PSYCH 11: Week 3 Infancy and Toddlerhood

frontal lobe

(behind the forehead), which is responsible primarily for thinking, planning, memory, and judgment.

Stranger wariness and separation anxiety:

- Fear is often associated with the presence of a stranger. - The departure of significant others known as separation anxiety. Both appear sometime between 6 and 15 months after object permanence has been acquired.

Sensorimotor Stage: Substage 1: Reflexes

0-1 month Newborns learn about their world through the use of their reflexes, such as when sucking, reaching, and grasping. Eventually the use of these reflexes becomes more deliberate and purposeful.

Global Considerations and Malnutrition

1 child in every 13 children in the world suffers from some form of wasting, and the majority of these children live in Asia (34.3 million) and Africa (13.9 million). Wasting can occur as a result of severe food shortages, regional diets that lack certain proteins and vitamins, or infectious diseases that inhibit appetite.

Sensorimotor Stage: Substage 5: Tertiary Circular Reactions

12-18 months The toddler is considered a "little scientist" and begins exploring the world in a trial-and-error manner, using both motor skills and planning abilities. For example, the child might throw her ball down the stairs to see what happens. The toddler's active engagement in experimentation helps them learn about their world.

Sensorimotor Stage: Substage 6: Beginning of Representational Thought

18-24 months The sensorimotor period ends with the appearance of symbolic or representational thought. The toddler now has a basic understanding that objects can be used as symbols. Additionally, the child is able to solve problems using mental strategies, to remember something heard days before and repeat it, and to engage in pretend play. This initial movement from a "hands-on" approach to knowing about the world to the more mental world of substage six marks the transition to preoperational thought.

Sensorimotor Stage: Substage 3: Secondary Circular Reactions

4-8 months The infant begins to interact with objects in the environment. At first the infant interacts with objects (e.g., a crib mobile) accidentally, but then these contacts with the objects are deliberate and become a repeated activity. The infant becomes more and more actively engaged in the outside world and takes delight in being able to make things happen. Repeated motion brings particular interest as, for example, the infant is able to bang two lids together from the cupboard when seated on the kitchen floor.

Sensorimotor Stage: Substage 4: Coordination of Secondary Circular Reactions

8-12 months The infant combines these basic reflexes and simple behaviors and uses planning and coordination to achieve a specific goal. Now the infant can engage in behaviors that others perform and anticipate upcoming events. Perhaps because of continued maturation of the prefrontal cortex, the infant become capable of having a thought and carrying out a planned, goal-directed activity. For example, an infant sees a toy car under the kitchen table and then crawls, reaches, and grabs the toy. The infant is coordinating both internal and external activities to achieve a planned goal.

underextension

A child who learns that a word stands for an object may initially think that the word can be used for only that particular object.

Infant Sleep:

A newborn typically sleeps approximately 16.5 hours per 24-hour period. This is usually polyphasic sleep in that the infant is accumulating the 16.5 hours over several sleep periods throughout the day. The infant is averaging 15 hours per 24-hour period by one month, and 14 hours by 6 months. By the time children turn two, they are averaging closer to 10 hours per 24 hours. Additionally, the average newborn will spend close to 50% of the sleep time in the Rapid Eye Movement (REM) phase, which decreases to 25% to 30% in childhood.

Babbling

At about 7 months, they are engaging in intentional vocalizations that lack specific meaning and comprise a consonant-vowel repeated sequence, such as ma-ma-ma, da-da- da. Children babble as practice in creating specific sounds, and by the time they are a 1 year old, the babbling uses primarily the sounds of the language that they are learning. These vocalizations have a conversational tone that sounds meaningful even though it is not. Babbling also helps children understand the social, communicative function of language. Children who are exposed to sign language babble in sign by making hand movements that represent real language

receptive language

At around ten months of age, the infant can understand more than he or she can say. You may have experienced this phenomenon as well if you have ever tried to learn a second language. You may have been able to follow a conversation more easily than contribute to it. One of the first words that children understand is their own name, usually by about 6 months, followed by commonly used words like "bottle," "mama," and "doggie" by 10 to 12 months (Mandel, Jusczyk, & Pisoni, 1995). Infants shake their head "no" around 6-9 months, and they respond to verbal requests to do things like "wave bye-bye" or "blow a kiss" around 9-12 months. Children also use contextual information, particularly the cues that parents provide, to help them learn language.

Body Proportions of Infants

At birth, the head makes up about 25 percent of our length, and by age 25 it comprises about 20 percent our length.

Nutrition

Breast milk is considered the ideal diet for newborns. Colostrum, the first breast milk produced during pregnancy and just after birth has been described as "liquid gold." Breast milk changes by the third to fifth day after birth, becoming much thinner, but containing just the right amount of fat, sugar, water, and proteins to support overall physical and neurological development. For most babies, breast milk is also easier to digest than formula. Formula fed infants experience more diarrhea and upset stomachs. The absence of antibodies in formula often results in a higher rate of ear infections and respiratory infections.

