Smarter than you think!

I took Rhea to a study at Harvard's Laboratory for Developmental Studies recently. The lab does fascinating work in developmental psychology, and really confirms what parents have known for a very long time - babies are much more intelligent than adults tend to believe. Rhea participated in the "Music & Space" study which is investigating whether infants use spatial metaphors to represent music (over your head?? - it basically sees if high-low tones in music relate to "high-low" spatial positions of objects). Rhea was shown flowers dancing up and down along with high-low musical sounds. I have to admit - being tone-deaf, I wasn't able to distinguish between the sounds (again, maybe all these responses are involuntary and not trained responses; so in my defense even if I couldn't "tell" the difference, my brain might have known it). "Boredom" signaled that she wasn't terribly excited in the tone-flower combination, and that they could move to the next image-sound combination. The findings so far suggest that infants do in fact prefer to look at the matching space and tone combination. More such fascinating tidbits and studies are in their newsletter.