Summary of the course Infancy at Maastricht University. This course is part of the Master Developmental Psychology. It is a course summary of all the literature from the whole course.
The summary is about the development of infants, what affects the development of infants, and how you can measure ...
Contents
Task 1 – Measuring Infants .................................................................................................................. 2
What are the differences between the methods/results from Darwin and Piaget? ................ 2
What are the different methods and how do they work? .......................................................... 3
What is the optimal method for measuring infants? ERP ............................................................. 8
Task 2 – Prenatal Exposure ............................................................................................................... 12
What are the critical periods during prenatal development? When are you most sensitive
to teratogens/external factors?.................................................................................................... 12
What are teratogens and what effects do they have? Which syndromes are caused by
teratogens? ..................................................................................................................................... 14
How do we measure the impact of prenatal exposure to teratogens? What are the
methodological issues? ................................................................................................................. 20
Task 3 – From Perception to Cognition ............................................................................................ 23
Visual perception in neurotypical development........................................................................ 23
Visual perception in children with ASD ........................................................................................ 27
Haptic perception .......................................................................................................................... 30
What are the methods to investigate development of visual context perception? ............. 32
How is human intelligence connected to bipedal walking? .................................................... 32
Task 4 – Agents that Act on the World ............................................................................................. 33
What are primitive reflexes, and which ones are there? ........................................................... 33
How do primitive reflexes develop in TD children and how in nontypically developing
children? .......................................................................................................................................... 34
What is the relationship between cerebral palsy and reflexes? ............................................... 37
How can infants predict the world around them? And how do we know they can? .......... 38
Task 5 – Development of Face Recognition ................................................................................... 42
What is the innate cortical face module? What is the two-process model?.......................... 42
What do face ERPs look like? ........................................................................................................ 44
To what extent do the data from the Johnson experiment support which theory? .............. 46
How is face recognition/processing measured? ........................................................................ 46
Task 6 – Object Reality ...................................................................................................................... 53
What is the evidence supporting object permanence? ........................................................... 53
How do you measure object permanence? .............................................................................. 57
How does the continuity principle impact the infant’s perception of reality? ....................... 60
Task 7 – Gaze and Social Cognition ................................................................................................ 66
How do joint attention and social cognition develop in infants? ............................................ 66
,INFANCY
How does eye gazing affect social cognition? .......................................................................... 68
How is gaze perception impacted by developmental disorders? .......................................... 69
What are the biological underpinnings of social cognition? .................................................... 71
How do we measure the development of social cognition? ................................................... 72
Task 8 – Language Development and Delays ................................................................................ 77
How does language develop in the first year? .......................................................................... 77
How do we measure language development?......................................................................... 80
What are the neurological underpinnings of language development? ................................. 82
Task 9 – Low Birth Weight .................................................................................................................. 86
How do low birth weight infants develop? And how does low birth weight impact
behavior? ........................................................................................................................................ 86
What could inactivity in infancy be indicative of? .................................................................... 89
What is childhood disintegrative disorder and to which case could it be linked? ................ 90
What is the link between prematurity and psychopathology? ................................................ 91
1
,INFANCY
Task 1 – Measuring Infants
* What are the differences between methods/results from Darwin and Piaget?
* What are the different methods and how do they work?
* What is the optimal method for measuring infants?
What are the differences between the methods/results from Darwin and Piaget?
• Darwin: naturalistic observation (19th century)
o Baby diaries
o He made observational biographies of his children
o Wrote down about seeing, hearing, anger, etc.
o However, he made some mistakes about hearing and seeing:
§ It has become clear with experimentation that children can
show preference for their mother’s face within hours after birth,
and that newborn infants can localize sounds at birth
§ Darwin was unable to detect sound recognition in his son for 4
months, so that shows the weakness of observations
o The use of baby biographies has some drawbacks
§ Bias – observant may only note anecdotes supporting their own
theories, leads to unsystematic observations
o Advantages of baby biographies
§ Biographer can give a detailed account of subtle changes in
behavior because of their intimate knowledge of the child
§ Observations can lead to the production of new theories of child
development, which can then be given a more systematic
(often experimental) test
• So, combination would be good
• Piaget: experimentational (20th century)
o Clinical method – combination of observation and loosely structured
experimentation
o Piaget would note an interesting behavior and then, in order to
understand it better, he varied the task to note any changes in the
infant’s response
o He was one of the first to begin systematic experimentation of infants’
development
• Key issues in infancy research
o Nature/nurture debate
§ Interaction of the two, without both no development can occur
o Stability vs. change
§ Infancy is characterized by rapid change; the question is
whether differences between infants remain the same (stable)
or do differences between infants change?
o Passive or active development
§ The infant and the child are active in shaping their own
development
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What are the different methods and how do they work?
