Posted: May 1st, 2025

Week 2 Reading Log

Respond to the following prompts. Remember to assimilate what you have read into a general understanding that you can make connections to. These connections can be prior knowledge or personal experiences. In addition, feel free to visually diagram your connections into concept maps, graphic organizers, or other images that will aid you in remembering and reinforcing the content. These can be scanned and uploaded to share with me, and–if you want–your peers. If it’s easier to talk about what you have read, feel free to video tape responses to your reading and upload those. If you are a slow typist, you can use a “speech to text” program to record your thoughts–going back to edit. If reading is difficult, there are also “text to speech” software options available. In addition, feel free to explore outside readings that may help you clarify your understanding. You may find some short videos that are helpful to you, which you can always share with your peers in the peer sharing module. Sharing relevant resources garners you extra credit points.

Cicchetti article on social experiences:

1. What are the three factors Piaget recognized are necessary for developmental processes (p. 1408)?
2. Compare/contrast equifinality and multifinality (p. 1410).
3. Discuss how self-organization allows individuals to participate in their development (p. 1411-1412).
4. What factors relating to individuals, according to Cicchetti, impact development among maltreated children? (p. 1416-1419) Also, include his research on resiliency in your response.

Based on Berk’s “Make Believe Play article,” answer the following questions/prompts:

1. In the article by Berk (Vygotsky’s Make-believe Play), explain and describe the importance of make-believe play in early childhood development.
2. Describe Berk’s thoughts on the interaction of social experience and the development of play.
3. Describe and explain how “pivots” are used in this type of representational play.
4. Describe the connections between rules and play. Give an example not in the reading.

From the Lee article:

1. In reading the Lee article, in what ways does his view of socio-centrism compare/contrast to Piaget’s view? What evidence does he use to support his view? (This is a comprehensive question that requires a minimum of 3 paragraphs for a thorough answer.)
2. How does Lee describe Piaget’s view of egocentricity?
3. What is Lee’s reasoning for why “children have difficulty with Piaget’s three-mountains task?”

16 Describe “gazing and pointing” in Lee’s view and why it is important.

1. Why is “showing and hiding,” according to Lee, an element of sociocentrism?

Based on your readings from chapters 6 and 7 in the Berger Textbook:

1. Describe Piaget’s sensorimotor intelligence. Include a brief synopsis of each stage and what this looks like.
2. Why does Piaget refer to a toddler in stage five as a “little scientist?”
3. Why is the development of “perspective” important, and what are three factors that affect the types of opportunities available for the developing infant?
4. What are the conditions of memory for an infant and how can that memory be strengthened?
5. What are the different attachment types, and what are some of the predictors for types A and D? (chap. 7)
6. Give a thorough description of Chomsky’s “Language Acquisition Device” described on p. 168, and then compare it to the other theories of language development. Which of these theories makes the most sense to you, based on your knowledge and experiences, and give your reasoning.
7. What is “synchrony” and how does it impact infant development?
8. Give a brief synopsis on the application of the different theories and the lenses through which each views the psychosocial development of infants.

CHAPTER 6
The First Two Years: Cognitive
Development
✦ The Eager Mind
Listening to Learn
Looking to Learn
Core Knowledge
a view from science : Face Recognition
Theories of the Infant Mind
Infant Memory
✦ Piaget’s Sensorimotor Intelligence
Stages One and Two: Primary Circular Reactions
Stages Three and Four: Secondary Circular Reactions
opposing perspectives : Object Permanence
Stages Five and Six: Tertiary Circular Reactions
✦ Language: What Develops in the First Two Years?
The Universal Sequence
a case to study : Early Speech
Theories of Language Learning
visualizing development : Early Communication and Language
What Will You Know?
1. What do infants remember before they can talk?
2. Why did Piaget compare 1-year-olds to scientists?
3. When does a typical baby say a first word?
A neuroscientist learned about a Korean fortune-telling ritual for 1year-olds:
The unsuspecting baby is placed in front of an assortment of objects and is
encouraged to pick one…. If the baby picks up a banana, she will never go hungry;
choosing a book means she is destined for academia; a silver coin foretells wealth, or
a paintbrush, creativity.
I was intrigued. The very same evening I placed Olivia [her infant daughter] in front
of a collection of items.
A stethoscope: would she be a doctor? A stuffed dog: a vet? A plant: a Green Peace
activist? A piece of pastry: a chef? And a colorful model of the brain; a neuroscientist?
Olivia inspected the objects closely, took her time, and then went straight for the
iPhone I had happened to leave at the corner of the table.
I shouldn’t have been surprised. The little girl was obsessed with this piece of
machinery. She would skillfully roll herself from one side of the room to the other to
grab hold of it…. When she finally grabbed hold of the phone she would quickly
insert it into her mouth and attempt to chew…. She had other bright, musical toys
that she did not desire as much. The iPhone was the item she wanted because from
the day she was born she had observed her parents constantly interacting with it with
great interest. Although she was only a few months old and could not even say a word
she was able to infer that these metal rectangles must be extremely valuable. Little
Livia’s fondness for iPhones tells us something important about how our brains work.
[Sharot, 2017, pp. 152–153]
This incident introduces the chapter on cognitive development
during infancy for three reasons.
First, this topic is intriguing: We all wonder what thoughts,
aspirations, and abilities the newest humans will have. We hope
they will do well and perpetuate our own values and choices. Did
you notice that the mother thought a stethoscope meant doctor (not
nurse), that a plant signified Greenpeace (not farmer), and that a
model of the brain was among the options (for the daughter of a
neuroscientist)?
The second reason is to highlight that infants are curious and social.
Of course all those Korean babies reach for something, as Olivia did
— every baby would. And of course they are influenced by what they
have observed in their parents.
The third is that caregiver behavior is pivotal. Without realizing it,
every family and each culture molds the infant mind. This social
influence on infants is obvious when babies begin to speak their
native language, not any of the 6,000 other languages that infants
elsewhere speak; but caregivers also affect curiosity, persistence,
and logic, as you will soon learn.
This chapter describes the process of infant cognition, as well as its
accomplishments. From the moment when newborns open their
eyes, to the insistent grabbing, experimenting, and talking of 2-yearolds, infants are active learners.
The Eager Mind
Chapter 5 chronicled the intense human drive to use every sensory
and motor ability. Newborns look and listen; toddlers run and climb.
Brain growth makes sensory and motor development possible;
babies obsessively use their abilities as soon as they can.
The same phenomenon occurs with cognitive development. One
team suggests that infants are “scientist[s] in the crib” (Gopnik et al.,
1999), a suggestion that was “frequently met with incredulity”
(Halberda, 2018, p. 1215). However, “the field of developmental
neuroscience has burgeoned over the last 20 years with advances in
technology and methods that are well suited for measuring the
human brain in vivo in infants” (Guyer et al., 2018, p. 687).
Incredulity faded as evidence accumulated.
As scientists discover more about the infant brain, they are
increasingly impressed by its inborn readiness to learn. One team
wrote: “from early on in development, infants display perceptual
biases and attentional patterns that strongly suggest a motive to
acquire information” (Lucca & Wilbourn, 2018, p. 942).
Brains do much more than increase in size (Chapter 5); infant brains
are preset to understand the world, using every step of the scientific
method. Curiosity leads to hypothesizing, observing, experimenting,
analyzing, and concluding.
Still Wrong Parents used to ignore infant cognition. Now some make the opposite
mistake, assuming that infants learn via active study.
Listening to Learn
Remember that newborns’ hearing is acute. Infants can hear all
noises — traffic on the street, clanking of dishes in the kitchen, the
hum or crackle of the radiator — but they ignore most of what they
hear. Thus, sensation does not usually become perception, and
perception does not necessarily become cognition. However, babies
listen closely to certain sounds, particularly the human voice.
Distinguishing Speech Sounds
Newborns do not understand words, of course, but they have an
inborn affinity for language, probably because, for humans, most
learning occurs via words.
Vast differences are audible in adult speech: Russian does not sound
like a tonal language such as Chinese; English does not pronounce
the r as French does; the cadence of German is quite different from
that of Spanish. Babies need to learn from whatever language their
caregivers speak, which means that every linguistic nuance must be
perceived.
That is how it happens. Even in the early weeks, babies distinguish
the difference between the sound of pa and ba, for example, and
they hear the nuances of many other speech sounds — some
insignificant in one language but crucial in another. They are called
universalists because they hear the differences in any language
(Kuhl, 2004).
By one year after birth, however, that ability to distinguish sounds in
never-heard languages deteriorates, a loss that continues throughout
childhood. Babies at first attend to all linguistic sounds; by
adulthood people literally cannot hear some sound differences that
are crucial in languages they have never learned. That is evidence
for cognitive maturation.
Babies from English-speaking families were shown pictures of 17
common objects while hearing the names of the objects (Bergelson
& Swingley, 2018). Sometimes the name was deliberately
mispronounced, as in the examples shown in Table 6.1.
TABLE 6.1 Examples of Mispronunciations in the Bergelson and
Swingley Study
Apple
opel
Banana
banoona
Milk
mulk
Hair
har
Mouth
mith
Nose
nazz
Six-month-olds were tested for knowledge of these words.
Performance overall was poor, but some babies already knew a few
of the 17. Importantly, their understanding was equally good in
three conditions: (1) their mother saying the words correctly; (2)
their mother mispronouncing the words; and (3) a stranger saying
the words correctly.
By 1 year of age, however, not only did they know more but also
their brains had already learned correct U.S. English pronunciation.
They were significantly better at understanding correct speech from
strangers than mispronunciation by their own mothers.
This study shows, first, that very young babies are primed to learn
language, and second, that 1-year-olds already know the accepted
way to pronounce words. (English-speaking babies in Jamaica, or
England, or India learn other nuances.)
VIDEO: Event-Related Potential (ERP) Research shows a procedure in which the electrical
activity of an infant’s brain is recorded to see whether the brain responds differently to
familiar versus unfamiliar words.
Learning Two Languages
Bilingual proficiency begins in the first year of life — every young
human brain can learn several languages. Ideally, parents often
speak in two languages, and then their children become doubly
fluent as well. The brains of bilingual 1-year-olds respond to both
languages (Ramirez et al., 2017), because infant brains are primed to
understand whatever speech they hear.
Infants also are attuned to the social context. Have you noticed that
most bilingual adults use one language with friends and family and
the other one in more formal settings? Very young infants notice
that, too: They figure out which language is most important to the
adults and respond preferentially to that one.
