Psychological Development From Infancy

Image to Intention

Marc H. Bornstein, William Kessen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351670272
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Entwicklungspsychologie

Originally published in 1979, this volume represented a unique attempt to connect the usually separated fields of infancy studies and studies of older children. In each chapter, eminent research workers attempt to cross the theoretical, empirical, and methodological barriers that had traditionally separated the study of preverbal infants from the study of verbal children and adults at the time. These completely new and original contributions traced the developmental links between birth and conversation within three major categories: perceptual, cognitive, and language development. Although the chapters range from reports of well-defined research areas to theoretical propositions, the aim throughout was to relate the events of the first year of life to the child's later perceptual and cognitive activity. This book will still be of interest for all concerned with child development and related areas, in that it demonstrates the remarkable range of observations about infants brought under a single guiding set of questions about continuity, stability, and the sources of change during and after the first year of life.

1
Introduction

William Kessen

Yale University

Not so long ago, we had occasion to celebrate the centenary of developmental psychology, an anniversary marked by the publication of Charles Darwin’s notes on son Doddy in Mind. The event was noteworthy for several reasons, but, for those of us who try to make sense of early human mind, Darwin’s biographical sketch claims our current attention primarily for two reasons. In the first place, we have lived so long with the idea of continuous development, both in its phylogenetic and its ontogenetic forms, that it is difficult for us to reclaim the revolutionary character of Darwin's proposals about the lives of children. Second, there are signs in contemporary communities that the hundredth birthday of evolutionary ontogenesis may also mark its decline, even its imminent demise. Should we maintain our commitment to the notion of continuous connected human development from infancy to adulthood?

It is worth remembering how the scientific study of children was twinned at its birth with the larger developmental principle that all life derives from its past and grows toward its future. Spencer, who had the bad luck to publish his Principles of Psychology just four years before the appearance of The Origin of Species, pushed the application of evolutionary principles to psychology as hard as he could and, along the way, he proposed the apparently eternal succession of reflex, instinct, memory, reason, feeling, and will. Yet even Spencer did not make the ontogenetic leap. For him, the hierarchical order of “the growth of intelligence” was a phylogenetic succession. As he said (1899):

… high intelligence … lies latent in the brain of the infant…. Thus it happens that faculties … which scarcely exist in some inferior human races, become congenital in superior ones. Thus it happens that out of savages unable to count up to the number of their fingers, and speaking a language containing only nouns and verbs, arise at length our Newtons and Shakspeares [p. 471].

For Spencer, as for all other evolutionists of his time, the only hope for ontogenetic change was in waiting for the tedious flow of phylogenetic change. The developmental revolution was to come in the recognition that Newton and Shakespeare were epigenetically available even in the savage Papuan.

In the last 20 years of the nineteenth century, the ontogenetic principle burst into life. Preyer, Taine, Hall, and Chamberlain were but the most audible proclaimers of the new doctrine-ascribed to Haekel but in the very air—ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. In the life of the child could be seen the life of the race and, happy biconditional, in the life of the race could be seen the life of the child. The feverish recognition of the applicability of the developmental principle to the growth of the child produced a literature of enthusiasm that can best be compared with William Jennings Bryan’s speeches on the virtue of silver.

But there was a way to go yet. The child as a reflection of the species is a static and, as it turned out, not a richly productive theoretical advance. It was left to James Mark Baldwin and Sigmund Freud to take the liberating next step—the step to epigenesis. Yes, they said in their very different ways, there are analogies (perhaps even homologies) between the growth of the mind and the growth of the species, but they are not analogies of content (Spencer’s reflex to Spencer’s will); they are analogies of construction. Each higher level of functioning does not lie latent in the baby, awaiting its scheduled call. Rather, each developmental moment is a moment of creation, an ever-recurring exchange between what the child’s mind is and what his experience asks of him. Baldwin (1895) made the contrast between antique doctrines and the new vision:

The old argument was this, — … consciousness reveals certain great ideas as simple and original…. If you do not find them in the child-mind, then you must read them into it.

The genetic idea reverses all this. Instead of a fixed substance, we have the conception of a growing, developing activity. … Are there principles in the adult consciousness which do not appear in the child consciousness; then the adult consciousness must, if possible, be interpreted by principles present in the child consciousness; and when this is not possible, the conditions under which these later principles take their rise and get the development must still be adequately explored [p. 2f.; italics mine].

Development can be understood only as a continuous interplay of principles and conditions, the dance of ontogenetic adaptation.

