Creating a safe and secure environment for babies to explore is essential for them to build cognitive skills. A German study on nine-month-old babies have found that infants who had the opportunity to crawl around may be better at spontaneously observing and exploring objects than those that did not. The study found that the mental representations of two-dimensional and three-dimensional object of nine-month-old infants was related to their abilities to crawl and manually explore objects.

A study carried out on eight to ten-month-old infants in China found that babies born during the winter months tended to have higher cognitive scores than those born in summer. This was because caregivers are more willing to take their infants outdoors in summer, which means their infants were exposed to more stimulation. Longer daylight hours meant higher activity levels and more stimulation received by the babies.