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

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

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.