Gesturing

Children communicate information through gesturing long before they speak. Because gesturing seems to be easier than vocalization for some toddlers, sign language is sometimes taught to enhance one's ability to communicate by making use of the ease of gesturing. The rhythm and pattern of language is used when deaf babies sign, just as it is when hearing babies babble.

Development of sense of self:

During the second year of life, children begin to recognize themselves as they gain a sense of self as object. In a classic experiment by Lewis and Brooks (1978) children 9 to 24 months of age were placed in front of a mirror after a spot of rouge was placed on their nose as their mothers pretended to wipe something off the child's face. If the child reacted by touching his or her own nose rather that of the "baby" in the mirror, it was taken to suggest that the child recognized the reflection as him- or herself. Lewis and Brooks found that somewhere between 15 and 24 months most infants developed a sense of self-awareness.

Attachment: Erickson (Trust vs. Mistrust)

Erikson was in agreement on the importance of a secure base, arguing that the most important goal of infancy was the development of a basic sense of trust in one's caregivers. Consequently, the first stage, trust vs. mistrust, highlights the importance of attachment. Erikson maintained that the first year to year and a half of life involves the establishment of a sense of trust. Infants are dependent and must rely on others to meet their basic physical needs as well as their needs for stimulation and comfort. A caregiver who consistently meets these needs instills a sense of trust or the belief that the world is a trustworthy place. The caregiver should not worry about overly indulging a child's need for comfort, contact or stimulation.

Reflex: Grasp

Fingers automatically grip anything that touches the palm of the hand

Attachment: Freud Psychoanalytic Theory

Freud believed the infant will become attached to a person or object that provides this pleasure. Consequently, infants were believed to become attached to their mother because she was the one who satisfied their oral needs and provided pleasure.

First words and cultural influences:

If the child is using English, first words tend to be nouns. The child labels objects such as cup, ball, or other items that they regularly interact with. In a verb-friendly language such as Chinese, however, children may learn more verbs. This may also be due to the different emphasis given to objects based on culture. Chinese children may be taught to notice action and relationships between objects, while children from the United States may be taught to name an object and its qualities (color, texture, size, etc.).

stranger anxiety

In Piaget's view, around the same time children develop object permanence, they also begin to exhibit this. which is a fear of unfamiliar people.

holophrasic speech

One-word expressions. Children begin using their first words at about 12 or 13 months of age and may use partial words to convey thoughts at even younger ages. For example, the child may say "ju" for the word "juice" and use this sound when referring to a bottle. The listener must interpret the meaning of the holophrase, and when this is someone who has spent time with the child, interpretation is not too difficult. But, someone who has not been around the child will have trouble knowing what is meant. Children's pronunciations become increasingly accurate between 1 and 3 years, but some problems may persist until school age.

Critique of Piaget:

Piaget believed that infants did not fully master object permanence until substage 5 of the sensorimotor period. However, infants seem to be able to recognize that objects have permanence at much younger ages. Diamond (1985) found that infants show earlier knowledge if the waiting period is shorter. At age 6 months, they retrieved the hidden object if their wait for retrieving the object is no longer than 2 seconds, and at 7 months if the wait is no longer than 4 seconds. In Baillargeon's (1987) study, infants observed a truck (a) roll down an unobstructed track, (b) roll down an unobstructed track with an obstruction (box) beside it, and (c) roll down and pass through what appeared to be an obstruction. His findings suggest that very young children have an understanding of objects and how they work, which Piaget (1954) would have said is beyond their cognitive abilities due to their limited experiences in the world.

Piaget

Piaget believed that we are continuously trying to maintain cognitive equilibrium, or a balance, in what we see and what we know. Children have much more of a challenge in maintaining this balance because they are constantly being confronted with new situations, new words, new objects, etc.

Sensory Capacities: Taste and Smell

Studies of taste and smell demonstrate that babies respond with different facial expressions, suggesting that certain preferences are innate. Newborns can distinguish between sour, bitter, sweet, and salty flavors and show a preference for sweet flavors. Newborns also prefer the smell of their mothers.

Reflex: Sucking

Suck on anything that touches the lips

Reflex: Rooting

Turning the head when the cheek is touched

The Brain in the First Two Years: part 1

We are born with most of the brain cells that we will ever have; that is, about 85 billion neurons whose function is to store and transmit information. During the next several years dendrites, or branching extensions that collect information from other neurons, will undergo a period of exuberance. Because of this proliferation of dendrites, by age two a single neuron might have thousands of dendrites. Synaptogenesis, or the formation of connections between neurons, continues from the prenatal period forming thousands of new connections during infancy and toddlerhood. This period of rapid neural growth is referred to as synaptic blooming.

Reflex: Tonic Neck

When lying on the back with the head to one side infants will extend the arm and leg on that side while flexing the limbs on the opposite side (looks like a fencer pose).

overextension

a child may think that a label applies to all objects that are similar to the original object.

