Cognitive world in human infants : Challenge of the developmental science

There is much progress in the study of infant's development. According to enormous studies in these three decades, we have known that human infants alive in rich environments where we expected before. They seem to have knowledge about the physical principles in the environments. They also seem to have great sensitivity to social signal of the human. In the first section, I introduce how to study infant's cognitive development. We can not use language as a mediator for their responses. Thus we developed new methods for psychological study in infants, such as preferential looking paradigm, habituation paradigm, violation-expectation paradigm, and so on. In the second section, I reported that the early social cognition in human infants. They showed the higher sensitivity to social stimuli of human, such as face, eye, eye direction, social interaction. In the final section, I introduce an exciting new research field in the development of mentalizing called "developmental cybernetics." In the future, robots will not only perform household chores but also serve as caregivers and educators to children. To date, no scientific evidence has ascertained whether children, particularly younger ones, will be amenable to receiving care, let alone learning, from robots as readily as from humans. Despite recent rapid growth in research on developmental cybernetics, it is entirely unknown what essential human characteristics must be built into robots to facilitate such learning