For my first blog posting I will discuss the first part of chapter 3 in Tomasello.  In the beginning of chapter 3, Tomasello looks at early infant cognition.  He makes the point that neonates are completely helpless in that they are not able to feed themselves, clean themselves or even dress themselves.  They need an adult to do all of this for them.  As well, they have no comprehension of the language and culture surrounding them.  Although the neonates are not able to do anything for themselves, they are able to understand much of their environment even though it is not apparent to the adults surrounding them. 

            From an early age, infants are able to understand what the objects in their immediate environment are even though they are not able to verbalize this.  At the early age of 4 months, infants do not understand that when an object disappears it still exists.  By 7 or 8 months, the same children understand that when an object disappears, that it still exists and that someone moved that object.  They will look for it until they find it.  For example; when my daughter was about 4 months old, if I moved my phone she would not look for it.  She thought it was gone, but by the time she was about 7 months old, if I moved my phone, she would look for it.  She would crawl around me and look behind furniture and other objects to try to find the phone.  She knew that it could not just disappear and that it had to be somewhere near. 

            When children are closer to one year of age, they are better able to understand and navigate their environment.  They are able to construct a kind of cognitive map of their environment.  For example; when my daughter was about one year of age, we were at my home in Saudi Arabia.  She did not know this area well but she was able to figure out the layout of the house and create somewhat of a map in her brain.  She followed me around the house with ease and even when she was not paying attention to where she was going she was able to navigate her way around the house without bumping into the furniture or the doorways.  She had a cognitive map of the house.

            Tomasello says that although infant children are very close in development to infant chimpanzees, human infants are much more social than infant chimpanzees.  He says that human infants may be ‘ultra-social’.  Neonates are able to distinguish between human faces and inanimate objects.  As well, neonates know their care-givers.  They know their mother’s face and voice.  When my daughter was about one month old and she was crying, my mother (her grandmother) tried to pick her up and make her stop crying.  She continued to cry until I picked her up.  My mother said that this was because she knew my voice and my face and my smell.  She felt comfortable and safe so she stopped crying. 

            Tomasello next talks about “proto-conversation”.  This is face to face conversation between the infant and the adult.  There is emotional conversation between the two which includes turn taking structure.  The infants are learning to share their emotions with the care givers that are face to face with them.  They change their intonation and are having conversation in a different language, baby language. 

            The infant also mimics the adults physical gestures, such as; tongue protrusion, reaching and head movement.  They try to do everything the same as the adult and will continue to try until the adult stops.  An example of this is when my daughter was 18 months mimicked everything I did.  I was swinging my hair and she watched me intently and kept trying until she got the same movement as me.  She was very happy and laughed a lot.

            Finally, infants are able to understand their capabilities and interact with their environment within the limitations of their abilities.  If an action exceeds their abilities, they will decide to stop that activity and move on to something else.  For example, if an infant is trying to reach a toy that is out of reach, he or she will try until he or she decides that it is too difficult and they are too scared to try harder.  On the other hand, the child may go ask for help to achieve their goal of reaching the toy from an adult.  As well, children of this age will also set goals and try to achieve it on their own.  For example, if they child wants to see what is behind a cup, he or she will attempt to move it.  If they can, the goal is achieved, if they can’t the goal is not achieve and they may attempt to achieve their goal in a different way, maybe by knocking over the cup or moving around to the other side of the cup to see what is behind it.  However, we are not able to truly understand if the infant has a sense of social self because infants are unable to verbally communicate this to adults.

            When reading Tomasello’s 3^rd chapter of “The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition”, I could identify with the cognitive abilities of the infant because of my experience with my own child.  All of the stages of cognition and the abilities of the infant to understand its environment took me back to my daughter’s infancy and I can follow her development exactly as Tomasello explained it.  I think that this part of the chapter was written in a way that was quite easy to understand and I can see that there has been a lot of research in this area of cognitive development.