What is my child thinking?
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What does Finn’s “Rat of the Highway” story reveal about how children think?
Stand and deliver. For I am the Right of the highway! Yes, I am the rat of the highway! And whatever I want I taste.
So can you say your name for me?
I know what's a high.
Okay, hey Red of the Highway. What are you thinking about at the moment? Foxes.
That's three-year-old Finn telling his dad Joel that he's also Rat of the Highway, just like his latest favourite TV show character. Finn also has foxes on his mind. Hi, it's All in the Mind on RN. I'm Lynn Malcolm, and today we explore how babies and young children think.
What do you know about foxes?
They sneak
all night.
Snake all night.
And I was like, Oh And the what up are you?
What do you think foxes eat?
Uh I'm not sure.
Do you think they would eat crackers?
No
Why not?
White what is
What do you think they'd like then?
I eat leaves.
Ah, they they might eat leaves. Okay. That sounds good.
Yeah. I think that what it's like to be a baby is it's like being in love in Paris for the first time after you've had four double espresso. Which is a very nice way to feel in some ways, but does mean that you tend to wake up at three o'clock in the morning crying.
Alison Gopnick is a professor of psychology and philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. She studies how children's minds work. She says we need to let kids be kids because they're brilliant and we have a lot to learn from them. She explained to me that our understanding of what's in an infant's mind has significantly changed over the last three or four decades.
So thirty or forty years ago, people thought that babies minds were a blank slate or a blooming buzzing confusion. Even the great developmental psychologist Jean Piaget thought that babies were irrational and amoral and egocentric, didn't understand very much about the world. And in the past thirty years or so we've discovered that it's just the opposite of that is true. In many respects, even the youngest babies are smarter even than grown-ups. They think, they make up theories, they try to figure out how the world works. And they pay attention to other people and try to understand things about what's going on in other people's minds. In the work that we've done most recently, we can actually show that in some respects
babies and young children are actually not only much smarter than we ever thought before, but smarter than grown ups are. And you
were one of the founders in the research field of theory of mind in relation to children's development. Can you just explain that theory of mind?
Yeah. So when psychologists talk about theory of mind, what they mean is our everyday understanding of what's going on in the minds of other people. And you know, if you think about it, if you look around a room of other people, what you actually see are a bunch of bags of skin that are stuffed into pieces of cloth.
How have modern psychology and neuroscience changed our view of infants’ minds?
And yet, of course, that's crazy. What we see are people with thoughts and desires and wants and feelings just like ours. And the question is is how do we ever figure that out? And in particular, how do children figure that out? So how do children go from just seeing these bodies around them and figuring out that they all have minds? And how
How did you investigate whether babies and young children think about what's in the minds of others? And is it the case for babies? I mean normally you'd ask, say, a three-year-old child, what they're thinking and you'd get this very cute rambling
story. So
how did you
test that in
the lab?
So, one of the questions, one of the reasons why we've changed our minds so much about what babies and young children are like is because we figured out new ways of asking them what they think in their language instead of in our language. So, for instance, one of the things that we were wondering about was when would children understand that I could want one thing and you could want another thing? When could they start in a simple way to take the perspective? of another person. And we know that perspective taking like that is very important for our adult morality and our adult social competence. And the wisdom was that this was something that children couldn't do until quite late in development.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What does Finn’s “Rat of the Highway” story reveal about how children think?
0:04–3:38
2
How have modern psychology and neuroscience changed our view of infants’ minds?
3:38–7:30
3
What is Theory of Mind and how do researchers test it in toddlers?
7:30–10:57
4
How did the food‑preference experiment show early perspective‑taking?
10:57–13:03
5
Why might children’s exploratory thinking inspire better AI design?
13:03–18:02
6
What is the difference between adult ‘exploit’ and child ‘explore’ cognition?
18:02–22:43
7
How should early childhood education change based on new brain research?
22:43–25:13
8
What are the next research questions about children’s superior learning abilities?
25:13–28:35