I agree Trinity Papa.  There is also the concept of Epigenetic Inheritance.  the environment that our grandparents grew up in affects how our DNA is expressed.  This article explains it pretty well http://www.i-sis.org.uk/epigeneticInheritance.php.

[Researcher Links Storytelling And Mathematical Ability]

Researcher Links Storytelling And Mathematical Ability
ScienceDaily (Aug. 2, 2004) — Math and storytelling may seem like very different abilities, but a new study by University of Waterloo scientist Daniela O'Neill suggests that preschool children's early storytelling abilities are predictive of their mathematical ability two years later. The study has just been published in the June 2004 issue of the journal First Language.

In the study, three-and four-year-old children were shown a book that contained only pictures and were asked to tell the story to a puppet. None of the children had seen the book before the study. The children were not prompted in any way and were free to say as much or as little about each page as they wished.

"Children were told the puppet had never heard the story before, and so this made it a fun thing for children to do. They really enjoyed telling the story to the puppet," explained O'Neill, a professor of developmental psychology.

"Having children tell the story on their own, without any adult prompting, also allowed us to better see what they were able to accomplish on their own and to get a more sensitive measure of their storytelling ability," she said.

O'Neill looked at several aspects of children's storytelling ability. Some aspects captured grammatical complexity, such as children's use of relative clauses or the length of their sentences. Other aspects involved more perspective-taking on the part of the child.

"In the story, a child brings his pet frog to a restaurant and lots of funny things happen as the frog begins to jump around and cause all sorts of mayhem," O'Neill said.

"This made it possible to see how well children were able to talk about the feelings or thoughts of the characters in the story and how well children were able to talk about the different actions of the various characters and switch clearly from talking about one character to another," she said.

Two years later, the children were brought back to the laboratory and were given a number of tests of academic achievement that included a test of mathematical achievement. What O'Neill found was that those children who scored highly on the mathematics test had also scored highly on certain measures of their storytelling ability two years earlier.

"It was only certain aspects of storytelling that were related to later mathematical ability. Most strongly predictive of children's mathematical performance was their ability to relate all the different events in the story, to shift clearly from the actions of one character to another, and to adopt the perspective of different characters and talk about what they were feeling or thinking," explained O'Neill.

This study suggests that building strong storytelling skills early in the preschool years may be helpful in preparing children for learning mathematics when they enter school.

"Almost all children experience the world of storytelling before they begin their journey into the world of mathematical thinking, and there's an intriguing possibility that providing children with experience with storytelling may later enhance their ability to tackle problems in the mathematical arena," said O'Neill.

"It is also a nice finding, I think, because storytelling is something every parent can easily do and foster with their children, without the need to buy any fancy toys or materials," said O'Neill.

Given these findings, O'Neill is continuing in further studies, also funded by Science and Engineering Research Canada, to explore more precisely what aspects of storytelling are linked to aspects of mathematical ability.

"There is a lot more to know about how these two domains of thinking are related. Both storytelling and mathematics involve many different abilities and we are trying to determine what the overlapping abilities are that might explain why being better at certain types of storytelling skills might help when tackling certain kinds of mathematical problems," O'Neill said.

[Infants Have Keen Memory For Learning Words]

Infants Have Keen Memory For Learning WordsScienceDaily (Sep. 26, 1997) — Be careful what you say; little ears might be listening.

And remembering.

Experimental psychologists have found that infants seem to remember relatively complex words, even when they only hear those words in tape-recorded stories without the benefit of any other stimuli. Audio-taped children's stories containing words like "peccaries" and "python" were played to 8-month-old infants once a day for 10 days; two weeks later, 36 words that occurred most frequently in the stories were played back to the babies in list form.

Perhaps the most remarkable finding was that the babies recognized the words, even though they sounded different in list form than they did in the stories.

"When we just read a list, we actually pronounce those words a little bit differently; those words have a very different acoustic form than they had in the stories," said Peter Jusczyk, a professor in the Department of Psychology at The Johns Hopkins University.

But the experiments indicated that the infants remembered the words they had heard in the stories, suggesting that babies memorize words that occur frequently in speech, an important prerequisite for learning language.

The findings will be detailed in a paper to be published on Sept. 26 in the journal Science.

Although much work has been conducted to investigate how children learn the meanings of words, there has been little research aimed at learning how infants focus on the sounds of words, said Jusczyk, who co-authored the paper with Elizabeth A. Hohne, a psychologist at AT&T Labs in Holmdel, N.J.

The scientists recorded women narrating three different children's stories, each lasting about 10 minutes. Then researchers visited the homes of 15 infants, playing the stories to them every day for 10 days. In the end, the 8-month-old babies had heard each story 10 times.

The psychologists identified the 36 content words -- usually nouns -- that occurred most frequently in the stories. Then they arranged those words in lists of 12 words each.

Two weeks after the final visit to the infants' homes, the babies were brought to Jusczyk's lab at Johns Hopkins. One at a time, they were placed inside a special testing booth, where they listened to the lists containing the words that occurred most frequently in the stories. Then they listened to lists of other, similar-sounding words that did not occur in the stories.

