Infant Psych - History

Historical Evolution

  • Baby diaries

  • 1700s

  • 1800s

  • Charles Darwin

  • Jean Piaget

Emergence of Areas

  • Social Development

  • Attention & Cognitive Development

  • Emotional Development

Contemporary Areas

  • Connectionism

  • Neuroscience

    • looks at how the growth and development of different brain areas affects overall development

Historical w/in Civilizations

  • Early civilizations

    • Infanticide — fathers/heads of households got to decide whether infants lived/died

  • Middle Ages & Renaissance

    • orphaning as substitute to infanticide

  • Enlightenment (romanticism v. empiricism)

  • Modern science (maturation vs. behaviorism vs dynamic system)

    • Head start

Topics w/in Infant Development

  • Perceptual/Sensorial skills

  • Sensorimotor/tool use

  • Conceptual thinking

  • Representational/symbolic

  • Communicative/linguistic
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  • social/interactive

  • Expressive/emotive

  • Self-regulatory/coping

Key Concepts

  • Development change: stable, irreversible

  • Development stage: stable and persistent patterns of behaviors

    • fully mastered abilities of the previous stage; won’t make mistakes from previous stages

  • Research methods

  • Quantitative — behavioral processes have a numerical index

  • Qualitative — emphasize the meaning/quality of the behaviors

  • Experimental

    • Random assignment is most challenging with infant studies due to ethics and logistics

  • Physiological recording

    • heart rate, hormonal activity, ERPS

  • Observational research

    • Longitudinal, cross-sectional

    • Predictor, outcome variable (cannot IV/DV because you are observing not experimenting)

  • Be clear in what target behaviors you are observing and why it matters

  • In infant studies, it’s common to have up to ~30% attrition

  • Microanalysis: observers record the presence or absence of the predefined categories

    • e.g. behavioral coding

  • Macroanalysis

Cross-Cultural Psych

  • became popular because it could be used to prove that certain behaviors/capacitites are innate

  • If a capacity were innate it would be true are sociocultural contexts

Documentary —

  • link between parenting and cognitive development unexplored

  • less connected in early times, partly due to Piaget

  • epistemology—study of learning about origins of knowledge

  • Piaget never claimed to be a developmental psych, instead was interested in learning how people acquire knowledge

  • John Piaget

  • First paper at 10, studying insect behavior

  • PhD in natural sciences

  • Got into child development after fatherhood

  • Study — babies reach for toy, continue push it out of their reach till they stop reaching → demonstrates comprehension of distance and scope of abilities

  • Dr. He’ study — add a cloth under/over toy so that it is in arms reach (but the toy is not); babies can pull cloth to bring toy closer → demonstrates tool use

  • Origins of Knowledge

  • Nativism (Rationalism)

  • Empiricism (Associativism)

  • Constructivism

  • Piaget took middle ground, stated not just nature or nurture is important but rather how it comes together in the environment

  • Hereditary factors

  • Structural: related to the constitution of our nervous system and sensory organs, thus we perceive e …

  • constant exchange between the individual and the environment

  • Adapation is the equilibrium of:

    • Assimilation (modify interpretation of new elements to fit schema)

    • and accomadation (modify schema in light of new elements)

  • Piagets’ Developmental stages

  • Sensorimotor

    1. reflex schemas exercised

    2. primary circular reactions — using body parts, extending arms, thumbs

    3. secondary circular reactions — involving an object outside their body

      1. Object permanence — signs: child will still look for object that has been obstructed from view

      2. A not B error: babies can find toys in location A but not in location B

    4. coordination of secondary

      1. Visable displacement: child will search for missing objects outside of trajectory the object followed while the child was playing with it

      2. Invisible displacement: Child with search multiple locations even they didn’t see the toy going there

    5. tertiary circular reactions —- coordination, multiple secondary reactions

      1. begin to understand that the object is independent of the child but only as long as movement id perceived

    6. beginning of symbolic representation —- testing behaviors e.g. dropping tools to watch parents pick it up

      1. begin to understand that the object is independent of the child

  • Pass: symbolic processing


  • Freud, through the study of personality, emphasized the importance of early experiences

  • Piaget focused on the origins of knowledge, the beginning point

    • first one to propose motor abilities are important

    • Motoric activities: crawling, cruising, walking, etc

    • Gross - throwing, turning, talking

    • Fine — swiffering, pointing/poking,

  • David Anderson paper

  • Self-produced locomotion

  • Central questions of developmental psych

  • Origins — what and when?

  • Process — how?

  • Gibson: invariant

  • motor activity plays a crucial role in

  • Anderson paper — metaanalysis

  • Infant crawling is linked to many psychological changes

    • visual perception

    • fear of heights

    • spatial coding strat

      • Egocentric — directions change based on where you are

      • Allocentric

    • joint visual attention

    • parent-child communication

    • Search for hidden objects

    • Cross cultural: certain tribes continue to use egocentric coding strat

  • Epigenesis: the emergence of a new skill creates experiences that bring about new psychological developments

  • eg onset of prone locomotion

  • Theorectical Framework of Developmental Process

  • crawling → fear of height

  • Infant that have newly learned crawling will cross without worry, while e

  • Visual proprioception: the awareness of ones own movement and posture produced by eyes alone (Ginson 1979)

  • plays a role inn height vertigo

  • utilizes peripheral vision

  • Infants don’t necessarily use vp the way adults do

  • Optica flow

  • Center

  • Study:

  • Pre-crawling don’t res

  • Crawling infants or infants with locomotor experience were more sensitive to peripheral vision change

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