The New Born - More Than Meets The Eyes

SURVEY QUESTION: What can newborn babies do?

- Neonate (newborn infant) will die if not cared for by adults. Samantha can see, hear,
smell, taste, and respond to pain and touch. Although their senses are less acute,
babies are very responsive. Samantha will follow a moving object with her eyes and will
turn in the direction of sounds.

Adaptive infant reflexes (Siegler, DeLoache, & Eisenberg, 2006):

● Grasping reflex - press an object in the neonate’s palm and she will grasp it with
surprising strength. Aids survival by helping infants avoid falling.
● Rooting reflex - turns towards touch on the cheek, helps infants find a bottle or a breast.
● Sucking reflex - rhythmic nursing helps her obtain needed food.
● Moro reflex - Hugging motion in response to abrupt changes or loud noises.

Motor Development
- the emergence of many basic abilities is closely tied to maturation, for example, as
Samantha learns motor skills, such as crawling and walking. Nevertheless, the order of
maturation is almost universal. For instance, Samantha will be able to sit without support
from David before she has matured enough to crawl. Infants around the world typically
sit before they crawl, crawl before they stand, and stand before they walk.

What about my weird cousin Na’vi who never crawled?

- a few children substitute rolling, creeping, or shuffling for crawling. A very few move
directly from sitting to standing and walking. Even so, their motor development is orderly.
Muscular control spreads in a pattern:
- Cephalocaudal - from head to toe
- Proximodistal - from the center of the body to the extremities

- Even if cousin Na’vi flunked Elementary Crawling, his motor development followed the
standard top-down, center-outward pattern (Piek, 2006).
- motor skills don’t simply “emerge.” With practice, babies “tune” their movements to be
smoother and more effective. Such learning is evident from the very first months of life
(Piek, 2006)

(insert yung pic ng bb na from fetal posture to walks alone)

Perceptual and Cognitive Development
- many people thought of newborn babies as mere bundles of reflexes, like the ones
previously described. But infants are capable of much more. Such mimicry obviously
aids rapid learning in infancy.

Infant imitation
- Psychologist Andrew Meltzoff makes facial gestures at an infant. The bottom row
records the infant’s responses. Videotapes of Meltzoff and of tested infants helped
ensure objectivity.

(insert pic nung guy whos making faces)

How intelligent are neonates?

- Babies are smarter than many people think. From an evolutionary perspective, a baby’s
mind is designed to soak up information, which it does at an amazing pace (Meltzoff &
Prinz, 2002).
- In the first months of life, babies are increasingly able to think, to learn from what they
see, to make predictions, and to search for explanations. For example:

❖ Jerome Bruner (1983) observed that 3- to 8-week-old babies seem to understand that a
person’s voice and body should be connected. If a baby hears his mother’s voice coming
from where she is standing, the baby will remain calm. If her voice comes from a
loudspeaker several feet away, the baby will become agitated and begin to cry.

❖ Robert Fantz’s device looking chamber:

(insrt pic figure 3.9 yung my blonde girl)

- In this innovative device, babies like Samantha, facing a lit area, reveal their visual
preferences and recognition abilities. Fantz discovered that even 3-day-old infants favor
complex patterns over simpler shapes. Over time, infants progress in object recognition,
distinguishing between animals by 9 months and achieving visual acuity comparable to
adults by 1 year. Neonates, drawn to faces about a foot away, particularly adore their
mothers' faces. Gaze direction becomes significant early on, with infants preferring direct
eye contact. The looking chamber experiments show infants spending more time on
human face patterns, emphasizing their fascination with familiar faces. As infants grow,
around age 2, their interests shift from faces to unusual objects, showcasing their active
engagement in understanding their surroundings. Jerome Kagan's study further
illustrates this shift, revealing infants' curiosity and need to comprehend the unexpected
Emotional Development
- General excitement is the only emotion newborn infants clearly express. Emotions are
“hardwired” by heredity and related to evolution.
- By the age of 8–12 months, however, infants smile more frequently when another
person is nearby ( Jones & Hong, 2001).
- This social smile is especially rewarding to parents. Infants can even use
their social smile to communicate interest in an object. On the other hand,
when new parents see and hear a crying baby, they feel annoyed, irritated, disturbed, or
unhappy.

Social Smile - Social smile Smiling elicited by social stimuli, such as seeing a
parent’s face.

- With dazzling speed, human infants are transformed from helpless babies to
independent persons. Emotions develop in a consistent order, starting with generalized
excitement in newborn babies.

Three of the basic emotions:

- Fear
- Anger
- Joy