Infant Motor Development

Motor Development

• Reflexes include stepping when a baby is lowered on a surface.
• Rooting is when infants turn their head and open their mouth in the direction of a touch.
• Grasping is when newborns close their fingers around anything that presses against their palm.
• Sucking is oral contact with a nipple which sets off the sucking reflex and swallowing reflex— this increases a baby's chance of getting nourishment and surviving.

Motor Milestones

• Motor development involves an infant's acquisitions of new ways to interact with the world, enabling new learning and ways of thinking.
• Most motor development research is based on participants from WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) countries, which leads to a lack of cultural representation.
• The average sitting milestone ranges from 5-7 months, but cultural comparisons are important.
• About 92% of Italian infants can sit independently at 5 months, compared to only 17% of US infants, suggesting that research based solely on Western children can be inaccurate/misleading.
• In countries like China, infants' motor skill progression may be slower due to restrictions on crawling for hygienic concerns.

The Effect of Experience on Motor Development

• Hopi cradleboards limit infant motion.
• Cultural practices often limit infants’ experience of moving on their own.
• Ache nomads carry infants and children for most of their first 3 years, which results in some delays in walking.
• These delays do not cause any problems
• West African stretching routines and other forms of motor stimulation, like massage and limb manipulation, are popular in African subcultures.

Dynamic Systems and the Disappearing Stepping Reflex

• Esther Thelen conducted a study testing the "Disappearing reflex", where infants were held under the arms and submerged waist-deep in water.
• The stepping reflex can be seen when a newborn is held under the arms with their feet touching a surface; they reactively step and lift one leg then the other, usually disappearing around 2 months old.
• It was once thought that the stepping reflex disappears due to cortical maturation.
• Two-month-old infants who were given extra practice using their stepping reflex continued to show it long after it should have disappeared.
• Seven-month-olds who don't usually show the stepping reflex will step smartly when supported on a moving treadmill.
• The question of why the stepping reflex disappears remains.
• Observations suggest the more body mass a baby has, the later they begin walking/crawling.
• Thelon suggested that an infant's rapid weight gain during the first few weeks of birth can cause the legs to get heavier faster than they get stronger, meaning more strength is needed for heavier legs to lift.
• Researchers tested this hypothesis by adding weights to young infants' ankles while they still had a stepping reflex.
• The addition of weight caused the babies to stop stepping.
• This showed that the disappearance of the stepping reflex is not caused by cortical maturation, but is instead masked by a changing ratio of leg weight to strength.

Modern Views of Motor Development

• Affordances are the possibilities for action offered or afforded by objects and situations.

Expanding World of the Infant.

• Infants take part in the reaching through sticky mittens (Velcro gloves) experiment.
• Two- to three-month-olds are too young to grab objects on their own.
• Training is completed for two weeks with Velcro or regular mittens.
• Infants with active experience reached more.
• Object exploration continues months later.
• Self-locomotion, scale errors & self-control occurs.
• Children are too excited to play and must inhibit that emotion to properly judge the mismatch between the size of the object and themselves.
• At about eight months, infants become capable of self-locomotion (moving around in the environment on their own), which alters other aspects of the infant's perceptual experience.
• Younger infants spend more time looking at faces than older infants because of the infant’s limited mobility (babies who are lying down or sitting can easily seek out their caregiver’s faces).

Integration of Perception and Motor Experience.

• The Held & Hein kitten experiment took place in 1963.

Ramp Experiments

• Ramp experiments explore if infants perceive depth.
• The "visual cliff" is used as an example.
• Six- to fourteen-month-olds would readily cross the shallow, safe-looking side of a visual cliff, but would not cross the deep side.
• The babies would avoid the deep side even when their parent was beckoning them.
• Infants were unwilling to cross the precipice, creating substantial evidence that they perceived and understood the depth cue significance regarding relative size.
• Infants in their first few weeks of crawling went down shallow slopes, but learned to use both visual and tactile information to determine when it was safe to climb a steep slope or cross a narrow bridge.
• When infants begin walking, they misjudged the slopes they could get down and failed to transfer what they had learned about crawling down slopes to walking down them.
• Infant's decisions depend on social information; children use perceptual and social information to decide what to do.

