ADVANCE PRAISE FOR
Experimenting with Babies
“Experimenting with Babies is a wonderful book, giving parents a hands-on way to understand their baby’s emerging mind. The experiments are easy, fun, and nicely annotated with the real science behind them. What a fabulous way for parents to get to know their new child!”
—Lise Eliot, PhD, associate professor of neuroscience at the Chicago Medical School of Rosalind Franklin University and author of What’s Going On in There? How the Brain and Mind Develop in the First Five Years of Life
“With the marketplace urging parents to buy all manner of things to make their babies ‘smart,’ Gallagher’s book offers parents a view based in science on how much babies really know and figure out on their own. Parents will have fun with this book and gain new respect and awe for their babies’ amazing capabilities.”
—Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, PhD, H. Rodney Sharp Professor at the University of Delaware and coauthor of How Babies Talk, Einstein Never Used Flash Cards, and A Mandate for Playful Learning in Preschool
A PERIGEE BOOK
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Copyright © 2013 by Shaun Gallagher
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eBook ISBN: 978-1-101-59969-3
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gallagher, Shaun, 1948–
Experimenting with babies : 50 amazing science projects you can perform on your kid / Shaun Gallagher.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-399-16246-6 (pbk.)
1. Parent and child. I. Title.
HQ755.8.G346 2013
306.874—dc23 2013021018
First edition: October 2013
A portion of the author’s royalty earnings will be donated to Show Hope, a nonprofit organization that offers adoption grants to families and medical care to orphans around the world. Learn more at ShowHope.org.
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To my children,
who are my favorite
science projects.
CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
DEDICATION
INTRODUCTION
1. Soothing Scents
Age range: 0–1 month
2. Baby Blueprints
Age range: 0–1 month
3. En Garde
Age range: 0–3 months
4. Happy Feet
Age range: 0–3 months
5. A Penchant for Patterns
Age range: 0–3 months
6. Feet Lead the Way
Age range: 0–6 months
7. Response Under Pressure
Age range: 0–6 months
8. I’m Hip to That
Age range: 0–9 months
9. This Little Piggy Was Named Babinski
Age range: 0–24 months
10. A Memorable Smile
Age range: 2–4 months
11. Out on a Limb
Age range: 2–4 months
12. Grasping Prep
Age range: 2–6 months
13. Tongue Testing
Age range: 2–6 months
14. Picture: Impossible
Age range: 3–6 months
15. Pitch Patterns
Age range: 3–9 months
16. Spider Sense
Age range: 4–5 months
17. Put an Age to That Face
Age range: 4–7 months
18. The Face Matches the Feeling
Age range: 4–12 months
19. Stress Busting
Age range: About 6 months
20. Propulsive Perceptions
Age range: 5–8 months
21. Body Stretches
Age range: 5–9 months
22. A Cappella Strikes a Chord
Age range: 5–11 months
23. Natural Interference
Age range: 6–8 months
24. The Gestation of Gestures
Age range: 6–9 months
25. Sizing Things Up
Age range: 6–9 months
26. Mirror, Mirror
Age range: 6–9 months
27. Capturing the Cup
Age range: 6–9 months
28. Grabby Hands
Age range: 6–10 months
29. I Want What You Want
Age range: 6–12 months
30. Be Still, My Face
Age range: 6–24 months
31. The In-Plain-Sight Switcheroo
Age range: 6–24 months
32. The Goldilocks Effect
Age range: 7–9 months
33. The Importance of an Audience
Age range: 7–11 months
34. A Gazy Connection
Age range: 9–10 months
35. Shapes or Kinds?
Age range: 10 months
36. Demonstration and Deduction
Age range: 9–15 months
37. Defending What’s Mine
Age range: 9–24 months
38. Taking Cues
Age range: 10–12 months
39. Walking Tour
Age range: 10–16 months
40. Familiarity and Foods
Age range: 12 months
41. The Retriever
Age range: 11–13 months
42. I Know Something You Don’t Know
Age range: 13–15 months
43. Using Your Head
Age range: 13–15 months
44. A Questioning Look
Age range: 13–18 months
45. Power Napping
Age range: 15 months
46. Same or Similar?
Age range: 14–20 months
47. The Ambiguous “One”
Age range: 16–18 months
48. Helping the Helper
Age range: 18–24 months
49. Punishing the Bad Guy
Age range: 19–23 months
Age range: 24 months
Appendix A
PROJECTS BY COMPLEXITY
Appendix B
PROJECTS BY RESEARCH AREA
REFERENCES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Introduction
When I was a kid, I begged Santa Claus for a Radio Shack 50-in-1 Electronic Projects Kit. The kit consisted of a “circuit board” with numerous capacitors, resistors, LEDs, and a buzzer for auditory output. For each project, you would connect various components with wires and then flip a switch and see what happens. It was great fun, and it contributed to my continued interest in science and engineering.
