Word: daniels
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...Daniel Haworth is settled into a high chair and wheeled behind a black screen, a sudden look of worry furrows his 9-month-old brow. His dark blue eyes dart left and right in search of the familiar reassurance of his mother's face. She calls his name and makes soothing noises, but Daniel senses something unusual is happening. He sucks his fingers for comfort, but, finding no solace, his mouth crumples, his body stiffens, and he lets rip an almighty shriek of distress. Mom picks him up, reassures him, and two minutes later, a chortling and alert Daniel returns...
...Daniel is now engrossed in watching video clips of a red toy train on a circular track. The train disappears into a tunnel and emerges on the other side. A hidden device above the screen is tracking Daniel's eyes as they follow the train and measuring the diameter of his pupils 50 times a second. As the child gets bored--or "habituated," as psychologists call the process--his attention level steadily drops. But it picks up a little whenever some novelty is introduced. The train might be green, or it might be blue. And sometimes an impossible thing happens...
...merely reflects a response to stimuli that are novel. Data from the eye tracker and the measurement of the pupils (which widen in response to arousal or interest) show that impossible events involving familiar objects are no more interesting than possible events involving novel objects. In other words, when Daniel has seen the red train come out of the tunnel green a few times, he gets as bored as when it stays the same color. The mistake of previous research, says Sirois, has been to leap to the conclusion that infants can understand the concept of an impossibility from...
...babies bridge the gap between knowing squat and drawing triangles--a task Daniel's sister Lois, 2 1/2, is happily tackling as she waits for her brother? "Babies have to learn everything, but as Piaget was saying, they start with a few primitive reflexes that get things going," says Sirois. For example, hardwired in the brain is an instinct that draws a baby's eyes to a human face. From brain-imaging studies we also know that the brain has some sort of visual buffer that continues to represent objects after they have been removed--a lingering perception rather than...
Kaysen has also attracted impressive mentors, including Daniel Boulud, the award-winning French chef who owns restaurants in New York City, Las Vegas and Palm Beach, Fla., and Charlie Trotter, the famed Chicago chef who has been a Bocuse judge. Both have high hopes for their protégé. "Gavin has the passion for French cuisine, a very good palate, and he's a master of technique and timing," says Boulud. "And he's very meticulous and detail oriented, which is crucial." Trotter, who has been following Kaysen's career since the younger chef applied for an internship in his kitchen...