Infancy

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Lecture 4

• Infancy

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Reflexes

• They are automatic and beyond the newborns
  control built-in reactions to stimuli.
• In these reflexes, infants have responses to
  their environment before theyve had the
  opportunity to learn.

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Survival reflexes

• Example The Sucking Reflex
• Occurs when newborns automatically suck an object
  placed in their mouth.
• Adaptive value Enables newborns to get
  nourishment.
• Present at birth later disappears at 3-4 months.

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Survival reflexes

• Example The Rooting Reflex
• The rooting reflex occurs when the infants cheek
  is stroked or the side of the mouth is touched.
• In response, the infant turns its head toward the
  side that was touched in an apparent effort to
  find something to suck.
• The rooting reflex disappears when the infant is
  3-4 months old, as it is replaced by the infants
  voluntary eating.

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Primitive reflexes

• Remnants of our evolutionary history?
• Example The Moro reflex is a neonatal startle
  response that occurs in response to a sudden,
  intense noise or movement.
• When startled, a newborn arches its back, throws
  back its head, and flings out its arms and legs.
• The newborn then rapidly closes its arms and legs
  to the center of its body.
• Tends to disappear around 3-4 months of age.

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Primitive reflexes

• Example The Grasping Reflex
• Occurs when something touches the infants palms.
• Infant responds by grasping tightly.
• Replaced around the end of the third month by
  voluntary grasps.

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A Classification Scheme for Infant States

• No REM sleep
• Active sleep without REM
• REM sleep
• Indeterminate sleep
• Drowsy
• Inactive alert
• Active awake
• Crying

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Sleep

• Newborns sleep 16-17 hours a day with individual
  variations.
• Most 1-month-olds begin sleeping longer at night.
• Researchers have found cultural variations in
  infant sleeping patterns.

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REM (Rapid Eye Movement) Sleep

• A recurring sleep stage during which vivid dreams
  commonly occur.
• Most adults spend about one-fifth of their night
  in REM sleep.
• Newborns spend about one-half of their sleep in
  REM sleep and it begins their sleep cycle.
• By 3 months the percentage of REM sleep falls to
  40, and it no longer starts their sleep cycle.
• REM sleep is thought to promote the brains
  development in infancy.

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Crying

• Crying is the most important mechanism newborns
  have for communicating with their world.
• Babies have at least three types of cries
• The hunger cry.
• The anger cry.
• The pain cry.

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Responding to Infant Cries

• Most parents can determine whether an infants
  cries signify hunger, anger or pain.
• Parents can distinguish the cries of their own
  baby better than those of a strange baby.
• There exists controversy as to whether parents
  should respond to an infants cries or not.
• Consensus Parents should soothe a crying infant
  rather than be unresponsive.
• Infants will thus develop a sense of trust and
  secure attachment to the caregiver.

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Motor development

• Growth is highly canalized
• Interindividual variations can be quite large
• Intraindividual development is uneven
• The average North American newborn is 51 cm long.
• Infants grow about 2.5 cm per month during the
  first year.
• Infants rate of growth is considerably slower in
  the second year of life.

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Gross Motor Skills

• Gross motor skills involve large muscle
  activities, such as moving ones arms and
  walking.
• The actual month at which gross motor milestones
  occur varies by as much as 2 to 4 months.
• The sequence of accomplishments is quite uniform.

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Gross Motor Milestones

• 3-4 months - roll over
• 6 months - sit without support
• 12-13 months - walk without assistance
• 13-18 months - climb some steps
• 18-24 months - walk quickly, run stiffly, kick,
  jump

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Sensation and Perception

• Sensation occurs when information interacts with
  sensory receptorsthe eyes, ears, tongue,
  nostrils, and skin.
• Perception is the interpretation of what is
  sensed.
• Nativists - Empiricists - Interactionists

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Methods

• (a) Preference Method
• In 1963 Robert Fantz discovered that infants look
  at different things for different lengths of
  time.
• He found that infants preferred to look at
  patterns rather than at color or brightness.
• Fantz also found that 2-day-old infants look
  longer at patterned stimuli than at
  single-colored discs.

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Methods

• (b) Habituation Method
• Habituation is the process by which infants
  become uninterested in a stimulus and respond
  less to it after it is repeatedly presented to
  them.
• Habituation can be used to tell us much about
  infants perception, such as the extent to which
  they can see, hear, smell, taste, and experience
  touch.

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Visual Acuity and Color

• The newborns acuity is limited.
• By the first birthday, the infants vision
  approximates that of an adult.
• At birth, babies can distinguish green and red.