A light flashed above the speaker through which the tape recording was played. When the infants looked at the light, the word lists began and continued to play as long as the infants looked toward the light. Babies who stopped listening to the words looked away from the light, telling the researchers how long the infants had listened to specific lists of words.

"What we found was that the babies listened longer to the lists of words from the stories, significantly longer," Jusczyk said.

Previous research using the technique has shown that infants tend to listen longer to words that are more familiar to them. The researchers, however, wanted to make sure that the infants were not listening longer to the story words simply because they found them more interesting, so they brought a new group of infants to the lab who had never heard the stories on tape. When those infants heard the lists of the story words and the non-story words, they showed no preference and actually listened slightly longer to the non-story words.

"That showed us that the experience the babies had had at home listening to the stories had an impact on what they really remembered," Jusczyk said. He noted that the infants learned the words even though they never had any personal contact with the women who narrated the stories.

"So, imagine what happens when you actually have the baby in your arms, and you are reading the story and you are turning the pages of the book," he said. "You'd expect that they would be even more inclined to store some of that information."

The babies who had never heard the stories listened an average of about six seconds to the story words and slightly more than that for the non-story words. The infants who had heard the stories listened an average of less than six seconds to the non-story words but nearly seven seconds to the story words.

"A second doesn't sound like a lot of time, but it's consistent," Jusczyk said. "The whole object of this was to see whether, when infants are listening to people talk or listening to people read stories to them, they are storing any information away about sound patterns that occur frequently."

Ultimately, scientists are trying to learn how young children are able to learn and master the complexities of language, a difficult task for the adult brain and the most powerful computers.

At about 18 months, a child's vocabulary and grasp of language suddenly expand, and scientists don't know why. One possible explanation is that children may begin storing the sounds and meanings of words while they are infants, and suddenly they are able to connect the words with meanings.

"It's sort of like working on a puzzle. You get a few pieces and then everything falls into place," Jusczyk said.

Learning words requires storing both sounds and meanings. This study shows that infants sometimes store the sounds of words, even when they have not yet learned the meanings, he said.

This research was supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the National Institutes of Health.

More information on Jusczyk and his research is available from his World Wide Web page at http://www.psy.jhu.edu/~jusczyk

[Fathers Influence Child Language Development More Than Mothers]

Fathers Influence Child Language Development More Than Mothers
ScienceDaily (Nov. 1, 2006) — In families with two working parents, fathers had greater impact than mothers on their children's language development between ages 2 and 3, according to a study by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Frank Porter Graham (FPG) Child Development Institute and UNC's School of Education.

Researchers videotaped pairs of parents and their 2-year-old children in their homes during playtime. The children whose fathers used more diverse vocabularies had greater language development when they were tested one year later. However, the mothers' vocabulary did not significantly affect a child's language skills.

"Most previous studies on early language development focused on mothers," said Nadya Panscofar, a graduate research assistant and an author of the study. "These findings underscore that for two-parent, dual earner families, fathers should be included in all efforts to improve language development and school readiness."

Panscofar and Dr. Lynne Vernon-Feagans, the William C. Friday distinguished professor of Child and Family Studies in the School of Education and a faculty fellow at FPG, conducted the study in Pennsylvania as part of the Penn State Health and Development Project when both were affiliated with that university.

The study appears in the online version of the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology. It will appear in the November print issue of that publication.

A secondary finding of this study was that high-quality child care during the first three years of life was associated with higher scores at age 3 on a test of expressive language development. However, child care accounted for less variance than family language. Researchers also found that, consistent with previous research, the parents' level of education had a significant impact on children's language abilities.

Has anyone taken the Tweedlewink Overiew course at the Right Brain Education site?  I have read so many early education and pop psychcology books that I wonder if it would be worth it.

JCS,

I was wondering the same thing.  This book just showed up in my recommended list from Amazon.com - Teaching Montessori in the Home: Pre-School Years: The Pre-School Years by Elizabeth G. Hainstock (Author), Lee Havis (Author).  It has received good reviews.  I was thinking about purchasing it.

[A Mother's Reasons For Choosing Montessori]

A Mother's Reasons For Choosing Montessori
by Deanna Mascle

This is the time of year when the parents of many preschoolers must decide where their child will attend school in the fall. I wanted to take this opportunity to share my experience with Montessori preschool education.

My son is completing his second year in a Montessori preschool program and attended from the age of 3 1/2.

I chose Montessori for several reasons. First, my son is a bright, inquisitive child who already had a sound grounding in recognition of his alphabet, numbers, shapes, and colors before he started preschool. I was worried that he might be bored in a more traditional preschool. Montessori's highly individual program means he is always challenged and interested. In addition, my son is a very active child and the Montessori program gives him lots of opportunity for free play outdoors and indoors as well as more freedom to move about, stand, or even lie on the ground while working on his lessons in the classroom.

In my opinion one of Montessori's great advantages is the fact that the child drives the educational experience. My son's interests and abilities determine his unique educational program and so his lessons may overlap but are not identical to those of his classmates. This makes him an eager and motivated student.

