Infants' Responses (infant + response)

Distribution by Scientific Domains


Selected Abstracts


II. VISUAL HABITUATION STUDIES: INFANTS' RESPONSES TO TYPICAL AND SCRAMBLED BODY PICTURES

MONOGRAPHS OF THE SOCIETY FOR RESEARCH IN CHILD DEVELOPMENT, Issue 2 2004
Article first published online: 12 AUG 200
First page of article [source]


Infants' Response to Maternal Mirroring in the Still Face and Replay Tasks

INFANCY, Issue 5 2009
Ann E. Bigelow
Infants' response to maternal mirroring was investigated in 4-month-old infants. Mother,infant dyads participated in the still face and replay tasks. Infants were grouped by those whose mothers did and did not mirror their behavior in the interactive phases of the tasks. In the still face task, infants with maternal mirroring showed more attention, smiling, and positive vocalizations across the phases, although both groups of infants demonstrated the still-face effect with attention and smiling. Infants' social bidding to the mother during the still-face phase correlated with mothers' mirroring behavior. In the replay task, infants with maternal mirroring demonstrated carryover effects with smiling; infants without maternal mirroring showed no awareness of change in their mothers' behavior. In both the still face and replay tasks, infants with maternal mirroring were more engaged with their mothers. Results suggest that maternal mirroring of infants' behavior affects infants' detection of, and response to, reciprocal interaction. [source]


Modeling Infant Speech Sound Discrimination Using Simple Associative Networks

INFANCY, Issue 1 2001
Graham Schafer
Infants' responses in speech sound discrimination tasks can be nonmonotonic over time. Stager and Werker (1997) reported such data in a bimodal habituation task. In this task, 8-month-old infants were capable of discriminations that involved minimal contrast pairs, whereas 14-month-old infants were not It was argued that the older infants' attenuated performance was linked to their processing of the stimuli for meaning. The authors suggested that these data are diagnostic of a qualitative shift in infant cognition. We describe an associative connectionist model showing a similar decrement in discrimination without any qualitative shift in processing. The model suggests that responses to phonemic contrasts may be a nonmonotonic function of experience with language. The implications of this idea are discussed. The model also provides a formal framework fer studying habituation-dishabituation behaviors in infancy. [source]


Evidence for Knowledge,Based Category Discrimination in Infancy

CHILD DEVELOPMENT, Issue 4 2002
Sabina Pauen
Two studies examined whether infants' category discrimination in an object,examination task was based solely on an ad hoc analysis of perceptual similarities among the experimental stimuli. In Experiment 1A, 11,month,olds examined four different exemplars of one superordinate category (animals or furniture) twice, followed by a new exemplar of the familiar category and an exemplar of the contrasting category. Group A (N= 39) explored natural,looking toy replicas with low between,category similarity, whereas group B (N= 40) explored artificial,looking toy models with high between,category similarity. Experiment 1B (N= 40) tested a group of 10,month,olds with the same design. Experiment 1C (N= 20) reversed the order of test trials. For Experiment 2 (N= 20), the same artificial,looking toy animals as in Experiment 1 (group B) were used for familiarization), but no category change was introduced at the end of the session. Infants' responses varied systematically only with the presence of a category change, and not with the degree of between,category similarity. This supports the hypothesis that performance was knowledge based. [source]


Relationships between nurse care-giving behaviours and preterm infant responses during bathing: a preliminary study

JOURNAL OF CLINICAL NURSING, Issue 1-2 2010
Jen-Jiuan Liaw
Aims., The purpose of this study was to explore the relationships between specific nurse care-giving behaviours and preterm infant behavioural responses during bathing and to identify nurse behaviours associated with infant ,stress'. Background., Although recent advances in medical technology have improved neonatal intensive care, the high mortality and morbidity rates in preterm infants have not decreased proportionally. As caregivers strive to reduce infant mortality and morbidity, a factor for consideration is which caregiver behaviours are associated with preterm infant well-being. Design., A descriptive correlational design. Method., Convenience samples of 24 preterm infants and 12 nurses were recruited. A total of 120 baths were videotaped. Infant and nurse behaviours were measured using the coding schemes developed by the researchers. Pearson coefficient correlation, non-parametric Kruskal,Wallis test, t -test and generalised linear models were methods for data analysis. Results., As nurses provided more support, stress was reduced in the infants, and their self-regulation during the bath was enhanced especially by the use of ,containment' and ,positional support'. Conversely, non-therapeutic caregiver behaviours including ,rapid and rough handling' of the baby, ,chatting with other people' and ,inappropriate handling' increased infant ,stress' during the bath. Conclusion., The findings provide new information about the link between care-giving and infant responses and how caregivers can better interact with preterm infants during a very sensitive period of brain development. Relevance to clinical practice., How nurses take care of the preterm infants influences their responses to care-giving stimuli. To interact better with the infant during care-giving procedures, nurses need to provide more supportive care-giving behaviours especially ,position support' and ,containment' based on the infant's needs, and avoid care-giving that may be too rough and occur too quickly without attending the baby's stressful signals, positioning the baby in hyperextension posture, or chatting with other people during procedures. [source]


Brainstem mechanisms underlying the sudden infant death syndrome: Evidence from human pathologic studies

DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOBIOLOGY, Issue 3 2009
Hannah C. Kinney
Abstract The brainstem hypothesis is one of the leading hypotheses concerning the sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). It states that SIDS, or an important subset of SIDS, is due to abnormal brainstem mechanisms in the control of respiration, chemosensitivity, autonomic regulation, and/or arousal which impairs the infant's response to life-threatening, but often occurring, stressors during sleep (e.g., hypoxia, hypercarbia, asphyxia, hyperthermia) and leads to sudden death in a vulnerable developmental period. In this review, we summarize neuropathologic evidence from SIDS cases that support this hypothesis, beginning with the seminal report of subtle brainstem gliosis three decades ago. We focus upon recent neurochemical studies in our laboratory concerning the neurotransmitter serotonin (5-HT) and its key role in mediating protective responses to homeostatic stressors via medullary circuits. The possible fetal origin of brainstem defects in SIDS is reviewed, including evidence for adverse effects of prenatal exposure to maternal cigarette smoking and alcohol upon the postnatal development of human brainstem 5-HT pathways. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Dev Psychobiol 51: 223,233, 2009 [source]


The role of maternal responsiveness in predicting infant affect during the still face paradigm with infants born very low birth weight

INFANT MENTAL HEALTH JOURNAL, Issue 2 2008
Sarah J. Erickson
There is limited empirical literature addressing infants' response to a standardized stressor with infants born very low birth weight (VLBW). The purpose of this study was to assess the relative strength of maternal responsiveness in predicting infant affect in response to the Still Face (SF) paradigm in a cross-sectional cohort of ethnically diverse infants born VLBW and their mothers (N = 50; infants 6,8 months old). Infant affect and maternal responsiveness were coded in 1-s intervals while dyads participated in the SF. In addition, perinatal medical status, developmental status, and infant temperament were assessed. Findings revealed that positive infant affect during and after the SF stressor were strongly associated with baseline infant positive affect and maternal responsiveness at the reunion episode, respectively. In contrast, when predicting negative infant affect during and after the SF stressor, prior infant negative affect was strongly and uniquely significant. Infant positive affect, negative affect, and maternal responsiveness were not significantly associated with gender, infant perinatal medical history, developmental status, or temperament. Future research is warranted to determine how these findings relate to infants' stress reactions in naturalistic settings and if relationship-focused interventions may reverse infant negative emotionality, enhance positive emotionality, and thereby improve self-regulation and longer term social and cognitive developmental outcomes in medically at-risk infants. [source]


Age-related differences in neural correlates of face recognition during the toddler and preschool years

DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOBIOLOGY, Issue 2 2003
Leslie J. Carver
Abstract Research on the development of face recognition in infancy has shown that infants respond to faces as if they are special and recognize familiar faces early in development. Infants also show recognition and differential attachment to familiar people very early in development. We tested the hypothesis that infants' responses to familiar and unfamiliar faces differ at different ages. Specifically, we present data showing age-related changes in infants' brain responses to mother's face versus a stranger's face in children between 18 and 54 months of age. We propose that these changes are based on age-related differences in the perceived salience of the face of the primary caregiver versus strangers. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Dev Psychobiol 42: 148,159, 2003 [source]


To generalize or not to generalize: spatial categories are influenced by physical attributes and language

DEVELOPMENTAL SCIENCE, Issue 1 2009
Susan J. Hespos
The current work explored the conditions under which infants generalize spatial relationships from one event to another. English-learning 5-month-olds habituated to a tight- or loose-fit covering event dishabituated to a change in fit during a containment test event, but infants habituated to a visually similar occlusion event did not. Thus, infants' responses appeared to be driven by the physical nature of the fit rather than visual similarity. This response pattern was replicated with Korean-speaking adults, but English-speaking adults showed no sensitivity to change in fit for either event. These findings suggest that language development links linguistic forms to universal, pre-existing representations of meaning, and that linguistic experience can shape sensitivity to distinctions that are marked in one's native language. [source]


The effect of spatial cues on infants' responses in the AB task, with and without a hidden object

DEVELOPMENTAL SCIENCE, Issue 4 2001
Andrew Bremner
The errors made by infants in the AB task were taken by Piaget as an indication of an inability to update their representations of the spatial location of a hidden object. This paper presents an experiment designed to further investigate the role of spatial representations in the production of the error. The introduction of strong visual cues to spatial location was found to reduce the traditional A-not-B search error. However, it also increased perseveration when a ,lids-only' analogue of the AB task was used, in which infants are simply cued to pick up lids rather than encouraged to search for a hidden object. These results present a challenge to the dynamic systems account of the error given by Smith, Thelen, Titzer and McLin (Psychological Review, 106 (1999), 235,260), and indicate that the traditional A-not-B search error arises from a difficulty in updating representations of the spatial location of hidden objects. The relation of these results to Munakata's PDP model (Developmental Science, 1 (1998), 161,211) and Thelen, Schöner, Scheier and Smith's (Behavioural and Brain Sciences, 24 (2001), 1--86) most recent dynamic systems model of the A-not-B error is also discussed. [source]


Spatiotemporal Regularity and Interevent Contingencies as Information for Infants' Visual Expectations

INFANCY, Issue 3 2002
Naomi Wentworth
This study examined infants' use of picture-location contingencies and spatiotemporal regularity in forming visual expectations. Ninety-six 3-month-olds watched an event sequence in which pictures appeared at 3 locations, either in regular left-center-right alternation or in a random center-side pattern. For half of the infants, the content of the central picture was predictive of the location of the upcoming peripheral event. Analyses of anticipations and interpicture fixation shifts revealed that both spatiotemporal regularity and consistent interevent contingencies fostered increased anticipation of peripheral pictures. The type of spatiotemporal sequence that infants observed also differentially biased their responses to test trials that followed the picture sequence: Infants who experienced regular alternation sequences continued the side-to-side pattern during the 2-choice test trials, whereas infants who experienced irregular sequences looked back to the location of the previous picture. Stable interevent contingencies, in contrast, did not bias infants' responses toward the contingent side during the choice test trials. [source]