Two to Five Months

1. Two to FiveMonths Fogel Chapter 6 Created by Ilse DeKoeyer-Laros, Ph.D.

2. Overview Chapter 6 • Physical and Motor Development • Perceptual Development • Cognitive Development • Emotional Development • Family and Society Experiential Exercises Co-regulating with Baby

3. Introduction • Around 6-8 weeks: first major developmental transition • motor movements more purposeful and deliberate • perception more acute • waking time and attention span increase rapidly • able to establish and maintain eye contact, demanding crying wanes, and social smile emerges • These changes lead to longer adult-infant interactions & the beginnings of social play

4. Physical Development • At birth, most infants are 19 to 21 inches in length & weigh between 7 and 8 pounds • boys are slightly longer & heavier than girls • By 6 months, height increases by a factor of 1.5, while weight increases by a factor of 2 • Individual differences become larger with age • as infants get older, their height becomes a better predictor of their adult height

5. Physical Development Growth is asynchronous – different parts of the body grow at different rates, and growth spurts occur at different times in each body region

6. Physical Development • By 3 months, • infants can sleep for longer periods before waking up and are more likely to sleep through the night • about half of their sleep time is in REM sleep.; this percentage decreases gradually (in adults, only 20% of sleep is REM sleep)

7. Motor Development • Changes along with physical development • Areas: • control over posture • locomotion • movements of the hands & arms • Video Examples on YouTube: • unsuccessful eye-hand coordination: www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDH1ZWqQNlU • successful reach & grasp: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZRIXMPBiMA • successful hand-hand transfer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cs5n8GekMC4

8. Motor Development

9. Motor Development A baby’s ability to perform a motor skill depends on two factors • the difficulty of the task • supports & resources in the environment Picture from: http://babyparenting.about.com/od/photogallery/ig/Baby-and-Toddler-Photo-Gallery/Zoe-Cosette--4-months.htm

10. Motor Development The difficulty of the task • easier tasks are mastered first: • objects with graspable appendages vs. balls & cubes • small vs. large objects • between 2 and 6 months, hand & arm movements • become more adapted to the size & shape of an object • become more coordinated with eye gaze • are related to emotional state: more likely to point when alert & attentive

11. Motor Development Supports & resources in the environment • during social play with objects, adults help infants to practice budding motor skills • adults hold infants in postures that are most conducive to the execution of motor skills • upright babies attend more to the environment, while supine babies are more likely to look at their mothers • infants in upright supine positions are more likely to reach for objects within their reach

12. Motor DevelopmentCultural differences • In Mali, mothers put babies through workout • training in sitting & standing, muscle stretching, suspending babies by their arms and legs • many African babies have advanced motor coordination compared to Caucasian babies • Navaho infants spend many hours strapped tightly onto cradle boards • motor development is slower than that of other groups

13. Motor Development In summary • motor and physical development in the first half year is the result of a systems interaction between infants, adults, and the environment. • the ability to perform a coordinated task is based on three systemic factors:

14. Perceptual Development There is a major shift in perceptual development between 2 and 5 months infants begin to recognize & prefer meaningful patterned stimuli

15. Perceptual DevelopmentVisual Pattern Perception The ability to perceive whole patterns increases dramatically around 3 months • infants dishabituate when a totally novel figure is introduced but not when a different view of the familiar figure is shown • they scan figures drawn with dashed or dotted lines as if they were drawn with a solid line

16. Perceptual DevelopmentVisual Pattern Perception: Faces • They prefer faces from their own ethnic-racial group over faces from a different group & attractive faces over less attractive ones • They can recognize a smile • By 3 months, infants can differentiate familiar from unfamiliar faces & prefer faces over nonface stimuli

17. Perceptual DevelopmentVisual Perception of Moving Objects • Young infants look longer at moving faces and patterns than at static ones • By 3-4 months, infants perceive moving objects as whole units • By using movement cues, 4-month-old infants are aware that objects are solid and that they take up their own space

