Six%20to%20Nine%20Months

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Six to Nine Months

• Fogel
• Chapter 7

Created by Ilse DeKoeyer-Laros, Ph.D.
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Six to Nine Months

• Physical and Motor Development
• Perceptual Development
• Cognitive Development
• Emotional Development
• Social and Language Development
• Family and Society

• Experiential Exercises
• Co-regulating with Baby

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Six to Nine Months

• Between the ages of 6 and 9 months, infants grow
  more adventurous.
• this development is physical in that babies can
  creep or crawl, at least for short distances, on
  their own
• it is also psychological in that infants begin to
  take initiatives and to call attention to
  themselves
• Infants of this age develop a serious interest in
  the object world, and they come to understand
  that objects are whole entities with an existence
  separate from their own.

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Physical Motor Development

• By the age of 5 months, infants can sit
  supported, and they can reach and grasp objects
• Between 6 and 9 moths, improvements in posture
  lead to independent sitting and to supported
  standing
• muscle strength improvements allow babies o roll
  over and to move their by creeping or crawling
• By 9 months, infants can take a few steps while
  holding on to furniture or an adult hand
• Their grasp becomes more precise so that by 9
  months, infants can pick up small objects such as
  peas or carrot slices using just the tips of the
  thumb and index finger

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Physical and Motor Development
Hand movements and hand preference

• The left and right hemispheres of the human
  brain
• serve different functions
• the right hemisphere is believed to control
  spatial patterns and nonlinguistic (e.g.,
  emotional) information processing
• the left hemisphere is more sensitive to
  sequential processing of the sort used in
  understanding language
• these hemisphere differences are found in
  right-handed people in left-handed people the
  hemisphere functions are reversed

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Physical Motor Development
Hand movements and hand preference

• Brain hemisphere specialization is linked to
  handedness, or the preference for the use of one
  hand over another
• the emergence in infancy of a preferred hand is
  thought to be related to milestones in the
  development of the brain
• if there is a hand-use preference in early
  infancy, it might suggest that the left and the
  right cortices are already functioning
  differently

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Physical Motor Development
Hand movements and hand preference

• Infants begin to exhibit a hand preference at
  about 2 months of age, around the same time when
  visually guided reaching begins
• more infants preferentially reach with their
  right than with their left hands
• this hand preference is relatively stable in
  babies over the first year of life

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Physical Motor Development
Hand movements and hand preference

• Left-right differences in infants are not the
  same as those found in adults
• in adults, hand preference is correlated with the
  hand preference of ones parents, but this is not
  true in infants
• about 90 of adults in all cultures are right
  handed
• only about 30 to 50 of infants under 1 year show
  a preference for the right hand in reaching
• 10 to 30 of infants have a left-hand preference
  in reaching
• the remaining infants show no hand preference

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Physical Motor Development
Hand movements and hand preference

• More-permanent adult-like hand preferences in
  infants do not emerge until the second year of
  life

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Physical Motor Development
Hand movements and hand preference

• Handedness does not mean that we use one hand and
  not the other it means that each of our hands
  may be doing different things

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Physical Motor Development
Hand movements and hand preference

• When infants first begin to reach for objects,
  they use two hands and reach symmetrically toward
  the midline of the body
• more mature reaching, beginning around 6 months,
  involves reaching with a single hand for the
  object
• The babies, who by 6 months are just learning to
  sit without support, extend the nonreaching hand
  backward to balance their upper bodies as the
  reaching hand moves forward

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Physical Motor Development
Hand movements and hand preference

• Single-handed reaches would be impossible for
  babies without the postural counterbalance
  provided by the other hand and arm
• Two handed reaches after 6 months are also more
  sophisticated because they typically occur with
  larger objects (like a big ball) and they can
  cross the mid-line of the body to retrieve
  objects off to one side

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Physical Motor Development
Crawling

• Being able to extend one arm independently of the
  other is believed to be important for the
  development of crawling
• observations of infants reveal that there are
  different types of crawling (see Table 7.2)
• as long as babies are still reaching with two
  hands at the same time (showing no hand
  preference), they either creep or rock
• infants begin to crawl as soon as they can reach
  with one hand
• crawling requires the extension of one hand and
  leg and then the other

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Physical Motor Development
Crawling

• Not all infants go through the sequence of types
  of crawling
• some infants creep before they crawl, while
  others skip the creeping phase and go directly to
  crawling
• infants who creep before they crawl, however, are
  better at crawling than those who do not creep.
  Creepers move faster and their movements are
  larger and more efficient
• non-creepers become proficient crawlers after a
  couple of weeks
• Infants use whatever means are available to
  achieve their goals, rather than staying with the
  most advanced form of movement all the time

