Infant Determinism

The speech, “What Do Babies Think” by Alison Gopnik, is in my opinion a wonderful speech about what babies think about, how they think, and the decision making processes. She is a phycologist who studies the intelligence-gathering and decision-making that babies are really doing when they play. I chose this speech to write about because I have always asked myself the same two popular questions. How do babies think? What do they think about?

Like many children his age, my nephew hates eating his vegetables and he cries whenever he has to eat them. Because of this, his mom takes the veggies away so that he doesn't have to eat them anymore. Due to this, he begins crying whenever vegetables are placed in front of him because he knows that it will make his mom take them away. This example is negative reinforcement because the behavior being altered the vegetables are being subtracted as he starts crying. This leads to him crying each time, so that the vegetables are taken away, being a successful type of operant conditioning.

There are numerous debates in regards to developmental psychology. One of the main debates to begin with is nature vs nurture; some individuals believe that we are products of our environment while others regards us while others believe that we are products of our genetics. John Locke believes that when we are born we are a “tabula rasa” a blank slate

Laura Schulz’s presentation, The Surprisingly Logical Minds of Babies, explores the idea of how babies and young children are able to learn so much in such a short span of time. In Schulz’s presentation, the viewers see multiple video experiments where she introduces babies to different balls and toys that make noises. I choose to explain and break down the first experiment, that she discusses. In the first experiment Schulz has a colleague reach into a bucket with mostly blue balls and a few yellow balls. The colleague pulls out three of the balls and when she takes each ball out she squeaks them. The colleague then pulls out a yellow ball and hands it to the baby. The child copies what Schulz’s colleague has done, but however the

Annie Murphy Paul started her Ted talk by asking everyone the question “When does learning begin?” While most people would answer preschool or kindergarten, where the child is under the guidance of a teacher, others may say anywhere from 0-3 years of age. This is primarily when children learn how to walk and talk. However, she explains that the fields of both psychology and biology have proved that fetuses start learning while they’re in the womb. Annie explains within her book Origins that the health and wellness of a child are effected during the 9 months of gestation.

According to Annie Murphy Paul’s research (2011), one of the first things babies learn before they are born are the sounds of their surroundings, and most important, the sound of their mother’s voice—her voice is the clearest to the baby so it is the most soothing and calming. Babies also learn smells and tastes in utero, once the olfactory receptors and taste buds are developed. This teaches the baby what is and is not safe to consume. Overall, babies learn about the culture they are going to enter—they learn their mother’s accent and the variety of food available.

Many psychologists agree that nurture play a greater part in the development of a human being. Studies such as those performed on monozygotic twins (identical), who share the same genetics and those performed

The philosophy of determinism states that everything humans do are determined by the previous action and the causal law of nature. Determinism believes that humans are no control over their action, therefore there is no free will, and nobody is responsible for their action. There are several responses to the philosophy of determinism including libertarianism, compatibilism, and fatalist

A psychologist in the 1950’s by the name of Harry Harlow did a study on the parent-infant bond using a baby monkey and two artificial mothers. To make the experiment proper, Harlow removed the infant from its biological mother early on and was raised with individual cages (Myers, 2010, p. 188). The experiment was set up so that there were two “mothers”; one with the monkey’s blanket and the other had a bottle attached to a wire skeleton. This experiment was to test if a soft, caring mother, or one that provided food whenever pleased would more comfort an infant monkey.

‘Babies’ is a documentary film which chronicles the first year of life of four babies spanning the globe. Documentarian Thomas Balmès fans out to the grasslands of Namibia, the plains of Mongolia, the high rises of Tokyo and the busy streets of San Francisco in a study of culture, societal structure, geography and tradition, along with parental love and the impact all these elements have on child rearing. In the hunting and gathering society of Namibia and pastoral Mongolia, Balmès follows Ponijao and Bayar and in postindustrial Tokyo and San Francisco we are introduced to Mari and Hattie. While the 1:18 film has no real dialogue, viewers are able to get a distinct feel for each baby’s personality, the role they play within the family

The old and popular debate between ‘nature vs. nurture’ has generated a lot of interest in newborns, who were previously thought to be ‘blank slates’, and has contributed a lot to developmental psychology, a field of psychology focusing on studying infants. It is now generally accepted that both nature and nurture make equal contribution to the infant’s development.

Cognitive changes in infants, consists in the ability to think, learn, and remember. The brain of a newborn develops rapidly. The brain of an infant is made up uniquely with neurons. Neurons controls the brain as well as the nervous system (Feldman, 2014, p.129). Infants are born with between 100 to 200 billion neurons (Feldman, 2014, p.129). Infants are capable of learning early through classical conditioning. However, classical conditioning is a type of learning in which an organism responds in a way to a neutral stimulus that normally does not bring about that type of response. Classical conditioning begins from the early operation from the time of birth (Feldman, 2014, p.115). For example, A hungry baby stops crying when her mother picks

Halbur & Halbur (2011) states that “Humans are shaped and determined by sociocultural conditioning. This paradigm is basically deterministic because all beahaviors are believed to be a product of learning through

In the environment, determinism is defined by their environment and are conditioned to be the people they are. With this explanation, it depends on the life experiences an individual encounter that affects their behaviors. With the psychological development explanation, people are governed by psychological forces, many of them unconscious, that cause them to think, feel, and act in certain ways. With this explanation, the actions that humans perform are the result of psychological impulses that have been formed by people’s earliest relationships and experiences. With the social dynamics explanation, people are social creatures and are influenced by the people around them.

This paper is going to carry out a literature review on cognitive development in infants. The paper will review cognitive development in infants at different stages. Effects of early experience on mental development in infants will also be discussed. The research question and the hypothesis of the research will also be given.