18. Perceptual DevelopmentVisual Perception of Moving Objects Infants also detect complex patterns of motion • 3- to 5-month-olds prefer to look at normal walkers or runners over inverted or biologically impossible ones

19. Perceptual Development the infant is able to perceive meaningful wholes because human infants are predisposed to finding the similarities and differences between things (p. 276)

20. Perceptual DevelopmentAuditory Perception • Infants recognize and prefer their mothers’ voices at birth • By 4 months, they prefer speech to nonspeech sounds • Infants seem able to detect different emotions expressed in the voice earlier than they can see differences between facial expressions • in one study, 5-month-olds listened longer to positive than to negative vocalizations & smiled more to approving voices, while they frowned more to voices expressing disapproval

21. Perceptual DevelopmentAuditory Perception Infants at 4 months like music • they look more toward consonant than dissonant music • they show more attention to maternal singing than to motherese • they can remember songs for at least a week without hearing them in between • they prefer being sung lullabies over recorded music • they attend more to their own bodies during lullabies and to the singer during play songs

22. Perceptual DevelopmentCross-modal Perception “The ability to integrate information coming from at least two sensory modalities” • by 3 months, infants can localize sounds better if they have visual cues, compared to a sound heard in the dark or made from behind a screen • after about 4 months, infants expect sights and sounds to “go together” & they perceive objects as coherent wholes

23. Cognitive Development Cognition: the processing of perceived information • includes: learning, memory, and the ability to mentally compare different situations (similarities & differences) Between 2-5 months, important developments take place in perceiving, habituating, learning, and remembering

24. Cognitive DevelopmentHabituation • Between 2-5 months, infants improve in speed of information processing • related to brain development & ability to focus on familiar tasks • by 3 months, infants usually habituate within 1½ to 2 minutes; by 6 months, this drops to 30 seconds • Speed of habituation is an early index of cognitive differences • it is a fairly good predictor over a period of 4 or 5 months (but not over longer terms)

25. Cognitive DevelopmentHabituation – Individual Differences Infants who habituate fast at 3 months are more likely to habituate fast at 6 months • faster habituators tend to have parents who stimulate their ability to focus visual attention & are more efficient in their information processing • slow habituators are more likely to have perinatal risk factors, illness, malnutrition, and poor state control

26. Cognitive DevelopmentMemory • From birth, infants have short-term memories lasting several hours or days • Long-term memory: by 3 months, infants can remember situations for up to 2 weeks • this has been tested in the mobile experiment, by Dr. Rovee-Collier and her colleagues Picture from: http://www.psichi.org/images/site_pages/rovee_fig1a.jpg

27. Cognitive DevelopmentMemory • Mobile experiment • Babies were placed in cribs with brightly colored mobiles overhead & trained for 15-20 minutes of training • Experimenters decided that they would move the mobile if the baby kicked with either the right or the left foot • The mobile was moved more the harder the infant kicked • Infants who were tested less than 2 weeks after training managed to repeat the same leg movements • After a delay of more than 2 weeks, infants behaved as if they had never seen the mobile

28. Cognitive DevelopmentLong-Term Memory • Studies suggest that infants can remember for an indefinite period, so long as they continue to receive non verbal reminders of the early situation • In one study, infants were given a reminder 24 hours before 2 weeks had elapsed since their original training • this was effective in helping the infants remember the earlier procedure as much as 4 weeks after training • However, when retested in different situations, infants are less likely to remember the event • incl. different cribs; same cribs with different colored bumpers; different mobiles; different odors or music in the room

29. Cognitive DevelopmentLong-Term Memory Lack of stability in the environment may have negative consequences for cognitive development • In a mobile-kicking study, the experimenters changed the mobile during the training phase • Infants who did not cry when the mobile was changed could easily reactivate the kicking, but infants who cried could not

30. Cognitive DevelopmentLong-Term Memory These findings • suggest that infants remember whole situations, including the emotions, and the specific sights, sounds, and smells of the surrounding environment • suggest that infants have a sense of self-history –the experience that the past can be connected to the present by means of recreating one’s own actions in similar situations • call for a reevaluation of the common observation that people do not remember their experiences as infants, a phenomenon known as infantile amnesia