Behavioral methods
• Pros of behavioral designs: relatively quick to administer compared to
functional methods
• Cons of behavioral designs:
o Behavioral data obtained in infants younger than five months are often
difficult to interpret
§ It leaves space for subjective interpretation
§ It does not provide any information about the timing and the locus
of cognitive mechanisms, which leaves a gap between the
understanding of the black box
§ Does not allow researchers to gain insights into the neural
mechanisms underlying early cognition à relation between brain
development and corresponding emerging cognitive abilities
remains unknown
o Methodological concerns
§ Failures to address a critical control condition
§ Failures to replicate the original findings à difficult to isolate the
critical difference between studies
Basic methods in infant research
• Standardized developmental tests (like Bayley)
• Experimental designs
o With experimental and control conditions
o Groups based on characteristics of interests (e.g., prematurely born
infants compared to full-term infants under the same controlled
conditions)
• Reliability, validity, and generalizability of findings are important
• Behavioral methods are used to evaluate sensorial discriminative abilities
and memory in both the visual and auditory modality
o To investigate if a certain ability exists: if the infant can complete a task
designed to investigate the presence of a determinate of cognitive
function, then it is assumed that the infant has the ability
Methods for testing sensory capacities
• Tracking behavior à earliest signs that a baby can see, used to determine an
infant’s early visual integrity, also use for auditory assessment
• Habituation à to test sensory abilities by varying specific characteristics of the
familiar and novel stimuli
• High-amplitude sucking à has been used in habituation procedures to
determine if infants can tell the difference between two sounds, when sucking
declines, it is assumed that the infant has habituated to the redundant
stimulus; can also be used for operant conditioning (if you suck more intense,
you get a happy stimulus)
• Preference paradigms à infants have a tendency to attend to the more
complex of two novel stimuli, used to study visual acuity
• Conditioned head turning à to assess hearing thresholds and auditory
discrimination in young infants; if the infant turns toward the sound, an
animated toy beside the speaker is activated to reward the head-turn
response; hearing threshold is obtained by comparing head turns toward the
speaker in the presence vs absence of the sound; can also be used to find if
3
,INFANCY
infants can detect a change in sounds (e.g., from one rhyming sound to
another)
Can you tell how smart an infant is?
• Standardized assessment
Bayley Scales of Infant Development (BSID) to assess general cognitive
level of infants
o Contains Mental Development Index (MDI) and Psychomotor
Development Index (PDI)
o Appropriate for ages 1-42 months, mostly observational but some
standard materials
o Mostly used to provide information about development level or as a
measure of the effects of intervention
o Cannot predict later outcomes very well
• Rate of habituation
o Indication of brain integrity and fundamental cognitive competence à
older infants need less time to habituate than younger infants
o Can better predict later outcomes
What do infants learn and remember?
• Habituation and conditioning procedures used to explore this question
• Classical conditioning
o Shows the types of stimulus information the youngest infants learn, how
rapidly they learn and how long they remember
• Expectancy violation
o For studying young infant’s understanding of the physical world
because they require only visual tracking and no other motor responses
à researchers can observe whether infants anticipate the next
location, indicating that they understand that there is a sequence and
are able to predict an object’s next appearance
• Contingency or operant learning
o To see if infants understand that certain behaviors have consequences
o Contingency methods assess whether infants’ behaviors increase and
decrease systematically, indicating learning of the relation between
behavior and the rewarding consequences
• Imitation
o To see if infants learn how to act in the world
o Imitation shows what infants regard as interesting or important
behavior, as well as their ability to perceive and process similarities
between their own actions and those of others
o Not yet well known whether neonatal imitation requires a social model
and what the minimum stimulus features required to stimulate matching
are
• Memory
o When memory is tested using contingency learning procedures, the
time between initial learning of the contingency and the memory test is
varied
o Reminders (reactivation) as well as the opportunity to briefly rehearse
the contingent response (reinstatement) allow infants to maintain
learned information for periods of months or more
Socio-emotional behavior
• How do infants learn to interact with others?
o Most studies focus on mother-infant interaction
4
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o Then interaction is coded as it occurs, or it is videotaped and later
coded for a variety of mother and infant behaviors of interest
o Also, more global categories of behavior can be rated, for example
the maternal emotional expression
o Still face procedure à to see how infants react when the expectation
of exaggerated facial expressions from (usually) the mother is violated
o Desynchronized interaction à to examine the importance of
contingent quality of maternal interactions; infants detect this
disruption in maternal contingency rather quickly and become upset
• Attachment
o Strange situation à the mother serves as a secure base that the infant
will seek when stressed
o Social referencing à to study whether infants use maternal behavior
and signals to regulate their behavior; social referencing occurs when
the infant attends to and then behaves in a manner consistent with
mother’s message
§ Visual cliff à infants are more likely to cross the cliff when
mothers looked happy than when they looked fearful
• How do infants react to stressful events?
o Behavioral stress reactivity: infants will show different levels of distress in
response to a painful event (e.g., inoculation) à intensity of crying and
fretting and facial expressions are coded from videotapes
o Physiological responses à stress hormones (cortisol) and heart rate
changes
§ Cortisol measures have been associated with behavioral
inhibition, other temperamental qualities, insecure attachment,
and emotion regulation
o Heart rate changes à small number of sensors are placed on the
infant’s chest and a count of the heart rate is obtained
• Relation between measures
o Behavioral responses and physiological reaction to the same event are
not necessarily related; behavioral and physiological stress reactions
have different meanings and are likely to relate to development in
different ways
How do infants express emotions?