The ontogenetic principle—regularity of progression—and the more demanding epigenetic principle—continuous adaptation—have been adhered to, give a little, take a little, for the last 100 years of child study. To be sure, the range of variation within the general adherence has been wide—Freud and Gesell and Piaget and Skinner all claim the sensible epigenetic middle ground. Now, the new dialecticians have rediscovered Baldwin, and the skeptical historian of developmental psychology may wonder whether many prized ideas in our study of children have not been sidesteps in evasion of the implications of an epigenetic analysis. Whatever our theoretical predisposition, most of us prefer conceptions of the child that do not require constant revision. The literature is not crowded with specific testable propositions about how the child’s mind at a particular moment in his life is transformed by his environment or his experience to a new level of functioning.

The editors᾿ sense that concrete proposals for the working of epigenetic change are rare and their recognition of the recent tendency, noted earlier, to be dubious about the developmental principle altogether led to the book that lies before you. In its most general form, the question we asked of our developmental colleagues was: Can we illustrate, in theory and data, the development of the child from one specifiable period of his life to another? In its narrower form, the question reads: Can we show, specifically and rigorously, how the infant becomes the noninfant?

Let us say briefly why we chose infancy as the testing ground for the more general question.

No one can speak wisely about all of development; some scissions must be made in the 70-year strand in order to avoid vacuous speculation. Readers of textbooks and of scholarly treatises as well are familiar with our favorite lines of division—between preschool and school, between adolescence and adulthood, between maturity and senility. The most common cutting point, and the only one that runs back to antiquity and that has never left modern expositions of development, is the line between the infant and the noninfant. The segregation of talkers from nontalkers—to pick the most persistent definition of the boundary—has profound cultural roots in dress, games, caretaking, expectations of responsibility, and ascriptions of competence, but the boundary has more academic marks. The methods that are used to study the behavior of the littlest people do not often overlap the methods used to study what are purported to be the same conceptual issues in older children. The theories used by those of us who look at babies and those who look at, say, the preschool child are different in central propositions as well as in parameters. Even the marks of mind that we observe—the basic “responses” of legendary consequence—shift markedly when we go from newborns to yearlings to 2-year-olds. There is not room here to explore many of the implications of the infant-noninfant wall that developmental psychology faces, but several summary notes will help get you ready for the chapters of the present book. Some developmental psychologists have effectively denied the boundary by concentrating their attention on processes assumed to be general. The most widely held such functional position has been maintained by the researchers committed to a learning analysis of behavioral change over age. Some developmental psychologists have recognized the wall between infants and noninfants and have called on a paired proposition—the existence of stages and the operation of general theoretical principles—to handle the boundary. Psychoanalytic theorists and Piaget are chiefs here; again, the skeptical observer sees more theoretical and empirical work going on within stages than between them. Some developmental psychologists seize on concepts of continuation (temperament, IQ, social class) to pierce the wall in the ballistic assumption that there are underlying (a favorite word for all of us) regularities in personal traits. Finally, there is a new return to the oldest idea of all—that infancy is not momentously connected with the rest of the developmental course but represents a biological continuation of pregnancy, which may be interesting in its own right but need not deter us in the study of later changes with age.

The last-noted position, the indifference proposition, is rare enough to emphasize another major characteristic of the segregation between infants and noninfants. In spite of our faltering attempts to get over the wall, there had been little doubt until recently that the events of the first months of life are of far-reaching consequence for later development. Perhaps the single shared ideological commitment of learning theorists, psychoanalysts, Piagetians, Wenerians, and maturationalists has been the belief in the high significance of the early months and years of life. Personalities are shaped, basic knowledge is acquired, directions are set. In sometimes lunatic fashion, mothers are urged to perform early-days rituals of caregiving, and frights are raised about the consequence of insufficient early support to intellectual growth, all in the name of infancy’s uniquely formative and defining place in life.

Thus, the editors saw a potentially productive paradox. Developmentalists study infants and noninfants in different ways, we talk about them in different ways, we have grave trouble connecting them up. Yet we persist in the rarely examined conviction that what happens to infants is a determinant of all later development. The transition from nontalker to talker seemed ideally suited to put our attention precisely on the problem of developmental transitions, their theory, and their data.

The book that follows on our introduction is made up of 11 original chapters and three commentaries on those chapters. We invited essays from 13 investigators who have worked with and thought about both infants and older children. We asked them to take some particular topic of interest to them and to attempt to make their way over, through, or around the boundary that segregates infants from noninfants. As you will see, they have carried out their assignment with uniform high intelligence and good spirit. We leave to our commentators and to our readers to judge with what success.