31. Cognitive DevelopmentLong-Term Memory Can we remember experiences from infancy? • One would have to be in almost exactly the same situation and the same emotional state as during the original experience • Since this is unlikely, adults and older children are unlikely to be able to retrieve early memories for specific events • People may have memories of early infancy, but because it is difficult to replicate the exact context, they may be unable to locate the memories in a specific time and place

32. Cognitive DevelopmentLong-Term Memory Can we remember experiences from infancy? • “Reaching in the dark” (Clifton et al.) • 2½-year-olds who had the experience of reaching for objects in the dark when they were 6 months of age were better at this task than children who did not have this experience, even though it is unlikely that these children remembered the actual experience of doing this when they were 6 months old • “Still Face” (Bornstein et al.) • 2½-year-olds who had experienced a “still-face” experiment at 5 months looked less at a photo of the person who had done the still-face compared to two other photos, while other 2½-year-olds showed no preference between these faces

33. Cognitive DevelopmentLong-Term Memory Can we remember experiences from infancy? • These studies support the idea of participatory memories (see Ch. 2) of early infancy, reported by people during somatic awareness and psychotherapeutic encounters • It may be possible to experience a feeling, an odor, a body posture, or a pattern of movement without remembering a specific time or place when it first occurred Picture from: www.globalsomatics.com/about/faculty-bios.htm

34. Cognitive DevelopmentPiagetian Perspectives Piaget viewed infant actions as adaptations to the environment that involve the whole infant • Sensorimotor Stage I (newborn period) • the majority of the infant’s actions are in the form of reflexes to adapt to the environment • Sensorimotor Stage II (about 1 to 5 months) • infants begin to act more purposefully – they are able to recognize the connections between their own behavior & events in the environment Picture from: http://streebgreebling.blogspot.com/2006_11_01_archive.html

35. Cognitive DevelopmentPiagetian Perspectives Sensorimotor Stage II (about 1 to 5 months) – primary circular reactions • repetitive movements in which the infant focuses on his or her own actions • by 2 to 3 months, the baby can recognize simple connections between behavior & its effect, and will repeat the same behavior many times, often with great delight • infants at this stage do not appear to be interested in the object for its own sake Picture from: babyparenting.about.com/od/photogallery/ig/Baby-and-Toddler-Photo-Gallery/Zoe-Cosette--3-months.htm

36. Cognitive DevelopmentPiagetian Perspectives According to Piaget, the meaningof a particular object or person to the infant isthe action and experiencethe child brings to it. (p. 282) For example, a rattle means “graspable, seeable, suckable”

37. Cognitive DevelopmentPiagetian Perspectives Sensorimotor Stage II (about 1 to 5 months) • infants’ actions are not intended to explore the object, but to experience the effects of their own behavior • this suggests that infants are developing a sense of self-agency, the feeling that they are a causal agent that can successfully affect one’s own body & environment • Later in this stage, infants begin to combine different primary circular reaction schemes into more unified behavior patterns • for example, visually guided reaching at about 4 months

38. Cognitive DevelopmentPiagetian Perspectives Sensorimotor Stage II (about 1 to 5 months) • Babies in Stage II have the ability for cross-modal perception; their memories are integrated wholes of sights, sounds, smells, and movements • This suggests that infants have a sense of self-coherence – the feeling that they and the objects around them are integrated whole that have distinct boundaries

39. Cognitive DevelopmentPiagetian Perspectives Sensorimotor Stage II (about 1 to 5 months) • One aspect of self-agency and self-coherence at this age is the experience of contingency (see Ch. 5) • In one study (Watson, 1973), the movements of a mobile were linked to an infants’ head presses on an automatic pillow • if infants discovered that the mobile would move with their head presses, they usually smiled and cooed • if the pillow inconsistently rewarded head presses, infants became frustrated and distressed

