Infancy

PRESENTED BY:
IRFAN ULLAH (F2025)
ABID ALI (F2016)
MARIA IKRAM (F2003)
SYEDA RAFIA ALI (F2024)
SARAH YOUNAS (F2023)
 Physical Development in
Infancy
 Cephalocaudal Pattern
 The CEPHALOCAUDAL TREND is the postnatal growth from conception to 5 months
when the head grows more than the body.

 Proximidistal Pattern
 The PROXIMIDISTAL trend is the pre natal growth from 5 months to birth when the fetus
grows from the body outwards
 Height & Weight:

Its normal for new born babies to drop 5-10% of their body weight within a couple of weeks of birth.
 Breastfeed babies are typically heavier than bottle feed babies, through the first six months.
 In general, an infant's length increases by about 30% in the first five months.
 A baby's weight usually triples during the first year but slows down In the second year of life.
 Low percentage are not a cause for alarm as long as natural curve of steady development.
 Brain Development:

 Among the most dramatic changes in the brain in the first two years of life are the spreading
connections of dendrites to each other.

Myelination Or Myelinization:

 The process by which the axons are covered and insulated by layers of fat cells, begins pre-natally
and continues after birth.
 Motor Development:

 Along this aspects of motor development, infants and toddlers begin From
REFLEXES, to GROSS MOTOR SKILLS to FINE MOTOR SKILLS.

 Reflexes

 The new born has some basic reflexes which are, of course automatic, and
serve as survival mechanisms before they have the opportunity to learn.
1. Sucking Reflex

 It is initiated when something

 touches the root of infants mouth
 Infants have a strong sucking reflex
 The sucking reflex is very strong in some infants
 and they may need to suck on pacifier for comfort
 2. Rooting Reflex

 It's the most evident when an infants cheek is stroked.

 Baby responds by turning his/her head in the direction of the touch and opening their mouth for feeding.

3. Gripping Reflex
 Babies will grasp anything that is placed in their palm.
 The strength of this grip is strong ,
 and most babies can support their entire weight in their grip.
 4. Curling Reflex:

 When the inner sole of a baby's foot is stroked, the infant respond by curling his toes.
 When the outer sole of a baby's foot is stroked the infant will respond by spreading out their toes.

5. Startleormoro Reflex:
 Infants will respond to sudden sounds or movements by throwing their arms and legs out and
throwing their heads back
 Most infants will usually cry when startled and proceed to pull their limbs back into their bodies.
 6. Gallant Reflex:

 It is shown when an infants middle or lower back is stroked next to spinal cord.
 The baby will respond by curving his or her body toward the side which is being stroked.

7. Tonic Neck Reflex:

 It is demonstrated in infants who are placed on their abdomens.
 Whichever side the childs head is facing. The limbs on that side will straighten, while the
opposite limbs will curl.
 Gross Motor Skills

 It is always a source of excitement for parents to witness dramatic changes in the infants first
year of life.
 This dramatic motor development is shown in babies unable to even lift their heads to being
able to grab things out the cabinet, to chase the ball and to walk away from parent.
 Fine Motor Skills

 This skills is involve a refined use of the small muscle controlling the hand, fingers and
thumb.
 The development of this skills allows one to be able to complete tasks such as writing,
drawing, and buttoning.
 Fine motor skills are the ability to exhibit activities that involve precise eye-hand
coordination.
 The development of reaching and grasping becomes more refined with age.
 Infants show only crude shoulder and elbow movements, but later they show wrist
movements, hand rotation and coordination of thumb and forefinger.
 The new born senses the world into which he/she is born through his/her senses of
vision, hearing, touch, taste and smell.

Ideally as she advances physically his/her sensory and perceptual abilities also
develop.
Can New Born See?

