(no subject)

[watertank]

The increase in attention to unfamiliar events toward the end of the first year, which is now an established fact, implies a maturational change in brain organization and a parallel change in the ability to relate the representations acquired in the past to the present moment. This ability is called working memory. We now know that one component of the maturation involves the establishment of connections between structures in the temporal lobe and the prefrontal cortex.... The more mature brain enables eight-month-olds to hold in a working memory ciruit the schema of the objects they saw moments earlier.
...
A few years latr Nathan Fox and Sally Weiskopf affirmed this conclusion by repeatedly administering twelve problems requiring working memory to eight infants across the period from five to fourteen months of age. The results were beautiful. The robustness of working memory improved most between seven and ten months in each of the eight infants. The evidence from more than a hundred studies in different labs pints to the same conclusion. Sometime between six and ten months infants begin to "think" for the first time because brain sites that were unconnected in the young brain have become connected. The more mature brain permits the infant to find the representations relevant to a current experience and to keep the tow schemata active until they can be combined. If the cannot, the infant turs away. ibid. p. 77.