1. Why Study Infants Three reasons for studying infancy
Philosophical questions
The opportunity for humans to study themselves
Parental investment
Applied concerns
The study of preterm infants
Infants of drug-using mothers

2. The Study of Infants Past, present, and future
The philosophical debate – Nature versus Nurture
The empiricist argument
Knowledge comes through the senses
John Locke and the tabula rasa
William James and the infant’s world as a “booming, buzzing confusion”

3. The Study of Infants Past, present, and future The nativist argument
Humans are endowed at birth with ideas or “categories of knowledge”
Immanuel Kant and Rene Descartes

4. The Study of Infants Past, present, and future The main effects model
Nativist View
Nurturist View
Environment
Good
Bad
Constitution
Environment
Good
Bad
Constitution

5. The Study of Infants Past, present, and future The interactional model
Environment
Good
Bad
Medium
Constitution

6. The Study of Infants Past, present, and future The transactional model
Constitution C C C C Cn
Environment E E E E En

7. Methods of Research in Infancy
Getting and keeping subjects
How do you find subjects
Sources of recruitment
Representativeness and sampling
Subject attrition
Why don’t researchers discuss sampling issues?
Infant state
The infant as a difficult experimental subject

8. Methods of Research in Infancy
Response measures
Visual fixation measures
Sucking measures
Physiological measures
Age comparisons

9. Experimental techniques
Spontaneous visual preference
The procedure
Limitations
Habituation techniques
Conditioning techniques
Physiological measures
Heart rate
Brain activation measures

10. Aspects of perception
Visual acuity

11. Aspects of perception Pattern preferences Facial configurations
Complexity and symmetry