Broca's area

an area in front of the left hemisphere near the motor cortex, is responsible for language production.

Wernicke's area

an area of the brain next to the auditory cortex, is responsible for language comprehension.

occipital lobe

at the very back of the skull, which processes visual information.

Caregiver Interactions: insecure avoidant style

is marked by insecurity, but this style is also characterized by a tendency to avoid contact with the caregiver and with others. This child may have learned that needs typically go unmet and learns that the caregiver does not provide care and cannot be relied upon for comfort, even sporadically. An insecure avoidant child learns to be more independent and disengaged.

Goodness-of-fit

meaning their styles match and communication and interaction can flow.

Motor Skills

refer to our ability to move our bodies and manipulate objects.

Infantile marasmus

refers to starvation due to a lack of calories and protein. Children who do not receive adequate nutrition lose fat and muscle until their bodies can no longer function. Babies who are breastfed are much less at risk of malnutrition than those who are bottle-fed.

self-conscious emotions

such as envy, pride, shame, guilt, doubt, and embarrassment.

Basic emotions

such as interest, happiness, anger, fear, surprise, sadness and disgust, which appear first.

deferred imitation

the imitation of actions after a time delay, can occur as early as six-months of age.

social referencing

the process whereby infants seek out information from others to clarify a situation and then use that information to act. To date, the strongest demonstration of social referencing comes from work on the visual cliff. In the first study to investigate this concept, Sorce, Emde, Campos, and Klinnert (1985) placed mothers on the far end of the "cliff" from the infant. Mothers first smiled to the infants and placed a toy on top of the safety glass to attract them; infants invariably began crawling to their mothers. When the infants were in the center of the table, however, the mother then posed an expression of fear, sadness, anger, interest, or joy. The results were clearly different for the different faces; no infant crossed the table when the mother showed fear; only 6% did when the mother posed anger, 33% crossed when the mother posed sadness, and approximately 75% of the infants crossed when the mother posed joy or interest.

Components of Language: Syntax

the set of rules of a language by which we construct sentences. Each language has a different syntax. The syntax of the English language requires that each sentence have a noun and a verb, each of which may be modified by adjectives and adverbs. Some syntaxes make use of the order in which words appear. For example, in English the meaning of the sentence "The man bites the dog" is different from "The dog bites the man."

Components of Language: Semantics

to the set of rules we use to obtain meaning from morphemes. For example, adding "ed" to the end of a verb makes it past tense.

Caregiver Interactions: securely attached

when there is consistent contact from one or more caregivers who meet the physical and emotional needs of the child in a responsive and appropriate manner.

Sensorimotor Stage: Substage 2: Primary Circular Reactions

1-4 months During these next 3 months, the infant begins to actively involve his or her own body in some form of repeated activity. An infant may accidentally engage in a behavior and find it interesting such as making a vocalization. This interest motivates trying to do it again and helps the infant learn a new behavior that originally occurred by chance. The behavior is identified as circular because of the repetition, and as primary because it centers on the infant's own body.

Reflex: Moro

A sudden noise or loss of support to the head and neck will cause infants to spread out their arms and legs then quickly contract the limbs inward.

Piagetian Perspective: Sensorimotor

The first stage of cognitive development and it occurs through six substages.

Piagetian perspective

According to the Piagetian perspective, infants learn about the world primarily through their senses and motor abilities (Harris, 2005). These basic motor and sensory abilities provide the foundation for the cognitive skills that will emerge during the subsequent stages of cognitive development.

In a 1956 landmark study, Chess and Thomas (1996) evaluated 141 children's temperament based on parental interviews. Referred to as the New York Longitudinal Study, infants were assessed on 9 dimensions of temperament including:

Activity level, rhythmicity (regularity of biological functions), approach/withdrawal (how children deal with new things), adaptability to situations, intensity of reactions, threshold of responsiveness (how intense a stimulus has to be for the child to react), quality of mood, distractibility, attention span, and persistence. Based on the infants' behavioral profiles, they were categorized into three general types of temperament: • Easy Child (40%) who is able to quickly adapt to routine and new situations, remains calm, is easy to soothe, and usually is in a positive mood. • Difficult Child (10%) who reacts negatively to new situations, has trouble adapting to routine, is usually negative in mood, and cries frequently. • Slow-to-Warm-Up Child (15%) has a low activity level, adjusts slowly to new situations and is often negative in mood. As can be seen the percentages do not equal 100% as some children were not able to be placed neatly into one of the categories.

Mary Ainsworth's Strange Situation Technique

Ainsworth and her colleagues created a laboratory test that measured an infant's attachment to his or her parent. The test is called The Strange Situation Technique because it is conducted in a context that is unfamiliar to the child and therefore likely to heighten the child's need for his or her parent. Secure attachment style, ambivalent(resistant) attachment style, avoidant attachment style, disorganized/disoriented attachment style.