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Physical Motor Development
How Motor Skills Develop

• The research on crawling shows that even though
  infants can get up on their hands and knees in a
  crawling posture, they still cannot crawl because
  they lack one of crawlings necessary skill
  components alternate extension of the arms and
  legs
• Dynamic systems theory predicts that new motor
  skills develop by adding additional components to
  existing skills

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Physical Motor Development
How Motor Skills Develop

• A similar analysis could be applied to the
  development of walking. In the age period covered
  in this chapter, 6 to 9 months, infants can stand
  and take a few steps, but they cannot yet walk
• Nine-month-old infants seem to possess the
  prerequisites of walking
• They can pull themselves into a standing
  position, take steps while holding onto
  something, and alternate their leg movements
• What they lack, however, is the ability to
  control balance. This was discovered in research
  using a moving-room technique (see Figure 7.1)

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Physical Motor Development
How Motor Skills Develop

• Moving-room technique
• A baby stands in a miniature room, the floor of
  which is stationary but whose walls and ceiling
  are moved either toward or away from the baby
• Infants under 1 year will fall in the direction
  in which the wall appears to be moving
• Infants older than 1 year may sway but are less
  likely to lose their balance
• The moving room recreates the visual experience
  of moving without asking the baby to take steps
  at the same time
• It is this visual experience of the room seeming
  to flow past the eyes that appears to cause
  babies to lose their balance

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Physical Motor Development
How Motor Skills Develop

• This research suggests that perception of ones
  own movement in space is a key ingredient in
  controlling the posture necessary for locomotor
  development
• Creeping or crawling experience enhances the
  infants self-awareness in relation to objects in
  space their ability to understand the
  differences between close and distant objects,
  and their ability to remember novel events

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Physical Motor Development
How Motor Skills Develop

• Balance and posture also influences other motor
  developmental processes
• the difference between a creep and a crawl (Table
  7.2), for example, is the ability to balance on
  the hands and knees while moving forward
• once balance is acquired in the crawl, infants
  movements become more efficient and uniform

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Physical Motor Development
How Motor Skills Develop

• Infants who had experience with creeping or
  crawling were observed in the moving room
  apparatus and compared with infants who had not
  yet begun to locomote themselves
• Those infants who had already begun self-produced
  locomotion were better able to make postural
  adjustments to the moving room, showing that the
  balance needed for walking may come from earlier
  experiences of balance while trying to crawl

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Physical Motor Development
How Motor Skills Develop

• Postural control while sitting is important for
  the development of skilled reaching
• before infants can sit upright steadily, they
  reach for objects with two hands at the same time
  
• after they can sit steadily, they are able to
  reach with a single hand, allowing them to use
  their other hand for something else
• infants of this age also seem to know how far
  they can reach for an object based on how stable
  they are in a sitting posture
• They reach out farther when they feel more stable
  and do not reach when they feel unstable

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Physical Motor Development
How Motor Skills Develop

• Motor development is a complex systems
  interaction of the different parts of the motor
  system (legs, trunk, and arms), but it also
  includes the perceptual system and the type of
  environment in which the child is moving
• Infants can execute walking movements, for
  example, if they are supported in their
  postureby an infant walker or an adultand
  allowed to move their legs cyclically
• The onset of walking is later in infants with
  fewer opportunities to exercise these movements

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Physical Motor Development
How Motor Skills Develop

• Infants in northern climates who are born in
  summer and fall will walk on their own an average
  of 3 weeks later than infants born in winter and
  spring
• Babies born in winter and spring are more likely
  to be practicing walking skills in the summer or
  fall, and the warmer temperatures give them more
  opportunity for movement without the constriction
  of a lot of clothing

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Physical Motor Development
How Motor Skills Develop

• Infant motor development is also facilitated by
  giving babies opportunities to move and explore
  on their own without equipment
• in one study, infants were ranked according to
  how much they used equipment such as a jolly
  jumper, walker, exersaucer, playpen, or swing
• those infants who used such equipment more had
  higher scores on motor development assessments at
  8 months of age
• it is recommended that moderate use of these
  devices may not be detrimental so long as infants
  are exposed to free play experience on the floor
  with adults

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Perceptual Development
New Developments in the Recognition of Objects
and Depth

• By 4 months, infants are able to recognize
  objects even though they may look different when
  seen from different orientations
• infants perceive objects as being solid and will
  become puzzled if one solid object appears to
  pass through another
• infants of this age can also perceive differences
  in distances between objects and will reach
  preferentially to objects they perceive as nearer
  to them
• For infants under 6 months, however, object
  recognition and depth perception are easier if
  the objects are moving and if real objects,
  rather than pictures of objects, are presented