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Hearing

• In the last few months of pregnancy, a fetus can
  hear sounds (the mothers voice, music, etc.)
• Infants can hear immediately after birth, but a
  sound must be louder to be heard by a newborn
  than an adult.
• Infants are responsive to speech

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Touch and Pain

• Newborns respond to touch -gt reflex.
• It used to be believed that newborns were
  impervious to pain, but it is now known that it
  is not true.

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Smell and Taste

• Newborns can differentiate odors.
• They appear to like vanilla and strawberry
  scents, but not those of rotten eggs and fish.
• Two-hour-old newborns made different facial
  expressions when they tasted sweet, sour, and
  bitter solutions.
• At 4 months of age, infants prefer salty tastes,
  which newborns found aversive.

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Depth Perception

• Gibson and Walk conducted the classic visual
  cliff experiment in 1960 to assess how early
  infants could perceive depth.
• They placed a piece of glass over a drop-off
  patterned the same as the table next to it.
• Mothers asked their infants from across the
  cliff to see if they would crawl on the glass
  over the drop-off.
• Most infants would not crawl out onto the glass,
  choosing instead to remain on the shallow
  sideindicating they could perceive depth.
• Problems with drawing a conclusions.

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Langlois, J. H., Roggman, L. A., Rieser-Danner,
L. A. (1990)

• Infants' differential social responses to
  attractive and unattractive faces. Developmental
  Psychology. 26,153-159.
• Two studies were conducted to examine infants'
  social responses to attractive and unattractive
  faces. In Study 1, 60 12-month-olds interacted
  with a stranger who wore a professionally
  constructed attractive or unattractive mask. The
  infants showed more positive affective tone, less
  withdrawal, and more play involvement with the
  stranger in the attractive condition. In Study 2,
  43 12-month-olds played with an attractive and an
  unattractive doll. The infants played
  significantly longer with the attractive doll.
  These results extend and amplify earlier findings
  showing that young infants exhibit visual
  preferences for attractive over unattractive
  faces. Both visual and behavioral preferences for
  attractiveness are evidently exhibited much
  earlier in life than was previously supposed.

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Piagets Theory of Infant Cognitive Development

• Piaget believed that the child passes through a
  series of stages of thought from infancy to
  adolescence.

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The Stage of Sensorimotor Development

• According to Piaget, this stage lasts from birth
  to about 2 years of age.
• Mental development Progression in the infants
  ability to organize and coordinate sensations
  with physical movements and actions.
• Children progress from having little more than
  reflexive patterns to work with to complex
  sensorimotor patterns and a primitive system of
  symbols.

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1. Modification of Reflexes

• Stage corresponds to the first month after birth.
• The basic means of coordinating sensation and
  action is through reflexive behaviors.

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2. Primary Circular Reactions

• This stage develops between 1-4 months of age.
• A primary circular reaction is a scheme based on
  the infants attempt to reproduce an interesting
  or pleasurable event that initially occurred by
  chance.

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3. Secondary Circular Reactions

• This stage develops between 4-8 months of age.
• The infant becomes more object-oriented or
  focused on the world, moving beyond preoccupation
  with the self in sensorimotor interactions.

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4. Coordination of Secondary Circular Reactions

• This stage develops between 8-12 months of age.
• Intentionality.
• Infants readily combine and recombine previously
  learned schemes in a coordinated way.
• Actions are even more outwardly directed.

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5. Tertiary Circular Reactions.

• This stage develops between 12-18 months of age.
• Tertiary circular reactions are schemes in which
  the infant purposely explores new possibilities
  with objects, continually changing what is done
  to them and exploring the results.
• Piaget believed this marks the developmental
  starting point for curiosity and interest in
  novelty.

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6. Internalization of Schemes

• This stage develops between 18-24 months.
• The infants mental functioning shifts from a
  purely sensorimotor plane to a symbolic plane.
• The infant develops the ability to use symbols
  (internalized sensory images or words that
  represent events).

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Object Permanence

• Object permanence is the Piagetian term for
  understanding that objects and events continue to
  exist, even when they cannot directly be seen,
  heard, or touched.

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Imitation

• Andrew Meltzoff believes infants imitative
  abilities to be biologically based because they
  can imitate a facial expression within the first
  few days after birth.

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Language Development

• Phonology
• Semantics
• Syntax
• Pragmatics
• During much of the infant's first year the
  emphasis is on phonological development.

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How Language Develops

• Newborns Preference for human voice.
• 6-8 weeks - cooing.
• 6-9 months - babbling begins (goo-goo).
• 10-15 months - the infant utters his/her first
  word

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The First Words

• The holophrase hypothesis states that a single
  word can be used to imply a complete sentence,
  and that infants first words characteristically
  are holophrastic.