Now that I’m a parent, though, I’ve outgrown the Radio Shack science kit and moved on to an experimental apparatus of significantly higher complexity: the baby.
My kids are the most fun, intriguing, surprising (and exhausting) research subjects I have ever had the privilege to conduct weird and wacky experiments on. I’ve spent hours upon hours trying to figure out the optimal way to hold a baby to get him to fall asleep quickly—only to discover, as many parents have, that what works for one baby does not work at all for another. I’ve tried at least 20 different techniques to get a toddler to eat his peas. (The winner: “Please, whatever you do, don’t eat your peas.”) I’ve tracked my baby’s acquisition of fine motor skills based on how gently he touches my face—it progresses from painful scratching to awkward poking to soft whisker stroking. I’ve seen how early babies’ unique personalities emerge. Even at a few weeks old, you can already sense how their gears are turning by the way they look at you and observe the world around them. And there is something especially fascinating about conducting research on babies, who are themselves conducting experiments all the time—which typically take the form, “What is this thing, and what does it feel like in my mouth?”
Before you begin experimenting on your own baby using the projects in this book, it’s important to be aware of a few caveats:
The projects in this book are not designed to assess your baby’s physical or mental health, intelligence, or any other aspect of his motor, cognitive, or behavioral development, nor are they intended to tell you whether your baby is developmentally on schedule or whether he measures up. Rather, they’re intended to demonstrate principles of infant development in a fun, easy-to-digest way. So don’t approach these projects as challenges that your baby must complete in order to keep up with the Joneses’ kid (or the Einsteins’).
Although suggested ages and age ranges are included in the projects, they should be considered fuzzy rather than firm, so don’t worry if your child is not able to perform a certain task described in one of the experiments. When possible, I’ve included milestone information instead of a strict age range, such as “once your baby is walking independently.”
In many of the original studies cited in this book, a number of children were tested but excluded from the results due to common problems such as fussiness, crying, or inability to complete a qualifying requirement. In some cases, certain results were excluded because a child’s behavior was substantially different from the majority of those studied. So if you attempt an experiment, but your baby is not able to complete it or your results are quite different from those described in the study, don’t worry! It’s not out of the ordinary.
In adapting published, peer-reviewed academic studies to parent-friendly exercises that require no special equipment or training, I’ve had to take some liberties that may affect the degree to which your results line up with those of the source material. For instance, in most published studies, children are separated into groups, and each group is assigned a different condition. One group is the “test” group, and another is the “control” group, allowing the researchers to compare the results across the two groups. In many of the projects in this book, you’ll instead conduct all of the conditions on the same child—your baby—separating each trial by a length of time. The former methodology is, of course, preferred in professional contexts, but because this is a book of at-home experiments, it’s more practical for parents to simply repeat the experiments, rather than recruit a bunch of neighborhood babies for a well-controlled study. (If you happen to have identical twins on hand, you can more closely replicate the control and test model. Then again, you might not have that much free time.)
As you work through the 50 experiments in this book, I hope they give you new insight into the various fields of child development—but most important, I hope you come away with many new insights into your own amazing little science projects.
1
Soothing Scents
Age range: 0–1 month
Experiment complexity: Simple
Research area: Sensory development
THE EXPERIMENT
Sometimes when your baby gets upset, nursing, which has a calming effect, isn’t an option (such as when Dad’s on baby duty while Mom takes a nap or a shower). If you have stored breast milk to use for a bottle, try placing a few drops on a cotton cloth. Then place the cloth a few inches from your baby’s nose.
THE HYPOTHESIS
The scent of the breast milk, to which your baby has been naturally familiarized through nursing, will have a soothing effect on her. She will cry, grimace, and flail less than a baby who has been exposed to an unfamiliar scent or no scent at all.