Habituation as Learning

• Habituation, a decrease in response after repeated stimulation, reveals learning has taken place.
• This habituation is adaptive.
• The speed at which an infant habituates reflects general efficiency of infant's processing information
• Differences in habituation speed among infants appear to be related to aspects of general cognitive ability
• Infants who habituate rapidly and take short looks have higher IQs

Statistical Learning

• Newborn infants track statistical regularities in domains, suggesting that statistical learning mechanisms are available at birth, if not before.
• Infants prefer to pay attention to specific types of statistical patterns over others.
• Infants like patterns that have some variability over patterns that are perfectly predictable or very complex.
• The "Goldilocks effect," by which infants avoid patterns that are too easy or too hard, suggests infants preferentially attend to patterns that are most informative given their learning abilities.

Classical Conditioning

• Ivan Pavlov discovered classical conditioning through dog research that paired food with a bell.
• Classical conditioning plays a role in infant’s learning about relations between significant environmental events.
• An example is when breast or bottle contact with an infant's mouth elicits the sucking reflex.
• Classical conditioning is shown when an infant's sucking motion begins to occur at the sight of a bottle or breast.
• An unconditioned stimulus is a nipple in infant’s mouth which elicits an unlearned response.
• A conditioned stimulus is a breast or bottle repeatedly presented before the unconditioned stimulus.
• A conditioned response is an originally reflexive response that becomes a learned behavior triggered by exposure to the conditioned stimulus.

Instrumental Conditioning

• Instrumental conditioning (operant) involves learning the relationship between a behavior and its consequences.
• Most research with instrumental conditioning involves positive reinforcement, and reward follows the behavior to increases its likelihood of being repeated.

Baby Mobile Experiment

• In a mobile experiment with babies, a ribbon is attached to a baby's ankle and connected to a mobile hanging above the infant's crib.
• Infants as young as two months old learn the relation between leg movements and the sight of the jiggling mobile, which increases their kicking rate.
• Three-month-olds remember the kicking response for 1 week.
• Six-month-olds remember it for 2 weeks.
• Infants younger than 6 months old remember the kicking response only when the test mobile is identical to the training mobile.

Observational Learning and Imitation

• Imitation is a form of observational learning.
• Infants as young as six to nine months imitate some actions they witnessed, even after a delay of 24 hours.
• Mirror neurons fire when one imitates someone’s actions.
• Patterns of infant brain activity are consistent with the hypothesis that mirror neurons are present.
• Observational learning is not limited to motor acts; infants can also imitate and learn about abstract concepts.

Rational Learning

• Rational learning is integrating a learner's prior beliefs and biases with what actually occurs in the environment.

Active Learning

• When something unexpected happens, infants are likely to start find explanations for what just occurred.

Memory

• For learning to occur, memory systems must be present in the brain.
• There are two forms of memory: working memory and long term memory.

Comprehension and Production

• Comprehension is understanding what others say. Production is the process of speaking.

Components of Language

• Language pieces combine at different levels to form a hierarchy, as sounds become words, words become sentences, and sentences become stories.
• Pieces create a system that is generative, or and a system in which a finite set of words combined can generate an infinite number of sentences.
• The system is complex for young learners, and difficulties manifest in many different components of language.

Language Preception

• Speech is composed of phonemes, or the smallest units of meaningful sound.
• A young learner can find it difficult to perceive some sounds.
• The change in phenome changes the meaning of a word.
• Different languages employ different sets of phonemes.

Meaning of Words

• Morphemes are the smallest units of meaning.
• Young learners have no idea what the sound means and morphemes constitute words.
• For example, “dog” is one morpheme (furry entity), and "dogs” has two morphemes (furry entity and plurality).

Rules Of Language

• Syntax consists of rules that specify how words from different categories (nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc) can be combined.
• Young learners would struggle to understand the utterance of a phrase if they didn't know how to combine words in a stranger’s language.
• Languages organize their sentences differently, and change the meaning.
• For example, "Lila can eat the lobster" vs "The lobster can eat Lila."

Social Cues and Pragmatics

• Pragmatics is understanding how language is typically used in a specific cultural context.
• A young learner wouldn't have the knowledge of cultural rules and contextual variations for using language.
• Using context and emotional tone helps in reading between the lines.