The education program offered by Montessori also includes many advantages. My son's experience includes the arts, math and science, language, and life skills. He regularly impresses our friends and family with his knowledge of science, sign language, and other areas not traditionally included in preschool programs.

I also like the fact that his classroom includes a wider range of ages so he has friends who are both younger and older. In addition, he really enjoys having regular contact with the elementary-age students who serve as both role models and friends.

Finally, as a parent, I cannot stress enough the benefits that a program like Montessori offers in terms of life skills. All students are expected to be responsible for their own personal hygiene as well as maintenance and cleaning of the classroom and food areas. While support is offered by adults and older children, even young children can learn to clean up after themselves. It has certainly had an impact on my son's willingness and ability to help out at home.

Recently I compared preschool experiences with a friend whose child is completing her second year in what most people consider to be the top preschool program in our community. We compared our children's skills to the checklist provided by our school district of 60 skills (including cognitive skills, listening and sequencing skills, language skills, fine motor skills, gross motor skills, and social/emotional skills) that will help children transition into kindergarten. My son has all 60 skills while her daughter lacked skills in each of the areas.

I recommend every parent at least consider Montessori for their child as it is a child-centered learning approach that can provide an excellent foundation for a child's future growth and learning.

[Even Babies Know Rock 'n' Roll]

Even Babies Know Rock 'n' Roll
By Robin Nixon, Special to LiveScience

posted: 26 January 2009 05:00 pm ET

In a new study, when the rhythm was disturbed, particularly by omitting the downbeat, the infant brain responded with an error signal.
 
In a new study, when the rhythm was disturbed, particularly by omitting the downbeat, the infant brain responded with an error signal. Image credit: Dreamstime Newborns can follow a rhythm, a new study has found, suggesting rocking out is innate.

The finding, published in the Jan. 26 issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, adds to growing evidence that the newborn brain is not the blank slate it was once thought to be.

Rather, scientists have shown, at birth we already have sophisticated methods for interpreting the world. Discrimination may be crude, explained lead researcher István Winkler of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest, but "the basic algorithms are in place already."

This may be particularly true when it comes to sound. Infants as young as 2 days old can process pitch and tell if a series of notes are rising or falling in scale. And it is now known they have rhythm, too.

Newborns can't exactly swing their hips to prove they can jive, so Winkler and his colleague Henkjan Honing of the University of Amsterdam monitored the brains of 14 infants listening to variations of a rock rhythm — complete with drum, snare and high hat cymbal.

When "metrically-unimportant portions" of the beat were silenced, nothing much changed among the auditory-related activity in the brain, Honing said. But when the rhythm was disturbed, particularly by omitting the downbeat, the infant brain responded with an error signal: An expectation for a rhythmic pattern was not met.

"A baby's auditory system is working the same way as an adult's, in that it is always making predictions," Winkler said. If the prediction is incorrect, an error signal helps gauge "how much you are off the actual target," he said.

While spoken language can take more than a year to develop, "music is one of the earliest things parents have with their children," Honing said.

On a note-to-note level, adult speech usually lacks the pulsing regularity of music, but when parents talk to babies, they instinctively switch to melodic and rhythmic intonations "as a way of communicating emotional messages," Honing said.

Infants can perceive anger, happiness and sadness from a caregiver's cooing and baby babble, he said.

A study last year found that babies as young as 5 months can distinguish an upbeat tune, such as "Ode to Joy" from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, from other gloomy tunes.

At a structural level, certain conversation protocols require rhythmic synchrony and are likely unique to humans, Winkler said. While other animals, such as birds and frogs, do have significant auditory skills, few, if any, perceive rhythm or carry on a dialogue, he said.

"If you ever talk to someone who will really not synchronize with you, for example like with a computer," Winkler said, "you have the feeling that you can not communicate."

An infant's perception of rhythm may make him receptive to the distinctively human tendency to teach, Winkler said. "Apes never teach," he said, explaining that baby apes learn by simply emulating their parents. But humans engage in a sing-song form of information exchange, where the recipient of new knowledge must respond in a synchronous way (not too fast, not too slow) to convey understanding.

Therefore, evolution may have favored brains wired to rock for learning purposes, said Winkler, and "music went along for the ride."

[Infants Have 'Amazing Capabilities' That Adults Lack]

Infants Have 'Amazing Capabilities' That Adults Lack

By Robin Lloyd

A baby sits on a caregiver's lap before a television screen used in a University of British Columbia study to see how babies watch the silent faces of bilingual (French/English) speakers reciting sentences in both languages. The caregiver wears darkened sunglasses to prevent influencing the baby.
 
A baby sits on a caregiver's lap before a television screen used in a University of British Columbia study to see how babies watch the silent faces of bilingual (French/English) speakers reciting sentences in both languages. The caregiver wears darkened sunglasses to prevent influencing the baby. Credit: Science Babies might seem a bit dim in their first six months of life, but researchers are getting smarter about what babies know, and the results are surprising.

The word "infant" comes from the Latin, meaning "unable to speak," but babies are building the foundations for babbling and language before they are born, responding to muffled sounds that travel through amniotic fluid.

