infant

Mother with her toddler perambulated the infant in tow.

Infants get born where they're just in continual pain.

Physiological immaturity may be part of why infants and toddlers do not form extremely enduring memories, even when they hear stories that promote such remembering in preschoolers.

Older children and adults often try to retrieve the names of things they saw, but infants would not have encoded the information verbally.

A third likely explanation for infantile amnesia involves incompatibilities between the ways in which infants encode information and the ways in which older children and adults retrieve it.

Demonstrations of infants’ and toddlers' long-term memory have involved their repeating motor activities that they had seen or done earlier, such as reaching in the dark for objects, putting a bottle in a doll’s mouth, or pulling apart two pieces of a toy.

While such repression may occur, people cannot remember ordinary events from the infant and toddler periods either.

Another seemingly plausible explanation—that infants do not form enduring memories at this point in development—also is incorrect.

Of course he didn’t claim that infants don’t have any sort of memory, it is acknowledged that they can recognize some stimuli, like faces.

Within them, infants and children are introduced to the ways of their society.

However, these measures are only "indirect" indicators of the infant's perceptual abilities.

Changes in the electrical pattern of the brain indicate that the stimulus is getting through to the infant's central nervous system and eliciting some form of response.

The habituation-dishabituation paradigm has been used most extensively with studies of auditory and olfactory perception in infants.

If the infant fails to dishabituate and continues to show habituation with the new stimulus, it is assumed that the baby is unable to perceive the new stimulus as different.

The first is the habituation-dishabituation technique, in which a single stimulus is presented repeatedly to the infant until there is a measurable decline (habituation) in whatever attending behavior is being observed.

Two additional techniques of studying infant perception have come into vogue.

Increases in the number of sucks were used as anindicator of the infant's attention to or preference for a given visual display.

As stimuli were presented, changes in the infant's sucking behavior were recorded.

Film analysis permits researchers to carefully study the infant's responses over and over and in slow motion.  

Film analysis of the infant's responses, heart and respiration rate monitors, and nonnutritive sucking devices are used as effective tools in understanding infant perception.

Therefore, when observational assessment is used as a technique for studying infant perceptual abilities, care must be taken not to overgeneralize from the data or to rely on one or two studies as conclusive evidence of a particular perceptual ability of the infant.

The infant may be responding to aspects of the stimulus different than those identified by the investigator.

The third, and most potent, limitation is that it is not possible to be certain that the infant's response was due to the stimulus presented or to a change from no stimulus to a stimulus.

Often the rapid and diffuse movements of the infant make it difficult to get an accurate record of the number of responses.

Similarly, changes in the infant's general level of motor activity —turning the head, blinking the eyes, crying, and so forth — have been used by researchers as visual indicators of the infant's perceptual abilities.

Each of these methods compares an infant's state prior to the introduction of a stimulus with its state during or immediately following the stimulus.

Because they cannot verbalize or fill out questionnaires, indirect techniques of naturalistic observation are used as the primary means of determining what infants can see, hear, feel, and so forth.

In the study of perceptual abilities of infants, a number of techniques are used to determine infants' responses to various stimuli.

According to this line of thought, the verbal abilities that blossom in the two year old allow events to be coded in a form radically different from the action-based codes of the infant.

The question of why infantile amnesia occurs has intrigued psychologists for decades, especially in light of ample evidence that infants and young children can display impressive memory capabilities.

And studies have shown that even six-month-old infants are able to use this sense to some extent.