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The One-Word Stage

• From about twelve to twenty months of age, most
  children speak only one word at a time.
• From about age eighteen months onward vocabulary
  spurt.
• Errors underextension and overextension.
• Language comprehension exceeds language
  production.
• Children show significant individual differences
  in the rates of language production.

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The Two-Word Stage

• At 18-24 months, children begin to utter two-word
  statements.
• Telegraphic speech is the use of short and
  precise words to communicate. Young childrens
  two- and three-word utterances are
  characteristically telegraphic.

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Biological Prewiring

• Linguist Noam Chomsky believes humans are
  biologically prewired to learn language at a
  certain time, in a certain way.
• He states children are born with a language
  acquisition device (LAD)a biological endowment
  that enables them to detect certain language
  categories, such as phonology, syntax, and
  semantics.

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Behavioral and Environmental Influences

• Behaviorists view language as just another
  behavior involving chains of responses or
  imitation.
• We do not learn language in a social vacuum most
  children are bathed in language from a very early
  age.

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Defining and Classifying Temperament

• Temperament is an individuals behavioral style
  and characteristic way of emotional response.
• Many scholars conceive of temperament as a stable
  characteristic of newborns, which comes to be
  shaped and modified by later experiences.

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Temperament Classifications of Chess and Thomas

• Psychiatrists Alexander Chess and Stella Thomas
  believe there are three basic types of
  temperament.
• An easy child is generally in a positive mood,
  quickly establishes regular routines in infancy,
  and adapts easily to new experiences.
• A difficult child tends to react negatively and
  cry frequently, engages in irregular daily
  routines, and is slow to accept new experiences.
• A slow-to-warm-up child has a low activity level,
  is somewhat negative, shows low adaptability, and
  displays a low intensity of mood.

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Parenting and the Childs Temperament

• Parents often dont discover the importance of
  temperament until the birth of their second
  child.
• Management strategies that worked with the first
  child might not be as effective with the second
  child, and new problems might arise.
• Parents need to be sensitive and flexible.

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The Difficult Child

• Some books and programs for parents focus
  specifically on temperament, particularly
  difficult temperaments.
• There is a problem, however, identifying a child
  as difficult implying that the problem rests
  solely with him or her, rather than being on the
  particular fit between characteristics and
  environment.

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What Is Attachment?

• Attachment is a close emotional bond between the
  infant and the caregiver.
• Harlow and Zimmerman study found that feeding is
  not the crucial element in the attachment process
  and that contact comfort is very important.
• John Bowlby believes that the newborn is
  biologically equipped to elicit the attachment
  behavior from the primary caregiver.

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The Development of Attachment

• Phase 1 Birth to 2 months - Infants
  instinctively direct their attachment to human
  figures.
• Phase 2 2-7 months - Attachment becomes
  focused on one figure, usually a primary
  caregiver.
• Phase 3 7-24 months - Specific attachments
  develop.
• Phase 4 24 months on - A goal-directed
  partnership is formed in which children become
  aware of others feelings, goals, and plans.

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Studying Attachment

• Mary Ainsworth believes that some babies have a
  more positive attachment experience than others.
• She created the Strange Situationan
  observational measure of infant attachment that
  requires the infant to move through a series of
  introductions, separations, and reunions with the
  caregiver and an adult stranger in a prescribed
  order.

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Individual Differences

• Secure babies use their caregiver as a secure
  base from which to explore the environment.
• Insecure avoidant babies show insecurity by
  avoiding their caregiver.
• Insecure resistant babies may cling to the
  caregiver then resist her by fighting against the
  closeness, by kicking or pushing away.
• Disorganized babies are disorganized and
  disoriented, appearing dazed, confused, and
  fearful.

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Caregiving Styles and Attachment Classification

• Caregivers of securely attached babies are
  sensitive to their signals and are consistently
  available to respond to their infants needs.
• Caregivers of avoidant babies tend to be
  unavailable or rejecting, tending not to respond
  to their babies signals and having little
  physical contact with them.
• Caregivers of resistant babies sometimes respond
  to their babies need and sometimes do not.
• Caregivers of disorganized babies often neglect
  or physically abuse their babies, and sometimes
  these caregivers suffer from depression.

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Day Care

• The type of day care that young children receive
  varies extensively.
• Quality of care is typically based on group size,
  child-adult ratio, physical environment,
  caregiver characteristics, and caregiver behavior.

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Findings of Day Care Research

• It has been discovered that children in
  low-quality day care as infants were least
  likely to be socially competent in early
  childhood.
• Children who come from families with few
  resources are more likely to experience
  poor-quality day care than more advantaged
  children.
• High-quality child care, especially sensitive and
  responsive attention, was linked with fewer child
  problems.