Soon after birth, infants are keen and sophisticated generalists, capable of seeing details in the world that are visible to some other animals but invisible to adults, older children and even slightly older infants.

Recently, scientists have learned the following:

At a few days old, infants can pick out their native tongue from a foreign one.
At 4 or 5 months, infants can lip read, matching faces on silent videos to "ee" and "ah" sounds.
Infants can recognize the consonants and vowels of all languages on Earth, and they can hear the difference between foreign language sounds that elude most adults.
Infants in their first six months can tell the difference between two monkey faces that an older person would say are identical, and they can match calls that monkeys make with pictures of their faces.
Infants are rhythm experts, capable of differentiating between the beats of their culture and another.
The latest finding, presented in the May 25 issue of the journal Science, is that infants just 4 months old can tell whether someone is speaking in their native tongue or not without any sound, just by watching a silent movie of their speech. This ability disappears by the age of 8 months, however, unless the child grows up in a bilingual environment and therefore needs to use the skill.

In fact, all the skills outlined above decline somewhere around the time infants pass the 6-month mark and learn to ignore information that bears little on their immediate environment.

Astounding babies

The new study involved showing videos to 36 infants of three bilingual French-English speakers reciting sentences. After being trained to become comfortable with a speaker reciting a sentence in one language, babies ages 4 and 6 months spent more time looking at a speaker reciting a sentence in a different language—demonstrating that they could tell the difference.

"In everything that we do in our research, babies seem to come out with these amazing capabilities," said Whitney M. Weikum, a graduate student at the University of British Columbia whose work is overseen by language processing specialist Janet F. Werker. "As young infants, they come set with abilities to make a lot of fine discriminations, and they continue to astound us."

The research also serves as a reminder that language is a multimedia experience, said psychologist George Hollich of Purdue University.

"We don't just see a rose," Hollich explained. "We feel the softness of its petals and we smell its perfume. Likewise, language isn't just hearing or seeing a word 'rose.' We immediately relate that word to a rose's sight, touch and smell, even the sight of a person saying that word. Ben Franklin noted that he could 'understand French better by the help of his spectacles.' This work shows that infants too can recognize some languages solely by looking on the face."

Infant intelligence

Weikum's study adds to mounting evidence showing how infants move from being "universal perceivers," equally capable of learning any of the world's languages, to being specialists in the sounds, meanings and structure of their own native tongue over the first year of life, said Hollich, who studies infant language.

The findings raise questions about what is meant by intelligence when speaking of young children.

"Newborns can be said to be 'intelligent' in that they have the ability to almost effortlessly learn any of the world's languages," Hollich told LiveScience. Some of Hollich's research shows that babies start to understand grammar by the age of 15 months, processing grammar and words simultaneously.

"We scientists consider infants more intelligent when they begin to notice and respond to familiar things. Of course, figuring out how exactly to best respond to familiar sights and sounds is something children will spend the rest of their lives learning to do and that is the hallmark of what most would consider true 'intelligence.'"

[Study: How to Give Music Lessons to Babies]

Study: How to Give Music Lessons to Babies
 
 If you want your baby to be a country star, bounce it to the two-step right off the bat. If a waltz is more your preference, then rock it to sleep on every third beat.

A new study finds that hearing and feeling different beats is an early step in a baby's appreciation and perception of music.

The research was designed to test how the infant brain processes auditory information. Sixteen babies at seven months heard an ambiguous rhythm pattern with no accented beats. Adults bounced half the infants on every second beat, in a march-like rhythm, as in ONE-two-ONE-two-ONE-two. The other half were bounced on every third beat, in a waltz-like ONE-two-three-ONE-two-three.

 
Then the infants heard rhythm patterns with accented beats, but without the bouncing. Those who had previously been waltzing listened longer to the waltz in Round 2, and the babies that had been marched preferred the march.

The study was done by Jessica Phillips-Silver and Laurel J. Trainor at McMaster University in Canada and is reported in today's issue of the journal Science.

The results "provide evidence that the experience of body movement plays an important role in musical rhythm perception," the authors write.

"The simultaneous experience of listening and moving to a rhythm wires the brain so that different senses work together," said Trainor, a psychology professor. "Our interpretation of sound is affected not only by our auditory system but by input from our other senses as well."

The point for parents:

"For the first time, we are able to show that this experience not only affects their emotional state, but also influences infants' sensory development," said Phillips-Silver.

[Like Monkeys, Babies Know Math]

Like Monkeys, Babies Know Math
By Robert Roy Britt, LiveScience Managing Editor



After long suspecting we're born with some math sense, researchers have shown infants indeed have some ability to count long before they can demonstrate it to Mom and Dad.

It turns out they're not unlike grown monkeys.

In the study, seven-month-old babies were presented with the voices of two or three women saying "look." The infants could choose between looking at a video image of two or women saying the word or an image of three women saying it. The babies spent significantly more time looking at the image that matched the number of women talking.

"We conclude that the babies are showing an internal representation of 'two-ness' or 'three-ness' that is separate from sensory modalities and, thus, reflects an abstract internal process," said Elizabeth Brannon of Duke University.

