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In Control
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16754 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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9 / 1989 |
1,463 Words |
| Author
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Lewis P. Lipsitt, Ph.d.
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The history of the field of child development and behavior has been curious, and in numerous ways. In no way has it been more fickle than in its secular trends relating to control of infant behavior. The issue of who and what causes change in a baby's behavior has vexed parents for years and has precipitated repeated controversies among developmental psychologists.
A child's avid or zestful pursuit of pleasure, not to mention avoidance of distressing or annoying events, can be understood in terms of survival. Yet, attributions of who is in control of whom, and with what consequences, condition parents' reactions to their infants' cries and other expressions of dependency. Whether the parent sees the infant as a victim of circumstances beyond his or her own control, on the one hand, or truly in charge (to an extent) of the world he or she experiences, on the other, can mediate very different reactions. The extent to which we respond to another's plea for help depends impressively on how we evaluate the supplicant's need. For those whom we believe to have been overly indulged or babied, we have pejorative terms, like leech and crybaby.
As information rapidly accrues about babies' surprising capabilities, it should not be surprising that after many years of the child's having been viewed as a helpless victim of both fortuitous and deliberately arranged environmental events, the tide has turned. Since the 1960s, infant-behavior investigators have been celebrating, through convincing demonstrations, the remarkable competencies infants display in changing their environment. Newly gathered data show that, contrary to previous perceptions, the newborn can indeed hear, see, taste, smell, feel, and even object strenuously to noxious stimulation. In addition, more than at any other time in modern history, humans are convinced that very young children can learn. It is only a question, now, of what they learn and what the specific processes are by which learned changes in behavior occur. Indeed, with increasing knowledge about infants' well-documented capability to remember previous experiences, there has appeared a ground swell of concern over unanesthetized, painful surgery traditionally performed on babies, as in circumcision.
Classical Pavlovian conditioning, in which a previously neutral stimulus becomes an elicitor of a reflex-like behavior, has been demonstrated even in newborns. Operant, or Skinnerian, learning, in which the infant engages in a behavior that produces reward and is thus energized to engage in more of that behavior, also occurs. There have been remarkable demonstrations of the ability of days-old infants to imitate significant behaviors of an adult model, such as sticking the tongue out of the mouth.
Six- and seven-week-old infants have been found to be remarkably rapid learners of "conjugate reinforcement" tasks, in which the amount of the reward is commensurate with the amount or strength of the behavior exerted. Learning such behavior and retaining it is very relevant to the Sammons thesis that very young infants can be taught to calm themselves. Operant learning of this type involves the shaping of a particular response, the rudiments of which are already in the infant's behavioral repertoire. What is required is that a satisfying (or hedonically positive) state of affairs should occur contingent upon the execution of the to-be-learned response. A large literature exists on this topic, pertaining to animals as well as humans. The human model may involve a leg-shaking or
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