Newborn skills

Even in her oh-so-early infancy, having had my new daughter for only six days, she is making me reexamine so many things I thought I knew... hell, that I had been taught in college.

Over the last 25 or so years (16 of those after I graduated college) experimental psychologists have been researching newborns. The experiments that had happened before that, though lauded and the results accepted into the general populations thoughts toward infants, were rudimentary and mainly false.

The classic example that keeps illustrating to me how so little of the newborn psychology I was taught in college is still valid regards object permanence. I had been taught (and, to be fair, psychologists believed) that an infant didn't remember the existence of an item when it was removed from her field of sight until eight or nine months old. More recent experiments that have moved out of the behavioral field and into experimental (i.e. measuring heart rate and tracking eye movements and such) have brought this down to three months old.

But the differences in what I thought a newborn understands and what they really do are staggering.

-newborns just a few hours old are able to recognize their mother's voice
-newborns listen attentively as long as mother reads forward, but will stop listening as soon as she reads backward
-newborns can tell the difference between a smiling face and a frowning face (whether or not they know what it means)

and more... but now my daughter needs my attention.

infant psychology