This was one conclusion from a study of 94 newborns (age 0 to 5
days) in Vancouver, Canada (Byers-Heinlein et al., 2010). For half of
them, their mother spoke English and Tagalog (a language native to
the Philippines); for one-third, their mothers spoke only English;
and for one-sixth, their mothers spoke English and Chinese.
Especially for Educators An infant day-care center has a new child whose parents
speak a language other than the one the teachers speak. Should the teachers learn basic
words in the new language, or should they expect the baby to learn the teachers’ language?
(see response, page 170)
The infants in all three groups sucked on a pacifier connected to a
recording of 10 minutes of English and 10 minutes of Tagalog. To
make sure there were no subtle biases in the streams of speech,
such as one language spoken with more animation, the two
languages were matched for pitch, duration, and number of
syllables.
As evident in the rate and intensity of their sucking (which activated
the recording), babies with English-only mothers preferred English
and those with bilingual mothers preferred Tagalog (Byers-Heinlein
et al., 2010). They had already connected Tagalog with more
animated, emotional talk — and that is what they wanted to learn
first.
Looking to Learn
Developmentalists have long known that very young infants spend
more time simply looking around than doing anything else. They
scan their surroundings, fixate on faces, follow moving objects with
their eyes. Experienced caregivers know that one way to quiet fussy
3-month-olds is to take them to see something — cars moving on the
street, dogs coming to be petted, flowers in a garden, toys that move.
Gaze-Following
Until recently, however, developmentalists did not appreciate how
important vision is for cognition. Very young babies choose to look
at whatever is likely to advance their understanding. They wisely
focus on whatever captures their caregivers’ attention, via gazefollowing, instinctively knowing that what caregivers look at might
tell them something important.
No Fear Like all infants, this 11-month-old girl is eager to explore through sight and
touch. Praise to all three — this mother for encouraging learning, this baby for
reaching out, and this dog for gently licking her hand. Most dogs recognize babies,
tolerating actions they would not accept from adults of any species.
For example, following adults’ lead, they look at the face of someone
entering the room, ignoring the ceiling, the floor, or the person’s
feet. Have they learned that adults look at faces because expressions
are informative, or is gaze-following natural for infants?
Both. It was thought that gaze-following occurred only as a response
to adults, who alert the babies to opportunities to learn. Adults say,
“Javier, look, here comes Daddy,” or “Sophia, here is your teddy
bear.” Such guides to gaze-following are part of adults’ natural
tendency to teach babies through natural pedagogy (Gergely &
Csibra, 2013).
Natural pedagogy is evident whenever caregivers direct the baby’s
gaze, calling their name, pointing at an object, and so on. Adults try
to advance infant cognition; very young babies respond by looking
at whatever the adult shows.
But we now know that infants will follow an adult’s gaze even
without caregiver cues (Gredeback et al., 2018). If a tilt of the head
and movement of the pupils indicates that something interests the
caregiver, the baby follows the gaze. Thus, gaze-following arises
from both nature and nurture.
Early Logic
Nature and nurture may also give babies some understanding of the
laws of physics. In one study, a toy dinosaur was removed from a
display where it had been next to a flower. A screen then covered the
display. A moment later, the screen was lifted to reveal the dinosaur
instead of the flower (Cesana-Arlotti et al., 2018).
Cameras and computers measured how long the babies looked at
that unexpected event. Infants stared longer when the flower was
surreptitiously replaced with the dinosaur than when the flower was
still there. This indicated that they knew how things should be and
were surprised when their basic understanding was wrong.
Many other events that contradict the basic laws of physics (such as
a ball that is suspended in the air rather than falling, or a toy that
becomes two toys) elicit the same surprise. From such research,
many developmentalists believe that infants have some innate logic.
Scientific reasoning may not be a “hard-won accomplishment
mastered later in life,” but rather an “inherent attribute of the mind”
(Halberda, 2018, p. 1214).
Core Knowledge
To explain infants’ cognition, scientists suggest that babies are born
with an understanding of how the world works, which they call core
knowledge (Stahl & Feigenson, 2017). Examples are that moving
objects stop when they bump into a solid wall, and that adult gaze
signals important information.
Core expectations not only prime learning but also alert the baby
when something unexpected happens. Surprise triggers curosity,
which triggers more learning. No one thinks that babies are born
with the knowledge and logic they will display in a few months or
years. But core knowledge and plasticity make rapid learning
possible as the brain grows (remember, it triples in size by age 2)
and experiences accumulate.
Consider how this works when infants see pictures (LoBue, 2013).
Infants are not instinctively afraid of snakes. However, when they
look at pictures of flowers and snakes, they focus more on the
snakes. Their brains seem to know that snakes may be important;
then, during early childhood, they are taught whether or not to be
afraid.
Recognizing Faces
Another example comes from attention to faces. Unless you have
prosopagnosia (face blindness), the fusiform face area of your brain is
astonishingly adept. This is innate. Compared to older children and
adults, newborns are quicker to recognize a face that they have seen
just once (Zeifman, 2013).
Because of experience-expectant brain development, every face is
fascinating: Babies stare at pictures of monkey faces and photos of
human ones, at drawings and toys with faces, as well as at live faces.
At 6 weeks, they smile at almost anyone whose face is about 2 feet
away. That fact indicates that faces are part of core knowledge.
Soon, with experience-dependent learning, babies smile more
readily at familiar people, differentiate men from women, and
distinguish among faces from their own ethnic group (called the
own-race effect). This fact could be worrisome: Does it suggest that
humans are naturally sexist and racist? No, as A View from Science
explains. Brains are primed to pay attention to familiar faces, and
most babies see faces of a particular kind.
A VIEW FROM SCIENCE
Face Recognition
The own-race effect refers to the fact that infants are better at recognizing individuals from
their own ethnic group than at distinguishing individuals from other groups. Researchers
test infant recognition by showing babies photos of strangers from various groups and
measuring their looking time and attention, to determine if they notice differences between
individuals.
This measure of looking time is used in thousands of studies that assess infant cognition.
Infants pay less attention to seeing the same thing again and again (that’s called
habituation), so if a baby were to look longer at a particular picture, that suggests that the
baby notices the difference between that picture and the previous one (Csibra et al., 2016).
When the experience of a baby or a child under age 12 is multiracial, the own-race effect is
less evident; that is, they recognize individuality between photos of people of another race
as well as of their own race. Research on children adopted from China and raised in Canada
found that if a child of one ethnicity (Chinese) is raised exclusively by people of another
ethnicity (European), that child recognizes differences among the people they see, not
among people of their biological group (McKone et al., 2019).
The importance of experience is confirmed by two studies. The first study occurred in
Malaysia, where many people of two ethnic groups (Malay and Chinese) live and where
women, but not men, interact with babies. A group of Chinese infants were shown photos of
people who varied by gender and ethnicity. The babies recognized individuality among
Chinese women by 3 months and among Malaysian women by 8 months. However, they did
not perceive individuality among Europeans or among men of any ethnicity — apparently
because they had limited experience with them (Tham et al., 2019).
In another study, parents repeatedly “read” a book to their 6-month-old infants (Scott &
Monesson, 2010). The book depicted six monkey faces. One-third of the parents said each
monkey’s name while showing the pictures; one-third said only “monkey” as they turned
each page; the final one-third simply turned the pages with no verbal labeling.
At 9 months, infants in all three groups viewed pictures of six unfamiliar monkeys. The
infants who had heard names of monkeys were better at distinguishing one new monkey
from another than were the infants who saw the same picture book but did not hear each
monkey’s name (Scott & Monesson, 2010).
Evidently, by hearing the names, the babies realized that monkeys vary in appearance, and
they learned to distinguish one monkey from another. This applies to humans’
understanding of racial and national groups as well. Interacting with several named people
of any group helps people understand that members of that group are individuals, not
stereotypes (Thorup et al., 2018).
As with almost every type of infant development, experience combines with inborn brain
proclivities. An intriguing study found that this innate preference is evident in all primates,
not just in humans.
In that study, researchers prevented macaque monkeys from seeing faces (including those
of other monkeys and of humans) for the first three months of life. Then they showed
pictures, some with faces and some not. Those deprived 3-month-olds looked more
attentively at photos of faces than photos of other objects, demonstrating that inborn
attraction to faces. Indeed, every face — of chimpanzees, otters, humans, as well as other
monkeys — was almost equally interesting.
Then, in the next few months, the monkeys were granted some experiences with other
macaques. By 6 months, the researchers found that these monkeys paid more attention to
the faces of their own species than of other primates (Simpson et al., 2017). That is just what
human babies do: They look intently at every face-like image at first but zero in on the faces
that are most important to them.
This research has important practical applications. If parents hope their children become
adults who relate well with people of many ages, genders, and ethnicities, they need to
expose them early on to friends, caregivers, neighbors, and so on from diverse backgrounds.
Iona Is Not Flora If you heard that Dario was not Louis or Boris, would you stare at
unfamiliar monkey faces more closely in the future? For 6-month-olds, the answer is
yes.
How to Learn
One other aspect of cognition merits mention — babies learn how to
learn. As you remember from Chapter 4, infants are born with
reflexes. Some of those reflexes fade and others build, depending on
experience.
Curiosity is an inborn reflex; newborns look at and listen to
everything. Then, some infants are allowed to explore and
experiment (fingering their toys, reaching for people, and so on);
others are not (“Don’t touch!”). It matters whether caregivers
encourage curiosity, respond to noises, and build on reflexes (as
Mrs. Todd did in Chapter 5). For example, if a baby utters a sound,
some caregivers stop and respond, others ignore the sound, and
some others tell the baby to be quiet.
By the second year of life, some toddlers are eager to explore and
investigate while others are much more hesitant. One quality,
sometimes called grit or effort, fosters learning throughout life.
In one experiment, 15-month-olds observed adults trying to get a toy
from a container (Leonard et al., 2017). The adult said, “How can I
get this toy out of here?” and then worked to do so. Half the infants
saw the toy come out quickly, and the other half watched the adult
working hard for half a minute to release the toy (see Figure 6.1).
FIGURE 6.1 If At First You Don’t Succeed … Quit? Two times, with two toys, babies watched
an adult try to get toys from a container. One group saw the toys quickly released, and
another group saw them released only after some effort. Then the babies were shown
another toy. This third toy played music when the adult turned it on, but then (unbeknownst
to the babies) the musicplaying was deactivated. When babies were handed the quiet toy,
how long did they try to turn on the music? (Answer is in the text.) If you don’t take time to
read the text, what does that suggest about your childhood?
Then the babies were handed another toy. The experimenter pushed
a button to demonstrate that the toy played music. However, the toy
was rigged to play once for the experimenter, but not after that. Not
surprisingly, every baby tried to make the toy play music again,
since they had just observed this could happen.
