Chapter 5 | Infancy

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of the losses they have in healthy development, such as the loss of primitive reexes over
the rst year of life, and the loss of the ability to perceive some sensory distinctions (such
as sounds that are not used in their native language) over the rst year of life.
Our second theme, the interaction of nature and nurture in development, borrows
the example of the interpretive skills of perception mentioned above. Sensory and perceptual development clearly require both nature and nurture to proceed. The infants
brain and sensory receptors mature over the rst year and this maturation limits and
guides the development of what the infant is able to sense and perceive. But the infants
abilities are also guided by the sensory experiences she has and how her experiences and
motor developments shape her perceptions of what she senses.
By denition, the various forms of learning the infant experiences early in life (habituation, classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and observational learning) all
require experience (or nurture) to develop. And yet we also saw many examples of how
infants developing cognitive abilitiesto retain and retrieve from memory the things
they observed and learnedprovided examples of how their biological development (or
nature) set limits on their developing learning abilities.
Learning also provided examples of qualitative and quantitative changes in development across infancy. Some of the changes in the ability to learn through observation and
conditioning improved quantitatively; the infant gradually became better able to retain,
recall, and use what he or she had learned over longer delays. Some of the changes in
learning, such as newborn imitation, changed qualitatively: Infants were able to express
this ability very early in life, but then passed through a developmental stage at a few
months of age when they were not able to imitate, and nally reached another stage
of development when imitation seemed to take a different form and they again could
imitate facial expressions. Another basic example of qualitative change in infancy is the
change from expressing newborn reexes to the loss of these reexes across the rst year
of life.
Finally, although we have focused heavily on perceptual growth in this chapter, we
should remember that development is a holistic enterprise and that a childs maturing
perceptual abilities inuence all aspects of development. Take intellectual development,
for example. As we will see in Chapter 7, Jean Piaget argued that all the intellectual advances of the rst 2 years spring from the infants sensory and motor activities. How
else, he asked, could infants ever come to understand the properties of objects without
being able to see, hear, or smell them, to fondle them, or to hold them in their mouths?
How could infants ever use language without rst perceiving meaningful regularities in
the speech they hear? So Piaget (and many others) claim that perception is central to
everythingthere is nothing we do (consciously, at least) that is not inuenced by our
interpretation of the world around us.

SUMMARY

Sensation: the detection of sensory stimulation

Perception: the interpretation of what is sensed

The Newborns Readiness for Life

Survival reexes help newborns adapt to their surroundings and satisfy basic needs.
Primitive reexes are not as useful; their disappearance
in the rst year is a sign that development is proceeding
normally.
Newborns sleep-waking cycle becomes better organized
over the rst year.

Babies move into and out of six infant states in a typical

day and spend up to 70 percent of their time sleeping.
REM sleep is characterized by twitches, jerks, and
rapid eye movements.
Autostimulation theorists believe the function
of the REM state is to provide infants with necessary
stimulation that helps develop the central nervous
system.
Sudden infant death syndrome is a leading cause of
infant mortality.
Crying is the state by which infants communicate
distress.

194 Part Two | Biological Foundations of Development

Brain damage may be indicated by a babys shrill and

nonrythmic cries.
Crying diminishes over the rst 6 months as the brain
matures and caregivers become better at preventing the
infants distress.

Research Methods Used to Study the Infants

Sensory and Perceptual Capabilities
Methods of determining what infants might be sensing
or perceiving include:
the preference method;
the habituation method;
the method of evoked potentials; and
the high-amplitude sucking method.
Infant Sensory Capabilities
Hearing
Young infants can hear very well: even newborns can
discriminate sounds that differ in loudness, direction,
duration, and frequency.
They already prefer their mothers voice to that of another woman, and are quite sensitive to phonemic contrasts in the speech they hear.
Even mild hearing losses, such as those associated with
otitis media, may have adverse developmental effects.
Taste, smell, and touch
Babies are also born with denite taste preferences,
favoring sweets over sour, bitter, or salty substances.
They avoid unpleasant smells and soon come to recognize their mothers by odor alone if they are breast-fed.
Newborns are also quite sensitive to touch, temperature, and pain.
Vision
Newborns can see patterns and colors and can detect
changes in brightness.
Their visual acuity is poor by adult standards but improves rapidly over the rst 6 months.
Visual Perception in Infancy
Visual perception develops rapidly in the rst year.
0 to 2 months: Babies are stimulus seekers who prefer to look at moderately complex, high-contrast targets,
particularly those that move.
2 to 6 months: Infants begin to explore visual targets
more systematically, become increasingly sensitive to
movement, and begin to perceive visual forms and recognize familiar faces.
9 to 12 months: Infants can construct forms from the
barest of cues.
Newborns display some size constancy but lack stereopsis and are insensitive to pictorial cues to depth; consequently, their spatial perception is immature.
By the end of the rst month, they become more sensitive to kinetic cues and respond to looming objects.