• Facial expressions à movements in the brow, eye/cheek, and mouth regions
of the face; videotaped
o Basic emotions (enjoyment, surprise, anger, fear, sadness, and disgust)
can be distinguished by these or similar distinctive patterns of facial
movements in infants and are observable from the opening weeks of
life
o Debate about the meaning of especially the negative ones (disgust
and anger) à can be combined with EEG or measuring heart rate and
cortisol to see how both relate to emotion in infants
§ What do the expressions really mean?
• Parent reports à measuring temperament in infancy by parent questionnaires
o Poor validity, test-retest, and interrater reliability
o Responses reflect what the mother thinks about the infant’s
temperament which is not necessarily objective
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• Observational methods
o Study the reactions to unfamiliar stimuli: colored toys, tape recordings
of voices, and unpleasant odors
o Indicate to what extent infants exhibit the temperamental quality of
being withdrawn and inhibited
When and how do infants develop a sense of themselves as individuals?
• Between 1 and 2 years
• Studies using mirrors, videotaped playback, photographs to see if there’s
visual recognition
o Mirror rouge task à rouge on the nose (touch your nose, not the mirror,
then you have a sense of self)
Structural methods
MRI
• Magnetic resonance imaging
• To quantify cortical folding and cortical thickness (able to draw depth maps
of cortical surface)
• Non-invasive
• Able to size total and regional cerebral volumes at different ages, depicting
the staggered time-course of the maturation of different cerebral structures
• MRI to preterm newborns has helped to reconstruct the emergence of fetal
cortical folding over a period critical to the human prenatal brain
development (26-36 weeks of gestational age) à able to describe the first
steps of the cortical sulcation process
• Fails to detect subtle forms of brain impairment, especially those concerning
white matter damage
DTI
• Diffusion tensor imaging
• Calculates apparent water diffusion coefficients and measures diffusion
anisotropy
• With that you can accurately describe the structural connectivity of different
cortical areas, white matter pathways
• Can finely differentiate subtle structural lesions in the early white matter
bundles in infants
Functional methods
+ They have enabled researchers to describe not only how the brain is but also how it
works when immersed in the sensorial environment
+ Disclosed new aspects of the maturation of CNS functioning as the basis for the
emergence of cognitive skills
+ Disclosed that instead of being due to the maturation of a specific area, cognitive
specialization would be the result of the strengthening of interactions between
several regions
EEG
• Electroencephalography
• Provides a direct index of brain functioning
• Good temporal resolution
• Important clinical tool for the study and diagnosis of different functional
neurological pathologies, such as epilepsy
• It is suggested that EEG changes seen in the maturing preterm infant relate to
the concurrent anatomical development of different brain structures
6
, INFANCY
o EEG pattern maturation occurs in a predictable time-linked fashion,
paralleling multiple, interconnected neuronal network organization
• Probably not the most appropriate tool for studying the role of experience in
cortical maturation: only general spontaneous brain functioning, not event-
related
ERPs
• Event-related potentials
• Small changes in electrical activity of the scalp, derived from EEG
• Changes are due to internal or external events
• Powerful tool for investigating the timing of specific cognitive processes
• Exogenous potentials
o In response to any kind of transient sensorial stimulation (e.g., click or a
flash) or a more complex stimulus (visual patterns or linguistic stimuli)
o Reflects the physical features of the perceived stimuli, such as intensity,
frequency, loudness presentation rate, etc.
o Are not affected (or only slightly) by cognitive variables such as
attention, motivation, etc.
• Endogenous potentials
o Reflect cognitive processing and are usually triggered by discrete
external and/or internal stimuli
o Independent of the physical parameters of the events of interests
o About cognitive processes (perception, memory, attention, language,
etc.)
o Odd-ball paradigm
§ Standard condition and deviant condition (rare stimuli)
§ Useful for indirectly and non-invasively measuring cortical
functioning in non-collaborative subjects like newborns and
infants, even when they are asleep
§ Used to investigate sensorial memory store, pitch discrimination,
phonological discrimination, phonological learning, and the
influence of sleep state on cognitive processing
§ Responses to odd-ball paradigm include mismatch negativity
(MMN)
o MMN
§ Evoked response reflecting a pre-attentive mechanism
underlying perceptive and memory (mnestic) functions
§ Stable response over a developmental timeline
• But the amplitude seems to be more susceptible to
developmental changes, since it is related to
maturational factors
• It is present from the second trimester of fetal life, since it
has been elicited in preterm babies in response to pitch
and speech sounds
§ Seems to strongly correlate with both the degree of maturation
as well as the adjunctive presence of prenatal or perinatal
pathologies
§ Results from MMN show that early environmental experience fails
to match the effects of longer intrauterine maturation, because
functional hemispheric asymmetries for pitch processing in
preterm newborns of less than 30 gestational weeks is absent,
and not in an older group (31-34 weeks)
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