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Perceptual Development
New Developments in the Recognition of Objects
and Depth

• After 6 months, infants can infer object
  properties and depth merely from visual cues
  alone
• by 6 months, infants can see three dimensions
  when they are shown objects in two dimensions, as
  in a drawing or a photograph
• By about 7 months of age, infants with a patch
  over one eye will reach toward the larger of two
  identical pictures of a face, apparently
  perceiving it as closer
• if a small and a large checkerboard are used, the
  infants do not reach more frequently for the
  larger one, since checkerboards have no standard
  size
• If the infants are allowed to reach while looking
  with both eyes, they do not show a preference for
  the larger object, either the car or the
  checkerboard

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Perceptual Development
New Developments in the Recognition of Objects
and Depth

• By 7 months, infants use visual cues, such as
  size, to judge depth
• infants can use other visual cues to judge depth
• if one object partially blocks the view of
  another, the blocked object is perceived as
  farther away
• relative shading in a drawing depicting a bump or
  a depression causes 7-month-olds, but not
  5-month-olds, to reach for the object shaded like
  a bump
• both 5- and 7-month-olds reach for actual bumps
• when objects are presented in a perspective
  drawing, infants use the perspective information
  to reach for the object that is apparently nearer
  to them
• Infants ability to recognize objects in two
  dimensions leads to increased interest in picture
  books and television at this age

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Perceptual Development
New Developments in the Recognition of Objects
and Depth

• During this period, infants learn to perceive
  object properties through touch as well as
  through vision
• Perception of the properties of an object using
  touch is called haptic perception
• Through haptic perception, infants soon after
  birth can distinguish different properties of
  objects primarily by using their mouths
• In the early months, the mouth is perhaps the
  most sensitive haptic organ
• Between 4 and 6 months, infants begin examining
  objects by active exploration combining hand,
  mouth, and vision
• After 6 months, infants develop specialized hand
  movements to detect information about specific
  object properties such as size, texture, and
  shape

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Perceptual Development
New Developments in the Recognition of Objects
and Depth

• Through both haptics and vision, therefore,
  infants become increasingly sophisticated in
  their knowledge of object properties.

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Perceptual Development
Other Perceptual Developments

• infants in this age period can recognize
  differences between simple melodies
• six-month-olds can discriminate between six-note
  melodies differing by only one note, and they can
  discriminate between melodies in which the pauses
  between notes are varied
• By this age, therefore, babies can recognize some
  nursery rhymes and simple melodies heard in songs
  

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Perceptual Development
Other Perceptual Developments

• By this age, babies show continuing evidence of
  cross-modal perception
• infants are sensitive to distortions in the sound
  track of a film showing a rattle shaking at a
  particular rhythm
• if the sound is faster or slower than the
  rattles movements, the babies notice the
  difference

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Perceptual Development
Other Perceptual Developments

• As the visual and auditory display becomes more
  complicated, however, infants preferentially
  process the sound but not the vision, reflecting
  the fact that even at 6 months, auditory
  perception is more advanced than visual
  perception
• These findings are important because they show
  that cross-modal perception is becoming more
  controlled for infants under certain conditions,
  they can distinguish between the separate
  attributes of each modality

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Perceptual Development
Other Perceptual Developments

• Infants older than 6 months can also use
  cross-modal perception to infer information about
  object properties
• Infants of this age who are familiarized with an
  object only by touch can recognize the object by
  sight alone and infants will alternatively look
  at and touch objects and put them into their
  mouths while exploring them
• If babies hear a sound in the dark, they will
  reach for an object in the direction of the
  sound. Infants can also distinguish whether the
  object is within or out of their reach based on
  hearing its sound in the dark

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Perceptual Development
Other Perceptual Developments

• Infants were given sweet and tart foods in cups
  of different colors. On subsequent color-choice
  trials, the infants consistently picked the color
  that had been paired with the sweet food

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Perceptual Development
Other Perceptual Developments

• These studies of perception show that by the
  middle of the first year of life, infants can use
  subtle cues to infer regularities in their
  perceptual world
• they can now learn from pictures in books and on
  television
• they can pick up relationships between different
  senses in order to pay attention to aspects of
  their environment that most interest them

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Perceptual Development
Other Perceptual Developments

• These perceptual abilities lead to clear
  preferences
• babies begin to take the initiative in expressing
  their desires for particular pictures, objects,
  and tastes
• as infants learn to perceive the world, they also
  learn about themselves

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Cognitive Development
Memory

