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Reading Your Baby's Mind
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New research on infants finally begins to
answer the question: what's going on in there?
Live Talk: Inside Baby's Brain
Join NEWSWEEK's Pat Wingert for a Live Talk about the inner life
of babies on Thursday, Aug. 11, at noon ET.
By Pat Wingert and Martha Brant
Newsweek
Aug. 15, 2005 issue - Little Victoria Bateman is blond and blue-eyed
and as cute a baby as there ever was. At 6 months, she is also trusting
and unsuspecting, which is a good thing, because otherwise she'd
never go along with what's about to happen. It's a blistering June
afternoon in Lubbock, Texas, and inside the Human Sciences lab at
Texas Tech University, Victoria's mother is settling her daughter
into a high chair, where she is the latest subject in an ongoing
experiment aimed at understanding the way babies think. Sybil Hart,
an associate professor of human development and leader of the study,
trains video cameras on mother and daughter. Everything is set.
Hart hands Cheryl Bateman a children's book, "Elmo Pops In,"
and instructs her to engross herself in its pages. "Just have
a conversation with me about the book," Hart tells her. "The
most important thing is, do not look at [Victoria.]" As the
two women chat, Victoria looks around the room, impassive and a
little bored.
After a few minutes, Hart leaves the room and returns cradling a
lifelike baby doll. Dramatically, Hart places it in Cheryl Bateman's
arms, and tells her to cuddle the doll while continuing to ignore
Victoria. "That's OK, little baby," Bateman coos, hugging
and rocking the doll. Victoria is not bored anymore. At first, she
cracks her best smile, showcasing a lone stubby tooth. When that
doesn't work, she begins kicking. But her mom pays her no mind.
That's when Victoria loses it. Soon she's beet red and crying so
hard it looks like she might spit up. Hart rushes in. "OK,
we're done," she says, and takes back the doll. Cheryl Bateman
goes to comfort her daughter. "I've never seen her react like
that to anything," she says. Over the last 10 months, Hart
has repeated the scenario hundreds of times. It's the same in nearly
every case: tiny babies, overwhelmed with jealousy. Even Hart was
stunned to find that infants could experience an emotion, which,
until recently, was thought to be way beyond their grasp.
And that's just for starters. The helpless, seemingly clueless
infant staring up at you from his crib, limbs flailing, drool oozing,
has a lot more going on inside his head than you ever imagined.
A wealth of new research is leading pediatricians and child psychologists
to rethink their long-held beliefs about the emotional and intellectual
abilities of even very young babies. In 1890, psychologist William
James famously described an infant's view of the world as "one
great blooming, buzzing confusion." It was a notion that held
for nearly a century: infants were simple-minded creatures who merely
mimicked those around them and grasped only the most basic emotions—happy,
sad, angry. Science is now giving us a much different picture of
what goes on inside their hearts and heads. Long before they form
their first words or attempt the feat of sitting up, they are already
mastering complex emotions—jealousy, empathy, frustration—that
were once thought to be learned much later in toddlerhood.
They are also far more sophisticated intellectually than we once
believed. Babies as young as 4 months have advanced powers of deduction
and an ability to decipher intricate patterns. They have a strikingly
nuanced visual palette, which enables them to notice small differences,
especially in faces, that adults and older children lose the ability
to see. Until a baby is 3 months old, he can recognize a scrambled
photograph of his mother just as quickly as a photo in which everything
is in the right place. And big brothers and sisters beware: your
sib has a long memory—and she can hold a grudge.
The new research is sure to enthrall new parents—See, Junior
is a genius!—but it's more than just an academic exercise.
Armed with the new information, pediatricians are starting to change
the way they evaluate their youngest patients. In addition to tracking
physical development, they are now focusing much more deeply on
emotional advancement. The research shows how powerful emotional
well-being is to a child's future health. A baby who fails to meet
certain key "emotional milestones" may have trouble learning
to speak, read and, later, do well in school. By reading emotional
responses, doctors have begun to discover ways to tell if a baby
as young as 3 months is showing early signs of possible psychological
disorders, including depression, anxiety, learning disabilities
and perhaps autism. "Instead of just asking if they're crawling
or sitting, we're asking more questions about how they share their
world with their caregivers," says Dr. Chet Johnson, chairman
of the American Academy of Pediatrics' early-childhood committee.