Previous work with monkeys yielded similar findings.

"These results support the idea that there is a shared system between preverbal infants and nonverbal animals for representing numbers," Brannon said.

Previous studies searching for this ability in human infants had failed, say Brannon and colleague Kerry Jordan, because the methods were inadequate.

The study, announced today, is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The research is pursued in an effort to better understand the evolutionary origins of numerical ability and how that ability has developed in humans.

[How Babies Learn Their First Words]

How Babies Learn Their First Words
By Robert Roy Britt, LiveScience Managing Editor

Like teenagers, babies don't much care what their parents say.

Though they are learning words at 10 months old, infants tend to grasp the names of objects that interest them rather than whatever the speaker thinks is important, a new study finds.

And they do it quickly.

The infants were able to learn two new words in five minutes with just five presentations for each word and object, said study leader Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a professor of psychology at Temple University. Importantly, the babies paired a new word to the object they liked best, regardless of what object the speaker referred to.

"The baby naturally assumes that the word you're speaking goes with the object that they think is interesting, not the object that you show an interest in," Hirsh-Pasek said.

The result is not too surprising, Hirsh-Pasek said in a telephone interview. She says interest drives learning for older children, too, and even adults.

She cites six-year-olds she's heard talking knowledgably about baseball players' batting averages. "How in the world do they get it? They're not going to do decimals until 7th or 8th grade."

"Ten-month-olds simply 'glue' a label onto the most interesting object they see," said Shannon Pruden, a Temple doctoral student in psychology and lead author of a report on the findings in the March/April issue of the journal Child Development.

Later, around 18 months, children learn to use the speaker's interest—such as where the eyes gaze—as a guide to learning, the researchers say.

Still, Hirsh-Pasek thinks there is a lesson for parents and educators of children at all ages: "Sometimes we fail to take notice of what our learners are doing and what they're interested in," she said. "We all learn best when things are meaningful."

I found this article on the Newsweek site.  http://www.newsweek.com/id/56437

Reading Your Baby's Mind
NEW RESEARCH ON INFANTS FINALLY BEGINS TO ANSWER THE QUESTION: WHAT'S GOING ON IN THERE?

BY PAT WINGERT AND MARTHA BRANT
NEWSWEEK
From the magazine issue dated Aug 15, 2005
Little Victoria Bateman is blond and blue-eyed and as cute a baby as there ever was. At 6 months, she is also trusting and unsuspecting, which is a good thing, because otherwise she'd never go along with what's about to happen. It's a blistering June afternoon in Lubbock, Texas, and inside the Human Sciences lab at Texas Tech University, Victoria's mother is settling her daughter into a high chair, where she is the latest subject in an ongoing experiment aimed at understanding the way babies think. Sybil Hart, an associate professor of human development and leader of the study, trains video cameras on mother and daughter. Everything is set. Hart hands Cheryl Bateman a children's book, "Elmo Pops In," and instructs her to engross herself in its pages. "Just have a conversation with me about the book," Hart tells her. "The most important thing is, do not look at [Victoria.]" As the two women chat, Victoria looks around the room, impassive and a little bored.

After a few minutes, Hart leaves the room and returns cradling a lifelike baby doll. Dramatically, Hart places it in Cheryl Bateman's arms, and tells her to cuddle the doll while continuing to ignore Victoria. "That's OK, little baby," Bateman coos, hugging and rocking the doll. Victoria is not bored anymore. At first, she cracks her best smile, showcasing a lone stubby tooth. When that doesn't work, she begins kicking. But her mom pays her no mind. That's when Victoria loses it. Soon she's beet red and crying so hard it looks like she might spit up. Hart rushes in. "OK, we're done," she says, and takes back the doll. Cheryl Bateman goes to comfort her daughter. "I've never seen her react like that to anything," she says. Over the last 10 months, Hart has repeated the scenario hundreds of times. It's the same in nearly every case: tiny babies, overwhelmed with jealousy. Even Hart was stunned to find that infants could experience an emotion, which, until recently, was thought to be way beyond their grasp.

And that's just for starters. The helpless, seemingly clueless infant staring up at you from his crib, limbs flailing, drool oozing, has a lot more going on inside his head than you ever imagined. A wealth of new research is leading pediatricians and child psychologists to rethink their long-held beliefs about the emotional and intellectual abilities of even very young babies. In 1890, psychologist William James famously described an infant's view of the world as "one great blooming, buzzing confusion." It was a notion that held for nearly a century: infants were simple-minded creatures who merely mimicked those around them and grasped only the most basic emotions--happy, sad, angry. Science is now giving us a much different picture of what goes on inside their hearts and heads. Long before they form their first words or attempt the feat of sitting up, they are already mastering complex emotions--jealousy, empathy, frustration--that were once thought to be learned much later in toddlerhood.

