PSY 2012 Lecture Notes - Lecture 19: Frontal Lobe, Birth Weight, Jerky
Document Summary
Because infants cannot describe their experiences, psychologists must find clever ways to take advantage of responses that infants can make, such as sucking and moving their eyes, to draw inferences about their capabilities and preferences. Can the fetus learn: twice a day, during the last 6 weeks of pregnancy, mothers in one study read aloud the same passage from dr. suess"s the cat in the hat. Two or 3 days after birth, infants were able to turn on a recording of their mother reading either the. Reflexes: newborns come with genetically wired reflexes, sucking, swallowing, coughing, blinking, yawning. Motor and perceptual skills: depend on each other, environmental experiences play a role in motor development, preferential looking technique, giving an infant a choice of what object to look at. Increase in synaptic connections: pruning of unused neural connections, rapid growth in frontal lobe areas.