"Do they point to things? When they see a new person, how do
they react? How children do on social and emotional and language
skills are better predictors of success in adulthood than motor
skills are." The goal: in the not-too-distant future, researchers
hope doctors will routinely identify at-risk kids years earlier
than they do now—giving parents crucial extra time to turn
things around.
Checklist: Social and emotional 'milestones' that babies should
reach by 18 months.
One of the earliest emotions that even tiny babies display is, admirably
enough, empathy. In fact, concern for others may be hard-wired into
babies' brains. Plop a newborn down next to another crying infant,
and chances are, both babies will soon be wailing away. "People
have always known that babies cry when they hear other babies cry,"
says Martin Hoffman, a psychology professor at New York University
who did the first studies on infant empathy in the 1970s. "The
question was, why are they crying?" Does it mean that the baby
is truly concerned for his fellow human, or just annoyed by the
racket? A recent study conducted in Italy, which built on Hoffman's
own work, has largely settled the question. Researchers played for
infants tapes of other babies crying. As predicted, that was enough
to start the tears flowing. But when researchers played babies recordings
of their own cries, they rarely began crying themselves. The verdict:
"There is some rudimentary empathy in place, right from birth,"
Hoffman says. The intensity of the emotion tends to fade over time.
Babies older than 6 months no longer cry but grimace at the discomfort
of others. By 13 to 15 months, babies tend to take matters into
their own hands. They'll try to comfort a crying playmate. "What
I find most charming is when, even if the two mothers are present,
they'll bring their own mother over to help," Hoffman says.
Part of that empathy may come from another early-baby skill that's
now better understood, the ability to discern emotions from the
facial expressions of the people around them. "Most textbooks
still say that babies younger than 6 months don't recognize emotions,"
says Diane Montague, assistant professor of psychology at LaSalle
University in Philadelphia. To put that belief to the test, Montague
came up with a twist on every infant's favorite game, peekaboo,
and recruited dozens of 4-month-olds to play along. She began by
peeking around a cloth with a big smile on her face. Predictably,
the babies were delighted, and stared at her intently—the
time-tested way to tell if a baby is interested. On the fourth peek,
though, Montague emerged with a sad look on her face. This time,
the response was much different. "They not only looked away,"
she says, but wouldn't look back even when she began smiling again.
Refusing to make eye contact is a classic baby sign of distress.
An angry face got their attention once again, but their faces showed
no pleasure. "They seemed primed to be alert, even vigilant,"
Montague says. "I realize that's speculative in regard to infants...
I think it shows that babies younger than 6 months find meaning
in expressions."
This might be a good place to pause for a word about the challenges
and perils of baby research. Since the subjects can't speak for
themselves, figuring out what's going on inside their heads is often
a matter of reading their faces and body language. If this seems
speculative, it's not. Over decades of trial and error, researchers
have fine-tuned their observation skills and zeroed in on numerous
consistent baby responses to various stimuli: how long they stare
at an object, what they reach out for and what makes them recoil
in fear or disgust can often tell experienced researchers everything
they need to know. More recently, scientists have added EEGs and
laser eye tracking, which allow more precise readings. Coming soon:
advanced MRI scans that will allow a deeper view inside the brain.
When infants near their first birthdays, they become increasingly
sophisticated social learners. They begin to infer what others are
thinking by following the gaze of those around them. "By understanding
others' gaze, babies come to understand others' minds," says
Andrew Meltzoff, a professor of psychology at the University of
Washington who has studied the "gaze following" of thousands
of babies. "You can tell a lot about people, what they're interested
in and what they intend to do next, by watching their eyes. It appears
that even babies know that... This is how they learn to become expert
members of our culture."
Meltzoff and colleague Rechele Brooks have found that this skill
first appears at 10 to 11 months, and is not only an important marker
of a baby's emotional and social growth, but can predict later language
development. In their study, babies who weren't proficient at gaze-following
by their first birthday had much less advanced-language skills at
2. Meltzoff says this helps explain why language occurs more slowly
in blind children, as well as children of depressed mothers, who
tend not to interact as much with their babies.