Requirement for Language

• The requirements for language are a human brain and a human environment
• Language is a species-specific behavior; meaning only humans acquire language in the normal course of development.
• Brain-language lateralization is hemispheric differences in language functioning.
• In 90% of people who are right-handed, language is represented and controlled in the left hemisphere.
• The reasons for why the left hemisphere predominantly processes linguistic stimuli are unknown.

Sensitivity

• Early years are a sensitive period during which languages are learned relatively easily.
• After this period (which ends between the ages of puberty and five), language acquisition outcomes become more variable and on average less successful.

Human Languages

• Children must be exposed to other people using language.
• Infants identify speech as something important early on.
• The preference for speech is fine-tuned through experience with human language.
• Infant directed speech is the distinctive mode of speech used when speaking to infants and toddlers.

Bilingualism

• Bilingualism is fluency in two languages.
• In 2013, roughly 20% of the population in the US reported speaking a language other than English at home.
• Bilingual children show little confusion and language delay.
• Evidence suggests bilingualism improves cognitive function in childhood and beyond.
• Bilingual learning can begin in the womb.
• Newborns prenatally exposed to only a native language prefer that language, whereas newborns prenatally exposed to two languages from their mother prefer both languages equally.
• Bilingual infants discriminate speech sounds of their two languages at roughly the same pace as monolingual infants with their one native language,
• Bilingual infants' attention to speech cues is heightened compared to monolingual infants.
• Children acquiring two languages do not typically confuse them.
• Children exhibit code mixing or code switching, which where bilingual speakers conversing in one language insert words or phrases from their other language.
• Code mixing reveals a gap of knowledge in one language.
• Children may appear to lag behind monolingual children since their vocab is distributed across two languages.
• They may know how to express a concept in one language but not the other.
• Language development is similar in monolingual and bilingual children.
• Bilingual toddlers are about as fast as monolingual peers at recognizing familiar words.
• Some countries have widely embraced multilingual schooling, but many regions of the US have not.
• Social and political debates emerge on whether full English immersion or multilingual schooling is best for successful learning.

Acquisition

• Speech perception is how one perceives the sounds of one's native language.
• Prosody uses the characteristic rhythm and intonational patterns with which a language is spoken.
• Differences in prosody are responsible for why languages sound so different from one another.

Categorical Perception

• Categorical perception centers on the perception of phonemes as belonging to discrete categories such that that adults and infants perceive speech sounds as belonging to categories.
• Voice onset time (VOT) is the length of time between when air passes through the lips and when the vocal cords start vibrating.
• Infants, even before they learn language, demonstrate categorical perception; they do not perceive gradual differences in VOT linearly, but rather classify sounds into distinct phonemic categories.

Speech Perception

• Perceptual narrowing is an infant’s increasing specialization, including poorer discrimination of nonnative faces and music at later ages.
• Infants increasingly focus on the speech sounds of their native language and by 12 months of age, they become less sensitive to the differences between nonnative speech sounds.
• Active learning helps babies with this process(live interaction is more effective than a video).

Word Segmentation

• Word segmentation is discovering where words begin and end in fluent speech.
• Infants begin word segmentation during the second half of their first year.
• Researchers found that infants listened longer to words that they head heard in the passages of fluent speech versus the words that never occurred in the passages.
• Infants seem to be remarkably good at picking up regularities in their native language that help them find word boundaries.
• Distributional properties of speech are where certain sounds are more likely to occur than others.
• Infants can discriminate between the words and the sequences that are not words.
• These infants used predictable sounds patterns to fish out words of the passing stream of speech.

Preparation for Production

• Newborns have a limited repertoire of sounds.
• With practice, they gain motor control over vocalizations.
• While expanding repertoire, infants discover that their vocalizations elicit responses from others.
• Babies will babble sounds and signs.
• Babbling begins between six and ten months of age.
• They produce strings of consonant-vowel syllables (“papapa”, “babababa”), which are drawn from a limited set of sounds, some which are not part of their native language.
• Language exposure is a key component of babbling development.
• Deaf infants who are regularly exposed to signed language like ASL babble with their hands or repetitive hand movements made up of pieces of ASL.

Early Interactions

• Intersubjectivity occurs when two interacting partners share a mutual understanding.
• The foundation of intersubjectivity is joint attention, where the caregiver follows the baby's lead, looking at and commenting on whatever the infant is looking at.

