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M H Bornstein

Publications and source records attributed to M H Bornstein.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1995

Information processing and developmental assessments in 3-month-old infants exposed prenatally to cocaine.

OBJECTIVE: To determine the effect of prenatal cocaine exposure on 3-month infant information processing and developmental assessments. METHODS: One hundred and eight infants, 61 cocaine-exposed and 47 controls, participated at 3 months of age in an infant-control habituation and novelty responsiveness procedure and in a developmental assessment using the Bayley Scales of Infant Development both administered by experimenters blind to the drug exposure status of the infant. RESULTS: Compared to the non-drug-exposed group, infants exposed prenatally to cocaine were significantly more likely to fail to start the habituation procedure and, for those who did, significantly more likely to react with irritability early in the procedure. The majority of infants in both groups reached the habituation criterion, and among those who did there were no significant differences between cocaine and non-cocaine-exposed infants in habituation or in recovery to a novel stimulus. Infants who were cocaine-exposed showed comparatively depressed performance on the motor (Psychomotor Developmental Index) but not the mental (Mental Developmental Index (MDI)) scales of the Bayley. These results obtained for habituation and Bayley MDI controlling for both perinatal and sociodemographic factors. CONCLUSIONS: Differences in reactivity to novelty but not in information processing between cocaine-exposed and non-cocaine-exposed infants suggest that the effects of prenatal cocaine exposure may be on arousal and attention regulation rather than early cognitive processes.

Adult↗
PubMed1992

Maternal responsiveness to infants in three societies: the United States, France, and Japan.

This study examines and compares prominent characteristics of maternal responsiveness to infant activity during home-based naturalistic interactions of mother-infant dyads in New York City, Paris, and Tokyo. Both culture-general and culture-specific patterns of responsiveness emerged. For example, in all 3 locales infants behaved similarly, mothers also behaved similarly with respect to a hierarchy of response types, and mothers and infants manifest both specificity and mutual appropriateness in their interactions: Mothers responded to infants' exploration of the environment with encouragement to the environment, to infants' vocalizing nondistress with imitation, and to infants' vocalizing distress with nurturance. Differences in maternal responsiveness among cultures occurred to infant looking rather than to infant vocalizing and in mothers' emphasizing dyadic versus extradyadic loci of interaction. Universals of maternal responsiveness, potential sources of cultural variation, and implications of similarities and differences in responsiveness for child development in different cultural contexts are discussed.

Adult↗
PubMed1991

Neurobehavioral outcomes in diseases of childhood. Individual change models for pediatric human immunodeficiency viruses.

The growing incidence of human immunodeficiency virus-1 (HIV-1) and acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) in children is a major public health problem. Current research emphasizes treatments for ameliorating deleterious effects on the child's neurological and behavioral development. This article outlines approaches to the assessment of individual change that may provide alternatives to more traditional approaches to the assessment of neurobehavioral outcomes in children with chronic diseases. These approaches provide more precise conceptualizations of changes that lead directly to statistical designs and measurement strategies for assessing effects of HIV-1 and AIDS on development. Such assessments can be superimposed on current clinical trial methodologies to evaluate the efficacy of pharmacological and behavioral interventions designed to improve quality of life in HIV-1 infected children.

Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome↗
PubMed1990

Activities and interactions of mothers and their firstborn infants in the first six months of life: covariation, stability, continuity, correspondence, and prediction.

Activities of primiparous mothers and infants were observed at 2 and 5 months of age during naturalistic interactions at home. 5 prominent features of mother and infant exchanges in this short-term longitudinal study are described and discussed in the context of 3 models of unique environment-development relations: covariation, stability, continuity, correspondence, and prediction. Generally, mothers' activities did not positively covary at either age, nor did those of infants. Some maternal activities were stable in this time period; some developmentally increased, and some developmentally decreased. Infants' activities were unstable, but most increased over time. Specific mother and infant activities corresponded, and over time mothers and infants influenced one another in specific ways. In the critical period of the first half year, infants appear to be flexible and plastic in their behavioral repertoires and are influenced by their mothers; mothers are somewhat consistent, but they also adapt to the behaviors of their infants.

