UNIVERSITY

OF
NAIROBI

TPS 102: DEVEOPMENT OF HUMAN PSYCHOLOGY

NAME: KIPSANG KELVIN KIPSOI

REG NO: E37/84211/2017

DATE OF SUBMISSION: 05/07/2018
SUMMARY

CHAPTER 5 INFANCY

Infancy development are carefully to distinguish between sensation and perception: Sensation- is the
process by which sensory receptors neurons detect information and transmit it to the brains results
from tastes, smell, sound reactions input recognizing what you see understanding what is said to you or
knowing that the odor you’ve detected is fresh-baked bread.

The newborn’s readiness for life

Newborns were often characterized as fragile and helpless little organism who were simply not
prepared for life outside the womb. This view may once have been highly adaptive, helping to ease
parent’s grief in earlier eras as when medical procedures.

Newborn Reflexes

A reflex is an involuntary and automotive respond to a stimulus as when the eye automatically blinks in
respond to a puff of air. Reflexes displays by newborns as survival reflexes helps newborn adapt to their
surrounding and satisfy basic needs. Primitive reflexes are not as useful; their disappearances in the first
year are a sign that development is proceeding normally. Newborn’s sleep walking cycle becomes better
organized over the first year.

Brain damage maybe indicated by a baby’s shill and non-rhythmic cries.

Crying diminishes over the first 6 months as the brain matures are caregivers become better at
preventing the infants distress.

INFANT STATES

Newborn also displays organized patterns of daily activities that are predictable and foster healthy
developmental outcomes.

Developmental changes in infant states

Two of the states sleeping and crying as shows regular patterns of changes over the first year and
provide important information about the developmental progress a baby is making.

i) Changes in sleep
As infants develop they spend less time sleeping and more time awake, alert, and attending to
their surrounding by the age of 2 to 6 weeks, babies sleep only 14 to 16 hours a day and
somewhere between 3-7 months of age may reduce the time to sleep.

ii) The functions and courses of crying.

A baby’s earliest cries are unlearned and involuntary responses to discomfort distress signals by
which the infant makes caregivers aware their needs.
 Research methods used to study the infants sensory and perceptual experiences
It is not that babies have become any more capable or any smarter and have developed some
research methods for understanding what nonverbal infant can sense and perceive methods
like:
The preference method:
This is a simple procedure in which at least two stimuli are presented simultaneously to see
whether infant will attend more to one of them than the others.
The habituation method
This is a process in which a repeated stimulus becomes so familiar that responses initially
associated with it (e.g. head or eye movements’ changes or changing in respiration or heart
rate) and no longer occur.
Method of Evoked Potentials
This is determining what infants can sense or discrimination of mother by smell.

iii) Touch, temperature and pain

Receptors in the skin are sensitive to touch, temperature and pain. Sensitivity to touch clearly
enhances infants’ responsiveness to their environments. Premature infant shows better
developmental progress when they periodically stroked and message in their isolators
iv) Vision
Vision maybe the least mature of the newborns sensory capabilities. Changes in brightness elicit
a subcortical reflex which indicates that the neonate is sensitive to light

Visual perception in infancy

Recall Robert Frantz observation of infants in his looking chamber. Babies only 2 days old easily
disseminate visual patterns.
Early pattern perception 0 to 2 months
Later research revealed that very young infants prefer to look at high contrast patterns with
many sharp boundaries between light and dark areas and at moderately complex patterns that
have curvilinear features.
Late for perception (2 months to 1 year)
Between these two ages the infants’ visual system is rapidly maturing. She now sees better and
is capable of making an increase complex visual discrimination and eventually even squeezing
into discrimination.
Perception of three Dimension space
When infants capable of perceiving depth and making reasonably accurate inference about size
and spatial relations briefly considers research designed to answer question. Perceive is to
present them with a stimulus and record their brain waves. This can even tell whether infant can
discriminate various sights, sound because two stimuli that are sensed as different produce
different pattern of electrical activity.
The High-Amplitude sucking method
This is where most of infants can exert enough control over their sucking behavior to use it to
show what they can sense and to give us some ideas of their likes or dislikes.