 New borns vision is about 10 to 30 times lower than normal adult vision.
 By 6 months of age, vision becomes better and by the first birthday, the infants
vision approximates that of adult. (Banks&Salapatek 1983 cited by Santrock,
2002)
 Infants look different things for different lengths of time. In an experiment
conducted by Robert Fantz.(1963 cited by Santrock. 2002)
Can New Born Hear?

 The sense of hearing in an infant develops much before the birth of the baby.
 The infants sensory thresholds are somewhat higher than those of adult.

CAN NEW BORNS DIFFERENTIATE Others?

 In an experiment conducted by Mcfarlane(1975) "young infants who were breastfeed showed a clear
preference for smelling their mothers breast pad when they were 6 days old.
Can New Borns Feel Pain?

 They do feel pain.

 New born males show a higher level of cortisol (an indicator of stress) after a circumcision
than prior to the surgery addio, etal, 1997 cited by Santrock. 2002).

Do They Respond To Touch?

 Babies respond to touch. In the earlier part of motordevelopment, you learned that a newborn
automatically sucks an object placed in his/her mouth, or a touch of the cheek makes the
newborn turn his/her head toward the side that was touched in an apparent effort to find
something to suck.
Can New Born Distinguish The Different Taste?

 In a study conducted with babies only two hour old, babies made different facial expressions
when they tasted sweet, sour and bitter solutions (Rosentein and Oster, 1988, cited by
Santrock. 2002)
 When saccharin was added to the amniotic fluid of a near-term fetus, increased swallowing
was observed
 This indicates that sensitivity to taste might be present before birth.
Do Infants Relate Information Through Several Senses?

 INTERMODAL PERCEPTION is the ability to relate, connect and integrate

informationabout two or more sensory modalities such as vision and hearing.
 In a study conducted by Spelke and Owsley (1979) it was found out that as early as at
3 1/2 months old, infants looked more at their mother when they also heard her voice
and long at their father when they also heard his voice.
 This capacity for intermodal perception or ability to connect informationcoming through
various modes gets sharpened considerably through experience.
 Cognitive Development in
Infancy
Key features of Piaget’s theory of
cognitive development.
 Building blocks of understanding the world are schemes.
 Series of four universal stages- sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational,
and formal operational.
 At first, schemes are related to physical, or sensorimotor.
 Give a baby a new cloth book, he or she will touch it, mouth it or drop it.
 Assimilation child who sees a flying squirrel calls it a “bird” is assimilating it to his
existing scheme of bird.
 Child sees a flying squirrel and calls it “a bird with a tail,” he is beginning to
accommodate new knowledge, modifying his scheme of bird.
Piaget’s sensorimotor stages of cognitive
development

1. Substage 1: Simple reflexes

 child inborn reflexes determine the interaction to the world.
 Age-First month of life
 Sucking reflex causes the infant to suck at anything placed in lips.
 Provides the newborn with information about objects.
 Accommodate the way child is sucking whether a nipple is on a breast or a
bottle.
Sub stage 2: First habits and primary circular reactions

 Age-From 1 to 4 months
 Infants begin to coordinate what were separate actions into single, integrated
activities.
 An infant might combine grasping an object with sucking on it.
 Primary circular reactions are infants repetition of interesting actions
 That focus on the infant’s own body.
 When an infant first puts his thumb in his mouth and begins to suck,
Sub stage 3: Secondary circular reactions

 Age-From 4 to 8 months.
 Shifting thinking from themselves to act on the outside world.
 Secondary circular reactions are schemes regarding repeated actions
 That bring about a desirable consequence related to outside world.
 Infants begin to imitate the sounds made by others.
 Lead to the development of language and the formation of social relationships.
Sub stage 4: Coordination of secondary circular
reactions

 Age-From 8 to 12 months.
 Coordinating several schemes to generate a single act.
 An infant will push one toy out of the way to reach another toy that is lying.
 object permanence the realization that people and objects exist even when they
cannot be seen.
 They develop object permanence in this stage.
 Sub stage 5: Tertiary circular reactions

