Cognitive structure stage one (birth to 2 Months and onward.)

 A sensory fog. 

When a child comes into the world, it is aware of sensory input from the self and beyond the self, but the child can make little sense of this sensory data, unable to even determine what is self and what is not. From birth on the child experiences the external world but it has no meaning. There is no conception, no self, there is only sensation without understanding. There is no reality. Sensory information comes to the child in the form of smells, tastes, sounds, images and feelings but is without meaning. When this sensory data reaches the adult brain it is associated together with other such data to form information packages about the world or reality. This sensory information becomes, via our brains, what we call knowledge, our understanding of reality. But for a newly born infant this sensory information is initially almost useless. Initially sensory information is separate and unconnected to anything else and so has no ability to predict outcomes or solve problems. The child experiences a meaningless fog of sensations.

Social structure begets cognitive structure. 

Some how, the infant has to progress from a state of knowing nothing to a state of understanding the reality around it. In other words somehow the child has to construct a model of reality that it can refer to out of this initial fog of sensory data. How does does an infant manage this incredibly intricate task? Stanly Greenspan and Stuart Shanker in their book  "The First Idea" have provided a new theory of how this comes about. They suggest that this ability to build a model of reality is a social construct that has evolved over thousands of years and is passed on to each succeeding generation by means of cultural interactions between infants and their caregivers. By evolution they do not mean genetic modification, which happens over much longer periods of time, but rather a cultural structure that evolves by means of modification by each succeeding generation. Although evolutionary forces have equipped the human baby with the potential to learn, that learning is dependent on a learning environment of emotional, social and cultural experiences without which learning cannot occur.

  Constructing a model of reality. First steps. 

Greenspan and Shanker's theory has as an essential premise that meaning is embedded in our emotions. Emotions provide our motivations and how we feel about the various elements of reality and thus give us meaning and understanding of those elements. Babies are born into the world with only very basic reflexes and primitive emotions which Greenspan and Shanker term catastrophic emotions. They are all or nothing because such emotions are not modulated to embody fine distinctions of feeling. If a baby experiences pain or unpleasantness it will prompt fear, anger, disgust or sadness and its reflexes are to flee, fight, recoil, avoid and scream or wail. If a baby experiences pleasure it will prompt curiosity, joy or happiness and its reflexes are to draw near, to investigate, to maintain the pleasure, to smile and laugh. Greenspan and Shanker see these reflex actions as the beginnings of communication in that they reflect the emotions of the child. By observing these reflex actions the parent gets some understanding of what is going on in the child's brain.

Interest in the world. 

For communication to begin the child must also be motivated to communicate and the first step the child needs to take, to begin this process, is to become generally interested in what is happening, to become interested in the world. This takes place by means of what Greenspan and Shanker call dual coding. By this they mean that when incoming sensory data is processed and stored as memory at the same time the child's emotional reaction to the sensory data is also recorded. These simultaneous recordings are associated together so that the sensory data is given some meaning by the emotion associated with it. Greenspan and Shanker explain this as follows:

"...we observed that each sensation, as it is registered by the child also gives rise,... to an affect or emotion; that is to say the infant responds to to it according to its emotional as well as physical effect on her. Thus a blanket may feel smooth and pleasant or itchy and irritating; a toy may be brilliantly red and intriguing or boring, a voice may be loud and inviting or jarring. Mom's cheek might feel soft and wonderful or rough and uncomfortable. As a baby's experience grows, sensory impressions become increasingly tied to feelings. This dual coding of experience is the key to understanding how emotions organize intellectual abilities and indeed create a sense of self. Human beings begin this coupling of phenomena and feelings at the very beginning of life."   

In the case of the infant experiencing external reality, curiosity prompts  investigation which produces pleasure. Pleasure is associated with the action of investigation thus producing interest which prompts further investigation and thus further interest.

 Parents and other caregivers. 

The caregivers of infants play a vital role in making sure infants start this first step of becoming interested in the world. By calming fears, soothing anger and making comfortable the caregivers are able to make possible time where curiosity can grow into interest. Thus intellectual interest in the world arises out of emotional curiosity. In their book Greenspan and Shanker explain it as follows:

"To elicit a baby's interest in the outer world, the sensations caregivers provide have to be emotionally pleasurable. If they are aversive, babies tune out or shut down and don't become interested in what is outside themselves."

Caregivers however, must closely monitor infant reactions to their ministrations as Greenspan and Shanker indicate:

"... a given sensation does not necessarily produce the same emotion in every individual. Inborn differences in peoples sensory makeup can make the sound of a given frequency and loudness - say, a high-pitched voice - strike one person as rousing and appealing , but another as shrill, like a siren."

Indeed, Greenspan and Shanker suggest each infant has a unique way of responding:

"...each baby has individual ways of responding to sound, sight, touch, smell, and movement. Some babies are very sensitive and require gentle soothing. Some are underreactive and require more energetic wooing. Some babies figure out patterns of sights and sounds quickly; some slowly. Some readily turn toward sounds or sights, but others take a while to notice. These responses happen more readily if adults tailor their approaches to each infant based on her individual preferences and abilities. Therefore, even at at this first and most basic stage of learning, the baby depends on a caregiver's ability to adapt her gaze, voice, and movements in a pleasurable, emotionally satisfying manner to the baby's unique way of responding to and taking in the world."  

System 1 or 2? 

It can be fairly safely assumed that system 1 (the unconscious system of the brain) is entirely responsible for all infant functions, perceptions and reactions at this stage.

Expectations. 

Once interest in the external world is established the baby's main occupation is that of connecting or associating emotions with actions performed by others that affect the baby and actions that the baby performs that affect him or herself. These are then further associated with similar events to be perceived as reoccurrences. Caregivers try to provide for what babies need. When caregivers perform these caregiving actions babies associate these with the satisfaction they feel and any other emotions that might be produced to form expectations of what might occur if caregivers perform such actions in the future. But babies are not just passive machines forming expectations in these separated little packets. Rather babies are active organisms always trying to satisfy their own needs. In order to satisfy their needs babies must take action. The moment babies do something and they get sensory information back about what they did. This action and the resulting sensory information associates together to form anticipation about what might result from such actions in the future. In the next stage this leads the baby to develop intention.

Conjecture. 

A conjecture is a proposition that is unproven but is thought to be true and has not been disproven. It is a packet of information that can induce anticipation or expectation.

A baby's expectations may be correct or incorrect. If they are incorrect they will lead to disappointment and rejection of those expectations. If they are correct they will lead to further information being associated together. A new bit of information that comes not from incoming sensory data but which is supplied by the cognitive structure itself is added to the associations. It is this extra bit of knowledge that is vitally important. It is a conjecture about the world (reality). A child anticipates because incoming sensory information activates a conjecture in his/her cognitive structure. If the sensations do not lead to the anticipated outcome consistently, the child is disappointed and confused. If it does lead to the anticipated outcome consistently, the conjecture is corroborated and it proceeds to become a dogmatic conjecture about reality.

At this early stage it cannot be said that the infant has knowledge as we understand it. The associating of emotion with sensory information and the associations of seeming recurrence of such events, presents a possibility, but one not well tested, and not even in a form that can be accurately tested. It is thus, not only not certain, but not even theory. It is the vaguest maybe, the almost formless beginnings of ideas. It is conjecture. The infant has these conjectures informing what he/she anticipates. These conjectures in the infant's brain do not make an interconnected body of data but are rather isolated islands each cut off from the others each in a separate box. At this early stage the infant begins to experience possible expectation based on tiny islands of conjecture that are floating freely in the vast sea of it's infantile brain.