40. Cognitive DevelopmentPiagetian Perspectives In sum, • In early infancy, exploration, cognition, and motor behavior are all part of the same underlying developmental process • Primary circular reactions create powerful motivations for babies to become engaged in the environment • especially when adults create highly ritualized and repetitive situations as in feeding, playing, bathing, and diapering • Babies of this age do not enjoy deviations from the routines, which makes it difficult for them to adapt quickly to new caregivers

41. Emotional DevelopmentEmotional Expression & Experience Three related topics: • emotion expression • emotion experience: the inner world of feelings • emotion regulation: self-control over emotions Picture from: babyparenting.about.com/od/photogallery/ig/Baby-and-Toddler-Photo-Gallery/Anya--3-and-a-half-months.htm

42. Emotional DevelopmentEmotional Expression & Experience Distress, anger & wariness • One-month-olds’ functional expressions are primarily related to the emotion of distress: crying, generally with eyes closed • By 4 months • infants can still show distress • they also cry with open eyes, looking at their parent, an expression that has been interpreted as anger • See Video Example at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmgceSSnhTE • they also show “wary” or hesitant expressions by turning or looking away from unpleasant or confusing situations Picture from: video.yahoo.com/watch/1171950/4194428

43. Emotional DevelopmentEmotional Expression & Experience Attention & enjoyment • One-month-olds show a range of expressions between alertness and drowsiness; they have difficulty switching attention • Around 2 months, infants become more complex & animated and better coordinated with events in the environment • Infants learn cognitive tasks more slowly when smiling, which shows that smiling corresponds to a non-analytical emotional experience

44. Emotional DevelopmentEmotional Expression & Experience After 2 months, babies also develop new expressions of attention and enjoyment • look for longer periods & can more easily shift gaze from one thing to another (related to brain development) • more complex expressions of attention • suggests that the infant is also developing different attention-related emotional experiences such as concentration, excitement, and astonishment

45. Emotional DevelopmentEmotional Expression & Experience Attention & enjoyment • Smiling during face-to-face interaction develops between 2-5 months • By 3 months, infants show multiple types of smiles that communicate different positive emotional experiences non-Duchenne smile Duchenne smile • Duchenne smiles are likely to occur during mother-infant face-to-face play when the infant is held upright and is able to see the mother smiling and talking

46. Emotional DevelopmentEmotional Expression & Experience Attention & enjoyment • The play smile – an extremely wide-open mouth and dropping of the jaw – is observed when infants are held closer to the mother, kissed, or tickled • About 15% of smiling is followed immediately by looking away from the social partner • Some researchers have interpreted this as an early manifestation of “coyness,” an emotion that may indicate an awareness of self in interaction with others (Reddy, 2000)

47. Emotional DevelopmentEmotional Expression & Experience Attention & enjoyment • During the first 2 months, vocalizations are of three sorts: cry, discomfort, and “vegetative” • After 2 months, two kinds of non-distress vocalizations appear • Speech-like sounds, such as cooing, are produced in the front of the mouth and have a more resonant quality – increase between 2 and 5 months • Video Example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTjIXHlB-m0 • Non-speechlike sounds: produced in the back of the mouth, lack projection, and have a more nasal quality – decline between 2 and 5 months

48. Emotional DevelopmentEmotional Expression & Experience According to the dynamic systems theory of emotion (see Ch. 2), emotion is closely related to the social communication system • For example, different types of communication (e.g., different types of play) require different forms of facial communication & will be accompanied by different types of internal feelings • In specific types of communicative situations, infants show organized patterns of expressive movements • e.g., positive engagement, passive withdrawal, active protest

49. Emotional DevelopmentEmotional Regulation • During the first 4 months, increases in emotion regulation are shown by • a decrease in crying • an ability to easily shift gaze from one thing to another • mastery of continuous and repeated bouts of smiling • smiling is a relaxation response, and it seems to be a way of reducing arousal without looking away from the situation. • Infants can now handle a wider variety of stimulation with more abrupt changes

50. Emotional DevelopmentEmotional Regulation • sensorimotor skills • infants can calm themselves when they can get their hand into their mouth & keep it there • movements such as reaching for an object can calm them down • caregivers Contributors to emotion regulation