Infant sensory capabilities

This is what reveals about babies sensory and perceptual capabilities. How well new born sense
their environments
i) Hearing
In the first few hours of life infants may hear about as well as an adult with head cold
effects.
ii) Reactions to voice
Young infants are particularly attentive to voices especially high pitched femine voices.
But they can recognize their mothers’ voice. Research reveals that newborns such faster
on a nipple to hear a recording of another woman.
iii) Reactions to language
Not only do babies listen closely to voices but they are also able to discriminate basic
speech sounds.
iv) Taste and smell
Infants are born with some very definite tastes preferences and are capable of detecting
a variety of odors and they can react rigorously by turning away and displaying
expressions of disgust in response to unpleasant such as vinegar, ammonia and rotten
egg. Also demonstrate.
Infants can interpret using
i) Size constantly
ii) Uses of pictorial cues
iii) Development of depth perception

Intermodal perception
This is the ability to recognize by one sensory modality in this case touch an object that’s
familiar through another vision. As adults we can make many inferences of this kind,
when the babies first display these abilities.
Development of intermodal perception
Research based on the sensory systems matures; intermodal perception continues to
assist infants in learning about and exploring their words. When habituated to a serial
presentation of objects that emits a serial of idio syncretic noises both 4 and 8 months
old.
Explaining intermodal perception
The inter sensory redundancy hypothesis suggests that a modal detection of a stimulus
aid in the development and differentiation of individual sense (Bahrick and Lickliter
2000) as multiple sensory modalities of stimulus objects draw an infant’s attention and
as the infants attends to and interacts with that objects.
Cultural influence on infant perception
How is perception influenced by one’s culture and cultural tradition? Although people in
different cultures rarely differ in such basic perceptual capabilities as the ability to
discriminate forms, patterns and degree of brightness or loudness.
Infants biologically prepared to acquire any language that human speak. Music is
another cultural tool that influences our auditory perception.
Perception learning refers to changes in one’s abilities to extract information from
sensory stimulation that occur as a result of experience.

Basic learning processes in infant

Learning is relatively permanent change in behavior that results from one’s experiences
or practice. It meets the following requirements
i) The change is relatively permanent.
ii) The individual reacts to the environment new way.
iii) Changes are clearly results from experiences.
Habituation: Early evidence of information processing and memory
Habituation- the process by which we stop attending or responding to stimulus
repeated over and over.
Habituation can be thought of learning to become disinterested in stimuli that are
recognized as familiar and nothing to get excited about, this results from developmental
trends and individual differences.

Classical conditioning
This is a second way that infants learn is through classical conditioning. In classical
conditioning neutral stimulus (conditioned stimulus) and unconditioned stimulus that
always elicit the response.
Limitations
It is successful only for biologically programmed reflexes such as sucking infants.
Only for infants that have survival value.
Neonates process information very slowly and require more than old participant to
associate.
Operant conditioning
Learned responses are elicited by a conditioned stimulus operant conditioning is quite
different. The learner first emits a response if some sort cooperates on the environment
and then associates this action with the unpleasant or pleasant consequences it
produces.
 Operant conditioning in infancy
Even babies born prematurely are susceptible to operant conditioning.
Successful conditioning in very young infants is generally limited to the few biologically
significant behaviors.
Newborns are also very inefficient information processors who learn very slowly.

Newborn limitation or observation learning

Observational learning results from observing the behavior of other people.
Observational learning takes center stage in social learning theory.
Successful observational learning not only required the capacity to imitate others but
also the abilities to encode a model behavior.

Applying development themes to infant development, perception and learning.

In consideration the newborn’s readiness for life, the growth of basic perceptual
abilities and means by which infants learned.
Although focused heavily on perceptual growth, development and holistic enterprise
and that a child maturing perceptual influence all aspects of development.
Take intellectual development at the first 2 years spring from infants’ sensory and
motor activities, renegotiating the parent-child relationship during adolescence.