But the crucial question is how persistent the babies were. One baby
quickly threw the toy to the floor in frustration and another kept
trying for more than two minutes. Why the difference? Some is
probably temperament, but observation mattered. If babies had
seen the adult keep trying for half a minute before getting the toy,
they pushed the button an average of 22.5 times. However, if they
had seen the adult succeed quickly, they pushed, on average, only 12
times (Leonard et al., 2017).
The authors conclude that adults should sometimes let children see
them struggle to complete a task. The idea that hard work pays off is
a learning strategy that helps throughout a person’s education — and
it may begin in infancy.
Theories of the Infant Mind
Two theories are relevant to this new understanding of the infant
mind: information-processing theory and evolutionary theory.
As you remember from Chapter 2, information-processing theory
originated from understanding the processing built into computers,
which gather millions of bits of information and then compute a
result. The central idea is that the human mind is like a computer,
accumulating experiences and then establishing knowledge. Thus,
information processing might lead to the hypothesis that the infant
mind is programmed for cognitive development, so the myriad
sights and sounds produce understanding.
The other theory that provides insight into early cognition is
evolutionary theory (Bjorklund, 2018). The idea is that the human
brain, unique among mammals, has evolved to be extraordinarily
plastic so that human babies can learn everything they need within
their culture. According to evolutionary theory, this occurs in two
steps.
First, infants innately attend to caregivers as well as to things
that, millennia ago, were crucial for survival. That is why they
listen to voices, like to be held snugly, and look at snakes more
than flowers.
Second, the diversity of human culture requires that the infant
brain be amazingly plastic, allowing inborn predispositions to
be shaped so people can adapt to whatever life may bring. Over
the millennia, people with flexible brains were likely to survive
and procreate, advancing the genes for plasticity.
Consider one more example: the sucking reflex. For hundreds of
thousands of years, the sucking/swallowing/breathing reflexes had
to function well in newborns so they could survive, even though no
other motor ability needed to work at birth.
Time for Adaptation Sucking is a reflex at first, but adaptation begins as soon as an
infant differentiates a pacifier from her mother’s breast or realizes that her hand has
grown too big to fit into her mouth. This infant’s expression of concentration suggests
that she is about to make that adaptation and suck just her thumb from now on.
You also remember that breast milk is good for the brain; babies
who are breast-fed tend to have higher IQs than those who are
formula-fed. That was recently proven again, this time carefully
controlling for third variables, such as the mother’s intelligence and
education, that might cause the correlation. Babies who were breast-
fed for at least a month had, by age 5, IQ scores that averaged 3
points higher than babies who were not breast-fed at all, or whose
mothers gave up breast-feeding in the first few weeks (Strøm et al.,
2019).
These two facts are particularly relevant for babies born very early.
The sucking reflex does not begin until about 33 weeks after
conception, which meant that, in prior centuries, preterm babies
died. Now respirators, incubators, and so on allow viable preterm
babies to live. They are tube-fed, ideally with breast milk that their
mothers have expressed with a breast pump. At about 34 weeks, in
the hospital, they begin to suck, either via a special bottle and nipple
designed for their tiny mouths or directly from the nipples of their
mothers.
NICU professionals prefer the bottle approach, since the mothers do
not need to be physically present and nurses can more easily
measure nutrition. Doctors thought that babies could easily switch
to direct breast-feeding at home. However, that idea ignored what
cognitive psychologists now know about infant learning: Sucking for
nourishment is core knowledge, evident in newborns.
As evolutionary theory explains, babies refine their evolutionary
impulses with experience, because plasticity is part of human
nature. Tiny babies who are bottle-fed learn that this is how sucking
brings milk. By contrast, those who are directly breast-fed in the
hospital (for very preterm infants this means many times a day,
often supplemented with tube-feeding) learn that breasts give milk.
Babies who are breast-fed in the hospital are released earlier and are
more often breast-fed at home (Suberi et al., 2018), which benefits
their cognition.
This is an example of the infant’s eager mind, because these tiny
babies quickly learned to adapt an inborn ability (sucking) with
experience (as evolutionary theory suggests). Sucking knowledge is
plastic; it adapts.
Infant Memory
Are infant skills and cognition impressive, or are they markedly
immature? Both. To further understand this, we need to look in
detail at one more ability — memory, which “is crucial for the
acquisition of the tremendous amount of knowledge and skills
infant[s] and children acquire in the first years of life” (Vöhringer et
al., 2018, p. 370).
To see the relationship between early cognition and memory, we
need to appreciate that children remember what they need to
remember instead of noticing their many “faults or shortcomings
relative to an adult standard” (Bjorklund & Sellers, 2014, p. 142).
Newborns quickly remember who their caregivers are, and they
learn how their own behaviors can affect their experiences.
Of course, they remember almost nothing at first. Repeated
sensations and brain maturation are required in order to recall
whatever happens, as is true lifelong (Bauer et al., 2010). Everyone’s
memory fades with time, especially if that memory was never
encoded into language, never compared with similar events, or
never discussed with anyone — all of which make infant memory
fragile.
CHAPTER APP 6
CDC’s Milestone Tracker
IOS:
https://tinyurl.com/ycppyalv
ANDROID:
https://tinyurl.com/y98yh6lv
RELEVANT TOPIC:
Cognitive development during infancy
Featuring the CDC’s illustrated checklists, this app enables parents to track important
milestones from age 2 months to 5 years. It also offers tips for encouraging their child’s
development and resources to consult if they have concerns.
Forget About Infant Amnesia!
That does not mean that babies do not remember. Piaget, Freud, and
other early developmentalists described infant amnesia, the idea that
people forget everything that happened to them before age 3.
However, we now know that infant brains are adapted to learn,
which means that they can remember.
An insight regarding infant amnesia begins with the distinction
between implicit and explicit memory. Implicit memory is not
verbal; it is memory for movement, emotions, or thoughts that are
not put into words. Implicit memory is evident by 3 months, begins
to stabilize by 9 months, and varies from one infant to another as
well as within each infant during the early months.
The reason it appears so early is partly because it comes from
Implicit memory comes from the old parts of the brain — including
the cerebellum and the amygdala (Vöhringer et al., 2018). Those
parts mature rapidly in the first months of life, and then change
relatively little, unlike the forebrain, which grows for decades. That’s
why implicit memory is evident so early in life.
VIDEO: Contingency Learning in Young Infants shows Carolyn Rovee-Collier’s procedure
for studying instrumental learning during infancy.
Explicit memory takes longer to emerge, as it depends on language.
It arises mainly from the cortex. Explicit memory improves
dramatically throughout childhood (Hayne et al., 2015). Verbal
memory, especially vocabulary, continues to increase throughout
adulthood. When adults tested memory by asking questions, they
were testing explicit memory, which seemed absent for the early
years. Infant amnesia? Yes for some kinds of memory, especially the
kind learned in school and traditionally tested by scientists. But not
for many other kinds of memory.
Thus, when people say “I don’t remember,” they mean “I cannot
recall,” because something is not in explicit memory. Unconsciously
and implicitly, they might remember. A person might have an
irrational fear of doctors or hospitals, for instance, because of early
terrifying and painful experiences that they do not recall.
Remind Me!
The most dramatic proof of very early memory comes from a series
of innovative experiments in which 3-month-olds learned to move a
mobile by kicking their legs (Rovee-Collier, 1987, 1990). The infants
lay on their backs connected to a mobile by means of a ribbon tied
to one foot.
He Remembers! Infants are fascinated by moving objects within a few feet of
their eyes — that’s why parents buy mobiles for cribs and why Rovee-Collier tied
a string to a mobile and a baby’s leg to test memory. Babies not in her
experiment, like this one, sometimes flail their limbs to make their cribs shake
and thus make their mobiles move. Piaget’s stage of “making interesting sights
last” is evident to every careful observer.
Observation Quiz Do you see anything here that is less than ideal? (see answer, page
171)
Virtually all babies realized that kicking made the mobile move.
They then kicked more vigorously and frequently, sometimes
laughing at their accomplishment. So far, this is no surprise —
observing self-activated movement is highly reinforcing to infants.
When infants as young as 3 months had the mobile-and-ribbon
apparatus reinstalled and reconnected one week later, most started to
kick immediately, proof that they remembered their previous
experience. But when other 3-month-old infants were retested two
weeks later, they kicked randomly. Had they forgotten? It seemed so.
But then, two weeks after the initial training, the lead researcher,
Carolyn Rovee-Collier, allowed some infants to watch the mobile
move when they were not connected to it. The next day, when a
ribbon again tied their leg to the mobile, they kicked almost
immediately.
Apparently, watching the mobile the previous day reminded them
about what they had previously experienced. Other research
similarly finds that reminders are powerful. If Daddy routinely plays
with a 3-month-old, goes on a long trip, and the mother shows
Daddy’s picture and says his name on the day before his return, the
baby might grin broadly when he reappears. Otherwise, he might
seem to be forgotten.
At 12 months, memory improves because brains have added tens of
thousands of dendrites and synapses. Babies have learned from
parents and strangers, from other babies and older siblings, from
picture books and family photographs, and soon from their own
walking and talking (Hayne & Simcock, 2009).
Every day of their young lives, infants are processing information
and storing memories. Indeed, if you saw a photo of a grandmother
who cared for you every day when you were an infant and who died
when you were 2, your brain would still react, even though you
thought you forgot her. Information-processing research finds
evidence of early memories, with visual memories particularly
strong (Gao et al., 2017; Leung et al., 2016).
Evolutional theory is confirmed as well. The extraordinary plasticity
of the human brain and the core knowledge of how the world might
work have together astonished twenty-first-century cognitive
psychologists.
Some suggest that a new theory — evolutionary developmental
psychology — may replace the traditional approach to infant
cognition, as expounded by Piaget (Bjorklund, 2018). This theory
benefits from twenty-first-century neuroscience and technology that
allows researchers to discover the amazing abilities of the infant
brain.
WHAT HAVE YOU LEARNED?
1. What is the developmental pattern of hearing the sound of speech?
2. Why do babies look at whatever they look at?
3. What suggests that infants have an understanding of how objects move?
4. What does face recognition tell us about infant cognition?
5. What suggests that infants develop strategies for learning by watching adults?
6. Why is information-processing theory relevant for infant cognition?
7. Why is evolutionary theory relevant for infant cognition?
Piaget’s Sensorimotor Intelligence
Now we turn to Jean Piaget, the groundbreaking theorist who
studied infant cognition a century ago. Of course, Piaget lacked the
technological advances that undergird our current understanding of
infant cognition, but his insights were revolutionary in his day.
