Infant Development Summary PDF

# Summary ## 4.1 Describe what infants look like when they are first born. The average newborn has rather red-looking skin, is often covered with a waxy substance, and has a skull rather compressed on the top. The health of newborns born in hospitals is assessed soon after delivery with the Apgar...

# Summary ## 4.1 Describe what infants look like when they are first born. The average newborn has rather red-looking skin, is often covered with a waxy substance, and has a skull rather compressed on the top. The health of newborns born in hospitals is assessed soon after delivery with the Apgar Scale. At full term, the average newborn weighs about 3.4 kilograms. Regardless of cultural background, the newborn's bodily proportions make the infant look appealing to adults and may foster the formation of attachments with adults. ## 4.2 Explain how infants' sleep and wakefulness patterns change as they get older. Infants sleep almost twice as much as adults do, but the amount of sleep they require gradually decreases as they get older. Interruptions in their sleep contribute to fatigue in their parents. ## 4.3 Review how infants' senses operate at birth. At birth infants can see and hear, but with less accuracy or acuity than adults. ## 4.4 Summarise what motor skills evolve during infancy and what factors influence this development. Infants are born with a number of innate reflexes, but quickly develop certain motor skills during the first year, including reaching, grasping, and walking. Motor skills develop differently, depending on cultural background, biological sex, and social gender roles. ## 4.5 Name the nutritional needs of infants. Infants need more protein and calories per kilogram of body weight than older children do. Compared to formula and bottle feeding, breastfeeding has a number of practical and psychological advantages. After weaning from breast or bottle, infants need a diet rich in protein and calories. Most Australasian families can provide these requirements, but many cannot. A common problem in Western diets is overnutrition, which can create health risks in the long term. ## 4.6 List the factors that can impair growth during infancy. One of the most important impairments to early growth is low birth weight, because the condition leads to difficulties with breathing, digestion and sleep, and impairs normal reflexes. The problems low-birth-weight infants experience can sometimes put stress on relationships with parents, but not always. For a variety of reasons, infants sometimes fail to thrive normally. Infant mortality has decreased in recent years, but in Australasia it is still a concern. ## 4.7 Consider how infant cognition can be studied. Infants' arousal and attention can be studied by noting changes in their heart rates. Infants' recognition and memory of familiar things can be studied by observing their habituation to stimuli, or tendency to attend to novel stimuli and ignore familiar ones. ## 4.8 Compare the way infants and adults see and hear. Perception refers to the immediate organisation of sensations. Cognition refers to the processes by which perceptions are organised and it often happens deliberately. Studies of visual perception suggest infants under six months of age perceive a variety of patterns, including those usually found on a human face. Young infants, including newborns, show object constancy in visual perception, as well as visual anticipation of events. Infants also show sensitivity to depth, as indicated in the visual cliff experiments. Infants can localise sounds to some extent at birth, but do not do so accurately until about six months of age. Categorical thought can be demonstrated during infancy by using the reversal shift procedure. ## 4.9 Explain the changes in thinking and learning during infancy. Piaget has proposed six stages of infant cognitive development in which infants' schemes become less egocentric and increasingly symbolic and organised. Research on Piaget's six stages generally confirms his original observations, but it also raises questions about the effects of motor skills and memory on infants' cognitive performance. ## 4.10 Describe the roles that conditioning and imitation play in infants' learning. Like older children and adults, infants can learn through behavioural conditioning and imitation. Behavioural learning tends to be ambiguous in infants less than three months old because it is difficult to distinguish true learning from general, automatic excitement. ## 4.11 Define the phases that infants go through in acquiring language. Babbling begins around six months of age and becomes increasingly complex, until it disappears sometime before the infant's second birthday. Infants show important individual differences in their selection of first words. Generally though, they use words for objects in their environment that are distinctive in some way. Adults influence language acquisition mainly by modelling simplified utterances, recasting their infants' own utterances, and directing considerable language at the child as they grow. Professional caregivers influence language acquisition in similar ways to parents, but they must also recognise the potential effects of cultural gaps between them and the child.