Growing babies. Part 2, Brainpower.

Presented by child psychologist Laverne Antrobus, this is the second in a two-part series looking at pregnancy and childbirth. This part looks at the origins of infant thought. Antrobus begins by looking at the work of child development specialist Jean Piaget who meticulously recorded the development of his own children from birth to later childhood. However while Piaget believed that all knowledge was learned and not inherent, that idea has since been discredited and it is now accepted that children are born with 'core knowledge.' The knowledge of object permanence can be witnessed in a two-week-old baby, while babies as young as six weeks old have a basic sense of number and natural geommetry. The work of researchers at Birkbeck Babylab is shown in some depth. But does some aspect of knowledge and learning begin in the womb? At Belfast Royal Hospital, Peter Hepper is working with 3-D scans of babies in the womb to get a clearer picture of where the core knowledge babies seem to have at birth has come from. Premature babies often don't get a chance to complete their pre-birth development. They show a high level sensitivity to external stimulus which is particularly marked as they are often kept lying flat in busy, noisy, emergency medical units rather than floating in the womb, protected from most loud noises and flexing their muscles. Dr. Heidelise Als has shown that premature babies show a lack of development of their front brain which controls our ability to filter out stimulus. She has devised a new care plan for premature babies which more closely resembles life in the womb. Finally we hear from Professor Deb Roy who is intending to make a robot which uses artificial intelligence based on a model of learning he has gathered from studying and analysing the experiences of his baby son's brain.