Word: infantes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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These experiments demonstrated the infant's very early capacity for what psychologists call "intermodal perception"-that is, to combine the brain's perceptions of two different activities, in this case vision and muscular action, which is virtually the first form of thinking. Says Yale's Kessen: "The past 15 to 20 years have demonstrated that the child has a mind. The next several years will be used to find out how it works...
...University of Edinburgh, T.G.R. Bower and his associates have been conducting about 1,000 experiments a year on various infant abilities. One of their most startling claims is that babies can tell the gender of other infants they are looking at, and they prefer to look at those of their own sex. Bower made films of an infant boy and girl making various movements, and then deleted from the film a11 apparent signs of gender and even swapped their clothes. Some adult viewers had difficulty telling them apart...
...babies do any of the things they do is a matter of considerable complexity. Some theorists, like Thomas Verny, a Canadian psychiatrist who wrote The Secret Life of the Unborn Child, believe the infant begins learning behavior patterns while it is still in the uterus. Most experts, however, assume that the genes still carry messages that primitive humans once needed for survival. The so-called Moro reflex,* for example, which makes a newborn infant reach out its arms in a desperate grasping motion whenever it feels itself falling, implies some monkey-like existence at the dawn of time. Says Lewis...
...mark major periods of change: in brain developments, in various skills and perceptions, in sociability. At about two months, for example, the baby is awake much longer than it was, it smiles a lot and stares with fascination at a new discovery: its own hand. At eight months, the infant is acquiring the important sense of its separate identity, and even an understanding of what Piaget called "object permanence," the realization that an object hidden from sight is still there. It begins to develop fears of strangers and of separation from its parents. At twelve months, the golden...
Many of these ventures in infant education are fueled by eager parents who will try anything to give their children a head start. Similar experiments are arousing interest in those who work among the poor. Dr. Joseph Sparling, for example, has developed and published a series of 100 educational games at the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. These games, which range from specific subjects like language development to vague concerns like self-image, have been tried out with some success over the past five years in a federally funded program...