More development happens in infancy than in any other time in life. Yet much of that development is unknown because of the limited communicative ability of infants and the gap between the adult world and the baby’s.

At StFX, groundbreaking work to understand this fascinating world is going on each and every day. Psychologists, Drs. Ann Bigelow, Tara Callaghan and Petra Hauf, each operate infancy labs and design studies to help infants teach them about their world and the sense they make of it.

Thanks to the generous support of local parent and child volunteers – the trio draws heavily on community participants – a steady stream of babies with moms and dads in tow come onto campus to participate in a variety of studies.

Current research includes:

Dr. Ann Bigelow

How babies learn about themselves:

That game of peek-a-boo a mom plays with her newborn, the tender touches on a baby’s toes, or the stories dad reads all may unwittingly help set the stage for a child’s future development. “Some people talk a lot, others are more tactile, there are different ways to engage with baby,” says Dr. Ann Bigelow, an NSERC-funded researcher studying newborns to six month olds to understand baby’s development of self-knowledge. “What is key is that people respond to babies.” Research shows that through this interaction babies come to first understand and feel they are effective agents in the world, and Dr. Bigelow says the more they develop a sense that they can cope, they can do things, and they’re not helpless, the better it is for attachment and for gaining an understanding of themselves. “Early self-knowledge helps build self confidence and a sense of self-efficacy that they then use in other situations,” she says. While people used to think self-knowledge began in the second year, she says an earlier learning is going on. It is as simple as baby realizing ‘I reach out and touch and things knock over, I smile and mom smiles back.’ “They don’t have to have an internal concept. They learn it through perception. They learn it most easily through social environments. It is most important that people are responsive to babies.”

Advantage:

Skin to Skin: Babies who have more skin-to-skin contact with their mother tend to be more responsive to the mother earlier, Dr. Bigelow has found. In a recently completed four-year study with over 100 mother/baby pairs funded by the Nova Scotia Health Research Foundation, she found this intimate contact allows the baby to know the mother in earlier ways. Babies exposed to daily skin-to-skin contact reacted to the still face test – where a previously engaged mother suddenly remains still – much earlier than their counterparts. Their social bidding to get their mother to engage with them again happened as early as three months. Typically this behaviour begins around six months. Thanks to a further grant from the Nova Scotia Health Research Foundation, Dr. Bigelow is now making a DVD of the results of her study to disperse to practitioners and agencies that work with new mothers.

Dr. Tara Callaghan

A picture is worth a thousand words:

“We’re trying to figure out what’s in the mind of the baby when they see pictures – when do they understand that a picture is something that can be used to stand for another thing.” says Dr. Tara Callaghan, whose lab is one of only a handful in the world investigating the development of pictorial symbol understanding. Dr. Callaghan has two lines of SSHRC and NSERC-funded research currently underway. The NSERC study focuses on how babies, aged 18 to 30 months, come to understand that a picture is a symbol for something else. “What we’re trying to do is find out the origins of this prototypical human behaviour. Using symbols is thought to be the main behavior that separates us from other species, although there has been some interesting research on dogs recently that may change our views on this.” The other project is related, a SSHRC-funded cross-cultural study, investigating the symbolic abilities of babies aged nine months to three years. Dr. Callaghan has conducted standard tests of pretense and pictorial symbols in Canada, in a rural village in the central highlands of Peru, and in Andhra Pradesh, a coastal state in India, to explore how social interaction is tied in with human development. “We’re the first project in the world trying to pin down whether the early social interaction we know is important for symbolic development is common across a variety of cultures.” The results? “Our preliminary findings suggest that the milestones of early social cognitive development that lead to symbolic understanding, things like imitation and reading the intentions from other people’s actions, are developing at the same time across the three cultures,” she says, but the symbolic behaviors of pretend and drawing that those milestones lead to are a little delayed in settings where symbolic social interaction with those symbols is not common between mothers and babies. In the Indian and Peruvian cultural settings, both traditional rural villages, very little pictorial symbols are available for babies, and the parents do not typically ‘play’ with children. “What our research suggests is that if you don’t have social interaction then the symbolic behaviors that depend on that interaction are going to be somewhat delayed,” Dr. Callaghan says. “Social contact with young babies and toddlers early in life is very important, not only for social development but also for cognitive development. A human mind takes more than biological heritage to develop into its mature, adult form. It also takes cultural heritage.”

Dr. Petra Hauf

Novel eye tracking aiding research:

A baby sits in a car seat on his mother’s lap while, behind a curtain, Dr. Petra Hauf, Canada Research Chair in Culture and Human Development, or one of her student assistants plays a video on a 21-inch flat screen monitor using infrared technology. The cornea in the baby’s eye reflects the light back and the camera in the screen pinpoints the exact coordinates of the baby’s eyes when presented with crawling and walking movements. She is hoping to make connections between what babies watch and what they do. As example, Dr. Hauf noted that one baby learning to crawl stared intently at the hip-knee relation. Her research may be particularly helpful to babies who may be delayed in motor development. Dr. Hauf is also investigating a connection between motor development and cognitive development. “I’m convinced that there is a link between different domains and skills developing at the same time which could improve the effectiveness of early development.” Dr. Hauf says around nine months babies are able to develop their motor skills much easier and thus can perform more complex actions that were a struggle only a month before. They start to move around on their own and are not so dependent on others. Dr. Hauf, who typically focuses on children in their first year of life, is also interested in how perception and action production are related to each other. She is trying to determine if infants have to develop certain rudimentary motor skills before they can begin to understand the intentions of the action production of others or if they understand intentionality even in the absence of fully functioning motor skills. Another research aim is to determine if the perception of action production varies according to the infants’ motor abilities. “Our goal is to determine whether infants’ views of action production are altered or influenced by their level of motor development.” The development of innovative eye-tracking technology is continuing to improve our understanding and the study of infant perception of motor development, she says.