Benefits from Breastfeeding:

Breastfeeding stimulates contractions in the uterus to help it regain its normal size, and women who breastfeed are more likely to space their pregnancies further apart. Mothers who breastfeed are at lower risk of developing breast cancer, especially among higher risk racial and ethnic groups. Women who breastfeed have lower rates of ovarian cancer, reduced risk for developing Type 2 diabetes, and rheumatoid arthritis. In most studies these benefits have been seen in women who breastfeed longer than 6 months.

Nativism: part 2

Chomsky differentiates between the deep structure of an idea; that is, how the idea is represented in the fundamental universal grammar that is common to all languages, and the surface structure of the idea or how it is expressed in any one language. Once we hear or express a thought in surface structure, we generally forget exactly how it happened. At the end of a lecture, you will remember a lot of the deep structure (i.e., the ideas expressed by the instructor), but you cannot reproduce the surface structure (the exact words that the instructor used to communicate the ideas). Although there is general agreement among psychologists that babies are genetically programmed to learn language, there is still debate about Chomsky's idea that there is a universal grammar that can account for all language learning. Evans and Levinson (2009) surveyed the world's languages and found that none of the presumed underlying features of the language acquisition device were entirely universal. In their search they found languages that did not have noun or verb phrases, that did not have tenses (e.g., past, present, future), and even some that did not have nouns or verbs at all, even though a basic assumption of a universal grammar is that all languages should share these features.

When to Introduce More Solid Foods: part 2

For many infants who are 4 to 6 months of age, breast milk or formula can be supplemented with more solid foods. The first semi-solid foods that are introduced are iron-fortified infant cereals mixed with breast milk or formula. Typically rice, oatmeal, and barley cereals are offered as a number of infants are sensitive to more wheat-based cereals. Finger foods such as toast squares, cooked vegetable strips, or peeled soft fruit can be introduced by 10-12 months. New foods should be introduced one at a time, and the new food should be fed for a few days in a row to allow the baby time to adjust to the new food. This also allows parents time to assess if the child has a food allergy. Foods that have multiple ingredients should be avoided until parents have assessed how the child responds to each ingredient separately. Foods that are sticky (such as peanut butter or taffy), cut into large chunks (such as cheese and harder meats), and firm and round (such as hard candies, grapes, or cherry tomatoes) should be avoided as they are a choking hazard. Honey and corn syrup should be avoided as these often contain botulism spores.

Sensory Capacities: How are Infants Tested

Habituation procedures, that is measuring decreased responsiveness to a stimulus after repeated presentations, have increasingly been used to evaluate infants to study the development of perceptual and memory skills. Phelps (2005) describes a habituation procedure used when measuring the rate of the sucking reflex. Researchers first measure the initial baseline rate of sucking to a pacifier equipped with transducers that measure muscle contractions. Next, an auditory stimulus is presented, such as a human voice uttering a speech sound such as "da." The rate of sucking will typically increase with the new sound, but then decrease to baseline levels as "da" is repeatedly presented, showing habituation. If the sound "ma" was then presented, the rate of sucking would again increase, demonstrating that the infant can discriminate between these two stimuli.

Attachment: Bowlby's Theory

He defined attachment as the affectional bond or tie that an infant forms with the mother. An infant must form this bond with a primary caregiver in order to have normal social and emotional development. In addition, Bowlby proposed that this attachment bond is very powerful and continues throughout life. He used the concept of secure base to define a healthy attachment between parent and child. A secure base is a parental presence that gives the child a sense of safety as the child explores the surroundings. He observed that these same expressions were common to many other mammals, and consequently argued that these negative responses to separation serve an evolutionary function. Because mammalian infants cannot feed or protect themselves, they are dependent upon the care and protection of adults for survival. Thus, those infants who were able to maintain proximity to an attachment figure were more likely to survive and reproduce.

Senory Capacities: Touch and Pain

Immediately after birth, a newborn is sensitive to touch and temperature, and is also highly sensitive to pain, responding with crying and cardiovascular responses. Newborns who are circumcised, which is the surgical removal of the foreskin of the penis, without anesthesia experience pain as demonstrated by increased blood pressure, increased heart rate, decreased oxygen in the blood, and a surge of stress hormones.

Sensory Capacities: Intermobility

Infants seem to be born with the ability to perceive the world in an intermodal way; that is, through stimulation from more than one sensory modality. For example, infants who sucked on a pacifier with either a smooth or textured surface preferred to look at a corresponding (smooth or textured) visual model of the pacifier. By 4 months, infants can match lip movements with speech sounds and can match other audiovisual events. Sensory processes are certainly affected by the infant's developing motor abilities. Reaching, crawling, and other actions allow the infant to see, touch, and organize his or her experiences in new ways.