Arousal↗
PubMed1989

Infant sensitivity to audiovisually coherent events.

We examined 5-month-old infants' sensitivity to audiovisually coherent and incoherent events. A person speaking and an automobile with engine running were filmed approaching and receding with corresponding (coherent) soundtracks. Infants were tested with a habituation paradigm in which they observed coherent or incoherent films, involving, respectively, acoustical radial motion in the direction seen or opposite to the direction seen. Infants habituated to both person and car films, but coherent events uniformly yielded more rapid habituation than did incoherent ones. In addition, infants treated silent events more like audiovisual coherence than like incoherence. Infants habituated more to cars than to people, suggesting that a speaking person may especially maintain infant attention.

Arousal↗
PubMed1989

Sensitive periods in development: structural characteristics and causal interpretations.

The presence or absence of a particular experience at a particular time in the life cycle may exert an extraordinary and dramatic influence over structure or function well beyond that point in development. Such sensitive periods are thought to be widespread in animal and in human neurobiology and psychology. A comprehensive treatment of the sensitive period needs minimally to include information about its structural characteristics as well as an interpretation of its causes, including why the sensitive period arises in terms of the natural history of the species and how the sensitive period is regulated in terms of physical, physiological, and psychological processes. This article provides a framework for research and theory concerning specific sensitive periods and the sensitive period generally conceived. The framework delimits four sets of parameters, which encompass 14 structural characteristics that define sensitive periods, and two levels of causal interpretation that guide research and theory into sensitive periods however they may be manifested.

Animals↗
PubMed1989

Habituation and maternal encouragement of attention in infancy as predictors of toddler language, play, and representational competence.

In a longitudinal study, infants' habituation and mothers' encouragement of attention were assessed at 5 months, and toddlers' language comprehension, language production, and pretense play and mothers' encouragement of attention were assessed at 13 months. Structural equation modeling was used to examine the unique contributions of infant habituation and maternal stimulation to toddlers' cognitive abilities. Habituation predicted language comprehension, pretense play, and a latent variable of language and play after the influences of both 5- and 13-month maternal encouragement of attention were partialed. Likewise, early maternal encouragement of attention explained unique variance in toddlers' language comprehension and the language-and-play latent variable after infant habituation was controlled. These findings indicate that links between early habituation and later cognitive development are direct and not solely mediated by maternal stimulation, and that maternal stimulation of young infants influences the development of children's representational competence over and above infants' own information-processing abilities.

Attention↗
PubMed1987

Perceiving similarity and comprehending metaphor.

We conducted a series of 3 experiments to assess the comprehension of 4 types of cross-modal (synesthetic) similarities in nearly 500 3.5-13.5-year-old children and more than 100 adults. We tested both perceptual and verbal (metaphoric) modes. Children of all ages and adults matched pitch to brightness and loudness to brightness, thereby showing that even very young children recognize perceptual similarities between hearing and vision. Children did not consistently recognize similarity between pitch and size until about age 11. This difference in developmental timetables is compatible with the view that pitch-brightness and loudness-brightness similarities are intrinsic characteristics of perception (characteristics based, perhaps, on common sensory codes), whereas pitch-size similarity may be learned (perhaps through association of size with resonance properties). In a parallel verbal task, even 4-year-old children showed at least some capacity to translate meanings metaphorically from one modality to another (e.g., rating "low pitched" as dim and "high pitched" as bright). But not all literal meanings produced metaphoric equivalents in the youngest children (e.g., rating "sunlight" brighter but not louder than "moonlight"). Improvements with age in making metaphoric translations of synesthetic expressions paralleled increasing differentiation of meanings along literal dimensions and increasing capacity to integrate meanings of components in compound expressions. We postulate that perceptual knowledge about objects and events is represented in terms of locations in a multidimensional space; cross-modal similarities imply that the space is also multimodal. Verbal processes later gain access to this graded perceptual knowledge, thus permitting the interpretation of synesthetic metaphors according to the rules of cross-modal perception.