In fact, at just a few months, infants begin to develop superpowers
when it comes to observation. Infants can easily tell the difference
between human faces. But at the University of Minnesota, neuroscientist
Charles Nelson (now of Harvard) wanted to test how discerning infants
really are. He showed a group of 6-month-old babies a photo of a
chimpanzee, and gave them time to stare at it until they lost interest.
They were then shown another chimp. The babies perked up and stared
at the new photo. The infants easily recognized each chimp as an
individual—they were fascinated by each new face. Now unless
you spend a good chunk of your day hanging around the local zoo,
chances are you couldn't tell the difference between a roomful of
chimps at a glance. As it turned out, neither could babies just
a few months older. By 9 months, those kids had lost the ability
to tell chimps apart; but at the same time, they had increased their
powers of observation when it came to human faces.
Checklist: Social and emotional 'milestones' that babies should
reach by 18 months.
Nelson has now taken his experiment a step further, to see how early
babies can detect subtle differences in facial expressions, a key
building block of social development. He designed a new study that
is attempting to get deep inside babies' heads by measuring brain-wave
activity. Nelson sent out letters to the parents of nearly every
newborn in the area, inviting them to participate. Earlier this
summer it was Dagny Winberg's turn. The 7-month-old was all smiles
as her mother, Armaiti, carried her into the lab, where she was
fitted with a snug cap wired with 64 sponge sensors. Nelson's assistant,
grad student Meg Moulson, began flashing photographs on a screen
of a woman. In each photo, the woman had a slightly different expression—many
different shades of happiness and fear. Dagny was given time to
look at each photo until she became bored and looked away. The whole
time, a computer was closely tracking her brain activity, measuring
her mind's minutest responses to the different photos. Eventually,
after she'd run through 60 photos, Dagny had had enough of the game
and began whimpering and fidgeting. That ended the session. The
point of the experiment is to see if baby brain scans look like
those of adults. "We want to see if babies categorize emotions
in the ways that adults do," Moulson says. "An adult can
see a slight smile and categorize it as happy. We want to know if
babies can do the same." They don't have the answer yet, but
Nelson believes that infants —who display early signs of emotional
disorders, such as autism, may be helped if they can develop these
critical powers of observation and emotional engagement.
Halfway across the country, researchers are working to dispel another
baby cliche: out of sight, out of mind. It was long believed that
babies under 9 months didn't grasp the idea of "object permanence"—the
ability to know, for instance, that when Mom leaves the room, she
isn't gone forever. New research by psychologist Su-hua Wang at
the University of California, Santa Cruz, is showing that babies
understand the concept as early as 10 weeks. Working with 2- and
3-month-olds, she performs a little puppet show. Each baby sees
a duck on a stage. Wang covers the duck, moves it across the stage
and lifts the cover. Sometimes the duck is there. Other times, the
duck disappears beneath a trapdoor. When they see the duck has gone
missing, the babies stare intently at the empty stage, searching
for it. "At 2 1/2 months," she says, "they already
have the idea that the object continues to exist."
A strong, well-developed ability to connect with the world—and
with parents in particular—is especially important when babies
begin making their first efforts at learning to speak. Baby talk
is much more than mimickry. Michael Goldstein, a psychologist at
Cornell University, gathered two groups of 8-month-olds and decked
them out in overalls rigged up with wireless microphones and transmitters.
One group of mothers was told to react immediately when their babies
cooed or babbled, giving them big smiles and loving pats. The other
group of parents was also told to smile at their kids, but randomly,
unconnected to the babies' sounds. It came as no surprise that the
babies who received immediate feedback babbled more and advanced
quicker than those who didn't. But what interested Goldstein was
the way in which the parents, without realizing it, raised the "babble
bar" with their kids. "The kinds of simple sounds that
get parents' attention at 4 months don't get the same reaction at
8 months," he says. "That motivates babies to experiment
with different sound combinations until they find new ones that
get noticed."
