Infant cognitive development is the first stage of human cognitive development, in the youngest children. The academic field of infant cognitive development studies of how psychological processes involved in thinking and knowing develop in young children. Information is acquired in a number of ways including through sight, sound, touch, taste, smell and language, all of which require processing by our cognitive system.

Scientific investigation in this field has its origin in the first half of the 20th century, an early and influential theory in this field is Jean Piaget's theory of cognitive development. Since Piaget's contribution to the field, infant cognitive development and methods for its investigation have advanced considerably, with numerous psychologists investigating different areas of cognitive development including memory, language and perception, coming up with various theories—for example Neo-Piagetian theories of cognitive development.

Tabula rasa is an idea (by now a discredited theory) that, at birth, the human mind is a "blank slate" without any rules for processing data, that data is added and rules for processing it are formed solely by one's sensory experiences. The modern idea of the theory is mostly attributed to John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, written in the 17th century.

Its corollary, nativism, argues that we are born with certain cognitive modules that allow us to learn and acquire certain skills, such as language, (for example the theory of Universal Grammar, the theory that the 'programming' for grammar is hardwired in the brain) and is most associated with the recent work of Noam Chomsky, Jerry Fodor, and Steven Pinker.

If one accepts that nothing is known until learned, and that everyone shares a basic common sense, it appears infants must—to some degree—make some specific ontological inferences about how the world works, and what kinds of things it contains. This procedure is studied in psychology and its validity is studied in philosophy.

We acquire these ordinary [common sense] beliefs at an early age and we take them for granted in everyday life; ... Then, because we are also self-reflective creatures, we turn back on our commonsense assumptions and find them to be more puzzling and problematic than we had bargained for. The concepts we habitually employ raise the kinds of disturbing questions we call philosophical'.

— Colin McGinn, Problems in Philosophy. 1993,

The notion of shared intentionality, a category of processes during social learning at the onset of life when organisms in the simple-reflexes substage of the sensorimotor stage of cognitive development do not maintain communication via the sensory system, proposes another approach to the problem: Cognition is fostered by social bonds between children and caregivers, which gradually increase through shared intentionality. Based on recent insights in neuroscience research, proponents argue that this collaborative interaction emerges in the mother-child pairs at birth for sharing the essential sensory stimulus of the actual cognitive problem.