In this talk Dr. Sommerville will elucidate the nature of early learning over the first two years of life, drawing out important lessons for parents, policy makers and educators. First, she will discuss evidence demonstrating that infants’ and toddlers’ learning is inherently social. Second, she will show how parents and caregivers are critical figures for helping infants learn about the norms and values of their environment and culture. Third, she will discuss new evidence that while even young infants are keenly attentive to the social information that parents provide, infants do not merely soak up, or reproduce social input from others. Rather, they integrate information with their own pre-existing knowledge and abilities to form novel inferences about the world around them. As a whole, these findings suggest that infants are active and adaptive learners par excellence. Moreover, the learning processes that infants invoke “in the wild” generate important take home messages for facilitating learning across a broad range of environments and populations.