Components of Language: Morpheme

Is a string of one or more phonemes that makes up the smallest units of meaning in a language. Some are prefixes and suffixes used to modify other words. For example, the syllable "re-" as in "rewrite" or "repay" means "to do again," and the suffix "-est" as in "happiest" or "coolest" means "to the maximum."

infant-directed speech

It involves exaggerating the vowel and consonant sounds, using a high-pitched voice, and delivering the phrase with great facial expression. Infants are frequently more attuned to the tone of voice of the person speaking than to the content of the words themselves and are aware of the target of speech. Werker, Pegg, and McLeod (1994) found that infants listened longer to a woman who was speaking to a baby than to a woman who was speaking to another adult. Adults may use this form of speech in order to clearly articulate the sounds of a word so that the child can hear the sounds involved. It may also be because when this type of speech is used, the infant pays more attention to the speaker and this sets up a pattern of interaction in which the speaker and listener are in tune with one another.

Social Pragmatics: Language

Language from this view is not only a cognitive skill, but also a social one. Language is a tool humans use to communicate, connect to, influence, and inform others. Most of all, language comes out of a need to cooperate. The social nature of language has been demonstrated by a number of studies that have shown that children use several pre-linguistic skills (such as pointing and other gestures) to communicate not only their own needs, but what others may need.

Reflex: Stepping

Legs move in stepping like motion when feet touch a smooth surface.

When to Introduce More Solid Foods: part 1

Solid foods should not be introduced until the infant is ready. Some things to look for include that the infant: • can sit up without needing support • can hold its head up without wobbling • shows interest in foods others are eating • is still hungry after being breastfed or formula fed • is able to move foods from the front to the back of the mouth • is able to turn away when they have had enough

The three commonly reported types of Sudden Unexpected Infant Deaths (SUID) are:

Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS): SIDS is identified when the death of a healthy infant occurs suddenly and unexpectedly, and medical and forensic investigation findings (including an autopsy) are inconclusive. Unknown Cause: The sudden death of an infant less than one year of age that cannot be explained because a thorough investigation was not conducted, and cause of death could not be determined. In 2017, 1300 infants died from unknown causes. Accidental Suffocation and Strangulation in Bed: Reasons for accidental suffocation include: Suffocation by soft bedding, another person rolling on top of or against the infant while sleeping, an infant being wedged between two objects such as a mattress and wall, and strangulation such as when an infant's head and neck become caught between crib railings. In 2017, 900 infants died from accidental suffocation and strangulation.

Overall Physical Growth of Infants

The average newborn in the United States weighs about 7.5 pounds (between 5 and 10 pounds) and is about 20 inches in length. For the first few days of life, infants typically lose about 5 percent of their body weight as they eliminate waste and get used to feeding. This weight loss is temporary, however, and is followed by a rapid period of growth. By the time an infant is 4 months old, it usually doubles in weight and by one year has tripled the birth weight. By age 2, the weight has quadrupled, so we can expect that a 2-year-old should weigh between 20 and 40 pounds. The average length at one year is about 29.5 inches and at two years it is around 34.4 inches.

The Brain in the First Two Years: part 2 **

The blooming period of neural growth is then followed by a period of synaptic pruning, where neural connections are reduced thereby making those that are used much stronger. It is thought that pruning causes the brain to function more efficiently, allowing for mastery of more complex skills. Experience will shape which of these connections are maintained and which of these are lost. Ultimately, about 40 percent of these connections will be lost. * Blooming occurs during the first few years of life, and pruning continues through childhood and into adolescence in various areas of the brain. Although the brain grows rapidly during infancy, specific brain regions do not mature at the same rate. Primary motor areas develop earlier than primary sensory areas, and the prefrontal cortex, that is located behind the forehead, is the least developed.

Sensory Capacities: Hearing

The infant's sense of hearing is very keen at birth, and the ability to hear is evidenced as soon as the seventh month of prenatal development. Newborns prefer their mother's voices over another female when speaking the same material. An infant can distinguish between very similar sounds as early as one month after birth and can distinguish between a familiar and non-familiar voice even earlier. Infants are especially sensitive to the frequencies of sounds in human speech and prefer the exaggeration of infant- directed speech, which will be discussed later. Additionally, infants are innately ready to respond to the sounds of any language, but between six and nine months they show preference for listening to their native language

Nativism: part 1

The linguist Noam Chomsky is a believer in the nature approach to language, arguing that human brains contain a language acquisition device (LAD) that includes a universal grammar that underlies all human language According to this approach, each of the many languages spoken around the world (there are between 6,000 and 8,000) is an individual example of the same underlying set of procedures that are hardwired into human brains. Chomsky's account proposes that children are born with a knowledge of general rules of syntax that determine how sentences are constructed. Language develops as long as the infant isexposed to it. No teaching, training, or reinforcement is required for language to develop as proposed by Skinner.

Should infants be sharing the bed with parents? Pg.76 Colvin, Collie-Akers, Schunn and Moon (2014) analyzed a total of 8207 deaths from 24 states during 2004-2012 that were contained in the National Center for the Review and Prevention of Child Deaths Case Reporting System, a database of death reports from state child death review teams.

