chapter summary:

Perception

• The human visual system is relatively immature at birth; young infants have poor acuity, low contrast sensitivity, and minimal color vision. Modern research has demonstrated, however, that newborns begin visually scanning the world minutes after birth and that very young infants show preferences for strongly contrasted patterns, for the same colors that adults prefer, and, especially, for human faces.
• Some visual abilities, including perception of constant size and shape, are present at birth; others develop rapidly over the first year. Binocular vision emerges quite suddenly at around 4 months of age, and the ability to identify object boundaries—object segregation—is also present at that age. By 7 months, infants are sensitive to a variety of monocular, or pictorial, depth cues; and pattern perception has developed to the point that infants can perceive illusory (subjective) contours, as adults do.
• The auditory system is comparatively well developed at birth, and newborns will turn their heads to localize a sound. Young infants' remarkable proficiency at perceiving pattern in auditory stimulation underlies their sensitivity to musical structure.
• Infants are sensitive to smell from birth. They learn to identify their mother in part by her unique scent.
• Through active touching, using both mouth and hands, infants explore and learn about themselves and their environment.
• Research on the phenomenon of intermodal perception has revealed that from very early on, infants integrate information from different senses, linking their visual with their auditory, olfactory, and tactile experiences.

Motor Development

• Motor development, or the development of action, proceeds rapidly in infancy through a series of “motor milestones,” starting with the reflexes displayed by newborn babies. Recent research has demonstrated that the regular pattern of development results from the confluence of many factors, including the development of strength, posture control, balance, and perceptual skills. Some aspects of motor development vary across cultures as a result of different cultural practices.
• Each new motor achievement, from reaching to self–locomotion, expands the infant's experience of the world but also presents new challenges. Infants adopt a variety of strategies to move around in the world successfully and safely. In the process, they make a variety of surprising mistakes.

Learning

• Various kinds of learning are present in infancy. Infants habituate to repeated stimuli and form expectancies about recurrent regularities in events. Through active exploration, they engage in perceptual learning. They also learn through classical conditioning, which involves forming associations between natural and neutral stimuli as well as through instrumental conditioning, which involves learning about the contingency between one's own behavior and some outcome. They can also make use of prior experiences to generate expectations about the future.
• From the second half of the first year on, observational learning—watching and imitating the behavior of other people—is an increasingly important source of information. Infants' assessment of the intention of a model affects what they imitate.

Cognition

• Powerful new research techniques—most notably the violation–of–expectancy procedure—have established that infants display impressive cognitive abilities. Much of this work on mental representation and thinking was originally inspired by Piaget's concept of object permanence. But it has been revealed that, contrary to Piaget's belief, young infants can mentally represent invisible objects and even reason about observed events.
• Other research, focused on infants' developing knowledge of the physical world, has demonstrated their understanding of some of the effects of gravity. It takes babies several months to work out the conditions under which one object can provide stable support for another.
• What infants know about people is a very active area of research. One clear finding is that infants pay particular attention to the intentions of others.
• Although many fascinating phenomena have been discovered in the area of infant cognition, basic issues about cognitive development remain unresolved. Theorists are sharply divided on how to account for the abilities, on the one hand, and the deficiencies, on the other hand, in infants' thinking.