THE RESEARCH
In a 2005 study, newborns were split into four groups. Babies in the first group had been naturally familiarized to the scent of their mother’s breast milk. The second group of babies were familiarized to a vanilla scent through repeated exposure. The other two groups were not familiarized to any scent.
On the third day after birth, while getting blood drawn in a heel stick procedure, infants in the first two groups were exposed to the scents they had been familiarized toward (breast milk for the first group and vanilla for the second). Infants in the third group were also exposed to a vanilla scent—but for them, it was an unfamiliar smell. And infants in the fourth group were not exposed to any scent. The researchers found that the babies in the first two groups cried less and showed less distress after the heel stick procedure than the babies in the other two groups. They also found that babies in the milk condition exhibited fewer flailing movements.
It should be noted, however, that infant formula does not appear to have the same effect as breast milk—at least not for breast-fed babies. In a 2009 study, newborns who were undergoing a routine heel stick procedure were exposed to the scent of their own mother’s breast milk, another mother’s breast milk, or formula. Only the infants exposed to the scent of their own mother’s milk showed lower distress compared with a control group.
THE TAKEAWAY
Using familiar scents to calm your baby is a great tool to have in your quiver of soothing techniques. But don’t let that be your only go-to move. Other effective ways to soothe your baby include skin-to-skin contact, nursing, shushing sounds, rocking movements, and mellow music.
2
Baby Blueprints
Age range: 0–1 month
Experiment complexity: Simple
Research area: Cognitive development
THE EXPERIMENT
Gather two pieces of cardboard or poster board, each about the size of a large postcard. On one, draw Figure A (on the left in the following illustration) and on the other, draw Figure B (on the right in the illustration).
While holding your awake, alert newborn, have a friend hold the two pieces of cardboard side by side in front of your baby, about a foot and a half away from his face. Ask your friend to observe which of the two shapes your baby looks at longest, and which your baby looks at most frequently. End the experiment when your baby stops looking at the images. After a short pause, repeat the experiment, but with the positions of the figures reversed.
THE HYPOTHESIS
Your b
aby will look longer and more frequently at Figure A.
THE RESEARCH
It’s well known that babies show a preference for faces not long after birth. But what is it about faces, exactly, that attracts babies? Do their brains have some sort of innate blueprint that describes human face structure in great detail, or are they attracted to more general structural properties that faces happen to have?
A 2002 study found that one characteristic of faces, top-heaviness of features (two eyebrows and two eyes above, but only one nose and mouth below), attracted infants even when presented in non-facelike illustrations. A 2008 study attempted to determine whether another characteristic—congruency of face shape to the inner features—might also attract babies’ interest. Newborns between one and three days old were presented with the two shapes seen above, and a video recorder captured their eye movements. An analysis of the recording found that the babies looked longer and more frequently at Figure A, whose outer shape is congruent with the arrangement of the three inner elements, than at Figure B, whose outer shape is incongruent with the arrangement of the inner elements. The results of their study lend further weight to the hypothesis that more general structural characteristics, rather than a blueprint for faces specifically, could explain why babies are so drawn to faces.
THE TAKEAWAY
Could it be a mere twist of fate—or twist of face—that your gentle visage happens to have the properties that capture wee ones’ attention? From a parent’s perspective, that thought might be hard to countenance, but whether babies are drawn to faces specifically or just to their more general characteristics is a topic of interest only to developmental researchers. For you as a parent, the principal thing that matters is that your face delights your baby, so make sure to give her plenty of opportunities to see it.
Tools of the Trade
A high-tech pacifier has given researchers new insight into what grabs babies’ attention. The pacifier uses a pressure sensor to measure the frequency and pressure of a baby’s sucking. The sensor can be linked to a computer to generate auditory stimuli, such as speech sounds, each time the baby sucks. Babies as young as a couple of months old are able to learn that sucking the pacifier controls the sounds and will suck more forcefully to generate sounds they enjoy. Researchers have used these special pacifiers to determine whether a baby can tell the difference between two sounds. If a single sound is played repeatedly and then a new sound is introduced, babies tend to suck with renewed vigor when the new sound is played. This “high-amplitude sucking” technique has been used in numerous experiments and has yielded significant data, especially about how babies learn to recognize and then acquire language.
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