Word: psychologistic
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...available as a tool. The key element in that discovery was the baby's desire to imitate its mother's facial movements. Jean Piaget, the celebrated Swiss psychologist who pioneered in this field with extended studies of his own three children, declared that such imitations began only at about eight to twelve months. Earlier than that, he reasoned, the baby could not understand that its own face was similar to that of its mother...
...important ability to recognize categories. This was once thought to require language-how can the unnameable be identified?-but babies apparently can organize perceptions without a word. Psychologist Elizabeth Spelke of the University of Pennsylvania showed four-month-old babies a pair of films in which two toys bounced around on a surface in different ways, each with a corresponding sound track. She then played one sound track, and the babies were able to match the correct film to its sound. From the babies' "highly differentiated ability" to decide what goes with what, Spelke went on to deduce that...
...illusion of peril and crawled across the table. Now he refuses to budge past the illusionary end of the table, not even when his mother holds out a toy as a lure. "We know that this response is not related to the experiences they've had," says Psychologist Nancy Rader, "but we've found that it relates to the age at which the baby starts crawling, and we're trying to find...
...Harvard's Center for Cognitive Studies, infants as young as two weeks were confronted with a cube (or sometimes only the shadow of a cube) that began moving slowly toward them. When it seemed about to hit them, they showed what psychologists call "a strong avoidance-reaction pattern." They turned aside and squirmed and tried to avoid being struck, though they had no previous experience that would make them think that the approaching object would hit them. When such a cube or its shadow approached the babies on an angled path that would miss them, however, the babies followed...
These physical and social achievements have long been obvious: any mother can see them in her own children. What the new research demonstrates is that babies' mental growth can be as early and as striking as the rest of its development. Robert Cooper, a psychologist with Southwest Texas State University, is even testing a group of ten- to twelve-month-old children on their ability to recognize different numbers. They can master up to four, but he adds that "beyond four, there's some controversy." By showing his little subjects various groups of objects, Cooper demonstrates that they...