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Infant Days - A Researcher’s Gaze
By Mohinish
Shukla
Infant research is, so to speak, past its infancy. The Society for Research in Child Development, for example, has thousands of member researchers across 50-odd nations. So, what do these men and women in lab-coats do? How do we understand what’s on a 6-month-old’s mind?
As with any scientific endeavor, the trick is in being able to reliably measure something. For example, imagine that the infant is in front of a display showing a sequence of different triangles, while the experimenter measures how long the infant is staring at the display. After a while, the infant gets tired of the display, and spends less time staring at it; the infant is said to adapt to the display. At this point, the experimenter throws a switch, and, instead of triangles, the display starts showing a sequence of squares. If the infant notices that there has been a change, it will recover from the adaptation, and start staring at the display with renewed intensity.
In this example, the so-called dependent measure was how long the infant looked at the display. Over the years, researchers have devised scores of different dependent measures, like the frequency of foot-kicks, the rate and amplitude of sucking on a dummy pacifier, and changes in heart-rate and, more recently, changes in electrical and hemodynamic activity in the brain.
Such methods allow us to examine what do infants consider “same” or “different”. For example, while adult Japanese speakers cannot reliably discriminate between the ‘l’ in ‘lip’ and the ‘r’ in ‘rip’, Japanese 6-month-olds can discriminate the two.
Such measures can also be used to measure a preference for certain stimuli. For example, newborns prefer to hear speech in their native language – they do not adapt as easily to native speech as compared to speech in a foreign language, and continue listening to it for a much longer period of time before being bored. Similarly, very young infants prefer upright to upside-down faces.
For further readings into the science behind understanding the cognitive capacities of infants, two accessible and fun, and yet scientifically rigorous books are What Infants Know: The New Cognitive Science of Early Development by Jacques Mehler and Emmanuel Dupoux, and The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About the Mind by Alison Gopnik, Andrew Meltzoff and Patricia
Kuhl.
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