother’s attention. Gliga and Begus think that infants often point to something to signal their interest in it. The child wants to know more about something, and expects their parent to tell them about it. Before they are able to speak, they are asking a question with their finger.
In one study, conducted with sixteen-month-old babies, Begus played games with the babies which involved everyday objects with which the infants were familiar, like a book or a cup, together with some unfamiliar toys that Begus had made herself. She and the baby explored the objects together. With some babies, Begus acted as you would expect a knowledgeable adult to — she named the familiar objects correctly and helped the baby label and explore the unfamiliar objects when the baby pointed at them. With other babies, Begus played the fool — she pretended not to know what the familiar objects were, or got them all wrong, calling a cup a shoe. What she found was that the babies in the second condition were much less likely to engage in pointing behaviour than the babies in the first condition.
It is sobering to think that even at an early age, infants are quite capable of telling whether or not you’re an idiot — a judgement which, when you think about it, demands substantial cognitive and social abilities. But this had been shown before. What was new about this study was its evidence that pointing is about learning from others, and that whether or not children point depends on the adult they’re with. When faced with someone clearly ignorant or unreliable, babies stop pointing. If you’re unlikely to give them good information, there’s no point.
The same principles apply to a baby’s babbling. Babies start to babble a few months after birth, and they do so in similar ways all over the world, regardless of which culture they are from. After writing this behaviour off as unimportant for many years, scientists now think of it as a key marker of cognitive and social development, and an essential precursor to speech. Michael Goldstein, an associate professor of psychology at Cornell University, has looked at how babies learn the names of objects they are unfamiliar with. He found that they are more likely to learn these new words when they are offered in response to the baby’s babbling. ‘In that moment of babbling, babies seem to be primed to take in more information,’ he says. ‘It’s about creating a social interaction where now you can learn new things.’
Babbling, like pointing, is a sign of readiness to learn, and babies are also more likely to use it as a tool of their curiosity if their parents respond to it as such; if, rather than ignoring them, they try and answer whatever they think the baby’s unintelligible question might be. If a baby looks at an apple and says ‘Da da da!’ and the adult says nothing, the baby not only fails to learn the name of that round greenish object, she also starts to think that this whole babbling business might be a waste of time.
Curiosity supercharges learning, even in these early months and years. In a separate study, Begus showed two novel objects to each baby. The toys were like simple puzzles, responding in interesting ways to pushes or pulls or brushes in the right places. After presenting the two objects, Begus waited for the baby to point to one of them. Then she demonstrated how one of the objects worked, choosing either the object the baby pointed to, or the one he hadn’t. Next, Begus took the objects away and, ten minutes later, brought them back to observe whether or not the baby played with them in the way they had been shown. Babies were much more likely to replicate her actions correctly with the object in which they had been interested in the first place.
It’s remarkable that even in the course of fifteen minutes in the laboratory, an adult can elicit a lot or a little curiosity from an infant, depending on how she behaves. But this is one of the secrets of curiosity. We don’t get allocated a fixed amount of it at birth. Instead, we inherit a mercurial quality that rises and falls through the day, and throughout our lives. What’s more, its progress is deeply affected by the behaviour of people around us, especially in those first months and years.
In the same study, Begus observed the infants at play with their parents. She found that children whose parents responded more to their promptings, and asked more questions in return, were the children who learned most about how their chosen object could be used. Here, then, is the most likely answer to the question that Begus and Gliga are investigating — to a surprisingly large extent, whether or not a child is highly curious or incurious depends how their parents responded to these early unspoken queries. Curiosity is a feedback loop.
What do children think pointing is for? That depends on how they see adults react when they do it. ‘If they just get given the object they’re pointing to, they learn that the function of pointing is getting things,’ Gliga told me. ‘If they get told the name of the object, then they learn to think of it as a way of getting information.’ What happens if they get neither, I asked — if they receive no response to their signal?
‘They stop pointing.’
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In most ways, children become more independent of adults as they grow older. But when it comes to curiosity, adults become more important to children as time goes by.
As any parent knows, children ask questions — a lot of questions. In 2007 the psychologist Michelle Chouinard analysed recordings of four children interacting with their respective caregivers for two hours at a time, for a total of over 200 hours. She found that, on average, the children posed over a hundred questions every hour. Some of the questions were requests or calls for attention, but about two thirds were designed to elicit information, e.g., ‘What is the name for that?’ Question-asking, concluded Chouinard, ‘is not something that happens every now and then — asking questions is a central part of what it means to be a child.’