Infants develop sensitivities to binocular cues (by 3 to 5

months) and pictorial cues (at 6 to 7 months).
Experiences through motor developments lead to a
fear of heights (as on the visual cliff) and to making more
accurate judgments about size constancy and other spatial relations.

Intermodal Perception
Signs that senses are integrated at birth include:
looking in the direction of sound-producing sources;
reaching for objects they can see; and
expecting to see the source of sounds or to feel objects for which they are reaching.
Intermodal perception
Intermodal perception is the ability to recognize by
one sensory modality an object or experience that is already familiar through another modality.
It becomes possible once the infant can process
through two different senses.
Cultural Inuences on Infant Perception
Inuences may involve losing the ability to detect sensory input that has little sociocultural signicance.
Basic Learning Processes in Infancy
Learning
a relatively permanent change in behavior
results from experience (repetition, practice, study, or
observations) rather than from heredity, maturation, or
physiological change resulting from injury
Habituation
a process in which infants come to recognize and
thus cease responding to stimuli that are presented
repeatedly
the simplest form of learning
may be possible even before birth
improves dramatically over the rst few months of life
Classical conditioning
A neutral conditioned stimulus (CS) is repeatedly
paired with an unconditioned stimulus (UCS) and,
eventually, the CS alone comes to elicit a response called
a conditioned response (CR).
Newborns can be classically conditioned if the responses have survival value, but are less susceptible to
this kind of learning than older infants.
Operant conditioning
The subject rst emits a response and then associates
this action with a particular outcome.
Observational learning
This occurs as the observer attends to a model and
constructs symbolic representations of its behavior.
These symbolic codes are stored in memory and may
be retrieved at a later date to guide the childs attempts
to imitate the behavior he or she has witnessed.

Chapter 5 | Infancy

Infants become better at imitating social models and

may even display deferred imitation by the end of the
rst year.

195

Improvement enables children to rapidly acquire

many new habits by attending to social models.

CHAPTER 5 PRACTICE QUIZ

Multiple Choice: Check your understanding of infancy by
selecting the best choice for each question. Answers appear
in the Appendix.
1. Dr. Frick studies the way infants detect stimuli with their
sensory receptors and the transmission of this information to the infants brains. We would label Dr. Frick a
______ psychologist.
a. perception
b. intermodal perception
c. sensory
d. learning
2. Which of the following is NOT considered a primitive
reex?
a. Babinski
b. rooting
c. palmar grasping
d. stepping
3. The autostimulation theory proposes that some infants
will spend less time in REM sleep than others. According
to this theory, which of the following infants will spend
the LEAST time in REM sleep?
a. John, who is developmentally disabled due to teratogen exposure before birth.
b. Jose, who is developmentally disabled due to anoxia
suffered at birth.
c. Juanita, whose parents spend a large amount of
time providing her with interesting visual stimuli to
explore.
d. Janice, whose parents have provided a simple, blackand-white nursery that is not lled with decorative stimuli that the newborn would be unlikely to
understand.
4. Which infant state of arousal is characterized by open
eyes, irregular breathing, and may include fussiness and
various bursts of motor activity?
a. drowsiness
b. irregular sleep
c. alert inactivity
d. alert activity
5. Research on infant crying has revealed that the effectiveness of the infants cry depends more on the ________
of distress than on the ________ of distress the baby is
experiencing.
a. kind; amount
b. amount; kind
c. urgency; recency
d. recency; urgency
6. Which method of studying infants sensory and perceptual abilities measures infants renewed interest in
an novel stimulus after becoming bored with a familiar
stimulus?

7.

8.

9.

10.

a. the preference method

b. the method of evoked potentials
c. the habituation method
d. the high-amplitude sucking method
Which of the following does not belong with the
others?
a. habituation
b. perception
c. operant conditioning
d. imitation
Which of the following statements is FALSE regarding
infants hearing abilities?
a. A fetus can learn the sound patterns of stories read
to them prenatally and then respond to the stories
in infancy.
b. Infants as young as 2 months old or younger can
distinguish speech sounds such as pa and ba or
a and i.
c. Newborn infants prefer their fathers voice (or the
voice of whoever was the mothers companion
during pregnancy).
d. By 4 months, infants will turn their head to the
sound of their own name, but not to hear other
names.
Your friend Sasha just had a baby. Because she knows
that you are studying developmental psychology, she
asks you what her babys senses are like. You tell her
that her babys least developed sense at birth is
a. vision
b. hearing
c. taste
d. smell
e. touch
You take your 7-month-old infant, Tuan, to the local
university, where she is tested on the visual cliff apparatus. Despite your calling and pleading from the deep
side, Tuan refuses to crawl over past the shallow side
to meet you. Alarmed, you ask the experimenter if
there is something wrong with Tuan. He tells you:
a. Perhaps, because babies of 7 months should be able
to crawl that far without problems.
b. Perhaps, because Tuan may not come when you
call and this may indicate a weak attachment between you and Tuan.
c. No, because 7-month-old babies usually cannot
crawl that far.
d. No, because 7-month-old babies perceive depth, are
afraid of heights, and usually do not crawl across
the deep side.