First Words

• Infants begin to understand highly frequent words surprisingly early on.
• Babies are able to point to image of appropriate person when they hear “mommy” or “daddy” at six months of age.
• Most parents report is that their infants did not know the meanings of these words yet.
• Infants understand more words than they can produce, and understand more than their caregivers may realize.

Early Word Production

• On average, infants produce their first words between 10 and 15 months of age.
• Early words are mispronounced in a variety of ways, for example, turning banana into “nana” or reordering words to easier sounds at the beginning of the word.
• Early words are typically referring to family members, pets, and important objects
• Overextension is using the dilemma where infants use a word in a broader context than is appropriate, and want to express their thoughts in one-word utterances using their limited vocabulary (dog referring to any 4-legged animal),
• Underextension occurs when they is a dilemma where young children use a word in a more limited context than appropriate.
• Ex. believing "dog" only refers to their dog and and not the neighbor's dog.
• Underextension and overextension show efforts to communicate despite a child’s limited vocabulary.

Word Learning

• At 18 months, the rate of learning appears to accelerate.
• This is called the "vocabulary spurt." Whole-object bias is where children expect a novel word to refer to a whole object, rather than a specific part, property, action, or other aspect of the object.
• There is a mutual exclusivity when children expect/assume that a given entity will have only one name, and they are less likely to accept a new label for the same object.
• Children use aspects of the social context for word learning.
• Infants can narrow down the possible meanings of new words through this process.
• Syntactic bootstrapping is the strategy of using grammatical structure to infer the meaning of a new word.

Rico the Dog Case

• Children arrive at different interpretations of a novel verb based on the structure of the sentence in which it occurred
• Case of Rico-dog learning shows the influence of language and socioeconomic status.

Language in Socioeconomic Status

• The quantity of words children know is related to the number of words they hear, which is linked to caregiver's vocabulary.
• A key determinant of the language children hear is the socioeconomic status of their parents.
• Landmark research completed by Hart and Risley recorded speech that forty-two parents used with their children over two and a half years.
• It was found that a mix of upper-class, working-class, and welfare-dependent parents.
• The average child whose parents were on welfare received only 50% of the linguistic experience that of a working class child's parents, which was less than 33% of an upper-class or professional family.
• Researchers noted differences in how parents spoke to their children as well, and more questions as well as conversations initiated in higher-income families.
• It was argued that the differences found in this study may be exaggerated and they didn’t account for input outside of caregivers, then income disparities in language spurred discussions about this issue, and heightened parents’ awareness of language output to their children.
• the number of words that children hear predicts the amount of words they learns.

Language Output

• On average, children from higher socioeconomic status families have larger vocabularies than children from lower socioeconomic groups, along with a faster word recognition rate.
• In short, input quality impacts language learning, and richer communicative context predicts attainment a year later,
• If there is higher quality language input, there is greater activation in language areas of the brain.
• Physical environment can also influence quality of input such that noisy environments make it difficult for children to receive quality language input.
• Children with low language skills in school show less language development than their classmates; however, language deficiency can be offset by positive teacher effects.
• Promising interventions can provide access to children's books or provide rich language exposure, and encourage parents to spend more time speaking to children.

Talking

• Averages for SES-related differences, with lots of variability in the amount of input that parents provide.
• Most children begin combining words into simple sentences by the end of their second year and understand word combinations earlier than when they start producing them.
• Telegraphic speech uses short utterances that leave out non-essential words.
• "Two-word utterances" do not include a number of elements that would appear in adult utterances.
• Many children continue to produce short utterances for some time, but others move on quickly to sentences containing 3 or more words.

Grammar

• Grammar is a tool that helps in building new words and sentences.
• A Wug experiment presents pictures of a made-up animal and its plural to test grammar skills
• Results provide evidence that participants had learned the English pleural and generalized it beyond words they had already learned
• Grammar can be learned through children making Overregularization, or speech errors, where they put words from irregulars or regular word families.

Speech Skills

• Children’s conversational skills stay behind their language in development.
• A Label Piagets made in references to young children are collective monologues, where talk with peers turns into a series of non sequiturs such that their content doesn't have anything to say about the statement.
• Narratives are story-like structured explanations of past events.
• As children’s capacity for conversation increases, they became better at sticking to same topic as their conversational partners as well as becoming better at talking about the past.
• Most five-year-olds produce narratives and describe past events with a beginning, middle, and end.
• Crucial aspects of a conversation include making it about the child's development or enabling a child to read between the lines
• The older the child are, the better their pragmatic development is and their capability to understand and communicate their needs.