 Age-From 12 to 18 months
 Infants appear to carry out miniature experiments to observe the
consequences.
 Infants’ discoveries can lead to newfound skills
 Babies are scientist the world around them is their lab.
Sub stage 6: Beginnings of thought

 Age-From 18 months to 2 years

 The major achievement of Sub stage 6 is the capacity for mental representation.
 Mental representation an internal image of a past event or object
 Deferred imitation an act in which a person who is no longer present is imitated
by children who have witnessed a similar act
 Support of and critics of Piaget’s theory

 Robert Siegler suggests that cognitive development proceeds not in stages but in
“waves.”
 Piaget’s notion that cognitive development is grounded in motor activities e.g
Studies of children born without arms and legs.
 To bolster infants are incapable of mastering the concept of object
permanence.
 Renée Baillargeon, object permanence may reflect more about infants’ memory
deficits.
 Humans are born with a basic, innate capability for imitating others’ actions.
 cognitive skills emerge on a different timetable for children in non-Western
cultures
Information Processing Approaches of
Cognitive Development

 Identify how individuals take in, use, and store information.

 Information processing has three basic aspects:
 Encoding initial recording of information.
 Storage information saved for future use.
 Retrieval recovery of stored information.
 Processes require little attention is automatic e.g walking, eating etc
 Processes require large attention is controlled e.g learning to drive, walk etc.
continued

 Automatic mental processes help children in their initial encounters.

 Age of five, children automatically encode information in terms of frequency without
tallying.
 Infant most learning tends to occur automatically
 categorizations of objects, or people that share common properties
 four legs, a wagging tail, and barking are often found together- dog
 Psychologist Karen Wynn infants show basic math like simple addition and
subtraction. (mickey mouse behind screen)
 Infants gazed more at wrong calculations.
Duration of memories

 Older infants can retrieve information more rapidly, and they can remember it
longer.
 Infantile amnesia—the lack of memory for experiences occurring prior to three
years of age
 May be newer information blocks out the older information.
 May be infant cant speak and language plays a key role in determining the way
in which memories.
Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory

 Explicit memory that is conscious and can be recalled intentionally e.g name
number etc
 Implicit memory which we are not consciously aware but that affect
performance and behavior e.g skills and habits
 The earliest memories seem to be implicit involve the cerebellum and brain
stem.
 Explicit memory doesn’t emerge until the second half of the first year and it
involves the hippocampus.
 Increasing number of areas of the cortex of the brain
 Infants differences in intelligence

 Developmental quotient development score in four domains:

1. motor skills (balance and sitting),
2. language use
3. adaptive behavior (alertness and exploration),
4. personal-social behavior.
 Bayley Scales evaluate development from 2 to 42 months focus on two areas:
1. mental (senses, perception, memory, learning, problem solving, and language
2. motor abilities (fine and gross motor skills).
 Visual-recognition memory Measures recognition of a stimulus that has been previously seen.
The more quickly an infant can retrieve, the more efficient that infant’s information processing.
Promote Cognitive Development In Infants

 Provide infants the opportunity to explore the world.

 Be responsive to infants on both a verbal and a nonverbal level.
 Read to your infants.
 Keep in mind that you don’t have to be with an infant 24 hours a day.
 Don’t push infants and don’t expect too much too soon.
 Language Development In
Infancy
 Introduction…
 One might have difficulty in learning language in
adulthood due to its complexity.
 Relatively easy for infants to learn .
 Crying; Meaning of crying
 Colic children
 Communication skill grow in first year of life
 Infant communication

 Intentional vocalization
 Babbling and gesturing
 Holophrastic speech
 Under-extension
 Vocabulary growth spurt
 Two word sentences and telegraphic speech
 Child-directed speech
Age Language development
At 3-4 months • make eye contact with you
• say ‘ah goo’ or another combination of vowels and consonants
• babble and combine vowels and consonants, like ‘ga ga ga ga’, ‘ba ba
ba ba’, ‘ma ma ma ma’ and ‘da da da da’.