Consequently, many contemporary developmentalists consider
Piaget’s six stages of infant cognition a foundation on which to build.
In 1918, when Piaget earned his doctorate in biology, most scientists
thought infants only ate, cried, and slept. His Ph.D. research was on
shellfish, specifically how they adapt to their environment. That
required meticulous observation to understand details such as how
a clam interacted with sandy water, or how a snail moved along a
particular surface.
When he became a father, Piaget used his scientific observation
skills with his own three infants. Contrary to conventional wisdom,
he detailed active learning from birth on, recording his children’s
cognitive development day by day.
Early reflexes, senses, and body movements are the raw materials
for infant cognition, Piaget surmised. That is why he called
cognition in the first two years sensorimotor intelligence. He
subdivided this period into six stages (see Table 6.2).
[Developmental Link: Piaget’s theory of cognitive development over
all the years of childhood is introduced in Chapter 2.]
sensorimotor intelligence
Piaget’s term for the way infants think — by using their senses and motor skills — during the first
period of cognitive development.
VIDEO: Sensorimotor Intelligence in Infancy and Toddlerhood shows how senses and
motor skills fuel infant cognition.
TABLE 6.2 The Six Stages of Sensorimotor Intelligence
For an overview of the stages of sensorimotor thought, it helps to group the six stages into
pairs.
Primary Circular Reactions
The first two stages involve infants’ responses to their own bodies.
Stage One
(birth to 1
month)
Reflexes: sucking, grasping, staring, listening
Example: sucking anything that touches the lips or cheek
Stage Two (1–
4 months)
The first acquired adaptations: accommodation and coordination of
reflexes
Examples: sucking a pacifier differently from a nipple; attempting to
hold a bottle to suck it
Secondary Circular Reactions
The next two stages involve infants’ responses to objects and people.
Stage Three
(4–8 months)
Making interesting sights last: responding to people and objects
Example: clapping hands when mother says “patty-cake”
Stage Four
(8–12
months)
New adaptation and anticipation: becoming more deliberate and
purposeful in responding to people and objects
Example: putting mother’s hands together in order to make her start
playing patty-cake
Tertiary Circular Reactions
The last two stages are the most creative, first with action and then with ideas.
Stage Five
(12–18
months)
New means through active experimentation: experimentation and
creativity in the actions of the “little scientist”
Example: putting a teddy bear in the toilet and flushing it
Stage Six (18–
24 months)
New means through mental combinations: thinking before doing; new
ways of achieving a goal without resorting to trial and error
Example: before flushing the teddy bear again, hesitating because of
the memory of the toilet overflowing and mother’s anger
Stages One and Two: Primary Circular
Reactions
Piaget described the interplay of sensation, perception, action, and
cognition as circular reactions, emphasizing that, as in a circle, there
is no beginning and no end. Each experience leads to the next,
which loops back (see Figure 6.2).
FIGURE 6.2
Never Ending Circular reactions keep going because each action produces pleasure that
encourages more action.
In primary circular reactions, the circle is within the infant’s body.
Stage one, called the stage of reflexes, lasts only a month. Reflexes
become deliberate; sensation leads to perception, perception leads
to cognition, and then cognition leads back to sensation.
primary circular reactions
The first of three types of feedback loops in sensorimotor intelligence, this one involving the
infant’s own body. The infant senses motion, sucking, noise, and other stimuli and tries to
understand them.
Stage two, called first acquired adaptations (also called stage of first
habits), begins as the mind of the infant allows adjustment to
whatever responses they elicit. Adaptation is cognitive; it includes
repeating old patterns (assimilation) and developing new ones
(accommodation). [Developmental Link: Assimilation and
accommodation are explained in Chapter 2.]
Here is one example. As you remember, full-term newborns
reflexively suck anything that touches their lips (stage one). They
must learn to suck, swallow, and suck again without spitting up too
much — a major circular reaction that takes a few days to learn.
Then, infants adapt their sucking reflex to bottles or breasts,
pacifiers or fingers, each requiring specific types of tongue pushing.
You already read about this in preterm babies who, at 33 weeks, first
are able to suck (Suberi et al., 2018). This adaptation signifies that
infants have begun to interpret sensations; as they accommodate,
they are thinking — ready for stage two.
During stage two, which Piaget pegged from about 1 to 4 months of
age, additional adaptation of the sucking reflex begins. Infant
cognition leads babies to suck in some ways for hunger, in other
ways for comfort — and not to suck fuzzy blankets or hard plastic.
Once adaptation occurs, it sticks.
Adaptation is specific. For instance, 4-month-old breast-fed babies
may reject milk from the nipple of a bottle if they have never
experienced it. Early cognition can endure, as evolutionary theory
contends. That explains why children like to suck lollipops and why
some adults still like to suck things.
Especially for Parents When should parents decide whether to feed their baby only by
breast, only by bottle, or by using some combination of the two? When should they decide
whether or not to let their baby use a pacifier? (see response, page 170)
Now, suppose 4-month-olds have discovered how to suck their
thumbs and have practiced thumb sucking to their joy and
satisfaction. Then, when this stage is over, suppose at 6 months the
parents decide that a pacifier is better — perhaps healthier for teeth.
Adaptation has already occurred; the baby might spit out the
pacifier and insert the thumb.
In the same way at every age, Piaget found that older children and
adults tend to stick to their early learning. This is apparent if you
ever try to convince someone that something they have done all
their life is wrong. Habits of thought and deed are hard to change,
from infancy on.
Stages Three and Four: Secondary
Circular Reactions
In stages three and four, development advances from primary to
secondary circular reactions. These reactions extend beyond the
infant’s body; this circular reaction is between the baby and
something else.
secondary circular reactions
The first of three types of feedback loops in sensorimotor intelligence, involving the infant and an
object or another person, as with shaking a rattle or playing peek-a-boo.
During stage three (4 to 8 months), infants attempt to produce
exciting experiences, a stage called making interesting sights last.
Realizing that rattles make noise, for example, they wave their arms
and laugh whenever someone puts a rattle in their hand. The sight
of something delightful — a favorite squeaky toy, a smiling parent —
can trigger active efforts for interaction.
Next comes stage four (8 months to 1 year), called new adaptation
and anticipation (also called the means to the end). Babies may ask for
help (fussing, pointing, gesturing) to accomplish what they want.
Thinking is more innovative because adaptation is more complex.
For instance, instead of always smiling at Grandpa, an infant might
first assess his mood. Stage-three babies continue an experience;
stage-four babies initiate and anticipate.
Pursuing a Goal
An impressive attribute of stage four is that babies work hard to
achieve their goals. A 10-month-old girl might crawl over to her
mother, bringing a bar of soap to signal she loves baths, and then
start to remove her clothes — finally squealing with delight when the
bath water is turned on. Similarly, if a 10-month-old boy sees his
father putting on a coat to leave, he might drag over his own jacket.
In both cases, infants have learned from repeated experience —
Daddy may have often brought the baby along when he went out.
With a combination of experience and brain maturation, babies
become attuned to the goals of others, an ability that is more evident
at 10 months than 8 months (Brandone et al., 2014).
Family Fun Peek-a-boo makes all three happy, each for cognitive reasons. The 9month-old is discovering object permanence, his sister (at the concrete operational
stage) enjoys making her brother laugh, and their mother understands more abstract
ideas — such as family bonding.
According to Piaget, a major accomplishment of stage four is object
permanence — the concept that objects or people continue to exist
when they are not visible. At about 8 months — not before — infants
look for toys that have fallen from the crib, rolled under a couch, or
disappeared under a blanket.
object permanence
The realization that objects (including people) still exist when they can no longer be seen,
touched, or heard.
As another scholar explains:
Many parents in our typical American middle-class households have tried out Piaget’s
experiment in situ: Take an adorable, drooling 7-month-old baby, show her a toy she
loves to play with, then cover it with a piece of cloth right in front of her eyes. What
do you observe next? The baby does not know what to do to get the toy! She looks
around, oblivious to the object’s continuing existence under the cloth cover, and turns
her attention to something else interesting in her environment. A few months later,
the same baby will readily reach out and yank away the cloth cover to retrieve the
highly desirable toy. This experiment has been done thousands of times and the
phenomenon remains one of the most compelling in all of developmental
psychology.
[Xu, 2013, p. 167]
This is one of Piaget’s most well-known, as well as most
controversial, insights, as Opposing Perspectives explains.
OPPOSING PERSPECTIVES
Object Permanence
Piaget found that:
Infants younger than 8 months do not search for an attractive object momentarily
covered by a cloth. They do not have the concept of object permanence.
At about 8 months, infants remove the cloth immediately after the object is covered
but not if they have to wait a few seconds.
At 18 months, infants search after a wait. However, if they have seen the object put
first in one place (A) and then moved to another (B), they search in A but not B.
By 2 years, children fully grasp object permanence, progressing through several
stages, including A and B displacements (Piaget, 1954/2013a).
This research provides many practical suggestions. If young infants fuss because they see
something they cannot have (keys, a cell phone, candy), caregivers can put that coveted
object out of sight. Fussing stops if object permanence has not yet appeared.
By contrast, for toddlers, hiding an object is not enough. It must be securely locked up, lest
the child later retrieve it, climbing onto the kitchen counter or under the bathroom sink to
do so. That much is evident to every developmental scientist. Then why is this an “opposing
perspective”?
The opposition comes from researchers who thought Piaget underestimated infant
cognition. Piaget believed that failure to search before 8 months meant that infants had no
concept of object permanence — that “out of sight” literally means “out of mind.” That is
where the controversy begins.
Does a baby need to be able to remove a cover from a hidden toy to demonstrate object
permanence? No, according to information-processing research. The best-known example is
a series of studies by Renee Baillargeon which proved that 3-month-old infants grasp object
permanence, long before 8 months, when Piaget said it emerged. How did informationprocessing measures lead to this conclusion?
Baillargeon devised clever experiments that entailed showing infants an object, then
covering it with a screen, and then removing the screen. If the object vanished behind the
screen, the babies’ brain waves, heart rate, or focused eyes showed surprise. This meant
that they expected the object to still be present — that is, they believed an object’s existence
was permanent (Baillargeon & DeVos, 1991; Spelke, 1993).
Later research on object permanence has continued to question Piaget’s conclusions. Many
other creatures (cats, monkeys, dogs, birds) develop object permanence faster than human
infants. The animal ability seems to be innate, not learned — wolves and dogs develop it,
but neither is as adept as human 2-year-olds at A-not-B displacement (Fiset & Plourde,
2013). Nonhuman animal species vary in their object permanence abilities, with other
primates better than dogs, for instance (Majecka & Pietraszewski, 2018).
