CH3: The Neonate Flashcards
Recall of pain during childbirth
In the period relatively soon after birth, mothers remember their labor to be less painful than it really was. This retrospective reconstruction may be evolutionarily adaptive to prevent resentment for the newborn or increase the chances of having a kid again. When they were asked 3-4 years later, they more accurately recalled the pain.
List some newborn reflexes and describe them
eye blink(protects from strong stimulation_
withdrwal
rooting
sucking (permits feeding)
more (embracing motion)
palmar grasp (prepared for voluuntary grasping)
stepping (prepares for voluntary walking)
Babinski (feet curl)
What are infants sleep scheudles like?
They sleep a lot and they have irregular sleep. They’re awake like 6 hours at most. They spend half of the time in REM.
Infant states of arousal
regular and irregular sleep, drowsiness, quiet alertness, waking acitivity and crying
Newborn sense of touch
-repond to touch on sensitive areas (like mouth, palms, soles, genitals)
-sensitive to pain ( if we touch infants too much, they can be stressed or overstimulated
-we can releive pain with anesthetics, sugar and gentle holding
Newborn taste and smell
-prefer sweet tastes at birth
-quickly learn to liek new tastes
-have odor prefrences from birth
-can locate odors and identify mother by smell from birth
-sucrose elicts positive responses, bitter negative
Newborn sense of hearing
-prefer complex sounds (voices and noises) to pure tones
-learn sound patterns within days
-sensitive to voices and biologically prepared to learn language (can tell between different ones)
Least developed sense at birth
vision
Newborn Vision
-least developed sense at birth
-can’t see long distances or focus clearly (like 12 inches)
-scan environment and try to track interesting objexts
-color vision improves in the first two months (prefer big contrasting patterns)
Research methods with infants
Habituation:
- infant sees or hears same stimuli over and over again until it loses interest
-infant is presented with new stimuli and researches see if they can tell
Preferential looking
-infant sees two objects at same time
-attention to each object is recorded
Tactile infant sensory expeirment
-non painful sensory stimulation reuslts in equal or higher levels of stress than painful stimulation
smell prenatal exposure experiment
infants born to moms who consumed more anise flavor had a preference to it (carrots)
do infants recognize moms voice at birth?
yes, experiment where they suck on a nipple and different sucking patterns have different results. Infants learned suck faster to produce the mother’s voice .
what voice do newborns prefer to be talked to in
neutral voice over “motherese”
they prefer muffled mom’s voice rather than clear voice (bc its what they heard in utero), although goes away quickly
do infants recognize material they’ve heard in utero ?
yes, they workerd harder(changing sucking patterns) to produce a specific Dr. Seuss passage they heard in utero… they even prefer strangers reading the same passage over the moms voice
what is an example of how babies are learning fragile systems?
in the experiment of reading Dr. seuss passages to babies in utero, newborns prefer passage read by stranger than by moms voice… they’re learning the rhythym and sounds of the passage but not necessarily the language or making the assocaition with the voice and the passage
do fetuses respond to their mothers voice in utero ?
yes, heart rate deceases even to tape recording, babies can recognize these sounds coming from mom and external sources
do infants recognize their fathers voice?
-distinguish between voices but don’t prefer them over another even if reading passage during utero
-exposure argument (probs not exposed enough to dad )
do infants recognize and prefer their language ?
yes, they suck to hear their native language, prefer
can infants learn and remmber mothers faces?
more they’re exposed, the more they prefere her face, preferential looking , still prefer her after 15 minutes
-brand new babies can do this
do newborns imitate actions of adults?
yes, and reliably imitate tongue protrusions and mouth openings.
-24 hours later, and they can till do the action…. shows that memory is intact even early in developmen expected
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-social learning may happen earlier than
-first signs of connectino between parents and child(big for social development)
Meltov’s argument
intermodal system: see it, think about it, act on it, lots of cognitive cordination
-this could be seen in how babies imitate actions of adults
give an example of intermodal integration
only infants who heard mothers voice in utero preffered their mother’s face
intermodal integration
infants integrating info from multiple systems, making connections and building on them (subconsciour or conscious)
-however these systems are fragile and easy to disrupt
