Sources of causal knowledge
Malika, Illya, and Lian are 11-month-old infants playing together. Malika passes a toy car to Illya, who had dropped it accidentally. Lian is trying to grab a new teddy bear that her sister put next to the chair. If you observe Malika, Illya, and Lian, you will quickly notice that they are very motivated to explore the environment around them.
This is a good sign – one of the indicators of a healthy developmental trajectory.
There’s a catch though.
How do they choose what to explore?
You and I, oversaturated
It’s estimated that around 11 million bits of information are sent from sensory inputs to the brain every second. In adults, only about 60 bits per second can be consciously processed (Martín, 2009).
It’s difficult to assess how much of the 11 million bits can be processed unconsciously. It is also difficult to translate these numbers directly into babies’ processing capabilities, but it’...