They are also far more sophisticated intellectually than we once believed. Babies as young as 4 months have advanced powers of deduction and an ability to decipher intricate patterns. They have a strikingly nuanced visual palette, which enables them to notice small differences, especially in faces, that adults and older children lose the ability to see. Until a baby is 3 months old, he can recognize a scrambled photograph of his mother just as quickly as a photo in which everything is in the right place. And big brothers and sisters beware: your sib has a long memory--and she can hold a grudge.

The new research is sure to enthrall new parents--See, Junior is a genius!--but it's more than just an academic exercise. Armed with the new information, pediatricians are starting to change the way they evaluate their youngest patients. In addition to tracking physical development, they are now focusing much more deeply on emotional advancement. The research shows how powerful emotional well-being is to a child's future health. A baby who fails to meet certain key "emotional milestones" may have trouble learning to speak, read and, later, do well in school. By reading emotional responses, doctors have begun to discover ways to tell if a baby as young as 3 months is showing early signs of possible psychological disorders, including depression, anxiety, learning disabilities and perhaps autism. "Instead of just asking if they're crawling or sitting, we're asking more questions about how they share their world with their caregivers," says Dr. Chet Johnson, chairman of the American Academy of Pediatrics' early-childhood committee. "Do they point to things? When they see a new person, how do they react? How children do on social and emotional and language skills are better predictors of success in adulthood than motor skills are." The goal: in the not-too-distant future, researchers hope doctors will routinely identify at-risk kids years earlier than they do now--giving parents crucial extra time to turn things around.

One of the earliest emotions that even tiny babies display is, admirably enough, empathy. In fact, concern for others may be hard-wired into babies' brains. Plop a newborn down next to another crying infant, and chances are, both babies will soon be wailing away. "People have always known that babies cry when they hear other babies cry," says Martin Hoffman, a psychology professor at New York University who did the first studies on infant empathy in the 1970s. "The question was, why are they crying?" Does it mean that the baby is truly concerned for his fellow human, or just annoyed by the racket? A recent study conducted in Italy, which built on Hoffman's own work, has largely settled the question. Researchers played for infants tapes of other babies crying. As predicted, that was enough to start the tears flowing. But when researchers played babies recordings of their own cries, they rarely began crying themselves. The verdict: "There is some rudimentary empathy in place, right from birth," Hoffman says. The intensity of the emotion tends to fade over time. Babies older than 6 months no longer cry but grimace at the discomfort of others. By 13 to 15 months, babies tend to take matters into their own hands. They'll try to comfort a crying playmate. "What I find most charming is when, even if the two mothers are present, they'll bring their own mother over to help," Hoffman says.

Part of that empathy may come from another early-baby skill that's now better understood, the ability to discern emotions from the facial expressions of the people around them. "Most textbooks still say that babies younger than 6 months don't recognize emotions," says Diane Montague, assistant professor of psychology at LaSalle University in Philadelphia. To put that belief to the test, Montague came up with a twist on every infant's favorite game, peekaboo, and recruited dozens of 4-month-olds to play along. She began by peeking around a cloth with a big smile on her face. Predictably, the babies were delighted, and stared at her intently--the time-tested way to tell if a baby is interested. On the fourth peek, though, Montague emerged with a sad look on her face. This time, the response was much different. "They not only looked away," she says, but wouldn't look back even when she began smiling again. Refusing to make eye contact is a classic baby sign of distress. An angry face got their attention once again, but their faces showed no pleasure. "They seemed primed to be alert, even vigilant," Montague says. "I realize that's speculative in regard to infants... I think it shows that babies younger than 6 months find meaning in expressions."

This might be a good place to pause for a word about the challenges and perils of baby research. Since the subjects can't speak for themselves, figuring out what's going on inside their heads is often a matter of reading their faces and body language. If this seems speculative, it's not. Over decades of trial and error, researchers have fine-tuned their observation skills and zeroed in on numerous consistent baby responses to various stimuli: how long they stare at an object, what they reach out for and what makes them recoil in fear or disgust can often tell experienced researchers everything they need to know. More recently, scientists have added EEGs and laser eye tracking, which allow more precise readings. Coming soon: advanced MRI scans that will allow a deeper view inside the brain.

When infants near their first birthdays, they become increasingly sophisticated social learners. They begin to infer what others are thinking by following the gaze of those around them. "By understanding others' gaze, babies come to understand others' minds," says Andrew Meltzoff, a professor of psychology at the University of Washington who has studied the "gaze following" of thousands of babies. "You can tell a lot about people, what they're interested in and what they intend to do next, by watching their eyes. It appears that even babies know that... This is how they learn to become expert members of our culture."

Meltzoff and colleague Rechele Brooks have found that this skill first appears at 10 to 11 months, and is not only an important marker of a baby's emotional and social growth, but can predict later language development. In their study, babies who weren't proficient at gaze-following by their first birthday had much less advanced-language skills at 2. Meltzoff says this helps explain why language occurs more slowly in blind children, as well as children of depressed mothers, who tend not to interact as much with their babies.

