2008-03-03

The first wild man. Nature versus nurture. <font color="red">This is of course very limited in understanding. It is assuming that human society is a universal, which is not true -- it is a product of our minds and mutual agreements. So to really test this all out we would have to have very tightly controlled environments.</font>

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William James - an infant was a totally confused and helpless organism. He believed that babies had overwhelming sensations, one great blooming buzzing confusion, in contrast to the tranquilty of life in the womb. In the late 1920s, the behaviorist James Watson called the infant a liverly squirming living piece of flesh, and in the 1960s it was shown that babies cannot focus their eyes, or respond to pain -- they are wrong, apprently. Babies are able to perform interesting feats when they come into the world. A few minutes after birth, a newborn's eyes can turn in the direction of voices, searching for sounds it prefers, it can reach out a hand, it can turn its head to follow a moving face. New research is showing that babies are born with likes and dislikes, as early as 12 hours of age they smile at bannana, they recoil at the taste of shrimp, and they like vanilla. So infants are prepared to respond to female voices, they are lulled to sleep by the sound of a heart beat and can immediately recognize their mother's speech. Vision is less well developed. They are born 20/500 vision, which is far beyond legally blind. They do not have enough visual cortex connections. Both the cones and the v1 neurons will develop. A one-month old will detect a head, a 2 mo old will distinguish colors, and a 3 mo will bring distant objects into focus, and at 3 mo, a baby can detect contrast and expressions, such as different emotions on the face. Human infants may be much less helpless than previously believed.

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<font color="blue">Babies prefer novelty to familiarity</font>. This decreasing response to repetitive events is habituation. Dishabituation is how the baby distinguishes between different things. Measure heart rate to detect attention of the baby -- <font color="red">why not just do fMRI studies of the baby's prefrontal cortex?</font>. In 1958, a baby's preference for looking for something new -- silent speech. Babies prefer objects that have contours, complex ones over simple ones, and full faces over jumbled up partial faces. John Piaget was a contributor. Piaget did not use fancy lab equipment, but rather simple generalizations that yielded observations of the working of a child's mind. He used volume conservation to figure out if children would respond in a certain way. Children tend to develop mentally faster than they can learn to respond with their babies. 

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Professor Renee Begagon -- Baillargeon. The first and most fundamnetal is that objects continue to exist when hidden. Piaget claimed that 8 to 9 mo at which infants start to understand that objects continue to exist when hidden, and it's at 12 mo that objects not only exist, but contain their physical and spatial properties when hidden. This is one where they were running a car on a track, and then place a block on the track, but then move it when it is hidden, letting the car still run by, but the infant should think that the block would stop it. So if the infant is confused, then you know they know something is wrong. 

DeLoache -- symbol ability is important. <font color="red">Symbols and tokens and so on.</font><br />


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The Visual Cliff. One side of a plexiglass sheet is painted, the other side is transparent with a painted surface, creating the illusion of a drop. This baby, who has just begun to crawl, will cross the drop. From 8.5 mo, a fear of heights on the visual cliff, is made possible by the new experience of crawling. 

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Temperament - some babies are excitable and active, while others are calm and passive. Such temperaments exhibited at birth are biologically based. They are constitutional tendencies that can affect a child's personality. Jerome Kagen has been studying inheritable differences in bold and shy children. The general view is that a small proportion, Jerome Kagan, about 10 to 15% have a slight push to be very outgoing or with a slight bias towards being bias and vicious and cautious. There is no intellectual difference among the two groups. Biology is not destiny. Born shy does not mean a lifetime of shyness, later experiences can induce or remove shyness. Activity level determines shyness in some case ... but this can be modified by learning and training etc.

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Steven Soomi<br />
Nurturing foster-mothers seem to work well with shy infant monkeys, and eventually those infants become strong. But if you revert those resources, the shyness turns off.