As children grow older, their questions become more probing; they start to ask for explanations, rather than just information. Chouinard found that up until the age of about thirty months, children mostly ask what and where questions: ‘What’s that?’, ‘What does it do?’, ‘Where is my ball?’ or (of a sibling or a pet) ‘What is he doing?’ These are questions designed to elicit facts. Then, sometime around their third birthday, they start to ask how and why questions; questions designed to elicit explanation.9 This type of question becomes more frequent as the child grows. When conversing with a familiar adult at home, preschoolers ask explanatory questions at a rate of about twenty-five times an hour.
Paul Harris, a professor of education at Harvard, is an expert on children’s question-asking. Extrapolating from Chouinard’s data, he estimates that between the ages of two and five, children ask a total of 40,000 ‘explanatory’ questions. ‘That’s an amazing number,’ he says. ‘It shows that questioning is an incredibly important engine for cognitive development.’ These explanatory questions can be profound or silly, perceptive or incomprehensible, stirring or hilarious. Here’s a random sample of questions from my friends’ children, all of whom were under ten years old when they asked them:
Paul Harris points out that asking a question requires a complex mental process. ‘The child has to first realise that there are things they don’t know . . . that there are invisible worlds of knowledge they have never visited.’ They also have to realise that other people are information-bearing agents, and that language can be used as ‘a tool for shifting stuff from that person to them’. The question is a technology that children use to trawl for insights. As Harris remarks, it’s striking that the questions children ask aren’t restricted to immediate goals, like what’s for dinner or how to make a toy work. ‘They probe the how and why of things, sometimes tenaciously, even if it yields no tangible rewards.’ Every question is a little bet. From a very young age, children sense that any information they can gather, even it doesn’t have an immediate application, may come in useful in the future. Some of their questions will lead to dead ends, confusions or refusals from embarrassed parents. But, cumulatively, their questions bring knowledge, and with more knowledge, the child knows that he is growing, just as surely as he knows he will exceed this year’s chalk mark on the wall chart next year.
The incuriosity of Kanzi — the highly intelligent bonobo ape — wasn’t a mere problem of linguistic complexity. Michelle Chouinard noted that even before they learn language, children can vocalise information-gathering questions. For example, one mother was unpacking her groceries when her child picked up an unfamiliar item — a kiwi fruit — and held it towards her mother with a puzzled expression on her face and the monosyllabic but perfectly expressive question, ‘Uh?’ Children sometimes ask questions simply by repeating what they have just heard. Researchers observed two three-year-old twins, David and Toby, talking to each other. David said, ‘My hands are cold.’ ‘Cold?’ asked Toby.
Kanzi doesn’t even do this. Unlike human children, Kanzi doesn’t seem to have grasped that communication can be an exchange of information, or that there are others who know more about the world than he does. Children intuitively understand, says Harris, that adults can be ‘trustworthy informers about hidden reality’. Children are scientists, experimenting on their physical environment, but they are also investigative reporters, pumping their sources for secrets.
We’re so used to the idea of being able to ask questions that we’ve forgotten what an amazing skill, or set of skills, it is. First, you have to know that you don’t know — to conceive of your own ignorance. Second, you have to be able to imagine different, competing possibilities; when a child asks whether ghosts are real or made-up, she is already imagining alternative explanations. Third, you have to understand that you can learn from other people. None of these abilities are shared by other primates, and neither is their development in human children simple or inevitable; under different conditions, they can flourish or atrophy.
When we’re adults, we can shape those conditions in the right way, as long as we know how to do so. But a young child can’t do this. Her curiosity is shaped for her, by parents and carers. Most parents, including this one, can get impatient with the incessant curiosity of children — with their pointing, babbling and question-asking. It’s hard to engage with every one of our child’s enquiries when we’re trying to make dinner, talk to a friend, finish an email or just relax.
These days it’s increasingly easy to fob them off to our electronic child-minders. Technology is a great aid in getting parents off the hook of their children’s curiosity; we can drop them in front of the TV, give them a cellphone to play with, or hand them an iPad with their favourite game on it. It’s not the worst thing you can do to a child. But after talking to the experts and learning about how children learn, I’m now painfully aware that every time I ignore my daughter’s questions, I may be stunting her innate desire to know.
9 How or why questions may not literally include the words ‘how’ or ‘why’. Paul Harris uses the example of a child looking at a broken toy airplane and asking ‘Daddy broke?’ As Harris says, ‘the child is probably seeking explanatory information, even if the question is not well formed.’