Amid the fine variety of the chapters you are about to read, there are some recurrent themes. First among them, naturally enough in light of our assignment, is the issue of continuity. Not always addressed directly, the question of getting from infant to noninfant with a coherent set of ideas is constantly present. Several other persistencies lie under the major one. Liberation from the response appears throughout; whether the exemplary case is drawn from perception or action, language or thought, the critical move from the conceptual importance of the visible response to the importance of the mental act that must be inferred is usual. In a happy controversial phrase from one of our authors, mind begins to control muscle. Closely tied to the peculiar reduction of the response are the problems of context and decentration. No attempt to understand perception or language (and perception and language are models for the rest of developmental study) can conscientiously ignore the troubling puzzle of how young children parcel out their experience into categories of figure and ground, of important and less important, of same and different. The development of a textured organized surrounding, in which some things go with some other things and some things matter more than other things, is a heart issue of this book. When the editors first talked about the book, we wanted to call it From Image to Intention in order to emphasize our conviction that one of the defining problems of the development from infancy to noninfancy was the coming on of plans, the child’s shift from species-general solutions of presented problems to particular solutions, from solutions based on the here-and-now to solutions based on memory, symbol, and reasoning. The title was canned, but the issue remains. How does the young child move toward that less automatic, less quick, and less uniform treatment of a problem he faces that marks the transition from image to intention?

Continuity, response-to-thought, context, and image-to-intention are everywhere concerns of the book's authors. However, the best contribution of these chapters almost certainly is not in solving fundamental and general psychological questions that we can hardly put into words but rather in wrestling, specifically and concretely, with the “principles” and “conditions” that carry the child from birth to conversation.

REFERENCES

Baldwin, J. M. Mental development in the child and the race. New York: Macmillan, 1895.

Spencer, H. The principles of psychology. New York: Appleton, 1899.

I PERCEPTUAL AND MOTOR DEVELOPMENT

2Perspectives on Infant Motor System Development

Claire B. Kopp

University of California at Los Angeles

INTRODUCTION

Movement is so fundamental to human existence that performance of countless acts scarcely intrudes upon consciousness. Yet one has only to see a single individual struggling with “nonbidding” limbs in executing otherwise routine tasks to appreciate the personal significance of motor behaviors. They are means to communication, exploration, tension release, skill, self-care, mastery, and work. Furthermore, empirical studies suggest that movement contributes to learning, perception, attention, memory, problem solving, motivation, and socialization. Movement has an ubiquitous character.

Because of this and sometimes despite it, the study of movement, its origins, controls, functions, and influences, has fascinated researchers for years. Although not without controversy, historic analyses of human motor research show trends often paralleling interests evident in other areas of psychological investigation. For example, studies of adult motor performance have shifted from a product orientation to examination of links between information processing and motor performance (Irion, 1966; Pew, 1974; Stelmach, 1976). As is seen later, a similar shift from product to process has characterized research on infant motor development.

The study of acquisition of voluntary movement, only one domain of a much larger research field, has been of particular interest to developmentalists. At the very least, to scientist as well as layman, awesome transformations of infant motor patterns take place—from first rudimentary forms, to endlessly practiced transitional structures, to mature configurations skill- fully executed. But beyond fascination, there is theory. Increasingly, developmentalists have thought about the significance of movement and ascribed to it a singular role in development. Infant motor acts are, after all, striking characteristics of the first two years of life and represent a common means by which the very young convey their abilities and feelings. Eventually, infant movement became the sine qua non of cognitive and social development. Only in the last decade or so has this view been questioned.

REFLECTIONS

To gain some perspective on ideas that governed much of our earlier thinking, it is useful to review in a summary way former periods of theory and research. This review is selective and arbitrary. For example, for organizational purposes four phases of research have been delineated, covering the period from the turn of the century to the present time. Although several common threads link the phases, one of the most striking concerns the emphasis and interest developmentalists placed on the age period of motor acquisition. Thus, almost all the ensuing discussion relates to the first year of life.

The first phase, spanning several decades...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Series Prologue
• Preface
• 1. Introduction: William Kessen
• PART I: PERCEPTUAL AND MOTOR DEVELOPMENT
• PART II: COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT
• PART III: LANGUAGE AND SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT
• Biographical Notes
• Author Index
• Subject Index