That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know.” Knowing what you don’t know? Since babies can’t verbalize whether or not they understand something, researchers assumed they didn’t have the ability to express uncertainty or to ask a caregiver for help.” But Kouider and his colleagues believed this point of view had to be wrong—after all, study after study has shown that rats, monkeys and other animals are all capable of monitoring their own levels of uncertainty when solving problems in a laboratory. “You can infer from this that they were ‘aware’ that: a) they couldn’t do the task; b) that someone else could do it; c) that that person would be able to tell them how to do it. Here, using a nonverbal memory-monitoring paradigm, we show that infants are able to strategically ask for help to avoid making mistakes. In an experimental group, infants were given the possibility to ask for help through nonverbal communication when they had forgotten the toy location. After a variable delay ranging from three to 12 seconds, the infants were asked to point to the box containing the toy. But when the task was made impossible to complete—say, the toy was hidden when the infants weren’t watching so they had no way of knowing under which box it was hidden—they consistently looked over at their parents, who were sitting nearby, for help solving the problem. Kouider says this information is relevant to parents and to anyone else interested in early education. Perhaps the tasks were just too hard and the children “couldn’t report if they were sure or unsure because they were just confused all the time,�? So it’s a whole lot of useful information that these babies compute.�?
– By 20 months of age, many infants are capable of a wide range of skills, from throwing a ball and using a toilet to stringing words together and finding objects. But researchers report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they now have evidence of babies doing more than gathering skills and knowledge—they're capable of something called metacognition, or as Donald Rumsfeld famously put it, they're aware that there are "known unknowns." What's more, they turn to caregivers when they realize they don't have an answer for something—as the researchers write, "They consciously experience their own uncertainty." To study this, researchers at the Ecole Normal Superieure in Paris developed a non-verbal memory test to get around the fact that most infants aren't yet verbalizing the inner workings of their minds. Gathering 80 Parisian parents and their 20-month-olds, the researchers prompted the babies to remember the location of a toy hidden beneath one of two boxes after a three- to 12-second delay, reports the Atlantic. Turns out they turned to their parents for help as the problem got harder—e.g., after a longer delay, or if hidden behind a curtain. And in doing so, they guessed correctly more often. "Children are capable of learning and questioning from an extremely young age," reports Time. "This means engaging the child, not just plonking him in front of a screen. It means that even when you're playing with your baby, he or she is learning about learning." (Check out why babies smile.)