Dr. Douglas Berger in Tokyo Comments on “How Babies Think” by Alison Gopnik

Tokyo psychiatrist, Dr. Douglas Berger, comments on “How Babies Think” by Alison Gopink, July 1, 2010, Scientific American:


Gopnick's article on how babies think was good food for thought for anyone who has or teaches children. One point, however, was their conclusion that children could infer that a person taking a large number of a rare colored objects would "prefer" to be given an object of that color. It might more likely be that they imitated the person's behavior rather than sense preference in others which seems to be much more complex task than imitation for the 20 month-olds tested. In fact, the authors interpreted children as mimicking a sequence of actions in another experiment later in the article, and SA had previously dedicated an entire article on imitation behavior: The Power of Memes; October 2000; by Susan Blackmore.

Douglas M. Berger, M.D., Ph.D.

U.S. Board-Certified Psychiatrist

Tokyo, Japan


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