• During the period from 6 to 9 months, the
  infants brain continues to develop
• Studies using kicking to make mobiles move have
  shown that infant memory during this period is
  similar to memory at 3 months
• 3-month-olds can remember how to produce mobile
  movements for up to 14 days, 7-month-olds can
  remember for as long as 21 days without a
  reminder
• By 7 months, their memories are somewhat less
  context dependent, meaning that infants can
  remember a salient event that has been learned in
  several different but related situations

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Cognitive Development
Memory

• Infants of this age have more control over
  reactivating their own memories and do not have
  to rely entirely on contextual cues
• Infants also can remember longer sequences of
  events, like longer melodies or longer sequences
  of flashing colored lights on electronic toys

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Cognitive Development
Memory

• Although the memory of infants of this age is
  improving, it is still limited and localized to
  the situation, at least compared to that of a
  preschool child or an adult
• The fact that infants can remind themselves means
  that they are beginning to take a role in
  creating their own self-history that transcends
  particular situations
• By 6 months, infants take a more active role in
  the processing of information

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Cognitive Development
Increasing Use of Concepts to Organize Process
Information

• Infants in this age period are able to group
  different stimuli into higher-order conceptual
  categories
• using a habituation procedure, researchers showed
  babies a series of pictures of the same face in
  different poses
• during the test trial, the infants dishabituated
  to an unfamiliar face but not to the same face in
  a different pose
• this shows that the babies had organized all the
  different poses they saw into a higher-order
  concept of a particular face
• seven-month-olds, but not 5-month-olds, were able
  to do this

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Cognitive Development
Increasing Use of Concepts to Organize Process
Information

• In a similar type of study, 7-month-old infants
  were habituated to different faces having the
  same facial expression (a smile)
• they dishabituated to a different face with a
  nonsmile expression but not to a different face
  with a smile expression

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Cognitive Development
Increasing Use of Concepts to Organize Process
Information

• In an interesting variant of this procedure,
  infants were familiarized with somewhat distorted
  versions of a prototype figure
• a prototype figure is one that is the clearest
  example of the form being represented
• if infants are actively organizing the images of
  the distorted figures into a category, then they
  should prefer to look at a related prototype,
  compared to an unrelated prototype in a test
  trial in which both are available to look at
• infants who were familiarized with the plus
  sign distortions preferred the plus sign
  prototype at ages 3, 5, and 7 months
• only 7-months-olds could recognize the prototype
  from the distorted versions

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Cognitive Development
Increasing Use of Concepts to Organize Process
Information

• Infants of this age are beginning to relate
  objects together into higher-order
  classifications
• seven-month-olds, for example, can distinguish
  horses from some other four-legged mammals such
  as cats, zebras, and giraffes
• infants develop motor categorizations for
  objects, grouping them into things shakable,
  drinkable, squeezable, and so on
• By 9 months, infants can distinguish these object
  properties visually as well as haptically

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Cognitive Development
Increasing Use of Concepts to Organize Process
Information

• Infants of this age are able to judge whether
  objects are too big to fit into containers, when
  shown objects and containers of various sizes
• They understand that moving objects should follow
  along their prior path of movement and that
  larger objects can support smaller objects
• Infants will respond differentially when the same
  object is placed above as opposed to below
  another object, showing that they have a category
  for these kinds of spatial relationships

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Cognitive Development
Increasing Use of Concepts to Organize Process
Information

• Infants of this age may even have a concept of
  number or quantity of objects
• infants were habituated to a puppet jumping in
  the air either two or three times
• they dishabituated when the number of jumps
  changed, from two to three or from three to two

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Cognitive Development
Increasing Use of Concepts to Organize Process
Information

• Piaget discovered that his children had a sense
  of quantity at 11 months of age when he tried to
  get them to imitate sounds
• if Piaget said papa, Laurent replied with
  papa. If Piaget said pa, so did Laurent
• by adding more pa syllables, Piaget discovered
  that Laurent had trouble with more than three.
  Saying papapapapapa only got a papapapa in
  return

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Cognitive Development
Increasing Use of Concepts to Organize Process
Information

• Other research found that 10- to 12-month-olds
  could easily discriminate visual arrays that
  differed only in number, particularly for one
  versus two objects, one versus three objects, and
  two versus three objects
• They had a harder time with four versus three
  objects, and no luck at all discriminating four
  from five objects

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Cognitive Development
Increasing Use of Concepts to Organize Process
Information

• Studies like these show that infants of this age
  have a concept of quantitymore versus lessbut
  they do not prove that infants of this age know
  numbers and can do math problems

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Cognitive Development
Piagets Third Sensorimotor Stage Secondary
Circular Reactions

