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By now your baby's understanding of causal relationships is much more developed. He not only distinguishes between cause and effect, but also understands how the result occurs and anticipates it with excitement.
Your baby wants to explore the rhyme and reason behind everything he hears, sees and feels, and through this examination he learns a great deal about the nature of objects and his power to manipulate them. His newly-found ability to influence his world influences his emotional development and solidifies his self-confidence. He examines and explores his toys, trying to figure out how to make them do what he wants them to do and begins to apply what he has learned in the past to new and similar situations. For instance, now that he knows that pushing a button will cause something to happen he tries pushing other buttons and expects a reaction.
At this stage, your baby is able to anticipate certain results in advance: he may break out in laughter if he believes you're about to tickle him, or back away in fright when you take out the vacuum cleaner, even before you turn it on. By nine months, your baby even has the ability to solve simple problems, such as removing an obstacle blocking the way to his favorite toy.
Towards the end of this period, your baby begins to become interested in the relationships between objects, and once he begins to crawl the world of spatial relationships – near, far, up and down – will add a new dimension to his knowledge.