The results indicated that younger victims (0-3 months) were more likely to die by bed-sharing and sleeping in an adult bed/on a person. A higher percentage of older victims (4 months to 364 days) rolled into objects in the sleep environment and changed position from side/back to prone. Carpenter et al. (2013) compared infants who died of SIDS with a matched control and found that infants younger than three months old who slept in bed with a parent were five times more likely to die of SIDS compared to babies who slept separately from the parents but were still in the same room. They concluded that bed sharing, even when the parents do not smoke or take alcohol or drugs, increases the risk of SIDS. However, when combined with parental smoking and maternal alcohol consumption and/or drug use, risks associated with bed sharing greatly increased.

Components of Language: Pragmatics

The social side of language, or how we communicate effectively and appropriately with others. Examples include turn- taking, staying on topic, volume and tone of voice, and appropriate eye contact. Lastly, words do not possess fixed meanings, but change their interpretation as a function of the context in which they are spoken. We use contextual information, the information surrounding language, to help us interpret it. Examples of contextual information include our knowledge and nonverbal expressions, such as facial expressions, postures, and gestures. Misunderstandings can easily arise if people are not attentive to contextual information or if some of it is missing, such as it may be in newspaper headlines or in text messages.

Reflex: Babinski

The toes will fan out and curl when the sole of the foot is stroked from heel to toe.

Sensory Capacities: Vision

The womb is a dark environment void of visual stimulation. Consequently, vision is one of the most poorly developed senses at birth, and time is needed to build those neural pathways between the eyes and the brain. Newborns typically cannot see further than 8 to 10 inches away from their faces. An 8-week old's vision is 20/300. This means an object 20 feet away from an infant has the same clarity as an object 300 feet away from an adult with normal vision. By 3-months visual acuity has sharpened to 20/200, which would allow them the see the letter E at the top of a standard eye chart. As a result, the world looks blurry to young infants. The fovea, which is the central field of vision in the retina and allows us to see sharp detail, is not fully developed at birth, and does not start to reach adult levels of development until 15 months. Young infants can perceive color, but the colors need to be very pure forms of basic colors, such as vivid red or green rather than weaker pastel shades. Most studies report that babies can see the full spectrum of colors by five months of age.

Infant Emotions: Attraction and Withdrawal

They show attraction to pleasant situations that bring comfort, stimulation, and pleasure, and they withdraw from unpleasant stimulation such as bitter flavors or physical discomfort. At around two months, infants exhibit social engagement in the form of social smiling as they respond with smiles to those who engage their positive attention. Pleasure is expressed as laughter at 3 to 5 months of age, and displeasure becomes more specific as fear, sadness, or anger between ages 6 and 8 months. Anger is often the reaction to being prevented from obtaining a goal, such as a toy being removed. In contrast, sadness is typically the response when infants are deprived of a caregiver.

myelin

a coating of fatty tissues around the axon of the neuron. Myelin helps insulate the nerve cell and speed the rate of transmission of impulses from one cell to another. This enhances the building of neural pathways and improves coordination and control of movement and thought processes.

schema

a framework for organizing information. Children develop schemata through the processes of assimilation and accommodation.

Cooing

a one-syllable combination of a consonant and a vowel sound (e.g., coo or ba). Interestingly, babies replicate sounds from their own languages. A baby whose parents speak French will coo in a different tone than a baby whose parents speak Spanish or Urdu. These gurgling, musical vocalizations can serve as a source of entertainment to an infant who has been laid down for a nap or seated in a carrier on a car ride. Cooing serves as practice for vocalization, as well as the infant hears the sound of his or her own voice and tries to repeat sounds that are entertaining. Infants also begin to learn the pace and pause of conversation as they alternate their vocalization with that of someone else and then take their turn again when the other person's vocalization has stopped. At about four to six months of age, infants begin making even more elaborate vocalizations that include the sounds required for any language. Guttural sounds, clicks, consonants, and vowel sounds stand ready to equip the child with the ability to repeat whatever sounds are characteristic of the language heard. Eventually, these sounds will no longer be used as the infant grows more accustomed to a particular language.

language

a system of communication that uses symbols in a regular way to create meaning.

critical period for learning language

a time in which learning can easily occur, for language. This critical period appears to be between infancy and puberty, but isolating the exact timeline has been elusive.

Personality

defined as an individual's consistent pattern of feeling, thinking, and behaving, is the result of the continuous interplay between biological disposition and experience. In addition, personality is made up of many other features besides temperament. Children's developing self-concept, their motivations to achieve or to socialize, their values and goals, their coping styles, their sense of responsibility and conscientiousness, and many other qualities are encompassed into personality. These qualities are influenced by biological dispositions, but even more by the child's experiences with others, particularly in close relationships, that guide the growth of individual characteristics. Indeed, personality development begins with the biological foundations of temperament but becomes increasingly elaborated, extended, and refined over time.