• Beginning at about 4 months and continuing until
  about 8 or 9 months, infants pass through
  Piagets third stage of sensorimotor development
  the stage of secondary circular reactions
• Instead of only repeating actions that they
  discover by chance on their own bodies (the
  primary circular reaction), infants soon begin to
  repeat actions that, by chance, produce some
  effect on the objects and people in the
  environment
• the idea of chance is what distinguishes this
  stage from the ones that follow
• once the chance discovery is made, however,
  infants make deliberate, intentional attempts to
  repeat that action

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Cognitive Development
Piagets Third Sensorimotor Stage Secondary
Circular Reactions

• In a primary circular reaction, babies repeat a
  movement of their own bodies but do not make the
  connection between that movement and its effect
• In secondary circular reactions, babies are
  focused more on the objects in the environment.
  They not only repeat actions that produce effects
  on objects, they also vary the actions in order
  to explore changes in the effect
• babies between 6 and 9 months will drop objects
  off the edge of their high chairs, perhaps
  listening for different sounds or looking at
  different movements when the objects hit the
  floor
• they shake objects in different ways to notice
  the effect or repeatedly dump things (such as
  their food) out of containers

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Cognitive Development
Piagets Third Sensorimotor Stage Secondary
Circular Reactions

• Infants in this period tend to apply the
  movements they use for particular objects as a
  way of representing or referring to the object
  (see Observation 7.1)
• when Piaget shakes his sons rattles, Laurent at
  41/2 months is too busily engaged in playing with
  the toy he is holding to actually strike his
  rattle. He seems to indicate the potential action
  by making a striking movement in the air
• instead of saying verbally, Those are my
  rattles, Laurent expresses himself through a
  motor movement that has the exact form of his
  previous interactions with that object

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Cognitive Development
Piagets Third Sensorimotor Stage Secondary
Circular Reactions

• Repeated occurrences in the environment take on
  meaning for the baby (see Observation 7.2)
• by 7 months, Laurent knew that he would be fed
  shortly after he heard his mothers bed creak
• earlier in his life, he would cry with hunger as
  soon as he woke up. Now he cries in relation to
  certain environmental events that have come to
  have a meaning for him
• like the act of pretend striking, the cry is a
  motor way of saying, Thats the sound of my
  food!

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Cognitive Development
Piagets Third Sensorimotor Stage Secondary
Circular Reactions

• Nine-month-old infants were shown an actor
  grasping first one toy and then another
• They were also shown an actor touching one toy
  with the back of her hand and then touching
  another toy the same way
• The infants looked longer when the grasping hand
  contacted the second toy than they did when the
  actor touched the second toy with the back of her
  hand

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Cognitive Development
Piagets Third Sensorimotor Stage Secondary
Circular Reactions

• These observations suggest that infants are
  becoming more intentional and goal directed, and
  also that they can perceive the intentional
  behavior of other people
• Also, infants are more interested in actions of
  other people that seem to have a clear goal

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Cognitive Development
Out of Sight, Out of Mind?

• Another aspect of conceptualizing objects is
  whether infants believe that objects have a
  permanent existence
• object permanence is the ability to remain aware
  of an object even after it has gone out of sight
• infants will not actively search for an object
  that has been hidden until after the age of 9
  months

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Cognitive Development
Out of Sight, Out of Mind?

• In one study, infants aged 7 to 8 months saw an
  object sitting on one of two red placemats that
  were 8.5 inches (21.5 centimeters) apart
• Next, two purple screens big enough to hide the
  object were slid in front of the placemats
• A hand then reached behind the screen and
  reappeared holding the object in either a
  possible situation or an impossible situation
• Infants looked longer at the hand following the
  impossible situation compared to the possible one
  
• This showed that they remembered the objects
  location and were surprised when the object
  appeared from behind the screen opposite that
  behind which they had seen it placed

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Cognitive Development
Out of Sight, Out of Mind?

• In a similar study with infants of the same age,
  this time with their parents present in the room,
  the infants not only looked longer at the
  impossible situation, they also looked more at
  their parents as if to share their puzzlement

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Cognitive Development
Out of Sight, Out of Mind?

• Infants between 3 and 7 months come to understand
  that objects seen in the light will still be in
  the same place when the lights are turned off
• in one study, infants were shown an object
  falling and making a noise on impact, after which
  they were allowed to reach for the fallen object
• next, the lights were turned off. When the
  infants heard the sound of the impact they
  reached for the object in the dark at the same
  location
• If infants have prior exposure to the situation
  in which the object is to be located, their
  memory abilities at this age allow them to search
  for the object in the correct location

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Cognitive Development
Out of Sight, Out of Mind?

