Tummy-Time Improves Infant Motor Skills
The recent trend of putting young babies to sleep on their backs also appears to be having an effect on their motor skill acquisition. This posture, which has proven advantageous in reducing the number of SIDS fatalities, does not permit babies to exercise their arm and neck muscles as much as and see the world. In one recent study, pediatricians found that babies who slept on their backs were significantly slower to roll over, sit, crawl, and pull to stand than babies who slept on their stom...
notesBy forcing the infant to work their neck and back to look around while on their tummy, they strengthen these important muscles; however, the infant should still remain on their back while sleeping to prevent SIDS.
The Development of Memory in Infants
Memory is not a single entity but a patchwork of several different forms of information storage that emerge progressively with the maturation of different brain circuits. Babies begin life with a primitive yet very useful set of memory skills; lower parts of the brain can store information, but it is at an automatic level, beneath consciousness, and lasts for relatively short periods of time. Then, starting at eight or nine months of age, they show signs of a more flexible, deliberate type of... notesThe first paragraph in this passage outlines the development milestones, while the second is included for its eloquence. Then select passages on habituation, classical and operant conditioning are included as types of memory.
Varying Breast Milk Flavoring
One reason why researchers have had such a hard time replicating the composition of breast milk is that it isn't a fixed commodity. No two women's milk is identical, nor is the composition of any one mother's milk constant at all times; it varies with the amount of time that has elapsed postpartum, gradually changing in composition to match the baby's changing nutritional needs. It also varies with time of day, with the thinnest milk (the lowest tat content) being produced early in the day an... notesBy eating a variety of differently flavored foods, like garlic, mint, vanilla, etc, the infant is exposed to a variety of flavors of breast milk,
The Importance of Vestibular Stimulation in Infants
One study offers particularly provocative evidence of the benefits of vestibular stimulation. These researchers exposed babies, who ranged in age from three to thirteen months, to sixteen sessions of chair spinning: Four times a week for four weeks, the infants were seated on a researcher's lap and spun around ten times in a swivel chair, each spin followed by an abrupt stop. To maximize stimulation of each of the three semicircular canals, the spinning included one or two rotations in each d...
1 Giving babies four "spin" sessions in a chair improved their reflexes and motor skills. Also, jiggling and rocking babies sorts out their discombobulation and allows them to focus and learn for a period of time.
The Importance of Touch on Infants
Touch plays a very special role in the life of young babies. Because it is so well developed at birth, it provides these brand-new arrivals more detailed access to their fascinating new world than any other sense. Touch is obviously essential to babies' sensory-motor development, but it also has a surprisingly potent influence over their physical growth, emotional well-being, cognitive potential, and even their overall health, because of some fascinating effects on their immune function.
[.... notesThere is a crucial period where an infant should be touched by its mother to reduce its stress level and the stress hormones that would otherwise damage its organs.
The Importance of "Motherese"
It just so happens that motherese is in many ways ideally suited to stimulate young babies' sense of hearing. Its unhurried cadence is easier for babies to follow, since as we've seen, their nervous systems process auditory information at least twice as slowly as adults. Its louder, more direct style helps babies distinguish it from background sounds and overcomes the fact that their hearing is much less sensitive than adults'. Its simpler words and highly intonated structure—with wide swings...
1 Babies prefer it when mothers speak in a highly- intonated cadence with slow emphasis on syllables highly repeated. This preference may begin in the womb, when such sounds are the only parts of the mother's speech to reach the fetus.
Baby's Cognitive Development Summarized
What are the babies' representations and rules like?
First, the babies' representations are rich and complex. As we've seen, they include ideas about how their face resembles the faces of others, how objects move, and how the sounds of a language are divided. The young babies' world is not simple. Babies translate the input at their eyes and ears into a world full of people with animated, expressive faces and captivating. intricate, rhythmic voices. It's also a world full of objects with co...The sequence of events in a child's development indicates that it's not all learned, there is a programming in the brain that follows a natural course, ready for the world.
Babies Can Distinguish Sounds Adults Cannot
Why do the speakers of different languages hear and produce sounds so differently? Ears and mouths are the same the world over. What differs is our brains. Exposure to a particular language has altered our brains and shaped our minds, so that we perceive sounds differently. This in turn leads speakers of different languages to produce sounds differently. When and how do babies start to do this? Do they start out listening like a computer, with no categorical distinctions? Or do they start out... notesBefore a baby learns the sounds of their language, they can distinguish the sounds of any language. Later, they are unable to distinguish the non-categorized sounds when produced in other languages.
When Babies Learn Categorization
However, there is some surprising evidence that young babies are actually not particularly interested if a blue toy car goes in one edge of the screen and a yellow toy duck emerges at the far edge on the same trajectory! A grown-up would assume the duck that came out was brand-new and the other toy was still there behind the screen. But young babies seem content to think the toy somehow magically became a new kind of thing behind the screen. The particular kind of category-crossing magic tric... notesBy three years of age, children develop a fairly sophisticated sense of categorization. Perhaps a playing close attention to taxonomy will benefit the child at this stage in their development.
Psychological VS Mechanical Causality in Infant Understan...
As scientists we think that everything is mediated by physical causality of some sort, including our interactions with other people. There are, in fact, light and sound waves that go from one person to another even if we can't see them with the naked eye. But from our everyday point of view, it appears we are able to influence people without any direct physical contact at all. (It's probably that fact that makes telepathy seem plausible to so many people.) After all, just looking at someone a... notesBabies learn the differences between psychological and physical causality, before this they tend to make the mistake of using psychological means to influence the physical world... Magical thinking in adults may be a holdover of this habit.
