Chapter 4: Infant Development

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

# Summary ## 4.1 Describe what infants look like when they are first born. - The average newborn has rather red-looking skin. - The newborn is often covered with a waxy substance. - The newborn 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. - 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. - Infants quickly develop certain motor skills during the first year. - These skills include 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. - Overnutrition 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. - Low birth weight 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 organization of sensations. - Cognition refers to the processes by which perceptions are organised. - Studies of visual perception suggest infants under six months of age perceive a variety of patterns. - These patterns include 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. - Research 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, infants 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.