Word: psychologists
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...crying by their babies (a controlled experiment in 1973 showed they could not), and they believe even more strongly that their babies can understand a parent's murmurings. And perhaps they can. Though children do not ordinarily say anything very elaborate before the age of one year, Psychologist Peter Eimas of Brown University has demonstrated that infants as young as one month can differentiate between sounds in virtually any language. They also have a "very sophisticated" ability to organize sounds into various categories. "A baby already knows which sounds communicate," says Eimas. "I've never heard a baby...
...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...