Developmental psychologist Stella Lourenco invites us to see babies not as blank slates, but as little thinkers: even before they can talk, babies are actively reasoning about the world. She shows how scientists use clever, nonverbal experiments to uncover what’s going on in babies’ minds — how they perceive objects, quantities, space, and even social relationships.

One example: infants as young as 10 months can make transitive inferences about dominance (if A dominates B, and B dominates C, then A should dominate C) — something once thought to emerge much later. Lourenco argues this reveals that babies are not just absorbing facts, but forming predictions, ruling out possibilities, and trying to make sense of cause and effect in their social world.

Ultimately, the talk reminds us that babies are deeply curious, reasoning creatures — and that understanding their hidden thought processes can help us appreciate how thinking and knowledge emerge from our earliest days.

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