Psychology 361 -- Chapter 4: What to study

p. 125: 2nd para.: William James was wrong.


p. 126: Define Neonate; heads of neonates are much larger proportion of body size than adults.


p. 128: Define Infant State (on p. 129: what are the 'two fundamental states'?)


p. 128: Babies as organized and predictable; babies as active, not merely passive; they are stirred by internal processes, just as adults are. Arousal patterns formed before birth.

p. 129: Arousal state patterns are formed before birth.


Sleep: Have a general idea of developmental changes in sleep over the first 8 weeks and by the end of the first year.

What two points does Figure 4.1 make?


p. 129: Infants (African Kipsigis) who are constantly with their mothers may continue to take short naps. Cultural variation in sleeping arrangements.

Box 4.1: What is SIDS? What characteristics make babies more susceptible to SIDS? What are some of the characteristics of mothers more likely to have SIDS babies? What is Lipsitt's (1990) theory on the origins of SIDS? Notice that babies should not sleep on their stomachs or on very soft mattresses. Co-sleeping is one way to prevent SIDS, but is controversial. Why do you think it's controversial?


p. 131: Define REM sleep: Is there any evidence that it has functional value? What is the autostimulation theory of REM sleep and what is the evidence on which it is based (circumcision results, physical and social stimulation)?


p. 131: 3 types of crying. p.132: When is the switch from physiological to psychological function of crying? (This also occurs with other emotions.)


pp. 132: Be able to summarize the discussion of whether mothers should respond promptly to infant crying. Bell and Ainsworth are attachment researchers. Their basic idea was that prompt responding made the infant feel more secure and therefore lowered crying. But what did Hubbard and van IJzendoorn find? How does the textbook reconciles their results with the results of the attachment researchers?


Box 4.2, p. 134: Culture and soothability: Euro-Amer babies more emotionally labile than Chinese-American, Japanese-American, Native American babies. These effects are the result of temperament, at least partly: Note what happens when Chinese-American mothers use minimal intervention. JA and NA babies are also more soothable. (Other researchers, not mentioned here, attribute this to lower emotionality in people from the Mongoloid (Oriental) gene pool.)


pp. 135, 137: What is the BNAS? Notice that it has a lot of uses, ranging from research on predictors of parent-infant interaction to diagnosis of neurological problems and African motor precocity. Scan Table 4-3 on p. 136 and notice some of the abilities of newborns: habituation, orientation to sights and sounds, motor development, regulation and self-regulation (including 'cuddliness'); lots of concern with arousal regulation


p. 137: Define sensation and perception. How do psychologists use babies' autonomic functions and sucking to determine what they are sensing? Notice that the infant is especially well-equipped to deal with its social environment.


p. 138: How does it take advantage of babies' ability to habituate? p. 139: What is the violation-of-expectation method? What is Fantz's visual preference method of assessing what infants can distinguish? p. 140: What is the habituation method?


p. 141: Hearing:  Note babies can hear before birth. Why do adults use high-pitch when talking to infants? What is motherese?

Box 4.3: What is prosody and what do DeCasper's and Spence's studies show
p. 142: babies may possess biological preparedness to prefer certain types of music (lullabies versus heavy metal??). Is there any evidence that listening to classical music or other types of music increases intelligence?


p. 142: Babies can distinguish music based on different scales (Javanese vs. Western) but adults can't. This is like language where 6-mo. old infants can distinguish sounds in any language, but older infants and adults who were not reared in a particular language environment can't so.


p. 143: Is there any evidence that babies innately prefer human voices?


p. 143: Vision: Define visual acuity. What is the visual acuity of a newborn up to one month of age? See also Figures 4-3 and 4-4 on p. 144. p. 144: When do babies achieve basically adult levels of acuity?
 

p. 145: What are the nativist and empiricist theories of pattern perception? p. 145: What did Salapatek and Kessen find, and which theory does it support? What parts of the triangle did the babies focus on? When do babies see patterns at approximately adult level? Notice that in the study referred to in Figure 4-5, babies 3-5 months old perceive patterns in moving displays; the authors conclude that 'this capacity to infer form from movement may be innate or at least develop very early.'


p. 146: How do young infants scan faces? (See Figure 4-6.) What seems to change at around 7 weeks to 2 months? But even though babies look longer at a person's eyes at 7 weeks and can recognize their mothers, we can't conclude that the baby sees the face as a whole. Why? (Hint: see study by Pascalis and colleagues [2002] on the narrowing or specializing of face processing, just as occurs in speech and music perception. See also the studies summarized on p. 147 on face scrambling. Bottom line is that we can't conclude that babies see whole faces before 2 months. Note the suggestion that babies are biased not to faces per se but to notice high contrast areas which faces in fact have. So babies are indirectly biased to prefer looking at faces because of this general tendency.

p. 148-149: What did Langlois et al. (1987, 1990) find? According to the text, what makes faces attractive to infants?