A decade ago Patricia Kuhl, a professor of speech and hearing at
the University of Washington and a leading authority on early language,
proved that tiny babies have a unique ability to learn a foreign
language. As a result of her well-publicized findings, parents ran
out to buy foreign-language tapes, hoping their little Einsteins
would pick up Russian or French before they left their cribs. It
didn't work, and Kuhl's new research shows why. Kuhl put American
9-month-olds in a room with Mandarin-speaking adults, who showed
them toys while talking to them. After 12 sessions, the babies had
learned to detect subtle Mandarin phonetic sounds that couldn't
be heard by a separate group of babies who were exposed only to
English. Kuhl then repeated the experiment, but this time played
the identical Mandarin —lessons to babies on video- and audiotape.
That group of babies failed to learn any Mandarin. Kuhl says that
without the emotional connection, the babies considered the tape
recording just another background noise, like a vacuum cleaner.
"We were genuinely surprised by the outcome," she says.
"We all assumed that when infants stare at a television, and
look engaged, that they are learning from it." Kuhl says there's
plenty of work to be done to explain why that isn't true. "But
at first blush one thinks that people—at least babies—need
people to learn."
So there you have it. That kid over there with one sock missing
and smashed peas all over his face is actually a formidable presence,
in possession of keen powers of observation, acute emotional sensitivity
and an impressive arsenal of deductive powers. "For the last
15 years, we've been focused on babies' abilities—what they
know and when they knew it," says the University of Washington's
Meltzoff. "But now we want to know what all this predicts about
later development. What does all this mean for the child?"
Courtesy Dr. Sybil Hart / Texas Tech University
Baby envy: In a Texas Tech laboratory, 8-month-old Joseph McCarty
becomes distressed when his mother directs attention to a life-size
doll.
Some of these questions are now finding answers. Take shyness, for
instance. It's long been known that 15 to 20 percent of children
are shy and anxious by nature. But doctors didn't know why some
seemed simply to grow out of it, while for others it became a debilitating
condition. Recent studies conducted by Nathan Fox of the University
of Maryland show that shyness is initially driven by biology. He
proved it by wiring dozens of 9-month-olds to EEG machines and conducting
a simple experiment. When greeted by a stranger, "behaviorally
inhibited" infants tensed up, and showed more activity in the
parts of the brain associated with anxiety and fear. Babies with
outgoing personalities reached out to the stranger. Their EEG scans
showed heightened activity in the parts of the brain that govern
positive emotions like pleasure.
But Fox, who has followed some of these children for 15 years,
says that parenting style has a big impact on which kind of adult
a child will turn out to be. Children of overprotective parents,
or those whose parents didn't encourage them to overcome shyness
and childhood anxiety, often remain shy and anxious as adults. But
kids born to confident and sensitive parents who gently help them
to take emotional risks and coax them out of their shells can often
overcome early awkwardness. That's an important finding, since behaviorally
inhibited kids are also at higher risk for other problems.
Checklist: Social and emotional 'milestones' that babies should
reach by 18 months.
Stanley Greenspan, clinical professor of psychiatry and pediatrics
at George Washington University Medical School, is one of the leaders
in developing diagnostic tools to help doctors identify babies who
may be at risk for language and learning problems, autism and a
whole range of other problems. He recently completed a checklist
of social and emotional "milestones" that babies should
reach by specific ages (graphic). "I'd like to see doctors
screen babies for these milestones and tell parents exactly what
to do if their babies are not mastering them. One of our biggest
problems now is that parents may sense intuitively that something
is not right," but by the time they are able to get their child
evaluated, "that family has missed a critical time to, maybe,
get that baby back on track."
Toby Burditt for Newsweek
Look Who's Talking: At a day-care center in Davis, Calif., a child
uses sign language to ask for another song. Babies can learn to
express needs and feelings with signs long before they can speak.
So what should parents do with all this new information? First
thing: relax. Just because your baby is more perceptive than you
might have thought doesn't mean she's going to be damaged for life
if she cries in her crib for a minute while you answer the phone.
Or that he'll wind up quitting school and stealing cars if he witnesses
an occasional argument between his parents. Children crave—and
thrive on—interaction, one-on-one time and lots of eye contact.
That doesn't mean filling the baby's room with "educational"
toys and posters. A child's social, emotional and academic life
begins with the earliest conversations between parent and child:
the first time the baby locks eyes with you; the quiet smile you
give your infant and the smile she gives you back. Your child is
speaking to you all the time. It's just a matter of knowing how
to listen.
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