Current research finds that early experiences combine with inherited brain dispositions,
making the age of object permanence (especially A-not-B displacements) much more
variable than Piaget described (MacNeill et al., 2018). The current context matters as well.
When testers look at B (not A), infants are likely to guess correctly. Does that indicate gaze
sensitivity, not object permanence? (Dunn & Bremner, 2019).
Most scientists agree with Baillargeon that surprise, and looking time, are evidence for early
object permanence. Other scientists are less convinced (Marcovitch et al., 2016; Mareschal &
Kaufman, 2012). Some stress that Piaget is essentially correct, in that object permanence is
fragile until later infancy (Bremner et al., 2015).
Thus, perspectives differ on exactly how infant cognition should be measured and what gaze
reveals (Dunn & Bremner, 2017). But, everyone now agrees that babies are thinking long
before Piaget found that they move their hands to uncover a hidden object.
Stages Five and Six: Tertiary Circular
Reactions
In their second year, infants start experimenting in thought and
deed — or, rather, in the opposite sequence, deed and thought. They
act first (stage five) and think later (stage six).
Tertiary circular reactions begin when 1-year-olds take
independent actions to discover the properties of other people,
animals, and things. Infants no longer respond only to their own
bodies (primary reactions) or to other people or objects (secondary
reactions). Their cognition is more like a spiral than a closed circle,
increasingly creative with each discovery.
tertiary circular reaction
Piaget’s description of the cognitive processes of the 1-year-old, who gathers information from
experiences with the wider world and then acts on it. The response to those actions leads to
further understanding, which makes this circular.
Piaget’s stage five (12 to 18 months), called new means through active
experimentation, builds on the accomplishments of stage four. Now,
goal-directed and purposeful activities become more expansive.
Toddlers delight in squeezing all the toothpaste out of the tube,
drawing on the wall, or uncovering an anthill — activities they have
never observed. Piaget referred to the stage-five toddler as a “little
scientist” who “experiments in order to see.” As you read, a
scientific approach may be evident earlier, but authors who studied
12- to 19-month-olds report that “flexible and productive hypothesis
testing does begin in infancy, with a vengeance” (Cesana-Arlotti et
al., 2018, p. 1263).
“little scientist”
Piaget’s term for toddlers’ insatiable curiosity and active experimentation as they engage in
various actions to understand their world.
Toddlers’ preferred research method is trial and error. Their
devotion to discovery is familiar to every adult scientist — and to
every parent. Protection is needed. A curious toddler might swallow
bleach, flush a doll down the toilet, or throw a cat out the window,
all to see what happens next.
Especially for Parents One parent wants to put all breakable or dangerous objects
away because the toddler is able to move around independently. The other parent says that
the baby should learn not to touch certain things. Who is right? (see response, page 171)
Finally, in the sixth stage (18 to 24 months), toddlers use mental
combinations, intellectual experimentation via imagination that can
supersede the active experimentation of stage five. Because they
combine ideas, stage-six toddlers can pretend as well as think about
the consequences of what they do, hesitating a moment before
yanking the cat’s tail or dropping a raw egg on the floor.
Imitation Is Lifelong As this photo illustrates, at every age, people copy what
others do — often to their mutual joy. The new ability at stage six is “deferred
imitation” — this boy may have seen another child lie on a tire a few days earlier.
Stage-six toddlers can remember what they have seen and do it later
themselves, an ability Piaget called deferred imitation. Newer
research finds that some accomplishments that Piaget pegged for
stage six — including pretending and deferred imitation — begin
much earlier.
However, although he was wrong on the timing of his stages, Piaget
was right to describe babies as avid and active learners who “learn
so fast and so well” (Xu & Kushnir, 2013, p. 28). His main mistake
was underestimating how rapidly their learning can occur.
WHAT HAVE YOU LEARNED?
1. Why did Piaget call cognition in the first two years “sensorimotor intelligence”?
2. How does stage one of sensorimotor intelligence lead to stage two?
3. In sensorimotor intelligence, what is the difference between stages three and four?
4. What is the significance of the concept of object permanence for infant cognition?
5. What does the active experimentation of the stage-five toddler suggest for parents?
6. Why did Piaget underestimate infant cognition?
Language: What Develops in the
First Two Years?
Human linguistic ability by age 2 far surpasses that of full-grown
adults from every other species. Very young infants listen intensely,
responding as best they can. One scholar explains, “infants are
acquiring much of their native language before they utter their first
word” (Aslin, 2012, p. 191). How do they do it?
The Universal Sequence
The sequence of language development is the same worldwide (see
At About This Time). Some children learn several languages, some
only one; some learn rapidly, others slowly. But all follow the same
path.
AT ABOUT THIS TIME
The Development of Spoken Language in the First Two Years
Agei
Means of Communication
Newborn
Reflexive communication — cries, movements, facial expressions.
2
A range of meaningful noises — cooing, fussing, crying, laughing.
months
3–6
months
New sounds, including squeals, growls, croons, trills, vowel sounds.
6–10
Babbling, including both consonant and vowel sounds repeated in syllables.
months
10–12
Comprehension of simple words; speechlike intonations; specific
months
vocalizations that have meaning to those who know the infant well. Deaf
babies express their first signs; hearing babies also use specific gestures
(e.g., pointing) to communicate.
12
First spoken words that are recognizably part of the native language.
months
13–18
Slow growth of vocabulary, up to about 50 words.
months
18
months
Naming explosion — three or more words learned per day. Much variation:
Some toddlers do not yet speak.i
21
First two-word sentence.
months
24
Multiword sentences. Half of the toddler’s utterances are two or more words
months
long.
iThe ages in this table reflect norms. Many healthy, intelligent children attain each linguistic
accomplishment earlier or later than indicated here. However, if a baby is late to babble,
speak a word, or put words together, that may indicate a speech, hearing, or cognitive
problem. A professional should determine whether something is amiss.
Listening and Responding
In every spoken language, adults use higher pitch, simpler words,
repetition, varied speed, and exaggerated emotional tone when
talking to infants. Babies respond with attention and emotion. By 7
months, they begin to recognize words that are distinctive: Bottle,
doggie, and mama, for instance, might be differentiated, not baby,
Bobbie, and Barbie.
Infants also like alliteration, rhymes, repetition, melody, rhythm,
and varied pitch. Think of your favorite lullaby (itself an alliterative
word); obviously, babies prefer sounds over content and singing
over talking (Tsang et al., 2017). Early listening abilities and
preferences are the result of brain function.
Babbling and Gesturing
Between 6 and 9 months, babies repeat certain syllables (ma-ma-ma,
da-da-da, ba-ba-ba), a vocalization called babbling because of the
way it sounds. Babbling is universal; even deaf babies babble.
babbling
An infant’s repetition of certain syllables, such as ba-ba-ba, that begins when babies are between
6 and 9 months old.
Caregivers usually encourage those noises, and it is wise that they do
so. Babbling predicts later vocabulary, even more than the other
major influence — the education of the mother (McGillion et al.,
2017).
Who Is Babbling? Probably both the 6-month-old and the 27-year-old. During every
day of infancy, mothers and babies communicate with noises, movements, and
expressions.
Before uttering their first word, infants notice patterns of speech,
such as which sounds are commonly spoken together. A baby who
often hears that something is “pretty” expects the sound of prit to be
followed by tee (MacWhinney, 2015) and is startled if someone says
“prit-if.”
Infants also learn the relationship between mouth movements and
sound. In one study, 8-month-olds watched a film of someone
speaking, with the audio a fraction of a second ahead of the video.
Even when the actor spoke an unknown language, babies noticed
the mistiming (Pons & Lewkowicz, 2014).
Some caregivers, recognizing the power of gestures, teach “baby
signs” to their 6- to 12-month-olds, who communicate with hand
signs months before they move their tongues, lips, and jaws to make
words. There is no evidence that baby signing accelerates talking (as
had been claimed), but it may make parents more responsive, which
itself is an advantage (Kirk et al., 2013). Every gesture and movement
aid communication.
For deaf babies, sign language is crucial in the first year: It not only
predicts later ability to communicate with signs but also advances
cognitive development (Hall et al., 2017). Remember how important
gaze-following was for infant learning? Deaf infants are even better
at gaze-following than hearing infants, because they rely on visual
signs from their caregivers (Brooks et al., 2019).
Even for hearing babies and without adult signing, gestures are a
powerful means of communication (Goldin-Meadow, 2015). One
early gesture is pointing and responding to pointing from someone
else. The latter requires something quite sophisticated —
understanding another person’s perspective.
Most animals cannot interpret pointing, but before they are a year
old most humans look toward wherever someone else points and
already point with their tiny index fingers. Pointing is well
developed by 12 months, especially when the person who is pointing
also speaks (e.g., “look at that”) (Daum et al., 2013).
Infants younger than a year old who are adept at pointing tend to be
those who will soon begin talking. That is one reason adults need to
respond to pointing as if it is intended to communicate — which it is
(Bohn & Köymen, 2018).
Show Me Where Pointing is one of the earliest forms of communication, emerging at
about 10 months. As you see here, pointing is useful lifelong for humans.
First Words
Finally, at about a year, the average baby utters a few words,
understood by caregivers if not by strangers. Those words often
coincide with the age when walking begins. It may be that a certain
amount of brain maturation is needed for both, or it may be that
walking allows a new set of questions and makes it more important
that people talk to the baby (Walle & Campos, 2014). Following the
first words, spoken vocabulary increases gradually (perhaps one
new word a week). Meanings are learned rapidly; babies understand
about 10 times more than they can say.
Initially, the first words are merely labels for familiar things (mama
and dada are common), but each early word soon becomes a
holophrase, a single word that expresses an entire thought. That
phrase is accompanied by gestures, facial expressions, and nuances
of tone, loudness, and cadence. Imagine meaningful
communication in “Dada,” “Dada?” and “Dada!” Each is a
holophrase.
holophrase
A single word that is used to express a complete, meaningful thought.
A CASE TO STUDY
Early Speech
As you read, sensitive caregiving is crucial for early cognition, as babies innately look at and
listen to their caregivers in order to learn. For their part, caregivers are sensitive and
responsive to the infant’s attempts to understand words. This is evident in early language:
Parents may understand what an infant is trying to say long before other people do.
Consider 13-month-old Kyle, who was advanced in language development. He knew
standard words such as mama, but he also knew da, ba, tam, opma, and daes, which his
parents knew to be, respectively, “downstairs,” “bottle,” “tummy,” “oatmeal,” and “starfish.”
He also had a special sound to call squirrels (Lewis et al., 1999).