Gross motor skills

focus on large muscle groups that control our head, torso, arms and legs and involve larger movements (e.g., balancing, running, and jumping). Examples include moving to bring the chin up when lying on the stomach, moving the chest up, and rocking back and forth on hands and knees. But it also includes exploring an object with one's feet as many babies do as early as 8 weeks of age if seated in a carrier or other device that frees the hips.

Fine motor skills

focus on the muscles in our fingers, toes, and eyes, and enable coordination of small actions (e.g., grasping a toy, writing with a pencil, and using a spoon). At about 4 months of age, the infant is able to reach for an object, first with both arms and within a few weeks, with only one arm. At this age grasping an object involves the use of the fingers and palm, but no thumbs. This is known as the Palmer Grasp. The use of the thumb comes at about 9 months of age when the infant is able to grasp an object using the forefinger and thumb. Now the infant uses a Pincer Grasp, and this ability greatly enhances the ability to control and manipulate an object and infants take great delight in this newfound ability.

Attachment

is the close bond with a caregiver from which the infant derives a sense of security. The formation of attachments in infancy has been the subject of considerable research as attachments have been viewed as foundations for future relationships. Additionally, attachments form the basis for confidence and curiosity as toddlers, and as important influences on self- concept.

self-awareness

is the realization that you are separate from others. Once a child has achieved self-awareness, the child is moving toward understanding social emotions such as guilt, shame or embarrassment, as well as, sympathy or empathy.

object permanence

is the understanding that even if something is out of sight, it still exists. Piaget emphasizes this construct because it was an objective way for children to demonstrate that they can mentally represent their world. Children have typically acquired this milestone by 8 months. Once toddlers have mastered object permanence, they enjoy games like hide and seek, and they realize that when someone leaves the room they will come back. Toddlers also point to pictures in books and look in appropriate places when you ask them to find objects.

Learning Theory: Language

it occurs through the principles of learning, including association and reinforcement. Additionally, Bandura (1977) described the importance of observation and imitation of others in learning language. There must be at least some truth to the idea that language is learned through environmental interactions or nurture. Children learn the language that they hear spoken around them rather than some other language. Also supporting this idea is the gradual improvement of language skills with time. It seems that children modify their language through imitation and reinforcement, such as parental praise and being understood. However, language cannot be entirely learned. For one, children learn words too fast for them to be learned through reinforcement. Between the ages of 18 months and 5 years, children learn up to 10 new words every day. More importantly, language is more generative than it is imitative. Language is not a predefined set of ideas and sentences that we choose when we need them, but rather a system of rules and procedures that allows us to create an infinite number of statements, thoughts, and ideas, including those that have never previously occurred.

Motor Development

occurs in an orderly sequence as infants move from reflexive reactions (e.g., sucking and rooting) to more advanced motor functioning. As motor skills develop, there are certain developmental milestones that young children should achieve. For each milestone there is an average age, as well as a range of ages in which the milestone should be reached. An example of a developmental milestone is a baby holding up its head. Babies on average are able to hold up their head at 6 weeks old, and 90% of babies achieve this between 3 weeks and 4 months old.

Caregiver Interactions: insecure ambivalent style

occurs when the parent is insensitive and responds inconsistently to the child's needs. Consequently, the infant is never sure that the world is a trustworthy place or that he or she can rely on others without some anxiety.

Telegraphic speech/text message speech

occurs when unnecessary words are not used. "Give baby ball" is used rather than "Give the baby the ball." Words needed to convey messages are used, but the articles and other parts of speech necessary for grammatical correctness are not yet used. These expressions sound like a telegraph, or perhaps a better analogy today would be that they read like a text message.

cortex

or the thin outer covering of the brain involved in voluntary activity and thinking. The cortex is divided into two hemispheres, and each hemisphere is divided into four lobes, each separated by folds known as fissures.

Attachment: Harlow's Research

psychologists Harry and Margaret Harlow investigated the responses of young monkeys. The infants were separated from their biological mothers, and two surrogate mothers were introduced to their cages. One, the wire mother, consisted of a round wooden head, a mesh of cold metal wires, and a bottle of milk from which the baby monkey could drink. The second mother was a foam-rubber form wrapped in a heated terry-cloth blanket. The infant monkeys went to the wire mother for food, but they overwhelmingly preferred and spent significantly more time with the warm terry-cloth mother. The warm terry-cloth mother provided no food but did provide comfort. The Harlows' studies confirmed that babies have social as well as physical needs. Both monkeys and human babies need a secure base that allows them to feel safe. From this base, they can gain the confidence they need to venture out and explore their worlds.