CHAPTER 7

Categorization of Objects

• Understanding includes how can infants and young children make sense of the items they encounter to group them in categories. Dividing objects is done through 3 kinds of classifications- moving, unmoving and animate.
• Experiments have shown that infants have some basic categories: living things, non-living things, people, animals, objects, plants such that an understanding of Perceptual categorization, enables the grouping together of objects that look similar.
• Infants categorize objects along many perceptual dimensions, including color, size, and movement. Forming category hierarchies makes the world easier to understand. There are three levels: the superordinate level, subordinate level, and basic level.

Naive Psychology

• Infants tend to prefer the human presence to the one of an artificial presence.
• Children who saw humans rather than unliving things were known to stay longer where there was a present company over a non living presence.
• Agents and objects can vary in their ability to catch children's intrigue.
• Children who understood the difference between helping and hindering, or good and bad traits were known to learn well in the experiment.

Theory of Mind

• This is knowing different goals, actions, and beliefs to navigate the world as it is known today.
• By a certain age, children are able to take on another person's perspective.
• In one study children understood that even if an idea was wrong, those involved believed it wholeheartedly and could learn how to interact with those kinds of beliefs.
• Autism relates to some of the shortcomings of human beliefs.
• Those with autism are less known to show sadness or pick up on the social aspects.
• In all, the general populous is good at understanding those types of characteristics.

Knowledge of Living Things

• By school age children are aware of what lives and what does not, even if some people might have misconstrued notions about the difference.
• By now most kids will know that you can change a person to be living.
• They understand the difference between if it's living and moving by itself like an animal versus a car and they can easily identify the difference.
• The reason for this has to relate to the fact that kids acquire these characteristics on their own and through their environments.
• To understand cause and effect we look to the experiment by Blicker and how children understood that it was more than just wishing to have it so,.

Space

• There is spatial learning which is relative to where the child themselves.
• Nativists agree that it's an almost evolutionary skill to process.
• From that we can get a lot about how a person uses what they do that is most important.

Number

• By 2 we can understand what is most related too how many and the type.
• Infant experiments look to understand how they compare numbers, and measure.
• Five principles include: one to one correspondence, the ability to order, cardinality, order irrelevance, and the ability of distraction/abstract characteristics.

CHAPTER 9

Social Development

• These theories provide insight on still face experiments, psychoanalytical theory, and learning theories.
• Watson’s behaviorism emphasizes the ability to shape children with correct interactions.
• B.F. Skinner's theory shows how operant conditions work.
• The social learning theory with the Bobo doll reveals that kids will learn based on what they are taught or observe.
• The way to have determinism comes if people understand themselves and follow what they choose as their career path
• Current social cognition is a key part of the social perspective.

Ethology

• Ethology is animal behavior within an evolutionary context.
• Birds and mammals require a parent , and animals print how they seek information from each other which requires to see things and follow it or have sensitivities.

Bioecological Model

• Bioecological model of development is over the characteristics of the children in their environment at each level.
• Different levels of variation in how much of immediate effect is known but bronfenbrenner says that every level impacts the child well.
• Each level varies depending on who is a child- those who aren't may feel isolated.
• Some children might have the difficulties to follow the rules because of ADHD.
• A major component of this in this day and age of learning is children and the media, the more and less violent that they will become.

Testimony

• In school a lot of the things that you cant see people see.
• Accuracy Vs how well you know the individual varies from the person and who is telling those types of information.

CHAPTER 10: EMOTIONS

• As babies grow up and turn to children they get a grasp on emotions
• It is discrete up to a point where it gets more specified for people For people a couple main components of emotion include their feelings for themselves, their physiology, expressions and lastly their cognitive abilities. When these 4 all match, it is believed that the individual is emotionally intelligent.

Theories

• The goal of theories include wanting you to be able to not only adapt to the world around you to find out those closest to you and if they understand the way you are acting. If emotions are well learned you can live and be culturally aware and have different types of emotion for different people.

Understanding

• As we discussed before how emotions are learned will help to know how we are understanding something.
• How a baby acts when he thinks his mom is in danger will help tell the child about their surroundings.