When acquaintances came to visit, they were often mystified by Kyle’s attempts to speak.
Who would know that daes meant starfish, or how a person might call squirrels? Only Kyle
and his very astute parents.
Even a caring grandmother might not interpret correctly. I know this personally. I was caring
for my 16-month-old grandson when he said, “Mama, mama.” He looked directly at me, and
he didn’t seem wistful.
“Mommy’s not here,” I told him. That didn’t stop him; he repeated “mama, mama,” more as
a command than a complaint. I tried several things. I know that some languages use “ma”
for milk. I offered some in his sippy cup. He said, “No, no.”
When his father appeared, Isaac repeated “mama.” Then his dad lifted him, and Isaac
cuddled in his arms. I asked Oscar what “mama” means. His reply: “Pick me up.”
I now understand Isaac’s logic: When he saw his mother, he said “mama” and she picked
him up. His parents understood and responded to his words and gestures.
Now Isaac is a proficient talker, explaining about bird families (pigeons are the parents,
because they are bigger), about who should get a seat on the subway (it is Isaac, because, as
he says very plaintively to other riders, “I need to sit down”; to my embarrassment, he
usually gets a seat, so his words are reinforced), and about what his brother has done wrong
(explained in detail to his parents, who listen sympathetically but almost never punish the
older boy).
I also listen to Isaac’s current chatter, repeating some of his phrases and saying “uh-huh,”
knowing that early adult responses continue to affect later talking. Isaac is well on his way
to becoming a highly verbal adult.
The Naming Explosion
Spoken vocabulary builds rapidly once the first 50 words are
mastered, with 21-month-olds typically saying twice as many words
as 18-month-olds (Adamson & Bakeman, 2006). This language spurt
is called the naming explosion because many early words are
nouns, that is, names of persons, places, or things.
naming explosion
A sudden increase in an infant’s vocabulary, especially in the number of nouns, that begins at
about 18 months of age.
Before the explosion, names are already favored. Infants learn the
names of each significant caregiver (often dada, mama, nana, papa,
baba, tata), sibling, and pet. (See Visualizing Development.) Other
frequently uttered words refer to favorite foods (nana can mean
“banana” as well as “grandma”) and to elimination (pee-pee, wee-wee,
poo-poo, ka-ka, doo-doo).
Notice that all of these words have two identical syllables, a
consonant followed by a vowel. Many early words follow that
pattern — not just baba but also bobo, bebe, bubu, bibi. Some of the
first words are only slightly more complicated — ma-me, ama, and so
on. The meanings vary by language, but every baby says such words,
and every culture assigns meaning to them. Words that are hard to
say are simplified: Rabbits are “bunnies,” stomachs are “tummies,”
and no man waits until his son or daughter can call him Father; he is
Daddy or Papa instead.
DATA CONNECTIONS: The Development of Spoken Language in the First Two
Years reviews communication milestones for infants and toddlers.
.
Cultural Differences
Early communication transcends culture. In one study, 102 adults
listened to 40 recorded infant sounds and were asked which of five
possibilities (pointing, giving, protesting, action request, food
request) was the reason for each cry, grunt, or whatever. Half of the
sounds, and about half of the adults, were from Scotland and the
other half from Uganda.
Adults in both cultures scored significantly better than chance
(although no group or individual got everything right). The number
correct was close to the same whether the sounds came from
Scottish or Ugandan infants, or whether the adults were parents or
not (Kersken et al., 2017). Human baby sounds are understood by
humans no matter what language the community speaks.
What Does He See? All children stare out of windows, but only some are told the
names of the various cloud formations and the landscape below. Does this matter for
language learning?
However, cultures and families vary in how much child-directed
speech children hear. Some parents read to their infants, teach them
signs, and respond to every burp or fart as if it were an attempt to
talk. Other parents are much less verbal. They use gestures and
touch; they say “hush” and “no” instead of expanding vocabulary.
Traditionally, in small agricultural communities, the goal was for
everyone to be “strong and silent.” If adults talked too much, they
might be called blabbermouths or gossips; a good worker did not
waste time in conversation.
In some rural areas of the world, that notion remains. One such
place is in Senegal, where mothers traditionally feared talking to
their babies lest that might encourage evil spirits to take over the
child (Zeitlin, 2011).
However, communication is crucial in the twenty-first-century
global economy. Government, teachers, and most parents recognize
this: A child’s first words may be celebrated as much or more than a
child’s first steps. But some parents are unaware that responding to
preverbal vocalizations promotes speech later on.
In one study in Senegal, professionals from the local community
(fluent in Woloff, the language spoken by the people) taught mothers
in some villages about infant development, including language. A
year later those babies were compared to babies in similar villages
where the educational intervention had not been offered.
The newly educated mothers talked more to their babies, and the
babies, in turn, talked more, with 20 more utterances in five minutes
than the control group (A. Weber et al., 2017). The researchers were
careful not to challenge the traditional notions directly; instead they
taught how early language development advanced infant cognition.
The mothers applied what they learned, and the babies responded.
Putting Words Together
Grammar includes all of the methods that languages use to
communicate meaning. There are many ways to add letters to words
and to put words together — that is grammar.
grammar
All of the methods — word order, verb forms, and so on — that languages use to communicate
meaning, apart from the words themselves.
Word order, prefixes, suffixes, intonation, verb forms, pronouns and
negations, prepositions and articles — all of these are aspects of
grammar. Grammar can be discerned in holophrases because one
word can be spoken differently depending on meaning. However,
grammar becomes essential when babies combine words (Bremner
& Wachs, 2010). That typically happens between 18 and 24 months.
For example, “Baby cry” and “More juice” follow grammatical word
order. Children do not usually say “Juice more,” and even toddlers
know that “Cry baby” is not the same as “Baby cry.” By age 2,
children combine three words. English grammar uses subject–verb–
object order; the grammar of other languages use other sequences
and their toddlers do the same.
For example, English-speaking toddlers say, “Mommy read book”
rather than any of the five other possible sequences of those three
words. Adults might say the same three-word sentence with a few
grammatical changes, “Mom reads e-books,” not “e-books reads
Mom.” As you see, grammar changes meanings markedly.
Children’s proficiency in grammar correlates with sentence length,
which is why mean length of utterance (MLU) is used to measure a
child’s language progress (e.g., Miyata et al., 2013). The child who
says, “The baby is crying” is more advanced than the child who says,
“Baby crying” or simply, “Baby cry!”
mean length of utterance (MLU)
The average number of words in a typical sentence (called utterance because children may not
talk in complete sentences). MLU is often used to measure language development.
VISUALIZING DEVELOPMENT
Early Communication and Language
Communication Milestones: The First Two
Years
These are norms. Many intelligent and healthy babies vary in the age at which they reach
these milestones.
Universal First Words
Across cultures, babies’ first words are remarkably similar. The words for mother and father
are recognizable in almost any language. Most children will learn to name their immediate
family and caregivers between the ages of 12 and 18 months.
Mastering Language
Children’s use of language becomes more complex as they acquire more words and begin to
master grammar and usage. A child’s spoken words or sounds (utterances) are broken down
into the smallest units of language to determine their length and complexity:
Theories of Language Learning
Worldwide, people who are not yet 2 years old express hopes, fears,
and memories — sometimes in more than one language. By
adolescence, people communicate with nuanced words and
gestures, some writing poems and lyrics that move thousands of
their co-linguists. How is language learned so easily and so well?
Answers come from at least three schools of thought. The first
theory says that infants are directly taught, the second that social
impulses propel infants to communicate, and the third that infants
understand language because of genetic brain structures that arose
more than 100,000 years ago.
Theory One: Infants Need to Be Taught
One idea arises from behaviorism. The essential idea is that learning
is acquired, step by step, through association and reinforcement.
B. F. Skinner (1957) noticed that spontaneous babbling is usually
reinforced. Often, when a baby says “ma-ma-ma-ma,” a grinning
mother appears, repeating the sound and showering the baby with
attention, praise, and perhaps food. This is especially likely if the
baby is a firstborn, which may explain why later-born children, on
average, have smaller vocabularies than the oldest child in a family.
Repetition strengthens associations, so infants learn language faster
if parents speak to them often. Few parents know this theory, but
many use behaviorist techniques by praising and responding to the
toddler’s simple, mispronounced speech, thus teaching language.
Behaviorists note that some 3-year-olds converse in elaborate
sentences; others just barely put one simple word before another.
Such variations correlate with the amount of language each child
has heard.
Indeed, to some extent infants are “statistical learners” of language,
deciding the meanings and boundaries of words based on how often
those sounds are heard (Saffran & Kirkham, 2018). Parents of the
most verbal children teach language throughout infancy — singing,
explaining, listening, responding, and reading to their babies every
day, giving their children a rich trove of verbal data, long before the
infant utters a first spoken word (see Figure 6.3).
FIGURE 6.3
Maternal Responsiveness and Infants’ Language Acquisition Learning the first
50 words is a milestone in early language acquisition, as it predicts the arrival
of the naming explosion and the multiword sentence a few weeks later.
Researchers found that half of the infants of highly responsive mothers (top 10
percent) reached this milestone at 15 months. The infants of less responsive
mothers (bottom 10 percent) lagged significantly behind, with half of them at
the 50-word level at 21 months.
Theory Two: Social Impulses Foster Infant
Language
The second theory arises from the sociocultural reason for
language: communication. According to this perspective, infants
communicate because humans are social beings, dependent on one
another for survival and joy.
All human infants (and no chimpanzees) seek to master words and
grammar in order to join the social world (Tomasello & Herrmann,
2010). According to this perspective, it is the social function of
speech, not the words, that undergirds early language.
This theory challenges child-directed videos, CDs, and downloads
named to appeal to parents (Baby Einstein, Brainy Baby, and Mozart
for Mommies and Daddies — Jumpstart your Newborn’s I.Q.). Since
early language development is impressive, even explosive, some
parents who allow infants to watch such programs believe that the
rapid language learning is aided by video. Commercial apps for
tablets and smartphones, such as Shapes Game HD and VocabuLarry,
have joined the market.
However, developmental research finds that screen time during
infancy may be harmful, because it avoids the social interaction that
is essential for learning to communicate. One recent study found
that toddlers could learn a word from either a book or a video but
that only book-learning, not video-learning, enabled children to use
the new word in another context (Strouse & Ganea, 2017). When the
parents read the books, they often held their baby, spoke with clear
and animated words, and allowed the child to grab pages, make
noises, and point to pictures. That was an engaging social
experience.
