Developmental Journal #2

           Last weekend as I was babysitting the two little boys I routinely watch social referencing occurred. The boys are 5 and 3; the oldest one is a little anxious and needs a lot of reassuring and the youngest one is a wild child with no fear of anything.

            The boys and I were outside playing in their blow-up pool when the youngest one began to stand on the side of the pool and jumping into the water. He routinely does this type of acrobats so I wasn’t too worried about the consequences, as crazy as it looked. After he completed several flying leaps from the side of the pool into the water the oldest boy stood on the side of the pool and then glanced back at me for a reassurance. He was social referencing.  I chuckled to myself because this is something he often does I just never had a name for it before. He stands back and watches his youngest brother do crazy stunts a few times. Then after he sees that his brother is ok, he decides try it for himself. Then he looks to an adult to reassure him that it is ok to try. The smiling look on my face and my verbal assurance allowed him to know that it was ok for him to jump into the water, which he did. The acrobats continued the rest of the afternoon.

Article Summary: Event Categorization in Infancy: Renee Baillargeon, Su-hua Wang

            This article focuses on early infant cognition, mainly their ability to sort information about their physical world into categories.  The categories studied in this article were about things that can happen to objects such as containment and occlusion. Containment is described as an object being put inside another object and occlusion is described as an object being hidden by another object.  The article suggests that infants have certain expectations about physical events that occur.

            The first series of experiments that were conducted looked at height in occlusion and containment. An object was lowered behind and occluder and then behind a containment. In the expected event the occluder and container were as tall as the object, but in the unexpected event the occluder and container were only half as tall as the object.  The infants that witnessed each event, but they did not look as long at the expected event as they did the unexpected event in the occlusion trial. This suggests that the object not being hidden by the occluder surprised them.  Height occlusion and containment are two different categories and infants do not generalize across the two even though they look similar in physical characteristics. Similar experiments revealed that it is not until about 7.5 months in age when infants begin to consider height when they are predicting events. Also it is not until about 12 months that infants consider the height of an object and whether it can fully covered or not.

            Another experiment discussed in this article looked at transparency in occlusion and containment.  In this experiment infants looked at either a transparent occluder or a transparent container. A shorter object was lowered behind a screen into the container or behind the occluder. When the screen was dropped it revealed either the transparent container or the transparent occluder. In the expected event the object was visible through the transparent occluder or container. In the unexpected event the object was not visible. The results of this experiment showed that infants looked longer at the unexpected occlusion event. At 7.5 month of age infants realize than an object placed behind a transparent occluder should remain visible, but it is not until about 10 months of age to do they realize that an object should also remain visible in a container.

            Infants can also be primed to attend to relative heights and objects. The infants were first exposed to the event as an occlusion event where the occluder was slid in front of the objects. The occluder was removed and the object was covered with a container lowered over top of it. The infants looked longer at the unexpected event, which suggested that the priming of the infants to attend to height information helped them determine the violation in the unexpected. When reviewing an event infant will place their knowledge of what is happening into a category and then review the information in the categories.

            This article brings up an interesting idea that infants sort information about their world into categories.  I wonder if the categories develop as an infant becomes habituated to an event occurring in their physical world? If an infant can consistently see and object through a transparent occluder then they become habituated to the object always being there. As the experiment is being conducted the infant does not attend to the event as long because they have been habituated to objects being visible in their physical world. It is not something new. When the object fails to be visible behind a transparent occluder they attend longer because it is an unexpected event. They haven’t been habituated to this event.

Developmental Journal 1

           This past holiday weekend, I spent a lot of time with family. I have two nephews, one is 3 and the other is 9. I also have a niece that is 8 weeks old. The entire weekend I watched them play and tried to look at what they were doing so that I could write a developmental blog post about something. I don’t normally blog because I don’t really think I have much to say, but I thought watching my family might give me a good topic. There is nothing like using family as study subjects.  With my Berk book in hand I watched their every move.

After watching their actions all weekend I decided to write about something very basic that can be found in the first few chapters of Infants, Children. and Adolescents. Operant conditioning of my niece’s smiling.  Since this weekend was the first time I had seen her in a few weeks, it was my first opportunity to see all the new additions to her repertoire of things she does. Not that there are that many because she is only 8 weeks old, but social smiling is always a pleasurable addition. As I laid her on the floor and began to make eye contact and smile and talk to her, she smiled back. We played this smiling game back and forth for a few minutes until she began distracted by something else. The stimulus of each of us smiling has reinforced the other to smile back. 

This addition of social smiling shows me that her development is moving along. As much as I love her being the cute little baby that she is, I can’t wait to see how else she develops.