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“One great blooming, buzzing confusion” was how William James, a 19th-century psychologist, described the way he thought the world looked to a newborn baby. But these experiments, and many others like them over the past few decades, have convinced researchers that, on the contrary, babies are born with many ways of making sense of what they see and hear. The trick is to use their love of novelty to work out what is happening inside their brains: when shown the same things repeatedly, babies’ eyes wander; when the scene changes, their gaze returns. That makes visible what to them constitutes a change in the world around them worthy of notice.