Another study focused on teaching baby signs, 18 hand gestures that
refer to particular objects (Dayanim & Namy, 2015). The babies in
this study were 15 months old, an age at which all babies use
gestures and are poised to learn object names. The 18 signs referred
to common early words, such as baby, ball, banana, bird, cat, and
dog.
In this study, the toddlers were divided into four groups: (1) video
only, (2) video with parent watching and reinforcing, (3) book
instruction with parent reading and reinforcing, and (4) no
instruction. Not surprisingly, the no-instruction group learned
words (as every normal toddler does) but not signs, and the other
three groups learned some signs. The two groups with parent
instruction learned most, with the book-reading group
remembering signs better than either video group. Why?
Caught in the Middle Parents try to limit screen time, but children are beguiled and
bombarded from many sides.
The crucial factor seemed to be parent interaction. When parents
watch a video with their infants, they talk less than when they read a
book or play with toys (Anderson & Hanson, 2016). Since adult input
is essential for language learning, cognitive development is reduced
by video time. Infants are most likely to understand and apply what
they have learned when they learn directly from another person
(Barr, 2013).
Screen time cannot “substitute for responsive, loving face-to-face
relationships” (Lemish & Kolucki, 2013, p. 335). Direct social
interaction is pivotal for language, according to theory two.
Theory Three: Infants Teach Themselves
A third theory holds that language learning is genetically
programmed. Adults need not teach it (theory one), nor is it a byproduct of social interaction (theory two). Instead, it arises from a
particular gene (FOXP2), brain maturation, and the overall human
impulse to imitate.
For example, English articles (the, an, a) signal that the next word
will be the name of an object. Since babies have “an innate base”
that primes them to learn, articles facilitate learning nouns (Shi,
2014, p. 9). Articles prove to be a useful clue for infants learning
English but are frustrating for anyone who learns English as an
adult. Adults from other linguistic communities may be highly
intelligent and motivated, but their language-learning genes are past
the sensitive learning time.
Our ancestors were genetically programmed to imitate for survival,
but until a few millennia ago, no one needed to learn languages
other than their own. Thus, human genes allow experiencedependent language learning, pruning the connections that our
particular language does not need. If we want to learn another
language in adulthood, our brains cannot resurrect the connections
we lost in infancy.
The prime spokesman for this perspective was Noam Chomsky
(1968, 1980). Although behaviorists focus on variations among
children in vocabulary size, Chomsky focused on similarities in
language acquisition — the evolutionary universals, not the
differences.
Noting that all young children master basic grammar according to a
schedule, Chomsky hypothesized that children are born with a brain
structure he called a language acquisition device (LAD), which
allows children, as their brains develop, to derive the rules of
grammar quickly and effectively from the speech they hear every
day.
language acquisition device (LAD)
Chomsky’s term for a hypothesized mental structure that enables humans to learn language,
including the basic aspects of grammar, vocabulary, and intonation.
For example, everywhere, a raised tone indicates a question, and
infants prefer questions to declarative statements (Soderstrom et al.,
2011). This suggests that infants are wired to talk, and caregivers
universally ask them questions long before they can answer back.
According to theory three, language is experience-expectant, as the
developing brain quickly and efficiently connects neurons to
support whichever language the infant hears. Because of this
experience-expectancy, the various languages of the world are all
logical, coherent, and systematic. Then some experience-dependent
learning occurs as each brain adjusts to a particular language.
The LAD works for deaf infants as well. All 6-month-olds, hearing or
not, prefer to look at sign language over nonlinguistic pantomime.
For hearing infants, this preference disappears by 10 months, but
deaf infants begin signing at that time, which is their particular
expression of the universal LAD.
Family Values Every family encourages the values and abilities that their children
need to be successful adults. For this family in Ecuador, that means strong legs and
lungs to climb the Andes, respecting their parents, and keeping quiet unless spoken
to. A “man of few words” is admired. By contrast, many North American parents
babble in response to infant babble, celebrate the first spoken word, and stop their
conversation to listen to an interrupting child. If a student never talks in class, or
another student blurts out irrelevant questions. Culture talks!
Observation Quiz If this is a typical scene, what family values are evident? (see answer,
page 171)
All True?
A master linguist explains that “the human mind is a hybrid system,”
perhaps using different parts of the brain for each kind of learning
(Pinker, 1999, p. 279).
The idea that every theory is partially correct may seem idealistic.
However, many scientists who are working on extending and
interpreting research on language acquisition have arrived at this
conclusion. They contend that language learning is neither the
direct product of repeated input (behaviorism) nor the result of a
specific human neurological capacity (LAD). Rather, from an
evolutionary perspective, “different elements of the language
apparatus may have evolved in different ways,” and thus, a
“piecemeal and empirical” approach is needed (Marcus &
Rabagliati, 2009, p. 281).
Neuroscience is the most recent method to investigate the
development of language. It was once thought that language was
located in two specific regions of the brain (Wernicke’s area and
Broca’s area). But now neuroscientists are convinced that language
arises from other regions as well. Some genes and regions are
crucial, but hundreds of genes and many brain regions contribute to
linguistic fluency.
Neuroscientists describing language development write about
“connections,” “networks,” “circuits,” and “hubs” to capture the idea
that language is interrelated and complex (Dehaene-Lambertz, 2017;
Pulvermüller, 2018). Even when the focus is simply on talking, one
neuroscientist notes that “speech is encoded at multiple levels in
different parallel pathways” (Dehaene-Lambertz, 2017, p. 52).
That neuroscientist begins her detailed description of the infant
brain and language with the same amazement that traditional
linguists have expressed for decades:
For thousands of years and across numerous cultures, human infants are able to
perfectly master oral or signed language in only a few years. No other machine, be it
silicon or carbon based, is able to reach the same level of expertise.
[Dehaene-Lambertz, 2017, p. 48]
Language is closely linked, in the early months, with cognition. As
one review of the many pathways between learning to talk and
understanding the world concludes:
A constellation of factors that are unique to human development — infants’ prolonged
period of dependency, exquisite sensitivity to experience, and powerful learning
strategies — collectively spark a cascade of developmental change whose ultimate
result is the acquisition of language and its unparalleled interface with cognition.
[Perszyk & Waxman, 2018, p. 246]
The words constellation and cascade signify that many brain
structures and social inputs result in both language and learning.
From this we are led to an overall conclusion. Infants are amazing
and active learners who advance their cognition in many ways —
through understanding of people, objects, memory, and
communication. Remember that before Piaget, many experts
assumed that babies did not yet learn or think. How wrong they
were!
WHAT HAVE YOU LEARNED?
1. What aspects of language develop in the first year?
2. When does vocabulary develop slowly and when does it develop quickly?
3. What is typical of the first words that infants speak?
4. What indicates that toddlers use some grammar?
5. According to behaviorism, how do adults teach infants to talk?
6. According to sociocultural theory, why do infants try to communicate?
7. Do people really have a language acquisition device?
8. Why do developmentalists accept several theories of language development?
SUMMARY
The Eager Mind
1. Infants learn so quickly that developmentalists now suggest that
some basic understanding is programmed into the brain — no
experience necessary.
2. Infants distinguish all of the possible sounds that human
languages use. This ability decreases as babies become more
attuned to whatever languages they hear.
3. Infants observe events and people to learn what merits their
attention. Face recognition is an inborn ability that is refined by
experience. They particularly attend to where adults are
looking, an inborn impulse called gaze-following.
4. Information-processing theory, which looks at each step of the
thinking process, helps researchers understand that every
moment of experience aids cognition, enhanced by the innate
programming of the infant mind.
5. Evolutionary theory is also relevant, as it emphasizes the basic
cognitive capacities that humans have needed to survive. The
emphasis is not only on inborn cognitive structures but also on
plasticity, which allows each infant to adapt to the environment.
6. Infant memory is fragile but not completely absent. Reminder
sessions help trigger memories, and young brains learn motor
sequences and respond to repeated emotions (their own and
those of other people) long before explicit memory, using
words.
Piaget’s Sensorimotor Intelligence
7. Piaget realized that very young infants are active learners who
seek to understand their complex observations and
experiences. The six stages of sensorimotor intelligence involve
early adaptation to experience.
8. Sensorimotor intelligence begins with reflexes and ends with
mental combinations. The six stages occur in pairs, with each
pair characterized by a circular reaction.
9. Infants first react to their own bodies (primary), then respond
to other people and things (secondary), and finally, in the stage
of tertiary circular reactions, infants become more goaloriented, creative, and experimental as “little scientists.”
10. Infants gradually develop an understanding of objects.
According to Piaget’s classic experiments, infants understand
object permanence and begin to search for hidden objects at
about 8 months. Newer research finds that Piaget
underestimated infant cognition.
Language: What Develops in the First Two Years?
11. Attempts to communicate are apparent in the first weeks and
months, beginning with noises, facial expressions, and avid
listening. Infants babble at about 6 months, understand words
and gestures by 10 months, and speak their first words at about
1 year.
12. Vocabulary builds slowly until the infant knows approximately
50 words. Then the naming explosion begins. Grammar is
evident in the first holophrases, and combining words together
in proper sequence is further evidence that babies learn
grammar as well as vocabulary.
13. Toward the end of the second year, toddlers express wishes and
emotions in short sentences. Variation is evident, in part
because of caregiver attention. Some babies are already
bilingual.
14. Theories differ in explaining how infants learn language —
whether infants must be taught or that social impulses foster
language learning or that brains are genetically attuned to
language as soon as the requisite maturation occurs.
15. Each theory of language learning is confirmed by research.
Developmental scientists find that many parts of the brain, and
many strategies for learning, result in early language
accomplishments. Current research, with the benefit of
advances in neuroscience, confirms that conclusion.
KEY TERMS
sensorimotor intelligence
primary circular reactions
secondary circular reactions
object permanence
tertiary circular reactions
“little scientist”
babbling
holophrase
naming explosion
grammar
mean length of utterance (MLU)
language acquisition device (LAD)
APPLICATIONS
1. Elicit vocalizations from an infant — babbling if the baby is
under age 1, using words if the baby is older. Write down
all of the baby’s communication for 10 minutes. Then ask
the primary caregiver to elicit vocalizations for 10 minutes,
and write these down. What differences are apparent
between the baby’s two attempts at communication?
Compare your findings with the norms described in the
chapter.
2. Many educators recommend that parents read to babies
every day, even before 1 year of age. What theory of
language development does this reflect and why? Ask
several parents whether they did so, and why or why not.
3. Test a toddler’s ability to pretend and to imitate, as Piaget
would expect. Use a doll or a toy car and pretend with it,
such as feeding the doll or making the car travel. Then see
whether the child will do it. This experiment can be more
elaborate if the child succeeds.