• Infants of this age are becoming aware of objects
  and people and whole entities
• They can appreciate that objects have features
  and boundaries, that they occupy unique locations
  in space, and that they do not disappear when out
  of sight
• The same is also true for infants conceptions of
  people
• people, however, are understood by infants as
  having intentions
• the ability to perceive anothers intentions
  corresponds with the infants awareness of their
  own intentions, their ability to have an effect
  on the environment

60
Emotional Development
The Development of Negative Emotions

• Until the beginning of Piagets Stage III (around
  5 months), babies have basically one response to
  a negative experience they cry
• With the onset of secondary circular reactions,
  infants become more aware that they can cause
  things to happen in the environment
• This sense of themselves as a causal agentpart
  of the ecological selfaccounts in part for the
  reduction in the amount of crying that occurs
  between 3 and 5 months
• When infants cannot succeed at being an effective
  causal agentwhen they cannot get a toy they
  want, for examplea new source of negative
  experience enters their lives anger.

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Emotional Development
The Development of Negative Emotions

• Anger in infants is a direct result of their
  having their motives disrupted
• Although both anger and distress are accompanied
  by crying, the facial expression during anger is
  different from that of distress, as is the babys
  underlying feeling
• in one study, infants reactions to inoculations
  were observed at 2, 4, and 7 months
• at 2 and 4 months, infants reacted with physical
  distress, a direct response to pain
• distress is expressed by crying with tightly shut
  eyes
• by 7 months, the babies responded with more angry
  expressions, crying with open, vigilant eyes
• it is almost as if the quality of the gaze
  signals that the infant is angry at the person
  being watched

62
Emotional Development
The Development of Negative Emotions

• Separation from the mother is another situation
  that causes negative emotions
• before the age of 6 months, infants cry with
  distress, particularly if their mothers leave,
  act depressed, or perform a still face in the
  middle of a feeding or play session
• after 6 months, infants respond to parental
  separation with some anger, especially if the
  parent happens to be a part of the infants
  activitysuch as during play or feedingwhen he
  or she leaves
• Expressions of anger are also seen in
  7-month-olds when a teething biscuit is removed
  from their mouths or when their arms are
  restrained

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Emotional Development
The Development of Negative Emotions

• Another negatively toned emotion seen at this age
  is wariness
• infants may become quiet and stare at a stranger
  or a strange situation, knit their brows, become
  momentarily sober, and look away
• Because wariness allows the infant to observe
  what is happening, it is a considerably more
  adaptive reaction to strange situations than is
  the withdrawal of infantile fussing and crying of
  previous ages

64
Emotional Development
The Development of Negative Emotions

• Infants of this age were taught to pull a string
  attached to their wrist in order to activate a
  slide projection of an infants face accompanied
  by the Sesame Street theme song
• After they learned this procedure, the
  experimenters stopped turning on the slide
  projector and music when the infant pulled the
  string
• Most of the infants reacted to this contingency
  failure with anger, although some showed
  expressions of sadness
• When the contingency was renewed, the infants who
  expressed anger immediately became interested
  again in the task, while those who showed sadness
  reacted to the renewal of the contingency with
  less enjoyment

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Emotional Development
The Development of Negative Emotions

• This shows that anger is an adaptive and useful
  response for some babies, who perceive the
  renewal of the contingency as under their control
  
• The babies who were saddened, however, may
  perceive themselves as helpless to change the
  course of events

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Emotional Development
The Development of Negative Emotions

• At this age, then, the helpless fussing of
  earlier ages gives way to demanding crying,
  anger, and wariness
• Each of these forms of negative emotional
  expression is considerably more adaptive from the
  infants point of view and these developments
  reflect some significant advances in the infants
  ability to cope with negative situations
• The end result of this increasing sophistication
  in the realm of negative responding is to bring
  the infant back into a positive engagement with
  the environment.

67
Emotional Development
The Development of Positive Emotions

• Positive emotions also become more complex during
  this age period
• In one study, mothers and infants were observed
  playing peekaboo and tickle games
• Different types of smiles had different emotional
  meanings depending upon whether the infant was
  attending to the mother or not
• simple smiling accompanied by gazing at the
  mother during peekaboo represents an enjoyment of
  recognition or perhaps an enjoyment of readiness
  to engage in play
• simple smiles occurring without gazing at mother
  after a previous tickle are often accompanied by
  gasping for air and sighing
• the feeling associated with these smiles may be
  an enjoyment of relief or perhaps an enjoyment of
  relaxation

68
Emotional Development
The Development of Positive Emotions

• Duchenne smiles (lip corner retraction with cheek
  raising) occur with gazing at the mother
  primarily when she uncovers her face during
  peekaboo
• these smiles may reflect an enjoyment of agency,
  sensing oneself as an active rather than passive
  participant in the game
• this may mean that the pleasure of peekaboo is in
  the experience of active visual searching for
  when and how the mother will reappear after
  hiding
• Duchenne smiles without gazing at the mother
  occur most frequently during a tickle, often as
  infants turn their whole bodies away as if trying
  to hide or to protect themselves
• these Duchenne smiles may reflect an enjoyment of
  hiding or perhaps an enjoyment of escape