In fact, at just a few months, infants begin to develop superpowers when it comes to observation. Infants can easily tell the difference between human faces. But at the University of Minnesota, neuroscientist Charles Nelson (now of Harvard) wanted to test how discerning infants really are. He showed a group of 6-month-old babies a photo of a chimpanzee, and gave them time to stare at it until they lost interest. They were then shown another chimp. The babies perked up and stared at the new photo. The infants easily recognized each chimp as an individual--they were fascinated by each new face. Now unless you spend a good chunk of your day hanging around the local zoo, chances are you couldn't tell the difference between a roomful of chimps at a glance. As it turned out, neither could babies just a few months older. By 9 months, those kids had lost the ability to tell chimps apart; but at the same time, they had increased their powers of observation when it came to human faces.

Nelson has now taken his experiment a step further, to see how early babies can detect subtle differences in facial expressions, a key building block of social development. He designed a new study that is attempting to get deep inside babies' heads by measuring brain-wave activity. Nelson sent out letters to the parents of nearly every newborn in the area, inviting them to participate. Earlier this summer it was Dagny Winberg's turn. The 7-month-old was all smiles as her mother, Armaiti, carried her into the lab, where she was fitted with a snug cap wired with 64 sponge sensors. Nelson's assistant, grad student Meg Moulson, began flashing photographs on a screen of a woman. In each photo, the woman had a slightly different expression--many different shades of happiness and fear. Dagny was given time to look at each photo until she became bored and looked away. The whole time, a computer was closely tracking her brain activity, measuring her mind's minutest responses to the different photos. Eventually, after she'd run through 60 photos, Dagny had had enough of the game and began whimpering and fidgeting. That ended the session. The point of the experiment is to see if baby brain scans look like those of adults. "We want to see if babies categorize emotions in the ways that adults do," Moulson says. "An adult can see a slight smile and categorize it as happy. We want to know if babies can do the same." They don't have the answer yet, but Nelson believes that infants who display early signs of emotional disorders, such as autism, may be helped if they can develop these critical powers of observation and emotional engagement.

Halfway across the country, researchers are working to dispel another baby cliche: out of sight, out of mind. It was long believed that babies under 9 months didn't grasp the idea of "object permanence"--the ability to know, for instance, that when Mom leaves the room, she isn't gone forever. New research by psychologist Su-hua Wang at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is showing that babies understand the concept as early as 10 weeks. Working with 2- and 3-month-olds, she performs a little puppet show. Each baby sees a duck on a stage. Wang covers the duck, moves it across the stage and lifts the cover. Sometimes the duck is there. Other times, the duck disappears beneath a trapdoor. When they see the duck has gone missing, the babies stare intently at the empty stage, searching for it. "At 2i months," she says, "they already have the idea that the object continues to exist."

A strong, well-developed ability to connect with the world--and with parents in particular--is especially important when babies begin making their first efforts at learning to speak. Baby talk is much more than mimickry. Michael Goldstein, a psychologist at Cornell University, gathered two groups of 8-month-olds and decked them out in overalls rigged up with wireless microphones and transmitters. One group of mothers was told to react immediately when their babies cooed or babbled, giving them big smiles and loving pats. The other group of parents was also told to smile at their kids, but randomly, unconnected to the babies' sounds. It came as no surprise that the babies who received immediate feedback babbled more and advanced quicker than those who didn't. But what interested Goldstein was the way in which the parents, without realizing it, raised the "babble bar" with their kids. "The kinds of simple sounds that get parents' attention at 4 months don't get the same reaction at 8 months," he says. "That motivates babies to experiment with different sound combinations until they find new ones that get noticed."

A decade ago Patricia Kuhl, a professor of speech and hearing at the University of Washington and a leading authority on early language, proved that tiny babies have a unique ability to learn a foreign language. As a result of her well-publicized findings, parents ran out to buy foreign-language tapes, hoping their little Einsteins would pick up Russian or French before they left their cribs. It didn't work, and Kuhl's new research shows why. Kuhl put American 9-month-olds in a room with Mandarin-speaking adults, who showed them toys while talking to them. After 12 sessions, the babies had learned to detect subtle Mandarin phonetic sounds that couldn't be heard by a separate group of babies who were exposed only to English. Kuhl then repeated the experiment, but this time played the identical Mandarin lessons to babies on video- and audiotape. That group of babies failed to learn any Mandarin. Kuhl says that without the emotional connection, the babies considered the tape recording just another background noise, like a vacuum cleaner. "We were genuinely surprised by the outcome," she says. "We all assumed that when infants stare at a television, and look engaged, that they are learning from it." Kuhl says there's plenty of work to be done to explain why that isn't true. "But at first blush one thinks that people--at least babies--need people to learn."

So there you have it. That kid over there with one sock missing and smashed peas all over his face is actually a formidable presence, in possession of keen powers of observation, acute emotional sensitivity and an impressive arsenal of deductive powers. "For the last 15 years, we've been focused on babies' abilities--what they know and when they knew it," says the University of Washington's Meltzoff. "But now we want to know what all this predicts about later development. What does all this mean for the child?"

