Naturalistic Observation Of Human Development

The first few years of human development has a significant impact on the person’s overall growth and progress. Since there are well-defined developmental milestones for each particular stage of infancy, interactions between a 15 month old (mo) female infant and her thirty-four year old female caregiver were observed to relate theoretical concepts of human development to infant behaviour.
Naturalistic Observation
This set of naturalistic observations occurred in the living room of the infant’s home during the morning with only her female caregiver present. The infant babbled, answered “yes” and “no,” and used baby signs, which is characteristic of infants between 10 to 15mo, whenever her caregiver engaged the infant with infant-directed speech

(IDS) throughout the observation. Her actions indicate that she was willing and able to engage in reciprocal communication and social interaction, suggesting that her language development depends on whether she wants to actively participate in such instances of intercommunication. In addition to this, the use of IDS by caregivers facilitate language development by promoting an infant’s attention to language, social interaction, and perceptual narrowing (Golinkoff et. al, 2015; Goldstein & Scwade, 2008). As the caregiver was preparing lunch, the infant spent time playing with tableware and utensils on the table of her highchair.

She spent time exploring these objects individually by chewing and sucking on them with her mouth, and then dropped each object off her highchair. Although she is still developing her fine motor skills, this action shows that she is capable of hand-eye coordination to achieve goal-directed behaviour that is typically for 12mo infants. By also engaging in oral exploration, she was able to aid her cognitive development by discovering additional sensory properties of the objects that she did not learn by only using her hands. The caregiver then picked up the objects for the infant and positioned the utensils into the small opening of the cups in front of the infant a couple times. The infant proceeded to put the utensils in her mouth again and was praised by her caregiver when she tried to place each eating utensil into the opening of the cup just like her caregiver had done. This instance of imitation demonstrates that observational learning allows infants to rapidly learn about behaviours and provides them the ability to successfully reproduce such behaviours at a later time. Imitation also

requires attention to parental actions, awareness of their own abilities and knowledge of their own body parts so they can learn to perform independently and act out of self-motivation in the future (Jones, 2007). Her actions also further indicate that observation and imitation is an innate social skill because it encourages bonding between the infant and the caregiver through positive social interactions (Jaine et. al, 2013), suggesting that these two learning mechanisms and an infant’s social environment play a crucial role in development. She did this a couple more times and then tried to insert a larger cup into the small opening of the cup. This type of behaviour where infants experiment by repeatedly performing the same actions with some form of variation is typical of 12 to 18mo infants in the tertiary circular reactions sub-stage of Piaget’s theory. It may also indicate that she is self-motivated to initiate different ways of learning. The caregiver began to feed the infant food and she continued to play with the cups in between bites for a while. Every so often the infant exhibited “m-m-m” sounds while eating, which may indicate that she was enjoying her food or trying to asking for more. Her play began to be less active because she started to doze off while eating. Interestingly, the infant still opened her mouth and chewed the food while nodding off periodically. Since infants consolidate their sleep into a night sleep cycle and a daytime nap cycle by 12mo (Middlemiss, 2007), her behaviour may be indicative that she did not receive enough REM sleep because of night wakings or had difficulties self-soothing from the previous night. She soon became frustrated and began to whine when the caregiver tried to continued feeding her, so she tried to climb out of the highchair herself. The caregiver intervened and carried her out to head towards her crib for a nap. Although the infant was tired, she began to cry for approximately 20 minutes until the caregiver went to comfort her by soothing her and rocking her to sleep. This may be a result of operant conditioning, in which the caregiver’s actions positively reinforce the infant’s undesirable behaviour. In this specific case, the infant learned that crying during naptime results in excessive positive attention from her caregiver so that she didn’t have to sleep alone.
Structured Observation
After the infant’s nap, activities guided by myself and the caregiver were conducted in the living room to assess her cognitive, motor, language and social-emotional development.

I began testing the A-not-B error by placing a plush toy under one of two cloths within the infant’s reach. The toy was first hidden under cloth A for three consecutive trials, and then hidden under cloth B for the fourth trial. Just like most infants who pass the A-not-B error test at approximately 10 months, she correctly identified the location of the toy for each of the four trials. Basing her behaviour on information-processing theory, it suggests that she has a developed schema of object permanence and strong mental representation of objects due to increased working memory capacity. 10mo infants are capable of successfully locating hidden objects as a result of improved attention, inhibitory and motor memory skills over time (Ruffman and Slade, 2005), so her behaviour demonstrates that she may be focusing on achieving the intention of goals by inhibiting previously rewarded motor responses at a younger age. After this task, I asked her to walk towards me with one of her toys. Although she continued to play with her toys at first, she successfully completed the task after some time. This demonstrates that she was able to understand and remember the task that was asked of her even though she was preoccupied with a task of her own interest. I then asked her to find her caregiver who was upstairs.

She used the stair banister to support her ascent, but she scooted down in a sitting position during descent. Although most infants between 13 to 16 months descend the stairs on their bellies with their feet first between, all strategies for ascent and descent relate to the interaction of increased cognitive demands for assessing the situation, coordinating complex locomotor skills, and knowledge of the infant’s own capabilities in order to achieve their goal (Berger et. al, 2007). This interaction between her behaviour and cognition allowed her to choose a strategy that she was most comfortable at the moment. As her actions become more complex with age, so do her thoughts about her abilities and environment, and vice versa. Therefore, simply changing the nature of the task may constrain well-established motor functioning by making the infant temporarily use alternative approaches that better accommodate the task. After this, I gave the infant some crayons and a piece of paper to assess her fine motor skills and cognitive development. Her actions demonstrated that she was able to grasp a crayon and to use it to scribble on a piece of paper. Although her drawing was indecipherable to me, she exhibited the ability to draw within a contained space and to listen to instruction. Children attempt to produce recognizable images at approximately 3 years of age, so her scribbles on the paper are not atypically considering that she is only 15mo. I then asked her questions about her drawing, and later asked her to identify her own body parts and my body parts. She did not use any holophrastic speech besides “yes” and “no” to reply, but she did correctly respond to each question about her drawing, and pointed to the correct body parts when asked to. Her responses demonstrate that she was able to identify where the words start and end through the process of word segmentation with the use of statistical learning, which consequently allows her to associate words with meaning. This also indicates that she has the knowledge and understanding of words she is unable to express by herself with words. As most of her responses were accompanied with arm movements and either a smile or a giggle, it further suggests that she may be trying to communicate much more than she is able to during this stage of development. Towards the end of my structured observation, I left the room only to return with a neutral facial expression and showed no response to any of her actions. This test is known as the still face procedure and it assesses an infant’s abilities to maintain affective regulation. The infant giggled and babbled when I was interacting with her earlier, but gazed into another direction when I was unresponsive to her actions moments after I entered the room expressionless. This gaze aversion behaviour helps infants to engage in self-regulation of emotions and is typical of 12 to 24mo infants. Her behaviour suggested that she was capable of understanding the intersubjectivity needed for social interaction and has the ability to connect my facial and verbal expressions with my feelings. Thus, her gaze aversion was an attempt to regulate her own emotional distress by disengaging from social interaction that was unreciprocated. Contrastingly, her behaviour when I was responsive to her indicated that was also capable of detecting the intentions of their social partners to help them achieve the goals of reciprocated social interaction (Adamanson and Frick, 2003).