Acoustic Stimulation↗
PubMed1986

Fine orientation discrimination and shape constancy in young infants.

The present study aimed to investigate simultaneously fine orientation discrimination and shape constancy in young infants. The design employed two variants of the habituation paradigm. Infants in one group were habituated to a single orientation (5 or 15 degrees) of a single stimulus presented repeatedly, and they were then tested with the complementary orientation (15 or 5 degrees). Infants in a second group were habituated to several orientations (5, 10, and 15 degrees) of the same stimulus, and they were then tested with a familiar orientation of the stimulus, with two novel orientations of the same stimulus, and with a new stimulus. Between-groups comparison showed that infants habituated more efficiently to re-presentations of a single orientation than to multiple orientations of the same stimulus, providing evidence of fine orientation discrimination; posthabituation comparison within the single-orientation group confirmed that infants discriminated small orientation changes. Posthabituation comparison within the multiple-orientation group showed that infants generalized over novel orientation changes of the familiar stimulus though they discriminated change to a novel stimulus. Cumulatively, the results of this study demonstrate that under one set of conditions young infants show sensitivity to relatively fine variations in pattern orientation, but that under a different set of conditions young infants give evidence of shape constancy with the same patterns.

Discrimination Learning↗
PubMed1986

Infant habituation: assessments of individual differences and short-term reliability at five months.

This study is concerned with individual differences and short-term reliability of infant-control habituation of visual attention. Habituation to single female faces and to single geometric patterns was observed separately in 2 groups of comparable 5-month-olds. Each group participated in habituation twice, and habituation sessions for each were separated from one another by 10 days. Across the 2 conditions, habituation was found to be distributed into 3 patterns: Most infants decreased looking and achieved criterion in a negatively exponential fashion, some infants first increased looking and then rapidly habituated, and some infants showed fluctuating and idiosyncratic looking-time functions prior to habituating. Both qualitative patterns and quantitative indexes of habituation showed moderate but significant reliability between assessment sessions. Quantitative and psychometric characteristics of habituation and the meaningfulness of habituation of attention as an index of infant cognition are discussed.

Attention↗
PubMed1986

Continuity in mental development from infancy.

In this essay we document moderate continuity in mental development beginning in infancy and extending into childhood. Psychological opinion in the past has tended to favor discontinuity theories of cognitive development from infancy. In recent years, however, the foundations on which discontinuity positions were originally established have themselves come under question and new findings grounded in new assessment procedures have appeared, necessitating revision of opinion on this significant psychological and developmental issue. Our essay has several aims. We first review briefly the bases for contemporary discontinuity theories of mental development. Second, we present current findings that support the alternative proposition of continuity: Recent research demonstrates that infants who more efficiently encode visual stimuli or more efficiently recollect visual or auditory stimuli tend to perform more proficiently on traditional psychometric assessments of intelligence and language during childhood. Third, we scrutinize the assessment methods from which these continuity results derive. Fourth, we offer several models that help to explain the continuity findings. Fifth, we discuss critically the origins and the maintenance of continuity in mental development as it is coming to be conceptualized currently. Finally, we reflect on implications of continuity for the future of infant assessments specifically and for theories of early mental development generally.

Arousal↗
PubMed1986

The perception of smiling and its experiential correlates in three-month-old infants.

We studied individual differences in 3-month-olds' perceptions of smiling and the experiential correlates of those differences. In the laboratory, infants saw a graduated series of smiles that grew in intensity of expression. As a group, 3-month-olds preferred increasingly intense expressions of smiling, but individually they showed different growth rates of preference across the smiling series. Further, infants' preferences related to their home experiences: Infants who showed greater sensitivity to smiling had mothers who more frequently encouraged attention to themselves when they were smiling and their infants were looking at them. Infant discrimination within and between categories of facial expression and the relative strengths of association between different kinds of naturally occurring experiences and infant perceptual sensitivity are discussed.

Attention↗