Especially For ANSWERS
Response for Educators (from p. 148): Probably both. Infants
love to communicate, and they seek every possible way to do so.
Therefore, the teachers should try to understand the baby and
the baby’s parents, but they should also start teaching the baby
the majority language of the school.
Response for Parents (from p. 158): Both decisions should be
made within the first month, during the stage of reflexes. If
parents wait until the infant is 4 months or older, they may
discover that they are too late. It is difficult to introduce a bottle
to a 4-month-old who has never sucked on an artificial nipple or
a pacifier to a baby who has already adapted the sucking reflex
to a thumb.
Response for Parents (from p. 160): It is easier and safer to
babyproof the house because toddlers, being “little scientists,”
want to explore. However, it is important for both parents to
encourage and guide the baby. If having untouchable items
prevents a major conflict between the adults, that might be the
best choice.
Observation Quiz ANSWERS
Answer to Observation Quiz (from p. 155): The mobile is a
good addition — colorful and too high for the baby to reach.
(Let’s hope it is securely fastened and those strings are strong
and tight!) But there are two things that are not what a cognitive
developmentalist would recommend. First, the crib and the
wall are both plain white, limiting what the baby can focus on,
and second, the crib bumper is a SIDS risk.
Answer to Observation Quiz (from p. 168): Not social
interaction, not talking. Instead, all quietly stare at sky and
terrain; awe of nature may be a family value. Hierarchy and
gender seem significant: The father is distant and above all, the
mother is busy, the children are below the parents. Do only
males wear hats?
CHAPTER 7
The First Two Years:
Psychosocial Development
✦ Emotional Development
Early Emotions
Toddlers’ Emotions
✦ Temperament and Personality
The Biology of Temperament
Dimensions of Temperament
Brain Variations
✦ The Development of Social Bonds
Synchrony
Attachment
a view from science : Measuring Attachment
a case to study : Can We Bear This Commitment?
Social Referencing
visualizing development : Developing Attachment
Fathers as Social Partners
✦ Theories of Infant Psychosocial Development
Psychoanalytic Theory
Behaviorism
Cognitive Theory
Evolutionary Theory
✦ Who Should Care for Babies?
In the United States
Other Nations
Fathers, Grandmothers, and Sisters
career alert : The Developmental Scientist
Conclusions from the Science
What Will You Know?
1. Will a difficult newborn become a difficult child?
2. What do infants do if they are securely attached to their
caregivers?
3. Is it ideal for infants to be cared for exclusively by their
mothers?
Bone-tired after a day of teaching, I was grateful to find a seat on the
crowded downtown train. At the next stop, more people boarded,
including a mother who stood in front of me. She held a welldressed baby, about 18 months old, in one arm, and she wrapped
her other arm around a pole as she held several heavy bags. I
thought of offering my seat. Too tired. But at least I could hold her
bags on my lap.
“Can I help you?” I asked, offering a hand. Wordlessly she handed
me … the baby! The toddler sat quietly and listened as I expressed
admiration for her socks, pointed out the red and blue stripes, and
then sang a lullaby. I could feel her body relax. Her eyes stayed on
her mother.
I should not have been surprised. Mothers everywhere need help
with infant care, and strangers everywhere are allomothers. We all
attend to infant cries, bring gifts to newborns, and study, consult
doctors, or volunteer to become helpers. I noticed other riders on
that train watching me with that little girl. Mother, strangers, and I
were doing what our culture expects. And the baby did what healthy
babies do. She responded to my off-key singing, reassured by the
sight of her mother.
This example opens this chapter because it illustrates infant
emotions and caregiver responses. You will read about psychosocial
changes over the first two years, from synchrony, to attachment, to
social referencing, quite evident in this baby.
At the end of the chapter, we explore a controversy: Who should
care for infants? Only mothers, or also fathers, grandmothers, daycare teachers, and strangers? Would you have handed me your baby?
Families and cultures answer this question in opposite ways.
Fortunately, as this chapter explains, despite diversity of
temperament and caregiving, most infants develop well if their
basic emotional needs are met. This baby seemed fine.
Emotional Development
Psychosocial development during infancy can be seen as two interwoven
strands — nature/nurture, or universal/particular, or experienceexpectant/experience-dependent. To portray these strands with words in a
book, we must pull them apart, so this chapter is a zigzag, turning from
universal to particular and back, again and again.
Early Emotions
We begin with universal: In their first two years, all infants progress from
reactive pain and pleasure to complex patterns of socioemotional awareness, a
movement from basic instincts to learned responses (see At About This Time).
AT ABOUT THIS TIME
Developing Emotions
Birth
Distress; contentment
6 weeks
Social smile
3 months
Laughter; curiosity
4 months
Full, responsive smiles
4–8 months
Anger
9–14 months
Fear of social events (strangers, separation from caregiver)
12 months
Fear of unexpected sights and sounds
18 months
Self-awareness; pride; shame; embarrassment
As always, culture and experience influence the norms of development. This is especially true for
emotional development after the first 8 months.
At first, comfort predominates: Newborns are content and relaxed when fed
and drifting off to sleep. Discomfort is also part of daily life: Newborns cry
when they are hurt or hungry, tired or frightened (as by a loud noise or a
sudden loss of support).
By the second week and increasing to six weeks, some infants have bouts of
uncontrollable crying, commonly referred to as colic, perhaps the result of
immature digestion or the infant version of a migraine headache (Gelfand,
2018). Others have reflux, probably the result of immature swallowing. About
10 to 20 percent of babies cry “excessively,” defined as more than three hours a
day, more than three days a week, for more than three weeks.
Fortunately, early emotions do not necessarily predict later life. A longitudinal
study of 291 infants found that, by age 2, infants with colic were no more likely
to have behavioral problems than those without (G. Bell et al., 2018). As you
will later read, newborn temperament is shaped by caregiver response.
Smiling and Laughing
Soon, crying decreases and additional emotions become recognizable. Colic
usually subsides by 3 months. Happiness is expressed by a fleeting social
smile, evoked by a human face at about 6 weeks (Wörmann et al., 2012).
social smile
A smile evoked by a human face, normally first evident in infants about six weeks after birth.
Preterm babies smile later, because the social smile is affected by age since
conception, not age since birth (White-Traut et al., 2018). The social smile is
universal; all babies do it when they are old enough, evidence of the human
social impulse.
Laughter builds over the first months, often in tandem with curiosity: A typical
6-month-old chortles upon discovering new things, particularly social
experiences that balance familiarity and surprise, such as Daddy making a
funny face. That is just what Piaget would expect, “making interesting
experiences last.” Very young infants prefer seeing happy faces over sad ones,
even if the happy faces are not looking at them (Kim & Johnson, 2013).
Soon happiness becomes more discriminating. In one study, infants first
enjoyed a video of dancing to music as it normally occurs, on the beat. Then
some watched a video in which the sound track was mismatched with dancing.
Eight- to twelve-month-old babies, compared to younger ones, were quite
curious — but less delighted — about offbeat dancing. The researchers
concluded “babies know bad dancing when they see it” (Hannon et al., 2017).
Developmentally Correct Both Santa’s smile and Olivia’s grimace are appropriate
reactions for people of their age. Adults playing Santa must smile no matter what,
and if Olivia smiled, that would be troubling to anyone who knows about 7-montholds. Yet every Christmas, thousands of parents wait in line to put their infants on the
laps of oddly dressed, bearded strangers.
Anger and Sadness
Crying in pain and smiling in pleasure are soon joined by emotions more
responsive to external experiences. Anger is notable at 6 months, usually
triggered by frustration.
For example, to study infant emotions, researchers “crouched behind the child
and gently restrained his or her arms for 2 min[utes] or until 20 s[econds] of
hard crying ensued” (Mills-Koonce et al., 2011, p. 390). “Hard crying” was not
rare: Infants hate to be strapped in, caged in, closed in, or just held in place
when they want to explore.
In infancy, anger is a healthy response to frustration, unlike sadness, which
also may appear in the first months (Thiam et al., 2017). Sadness indicates
withdrawal instead of a bid for help, and it is accompanied by a greater
increase in the body’s production of cortisol. For that reason,
developmentalists are troubled if a very young baby is sad.
Fear
Fear begins with unexpected events, such as fear of falling or of loud noises,
but soon it involves human interaction. Indeed, being frightened of something,
from snakes to strangers, may depend on three factors: awareness of
discrepancy, inborn temperament, and social context. Two kinds of social fear
are typical, increasing from the middle of the first year:
Separation anxiety — clinging and crying when a familiar caregiver is
about to leave. Some separation anxiety is normal at age 1, may be more
intense by age 2, and then usually subsides.
Stranger wariness — fear of unfamiliar people, especially when they move
too close, too quickly. Knowing that, in the subway incident that opened
this chapter, I first distracted the baby by talking about her socks, and then
sang to her. Babies everywhere respond to song.
separation anxiety
An infant’s distress when a familiar caregiver leaves; most obvious between 9 and 14 months.
stranger wariness
An infant’s expression of concern — a quiet stare while clinging to a familiar person, or a look of fear — when a
stranger appears.
If separation anxiety and stranger fear remain intense after age 3, impairing a
child’s ability to leave home, to go to school, or to play with other children, that
is an emotional disorder. According to the DSM-5, separation anxiety becomes
a disorder when it lingers into childhood or adolescence (American Psychiatric
Association, 2013); clinicians may diagnose it in adults, as well, especially if
symptoms persist for at least six months (Bögels et al., 2013).
Especially for Nurses and Pediatricians Parents come to you concerned that their 1-year-old hides
her face and holds onto them tightly whenever a stranger appears. What do you tell them? (see response,
page 201)
Likewise, stranger wariness may continue, becoming social phobia or
generalized anxiety (Rudaz et al., 2017). Both emotions are expected at age 1,
becoming possible problems later. And both are experience-expectant and
then experience-dependent, responsive to context (LoBue & Adolph, 2019).
Infants at home with their mothers when a stranger comes to visit are likely to
smile, not be afraid. But if a stranger yells and approaches quickly to a few
inches from the babies face with an angry expression, almost any 1-year-old
cries and tries to move away.
Many 1-year-olds are curious but wary of anything unexpected, from the flush
of the toilet to the pop of a jack-in-the-box, from closing elevator doors to the
tail-wagging approach of a dog. With repeated experience and reassurance,
older infants might enjoy flushing the toilet (again and again) or calling the dog
(crying if the dog does not come). Note the transition from instinct to learning
to thought, from the amygdala to the cortex.
Toddlers’ Emotions
Emotions take on new strength during toddlerhood, as both memory and
mobility advance. Co…