Emotional self-regulation

refers to strategies we use to control our emotional states so that we can attain goals. This requires effortful control of emotions and initially requires assistance from caregivers. Young infants have very limited capacity to adjust their emotional states and depend on their caregivers to help soothe themselves. Caregivers can offer distractions to redirect the infant's attention and comfort to reduce the emotional distress.

neuroplasticity **

refers to the brain's ability to change, both physically and chemically, to enhance its adaptability to environmental change and compensate for injury. The brain's neurons have a remarkable capacity to reorganize and extend themselves to carry out these particular functions in response to the needs of the organism, and to repair any damage. As a result, the brain constantly creates new neural communication routes and rewires existing ones. Both environmental experiences, such as stimulation and events within a person's body, such as hormones and genes, affect the brain's plasticity. So too does age. Adult brains demonstrate neuroplasticity, but they are influenced less extensively than those of infants

Caregiver Interactions:

represents the most insecure style of attachment and occurs when the child is given mixed, confused, and inappropriate responses from the caregiver. This type of attachment is also often seen in children who have been abused.

temporal lobe

responsible for hearing and language

infantile amnesia

the inability to recall memories from the first few years of life. Several hypotheses have been proposed for this amnesia. From the biological perspective, it has been suggested that infantile amnesia is due to the immaturity of the infant brain, especially those areas that are crucial to the formation of autobiographical memory, such as the hippocampus. From the cognitive perspective, it has been suggested that the lack of linguistic skills of babies and toddlers limit their ability to mentally represent events; thereby, reducing their ability to encode memory. Finally, social theorists argue that episodic memories of personal experiences may hinge on an understanding of "self", something that is clearly lacking in infants and young toddlers.

Temperment

the innate characteristics of the infant, including mood, activity level, and emotional reactivity, noticeable soon after birth. Temperament does not change dramatically as we grow up, but we may learn how to work around and manage our temperamental qualities. Temperament may be one of the things about us that stays the same throughout development.

Lateralization

the process in which different functions become localized primarily on one side of the brain. Example: In most adults the left hemisphere is more active than the right during language production, while the reverse pattern is observed during tasks involving visuospatial abilities

Components of Language: Phoneme

the smallest unit of sound that makes a meaningful difference in a language. The word "bit" has three phonemes. In spoken languages, phonemes are produced by the positions and movements of the vocal tract, including our lips, teeth, tongue, vocal cords, and throat, whereas in sign languages phonemes are defined by the shapes and movement of the hands. English contains about 45 phonemes, whereas other languages have as few as 15 and others more than 60. The Hawaiian language contains less phonemes as it includes only 5 vowels (a, e, i, o, and u) and 7 consonants (h, k, l, m, n, p, and w). Infants are born able to detect all phonemes, but they lose their ability to do so as they get older; by 10 months of age a child's ability to recognize phonemes becomes very similar to that of the adult speakers of the native language. Phonemes that were initially differentiated come to be treated as equivalent.

How do newborns communicate?

they communicate their thoughts and needs with body posture (being relaxed or still), gestures, cries, and facial expressions. A person who spends adequate time with an infant can learn which cries indicate pain and which ones indicate hunger, discomfort, or frustration.

reflexes

which are involuntary movements in response to stimulation. Some of the more common reflexes, such as the sucking reflex and rooting reflex, are important to feeding. The grasping and stepping reflexes are eventually replaced by more voluntary behaviors. Within the first few months of life these reflexes disappear, while other reflexes, such as the eye-blink, swallowing, sneezing, gagging, and withdrawal reflex stay with us as they continue to serve important functions. Reflexes offer pediatricians insight into the maturation and health of the nervous system.

parietal lobe

which extends from the middle to the back of the skull and which is responsible primarily for processing information about touch.

accommodation

which is expanding the framework of knowledge to accommodate the new situation and thus learning a new word to more accurately name the animal. For example, recognizing that a horse is different than a zebra means the child has accommodated, and now the child has both a zebra schema and a horse schema. Even as adults we continue to try and "make sense" of new situations by determining whether they fit into our old way of thinking (assimilation) or whether we need to modify our thoughts (accommodation).

assimilation

which is fitting the new information into an existing schema, such as calling all animals with four legs "doggies" because he or she knows the word doggie.

Binocular vision

which requires input from both eyes, is evident around the third month and continues to develop during the first six months. By six months infants can perceive depth perception in pictures as well.

Vision: Researchers have examined the development of attention and tracking in the visual system and have found the following for young infants:

• One-month-olds have difficulty disengaging their attention and can spend several minutes fixedly gazing at a stimulus. • Aslin (1981) found that when tracking an object visually, the eye movements of newborns and one-month olds are not smooth but saccadic, that is step-like jerky movements. Aslin also found their eye movements lag behind the object's motion. This means young infants do not anticipate the trajectory of the object. By two months of age, their eye movements are becoming smoother, but they still lag behind the motion of the object and will not achieve this until about three to four months of age. • Newborns also orient more to the visual field toward the side of the head, than to the visual field on either side of the nose. By two to three months, stimuli in both fields are now equally attended to