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Emotional Development
The Development of Positive Emotions

• These findings reveal that infants of this age
  are showing the beginnings of adultlike emotional
  experiences
• Beginning around 8 months of age, infants who
  smile when looking at an object will
  spontaneously turn to smile at a nearby adult
• taken together with the gazing at the adult that
  occurs in anger expressions, there is a growing
  ability in infants of this age to communicate
  with others about emotions
• By the age of 6 months, babies will laugh at your
  jokes. They will laugh when you play tug with
  them, when they see you suck on their pacifiers
  or bottles, and when they try to pull the bottles
  out of your mouth

70
Emotional Development
The Development of Positive Emotions

• Babies also laugh at very abrupt and highly
  arousing stimuli
• They may laugh at things that once made them cry,
  such as a loud noise or a loss of balance
• The laugh will sometimes follow a very serious or
  wary expression, almost as if the babies were
  trying to make up their minds about whether to
  get upset or enjoy the situation

71
Emotional Development
The Development of Positive Emotions

• In one study, 8-month-old babies watched while
  someone wearing a scary mask approached them
• When the mask was worn by a stranger, the babies
  cried
• When it was worn by their mothers, the babies
  laughed

72
Emotional Development
Emotion Regulation

• This experiment suggests that by this age, the
  infant is beginning to use cognition to decide
  what to feel, a process known as appraisal
• This means that there is a growing relationship
  between infant emotion and attention to the
  events and processes related to that emotion

73
Emotional Development
Emotion Regulation

• Seven-month-old infants were familiarized with a
  computerized drawing of a face and asked to
  choose between the familiar face and an
  unfamiliar one using a paired preference
  procedure
• if infants studied the familiar faces with a
  neutral facial expression, they looked at the
  pair of faces for a shorter time and were better
  able to distinguish the familiar from the
  unfamiliar faces
• if the infants were smiling, they looked longer
  at the familiar faces and were less efficient in
  their discrimination during the paired preference
  test
• this means that positive emotions are related to
  a less analytical style of attending and most
  likely reflect right-brain processing

74
Emotional Development
Emotion Regulation

• Different patterns of communication between
  mothers and their male and female infants are
  related to gender differences in emotion
  regulation
• Six-month-old boys and girls were observed during
  face-to-face play, followed by maternal
  still-face
• during the still-face condition, boys were more
  likely than girls to show expressions of anger,
  to fuss, to gesture to be picked up, or to try to
  get out of the infant seat
• boys also were more likely to try to get the
  mothers attention by smiling and vocalizing to
  her
• boys also had a more positive interaction with
  the mother during the normal face-to-face period
  
• girls, on the other hand, spent more time gazing
  at objects and showing expressions of interest

75
Emotional Development
Emotion Regulation

• This study, however, does not reveal that boys
  are more social than girls but, rather, that boys
  are less able to regulate their emotions under
  stressful conditions
• The more positive interaction between mothers and
  sons during the normal condition may reflect a
  necessity to achieve co-regulated communication
  because boys are more upset when there are
  breakdowns in communication
• The girls were able to manage their emotions
  during the still face by becoming more observant
  of the objects in the environment

76
Emotional Development
Emotion Regulation

• The findings on emotion regulation show that
  infants of both genders are highly tuned into
  their emotional communication with others
• They are able to experience subtle differences of
  emotion as a function of how their attention is
  directed and whether the communication is
  co-regulated or disrupted
• In older children and adults, males and females,
  emotions are related to their early experiences
  in interpersonal communication

77
Emotional Development
Recognition of Emotional Expressions

• An infants ability to recognize and discriminate
  among different emotional expressions increases
  between 6 and 9 months
• Babies seem more capable of recognizing smiles
  than other expressions
• Infants were familiarized with pictures of faces
  with smiles of different inensities
• Later, they dishabituated to nonsmile expressions
  but not to smiles differing in intensity
• their ability at this age to distinguish between
  other expressions, such as fear and anger, is
  relatively poor
• 7-month-old infants whose mothers are high in
  their display of positive emotions are more
  likely to respond to negative facial expressions,
  perhaps because of their relative novelty