At 5-7 months • copy some of the sounds you make, like coughing, laughing, clicking
or making ‘raspberries’
• copy some of the gestures you make, like waving, pointing or clapping
• play with making different sounds, like ‘aaieee’, ‘booo’ and ‘ahh’ at
different pitches and volumes.

At 8-9 months • put sounds together with rhythm and tone, in ways that sound like
normal speech – ‘jargon phase’
• say ‘mama’ or ‘dada’, although they might not know what these mean
yet.

At 10-11 months • communicate using noises or gestures

• ask for something by pointing, or by looking at a person then at
something they want.
12-14 months • your baby might say a few words and know what they mean, like
‘mama’ or ‘dada’ to refer to mum or dad.
 Theories of language development

1. Chomsky and the language acquisition device

 Nativism; Posits that infants teach themselves and that
language learning is genetically programed.
 Neurological construct referred to as the language acquisition
device (LAD)
 Language develops as long as the infant is exposed to it.
2. Skinner and reinforcement
 Suggests that infants need to be taught language
through reinforcement.
 This repetition strengthens associations, so infants
learn the language faster as parents speak to them
often.
3. Social pragmatics
 Emphasizes the child’s active engagement in learning the
language out of a need to communicate.
 The child seeks information, memorizes terms, imitates the
speech heard from others.
 Tomasello & Herrmann (2010); all human infants seek to
master words and grammar in order to join the social world.
 Emotional Development in
Infancy
Emotions in Infants

 Nonverbal encoding
 Experiencing emotions:
 3 components of emotion
1. Biological
2. Cognitive
3. Behavioral
 Sophistication of brain
 Smiling:
 Social smile
Stranger Anxiety & Separation Anxiety

 Stranger anxiety
 Second half of the 1st year
 6 & 9 months
 Separation anxiety
 7 or 8 months
 14 months
Social Referencing

 8 or 9 months
 Sophisticated social ability
 Two explanations
1. Observing other’s brings out their emotions
2. Viewing another’s facial expression simply provide information
 Conflicting nonverbal messages
Nonverbal Decoding Abilities

 Emerge soon after birth

 5 months
 Sequence in which nonverbal facial decoding ability
progresses
 First 6 to 8 weeks
 Midway through their 1st year
Development of Self

 Self-awareness
 12 months
 17 & 24 months
 Experiments on 23 & 25 months old
 18 to 24 months
 Primary understanding of how the mind operates
Theory of Mind

 How others think

 See people as compliant agents
 10 & 13 months
 18 months
 Empathy by 2 years
 Begin to use deception
 Social Development in Infancy
 Attachment

 Ethologist Konrad Lorenz

 Imprinting
 Harlow’s Monkeys
 Psychologist Harry Harlow
 Contact comfort
 Bowlby’s Contributions
 British psychiatrist John Bowlby
 Needs for safety & security
 The Ainsworth Strange Situation
 Developmental psychologist Mary Ainsworth
 Sequence of staged episodes
 1-year-olds show one of 4 major patterns:
1. Secure attachment pattern
2. Avoidant attachment pattern
3. Ambivalent attachment pattern
4. Disorganized-disoriented attachment pattern
 Major consequences in later relationships
 Reactive attachment disorder
 The Role of the Mother& Father

 Mother’s & attachment

 Interactional synchrony
 Mothers reaction to emotional cues
 Similarity in attachment patterns
 Child’s ability to provide effective cues
 Father’s & attachment
 Little mention of the father
 Mother was uniquely equipped
 Traditional social views
 Psychological disorders
 Multiple relationships

 Difference in Mother’s & Father’s Attachment

 The nature of attachment is not same
 Mothers spend more time than fathers
 Different style of playing
Development of Relationships

 Mutual regulation model is infants and parents learn to communicate emotional states to
one another
 These interactions are through facial expressions.
 Infants show more happiness when see their mother happy
 Reciprocal Socialization infants’ behaviors create more responses from caregivers which
results more responses from infant.(cycle)
 Baby who kept crying to be picked up when her mother put her in crib
 These types of cylces continued and increasing in attachment.
Infant to Infant Interactions

 Infants show more interest in peers than in still objects.

