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newborn also shows a preference for the face of its own mother (Bushnell, Sai, & Mullin,
1989). [3]
Although infants are born ready to engage in some activities, they also contribute to their own
development through their own behaviors. The child’s knowledge and abilities increase as it
babbles, talks, crawls, tastes, grasps, plays, and interacts with the objects in the environment
(Gibson, Rosenzweig, & Porter, 1988; Gibson & Pick, 2000; Smith & Thelen, 2003). [4] Parents
may help in this process by providing a variety of activities and experiences for the child.
Research has found that animals raised in environments with more novel objects and that engage
in a variety of stimulating activities have more brain synapses and larger cerebral cortexes, and
they perform better on a variety of learning tasks compared with animals raised in more
impoverished environments (Juraska, Henderson, & Müller, 1984). [5] Similar effects are likely
occurring in children who have opportunities to play, explore, and interact with their
environments (Soska, Adolph, & Johnson, 2010). [6]
Research Focus: Using the Habituation Technique to Study What Infants Know
It may seem to you that babies have little ability to view, hear, understand, or remember the world around them.
Indeed, the famous psychologist William James presumed that the newborn experiences a “blooming, buzzing
confusion” (James, 1890, p. 462). [7] And you may think that, even if babies do know more than James gave them
credit for, it might not be possible to find out what they know. After all, infants can’t talk or respond to questions, so
how would we ever find out? But over the past two decades, developmental psychologists have created new ways to
determine what babies know, and they have found that they know much more than you, or William James, might
have expected.
One way that we can learn about the cognitive development of babies is by measuring their behavior in response to
the stimuli around them. For instance, some researchers have given babies the chance to control which shapes they
get to see or which sounds they get to hear according to how hard they suck on a pacifier (Trehub & Rabinovitch,
1972). [8] The sucking behavior is used as a measure of the infants’ interest in the stimuli—the sounds or images they
suck hardest in response to are the ones we can assume they prefer.
Another approach to understanding cognitive development by observing the behavior of infants is through the use of
the habituation technique. Habituation refers to the decreased responsiveness toward a stimulus after it has been
presented numerous times in succession. Organisms, including infants, tend to be more interested in things the first