The First Two Years of Birth

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A person that say babies are boring, they haven’t spent too much time watching them. Most people accept the thought that a newborn infant just eats and sleeps, ignoring the complex and their rapid growth.

A typical infant comes into the world with all of its senses: it can see, taste, hear, feel, and smell. However, all of these senses are not yet completely developed. Also, they can move. The muscles, bones, and nervous system are already developed and ready for use. The first duty from the early weeks and months is to learn to use their sensory and motor (movement) abilities, to learn how to use these sensory and use it efficiently. This has to be most remarkable task anyone faces in life. Think about the incredible amount of growth a child most make in its first two years. There are no other period in all of our life will be mark by such massive and speedy development.

Infants’ Sensory Development

In the past, it was thought that the infants’ sensory development was minimal. These days we know the infants can see almost the first time when it opens its eyes; there is evidence that infants even has some depth perception. What this means, is a newborn can locate objects in space. Many tests have revealed that infants will turn their heads and move their eyes in the path of a loud noise within the first minutes after birth. In addition, mothers have always recognized that their infants react to touch, although they have not always know that the infant can differentiate among tastes like bitter, sour, and sweet. Infants will also twist away from any unpleasant smell almost immediately after birth.

All of these sensory mechanisms are the newborn baby’s tools of exploring the world. Different theorists have different explanations for how or why an infant responds to stimulus.

In an experiment conducted by Robert Fantz, infants from the age of two months were shown pictures of a yellow disk, a white disk, a red disk, a bull’s eye, a circle with newsprint, and a human face. The time the infants spent staring at each picture was carefully measured. It was soon determined that the babies responded most to a human face.

The infants set their stare on the areas of highest black and white contrast. The youngest subjects concentrated on the hairline. Those several weeks older began to focus on the eyes. Other experiments showed that the infants were more interested in patterns than solid colors, and that they devoted more time to complex patterns than to simple ones.

Similarly, infants respond more to tones within the register of human speech. In fact, they are most responsive to high-pitched tones in the female speech register. The common dooling and babbling that adults use to “communicate” with a baby seem to correspond to the things the baby is “interested in.”

Someone might say that the newborn responds to stimuli since it has been conditioned by the parents to do so. While other people say, the infant responds because it somehow wants or needs to learn. These theories are too complicated to debate here. Yet there is no doubt that within a matter of weeks or months an infant not only responds to the things it sees and hears but it learns to exert some control over its environment.

An interesting question is how an infant chooses between the virtually overpowering varieties of stimuli around the surrounding environment. If the infant respond equally and continuously to all the stimuli, this would soon be overwhelmed. It appears that the infant becomes habituate to a given stimulus when it has been present for a long time; the child studies a new stimulus, responds to it, and then (if it continues) tunes it out. As soon as a change is made in the stimulus, even a minor one, the infant responds once again.

In one particular experiment, a number of infants was presented with a strong-smelling mixture of odors. Initial, they responded powerfully to the odor. Slowly, the infants started to ignore the odor and then the concentration of the odor was reduced. Once again, the infants responded to the odor. Apparently, this minor change even in a negative direction was sufficient to reawaken their interest. Therefore, we can assume that infants are quite sensitive even to small changes in their environment. This sensitivity probably extends beyond the simple realm of sight, smell, and touch. Infants often seem able (perhaps through a combination of sensory clues) to sense the emotional climate around them. Infants may become fussy when the mother is nervous or upset.

Infants do not always wait for outside stimulus. Studies have shown that they actively seek experience. In one such study, two and three-month-old infants were presented with a visual display that was controlled by a pacifier. By sucking at different rates the babies could control the focus of the picture. They soon learned to keep the pictures in focus.

In a different experiment, infants learned to turn on a motorized mobile by a specific sequence of arm and leg movements. When the correct sequence was changed, they soon learned the new sequence as well.

This is a commanding proof that infants are engaged in an active effort to make sense out of their environments and to use control over their environment. They seem to be self-motivated to solve problems and gain pleasure from a successful outcome.