 They prefer familiar infant than others.
 Twin infant exhibit a higher level of social behavior to each other.
 They socialize by smiling, expressions and imitation others behavior
 Mirror neurons may help infants to understand others’ actions
 Interactions between infants provide an impact on children’s social skills and future
cognitive development.
 Personality Development in
Infancy
Infant’s Personality Development

 Characteristics that differentiate one infant from another is Personality.

 Erikson’s theory suggest during the first 18 months of life trust-versus-mistrust
stage.
 Erikson argues that personality is primarily shaped by infants’ experiences
 Temperament of infants create differences in the infants personality.
 Temperament in Infants
 Temperament are patterns of arousal and emotionality that are consistent.
 Temperament of infant with behavior indicator
 Activity level
1. High: wriggles while diaper is changed
2. Low: lies still while being dressed
 Approach-withdrawal
1. Approach orientation: accepts novel foods and toys easily
2. Withdrawal orientation: cries when a stranger comes near
 Rhythmicity
1. Regular: has consistent feeding schedule
2. Irregular: has varying sleep and waking schedule
 Distractibility
1. Low: continues crying even when diaper is changed
2. High: stops fussing when held and rocked
 Quality of mood
1. Negative: cries when carriage is rocked
2. Positive: smiles or smacks lips when tasting new food
 Threshold of responsiveness
1. High: not startled by sudden noises or bright lights
2. Low: pauses sucking on bottle at approach of parent or slight noise
 Categorizing Temperament
 Easy babies: Babies who have a positive disposition.
 Their body functions operate regularly, and they are adaptable.
 They are generally positive, showing curiosity.
 Their emotions are moderate or low in intensity.
 About 40 % of infant are difficult.
 Difficult babies have more negative moods.
 They are slow to adapt to new situations.
 When confronted with a new situation.
 They tend to withdraw.
 About 10% of infants belong in this category.
 Slow-to-warm babies are inactive
 Showing relatively calm reactions to their environment.
 Their moods are generally negative
 they withdraw from new situations, adapting slowly.
 Approximately 15 percent of infants are slow-to-warm.
 No single type of temperament is invariably good or bad it depend on thier
environment
Consequences of temperament

 Goodness-of-fit the development is dependent on the degree of match between

 Children’s temperament
 The nature of infant
 Demands of the environment in which they are being raised.
 E.g. children with a low-activity level do well in an environment in which they are left
to explore on their own and are allowed largely to direct their own behavior.
 These temperament in infancy have great impact on our personality through out life e.g
inhibition to the unfamiliar.
Boys in Blue and Girls in Pink

 Gender refers to our sense of being male or female

 It play important role from childhood both are treated differently
 Father play more with sons as their plays are more physical and rough.
 Mothers plays are simple traditions game.
 Male infants tend to be more active and fussier than female infants.
 Boys’ sleep tends to be more disturbed than that of girls.
 There are some differences but they can’t be recognize e.g Mary and John.
 Gender Roles
 By age of 1 infants are able to differentiate between male and female.
 Certain kinds of toys are reinforced by their parents
 Boys receive more reinforcement for playing with toys that society deems appropriate for boys than
girls.
 Girl playing with a truck is viewed with considerably less concern.
 Boy playing with a doll is discouraged.
 By 2 years, boys behave more independently and less compliantly than girls.
 Some Girls are born with high level ANDROGEN male hormones as their mother have took some drugs
during pregnancy which contain it.
 These girls naturally attracted to the toys of boys such as truck and games of boys etc.