78
Emotional Development
Recognition of Emotional Expressions

• When facial expressions of emotions are combined
  with voices expressing those emotions,
  7-month-olds improve considerably in their
  ability to distinguish between emotions
• When faces are presented dynamically, that is,
  via videorecordings rather than still pictures,
  7-month-old infants ability to distinguish
  different types of expression also improves
• Infants also more readily recognize emotional
  differences if the facial expression is paired
  with a matching (compared to a mismatched)
  intonation pattern
• as when an angry expression is matched with an
  angry vs. happy tone of voice

79
Emotional Development
Recognition of Emotional Expressions

• Except for a happy expression, to which infants
  will respond with a smile, there is little
  evidence that infants of this age view facial
  expressions alone as meaningful emotion signals

80
Emotional Development
Recognition of Emotional Expressions

• Infants of this age prefer to look at faces
  judged by adults to be attractive, regardless of
  the race or gender of the faces they are looking
  at
• apparently, attractiveness, like recognition of
  particular people, can be inferred from more
  global features of the face that do not involve
  specific expressions
• Infants can also distinguish between the faces of
  children and adults

81
Emotional Development
Infant Temperament

• Temperament is a persistent pattern of emotion
  and emotion regulation in the infants
  relationship to people and things in the
  environment
• Researchers have identified a number of
  expressive and responsive dimensions along which
  infants vary
• on each dimension, some children are especially
  high or especially low, and such extreme cases
  have been referred to as easy or as difficult

82
Emotional Development
Infant Temperament

• Research done using twin studies and behavior
  genetics methods has found that some aspects of
  temperament are partly inherited
• Inhibition to the unfamiliar, as observed in the
  laboratory, and infant negative emotions, as
  rated by parents, both have some genetic
  influence
• negativity and inhibition both appear early in
  life and are persistent characteristics in 5 to
  10 of all infants up until at least the ages of
  5 to 7 years
• in addition, similar proportions of persistently
  inhibited children are found in different
  countries and even in infant monkeys, which
  further suggests some genetic contribution

83
Emotional Development
Infant Temperament

• One long-term study found that infants who were
  the most inhibited at 4 months, when they were
  teenagers, were more likely to be subdued in
  unfamiliar situations, to have a dour mood, to
  report more anxiety, and to have an overactive
  sympathetic nervous system response
• Another study found that adults who were
  inhibited as infants showed a higher activation
  in the amygdala (the part of the limbic system
  responsive to fear) when viewing pictures of
  unfamiliar faces than adults who were not
  inhibited as infants
• This fear of new faces reflects the persistence
  of social anxiety in inhibited individuals

84
Emotional Development
Infant Temperament

• According to both Rothbart and Kagan, temperament
  is rooted in biological processes but not
  necessarily inherited. For these researchers,
  behavioral characteristics called temperamental
  must be associated with specific central nervous
  system (CNS) and autonomic nervous system (ANS
  sympathetic-arousal and parasympathetic-relaxation
  ) activity
• In this view, temperament is a somatic pattern,
  involving both mind and body
• Infants and children who have difficulties with
  attention and emotion regulation -- those rated
  as highly reactive, emotional, inattentive, or
  inhibited -- have different patterns of activity
  in the prefrontal cortex compared to
  well-regulated infants

85
Emotional Development
Infant Temperament

• For example, inhibition is related to brain wave
  and heart rate patterns as well as to stress
  responses to frustration
• Physiological stress responses to frustration,
  such as heart rate acceleration, cortisol
  secretion, and sympathetic nervous system
  activation, are present at an early age for some
  inhibited infants and may persist for periods of
  up to 1 year

86
Emotional Development
Infant Temperament

• Some research has shown that infant temperament,
  and its associated physiological features, is
  correlated with parental personality
• infants who are more inhibited, for example, are
  more likely to have parents who are introverted,
  shy, and anxious
• also, persistent infant inhibition and high
  levels of negativity are related to lower scores
  on maternal adaptation to pregnancy, maternal
  sensitivity to the infant after birth, and
  maternal self-esteem
• mothers who rate infant cries as more aversive
  are more likely to rate their infants as
  difficult
• These findings, while they suggest that parents
  play a role in the development of infant
  temperament, do not necessarily rule out a
  partial genetic explanation for inhibition, since
  parents and infants could both share similar
  genetic make-ups.

87
Emotional Development
Infant Temperament

• Another finding that may call the genetic
  explanation into question is that children do not
  necessarily exhibit continuity of temperament
• inhibited children may, with appropriately
  sensitive child rearing, eventually lose their
  extreme sensitivity
• normal children may become more inhibited in
  extremely stressful environments

88
Emotional Development
Infant Temperament

• Extreme fussiness at birth predicts later
  emotionality in full-term infants
• Fussiness at birth is not related to later
  behavior in premature infants
• the stress of premature birth may have made it
  impossible to assess the infants temperament at
  the time of bir