Infant Learning and Motor Development

• Focus: Learning, Motor and Perceptual Development in Infancy.

Learning in Infancy

• Infants learn through imitation, association, and novelty preference.
• Classical and Operant conditioning are types of association that are also used as methodologies to study learning.
• Habituation is used as a method to study learning.

Neonatal Imitation

• Newborns can implicitly equate their unseen behaviors with observed gestures, such as sticking out their tongue.
• Imitation can be a way for infants to explore the world.
• Imitation can be linked to an increase in mouth and tongue movements in response to any interesting stimulus.
• Neonatal imitation may disappear between 2 to 3 months of age, and be replaced by more deliberative imitation at approximately 6 months.
• Macaque newborns imitate humans.

Associative Learning

• Associations between neutral and natural stimuli occur through classical conditioning.
• Operant conditioning is when a behavior increases when rewarded.
• Newborns suck faster when this action produces rewards, which is also known as the High Amplitude Sucking- HAS procedure.
• Infants also kick more when this action produces rewards.
• Operant conditioning is used in studies on infant language and memory.

Response to Novelty

• Habituation is a gradual reduction in the strength of a response due to repetitive stimulation.
• Recovery is shown when a new stimulus is presented.
• By 30 weeks gestation, fetuses habituate to sounds and show heart rate decelerations.
• Infants dishabituate to music after listening to speech, and vice versa.
• After a 10-minute delay, babies habituate more quickly.

Speech Perception

• Infants prefer mom's voice over other voices, full term fetuses and newborns show this preference.
• Newborns preferences change the more they are exposed to a filtered voice that sounds like it did in utero.
• Infants recognize, and prefer language and stories heard in utero (last 6 weeks).
• Infants prefer "infantese."
• Adults help infants to develop temporal synchrony.
• From birth to about six months, infants are universal language learners.
• From 6-12 months, babies become experts in their native language, and recognize familiar words in speech.
• They prefer listening to words they have previously heard in speech, and passages that contain words they heard in isolation.

Perceptual Narrowing Effect

• There is a perceptual sensitivity that increases with age and experience.
• Domains from 6-12 months include phonemes and faces of own species compared to other species.

Perceptual Narrowing: Experience

• There is a preference for processing faces of different races.
• Newborns do not have a preference, but 3-month-olds prefer own race faces over other race faces.
• The ability to discriminate faces of one's own race is higher than other races.
• At 9-months-olds performance declines and is worse than younger babies, but this is dependent on experience.
• Regular exposure to Mandarin Chinese allows 10-month-olds retain phoneme discrimination abilities and is similar to results for other race faces.

Elements of Vision

• Focus: acuity or fineness of discrimination, includes near and far objects.
• Color
• Motion
• Scanning and tracking.
• Depth, patterns, objects, and faces are additional elements of vision.
• Distant objects' visual acuity improves from 20/600 in newborns, to 20/80 at 6 months, and reaches 20/20 at the age of 4 years.
• Focusing abilities becomes adult-like at approximately 2 months of age.
• Color discrimination appears at 4 months.

Face Perception

• Newborns prefer upright faces, or faces that orient towards conspecifics, versus upside down or sideways faces, and prefer top-heavy patterns.
• They prefer faces with open eyes and direct gaze, and 'attractive' faces.
• At 1 month infants recognize their mom.
• At 2-3 months infants explore internal features.
• At 3 months infants discriminate between strange faces and prefer female faces to male faces.
• They recognize own race faces, and this preference changes depending on experience.
• At 5 months infants discriminate emotional expressions such as postivie and negative ones.

Depth Perception

• Depth perception is the ability to judge distance of objects from one another and from ourselves.
• Newborns are sensitive to motion.
• At 2 to 3 months, binocular depth cues emerge.
• By 3 months, infants perceive objects as three-dimensional.
• After 3 months, pictorial depth cues are used.
• Motor development plays a role.
• Independent movement and the visual clift contribute to depth perception.
• Crawling experience helps with depth.
• Each new motor development is a recalibration of depth cues.

Motor Development

• Gross-motor development includes crawling, standing, and walking.
• Fine-motor development involves reaching, grasping, and pincer grasp.
• Individual differences in rate and order of skill acquisition are normal.
• 'Normal' is a wide range.
• Motor skill development is a dynamic system that consists of Central Nervous System (brain) development, body's movement capacity- muscular, skeletal growth, child's goals, environmental supports and differences across cultural contexts.
• Motor development is looked at through Sticky Mittens studies and reaching studies.

Sway model for postural milestones

• Experiences with an earlier-developing skill does not transfer automatically to a later-developing skill.
• Sitting, crawling, and walking postures involve regional permissible sway for different key pivots.
• Extensive experience with each postural milestone in development may be required to master that system.
• Different muscle groups, vantage points and correlations between visual, kinesthetic, and vestibular information all factor into development.

Explore infant learning mechanisms like neonatal imitation and habituation. Understand motor development through dynamic systems theory and specificity of learning. Test your knowledge of early motor skill training.