Some of these questions are now finding answers. Take shyness, for instance. It's long been known that 15 to 20 percent of children are shy and anxious by nature. But doctors didn't know why some seemed simply to grow out of it, while for others it became a debilitating condition. Recent studies conducted by Nathan Fox of the University of Maryland show that shyness is initially driven by biology. He proved it by wiring dozens of 9-month-olds to EEG machines and conducting a simple experiment. When greeted by a stranger, "behaviorally inhibited" infants tensed up, and showed more activity in the parts of the brain associated with anxiety and fear. Babies with outgoing personalities reached out to the stranger. Their EEG scans showed heightened activity in the parts of the brain that govern positive emotions like pleasure.

But Fox, who has followed some of these children for 15 years, says that parenting style has a big impact on which kind of adult a child will turn out to be. Children of overprotective parents, or those whose parents didn't encourage them to overcome shyness and childhood anxiety, often remain shy and anxious as adults. But kids born to confident and sensitive parents who gently help them to take emotional risks and coax them out of their shells can often overcome early awkwardness. That's an important finding, since behaviorally inhibited kids are also at higher risk for other problems.

Stanley Greenspan, clinical professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at George Washington University Medical School, is one of the leaders in developing diagnostic tools to help doctors identify babies who may be at risk for language and learning problems, autism and a whole range of other problems. He recently completed a checklist of social and emotional "milestones" that babies should reach by specific ages (graphic). "I'd like to see doctors screen babies for these milestones and tell parents exactly what to do if their babies are not mastering them. One of our biggest problems now is that parents may sense intuitively that something is not right," but by the time they are able to get their child evaluated, "that family has missed a critical time to, maybe, get that baby back on track."

So what should parents do with all this new information? First thing: relax. Just because your baby is more perceptive than you might have thought doesn't mean she's going to be damaged for life if she cries in her crib for a minute while you answer the phone. Or that he'll wind up quitting school and stealing cars if he witnesses an occasional argument between his parents. Children crave--and thrive on--interaction, one-on-one time and lots of eye contact. That doesn't mean filling the baby's room with "educational" toys and posters. A child's social, emotional and academic life begins with the earliest conversations between parent and child: the first time the baby locks eyes with you; the quiet smile you give your infant and the smile she gives you back. Your child is speaking to you all the time. It's just a matter of knowing how to listen.

I found this article at http://www.parents.com/baby/development/intellectual/babys-three-types-of-intelligence/

Baby's Three Types of Intelligence
By Karin A. Bilich




Your baby's developing speech, logic, and emotional skills.

Emotions: Birth to 18 Months
The brain learns best when it's challenged with new information. The University of Georgia's Better Brains for Babies program reports that babies and children learn certain skills most easily during particular "windows of opportunity." Read on to find out at what ages babies reach these windows of opportunity for emotional, verbal, and logical skills, and learn how to help the process along with the advice of the Better Brains for Babies campaign.

Emotional intelligence, which involves an understanding of others, predicts about 80 percent of a person's career success, reports the University of Georgia's Department of Child and Family Development (CFD). Emotions such as empathy, happiness, hopefulness, and sadness are shaped by how the infant is nurtured. With a well-developed emotional intelligence, a person tends to form good moral standards for himself. Although emotional intelligence continues to develop through adolescence, a baby's early experiences form the basis for a lifetime. Here are some methods for enhancing your baby's early emotional skills:



Provide a secure and consistent environment for baby.

Smile often.

Acknowledge and verbalize the emotions that your baby is feeling.

Show empathy when baby is upset.

Bond with your baby on his level; "converse" through baby sounds.

Explain why you're saying "no" instead of just saying it.

Allow your baby to help in family activities, such as sorting laundry.

Express positive feedback for good behavior.

Explain when and how your baby's actions affect others.




Speech: Birth to Age 10
Babies are born with the ability to learn any language. The more spoken communication a baby is exposed to, the quicker and more thoroughly the baby will learn that language. Babies and children also quickly pick up grammar and sentence construction in a way that adults learning a new language can't. Here are some tips on guiding your baby's language development:



Start reading to your baby at a very young age.

Talk back to baby's cooing and babbling.

Point out and name things around you.

Repeat yourself often.

Pronounce words clearly.

Use daily life activities to explain what you're doing.

Sing songs and teach your baby the words.

Play language games with your baby, such as nursery rhymes or patty-cake.

Consider teaching your child a second language while he's young.




Math and Logic: Ages 1 to 5
Problem-solving skills are directly related to sight, hearing, and touch. Interestingly, a baby's math skills are often developed in conjunction with his musical skills, reports the University of Georgia's CFD. By stimulating these senses, your baby can develop strong skills in spatial relations and problem solving. Here are some ways to do that:



Give your baby different shapes, objects, and colors to touch and see.

Expose your child to classical music.

Give your baby toy musical instruments to play with.

Attach a mirror in your baby's crib.

Carry your baby facing outwards so she'll have lots to look at.

Provide an assortment of toys that can be taken apart or put together.

Give your baby toys that make noise when she squeezes or pulls a string; they can teach cause and effect.

Teach your baby to put things in categories.

Play counting games.



Additional Sources: Jenny Friedman, PhD; Child Development Specialist Karen DeBord, PhD; Building Baby's Brain: The Basics by Diane Bales, PhD

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