Studying the Life of Young Infants

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Studying infants detail enables us to fully appreciate the roots of the psychical and psychological life of young infants, henceforth why researchers study infants in particular since during 0-2 years of age which is infancy, as these changes are very prevalent and fast in infancy. A famous researcher by the name of William James (1891), a prominent psychologist identified that infancy world is a very high profile, buzzing and confusing matter as they do not grasp the world like adults do; Additionally they do not recognize objects that have features such as size and color. Subsequently as a result during the twentieth century researchers devised fertile methods to study infants and this challenged anything William James (1891) had previously thought about infants, so these researchers came up with the ideas/concepts that infant capacities are developed in some way, counting aspects such as cognition, emotion etc. As infants capacity to acquire new information and construct upon it are continuing to grow and develop.
In investigating young infants we use looking time approaches, where it permits us to adjust if for example, a baby in the age group of 3-5 is able to notice very precise variations in the video shown to them. The assumption of looking time is for instance; if the baby finds the video clip to be stimulating then they will tend to watch it more. In an experiment the infant would be shown the same video clip for a given number of times. Thus as the number of times of watching the video clip increases by the infant then he/she should find it tedious after watching it for a while.
Consequently this would lead to shorter looking-times; Nevertheless babies are able to perceive a change in the video clip if it were to be ch...

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...to recognize objects and surfaces such as size and color. As proven new and innovative methods such as Object Permanence make use of infants naturally occurring behaviors, however critics have criticized Piagets search studies because the limited amount of samples and the use of artificial tasks and settings which lack external validity. Haith, (1998) said that there’s an over-interpretation of infant’s behavior in experimental testing, in relation to this Scholl & Leslie, (1999) found that researchers who rely on relatively strict measures to asses infant knowledge are sometimes blamed of proposing “deflationary accounts”. Also new technologies are developing such as MRI, EEG, so researchers will be able to find new ways of testing infants meaning that new discovered can be made, so researchers will build a bigger framework for the future development of the mind.

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