Child development varies and is hard to predict

On average, children take the first steps on their own at the age of 12 months. Many parents perceive this event as a decisive turning point. However, the timing is really of no consequence. Children who start walking early turn out later to be neither more intelligent nor more well-coordinated. This is the conclusion reached by a study supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF).

Because parents pay great attention to their offspring, they often compare them with the other children in the sandpit or playground. Many of them worry that their child is lagging behind in terms of mental development if it sits up or starts to walk a bit later than other children. Now, however, in a statistical analysis of the developmental data of 222 children born healthy, researchers headed by Oskar Jenni of the Zurich Children’s Hospital and Valentin Rousson of Lausanne University have come to the conclusion that most of these fears are groundless.

Considerable variance
Within the framework of the Zurich longitudinal study, the paediatricians conducted a detailed study of the development of 119 boys and 103 girls. The researchers examined the children seven times during the first two years of their life and subsequently carried out motor and intelligence tests with them every two to three years after they reached school age. The results show that children sit up for the first time at an age of between slightly less than four months and thirteen months (average 6.5 months). They begin to walk at an age of between 8.5 months and 20 months (average 12 months). In other words, there is considerable variance.

The researchers found no correlation between the age at which the children reached these motor milestones and their performance in the intelligence and motor tests between the age of seven and eighteen. In short, by the time they reach school age, children who start walking later than others are just as well-coordinated and intelligent as those who were up on their feet early.

More relaxed
Although the first steps that a child takes on its own represent a decisive turning point for most parents, the precise timing of this event is manifestly of no consequence. “That’s why I advise parents to be more relaxed if their child only starts walking at 16 or 18 months,” says Jenni. If a child still can’t walk unaided after 20 months, then further medical investigations are indicated.

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Meet London’s Babylab, where scientists experiment on babies’ brains

In the laboratories of the Henry Wellcome Building at Birkbeck, University of London, children’s squeaky toys lie scattered on the floor. Brightly coloured posters of animals are pasted on the walls and picture books are stacked on the low tables. This is the Babylab — a research centre that experiments on children aged one month to three years, to understand how they learn, develop and think. “The way babies’ brains change is an amazing and mysterious process,” says the lab director, psychologist Mark Johnson. “The brain increases in size by three- to four-fold between birth and teenage years, but we don’t understand how that relates to its function.”

The Birkbeck neuroscientists are interested in finding out how babies recognise faces, how they learn to pay attention to some things and not others, how they perceive emotion and how their language develops. Studies published by the lab have shown that babies prefer to look at faces over objects. They have also found that differences in the dopamine-producing gene can affect babies’ attention span and that at six to eight months of age, there are detectable differences in the brain patterns of babies who were later diagnosed with autism.

The biggest obstacle is designing the right kinds of experiment. “There aren’t many methods for getting inside the mind of an infant or a toddler,” Johnson explains. Graduate students at the Babylab have teamed up with technology companies, using a €1.9 million (£1.7 million) grant from the European Union, to develop tools such as EEG head nets that record electrical brain activity, helmets that use light to measure blood flow in different parts of the brain, and eye-trackers that help study attention. Eventually, they want to create wireless systems so babies can react and play naturally during experiments. But despite the wires, “all our studies are geared towards making sure our babies are contented,” says Johnson. “If we want data, we need happy babies.”

Newborn memories of the “oohs” and “ahs” heard in the womb

Newborns are much more attuned to the sounds of their native language than first thought. In fact, these linguistic whizzes can up pick on distinctive sounds of their mother tongue while in utero, a new study has concluded.

Research led by Christine Moon, a professor of psychology at Pacific Lutheran University, shows that infants, only hours old showed marked interest for the vowels of a language that was not their mother tongue.



"We have known for over 30 years that we begin learning prenatally about voices by listening to the sound of our mother talking," Moon said. "This is the first study that shows we learn about the particular speech sounds of our mother’s language before we are born."

Before the study, the general consensus was that infants learned about the small parts of speech, the vowels and the consonants, postnatally. Moon added. “This study moves the measurable result of experience with individual speech sounds from six months of age to before birth,” she said. The findings were published in Acta Paediatrica.

Want Your Baby to Learn? Research Shows Sitting Up Helps

From the Mozart effect to educational videos, many parents want to aid their infants in learning. New research out of North Dakota State University, Fargo, and Texas A&M shows that something as simple as the body position of babies while they learn plays a critical role in their cognitive development.

The study shows that for babies, sitting up, either by themselves or with assistance, plays a significant role in how infants learn. The research titled “Posture Support Improves Object Individuation in Infants,” co-authored by Rebecca J. Woods, assistant professor of human development and family science and doctoral psychology lecturer at North Dakota State University, and by psychology professor Teresa Wilcox of Texas A&M, is published in the journal Developmental Psychology®.

The study’s results show that babies’ ability to sit up unsupported has a profound effect on their ability to learn about objects. The research also shows that when babies who cannot sit up alone are given posture support from infant seats that help them sit up, they learn as well as babies who can already sit alone.

“An important part of human cognitive development is the ability to understand whether an object in view is the same or different from an object seen earlier,” said Dr. Woods. Through two experiments, she confirmed that 5-and-a-half- and 6-and-a-half-month-olds don’t use patterns to differentiate objects on their own. However, 6-and-a-half-month-olds can be primed to use patterns, if they have the opportunity to look at, touch and mouth the objects before being tested.

“An advantage the 6-and-a-half-month-olds may have is the ability to sit unsupported, which makes it easier for babies to reach for, grasp and manipulate objects. If babies don’t have to focus on balancing, their attention can be on exploring the object,” said Woods.

In a third experiment, 5-and-a-half-month-olds were given full postural support while they explored objects. When they had posture support, they were able to use patterns to differentiate objects. The research study also suggests that delayed sitting may cause babies to miss learning experiences that affect other areas of development.

“Helping a baby sit up in a secure, well-supported manner during learning sessions may help them in a wide variety of learning situations, not just during object-feature learning,” Woods said. “This knowledge can be advantageous, particularly to infants who have cognitive delays who truly need an optimal learning environment.”

Higher-math skills entwined with lower-order magnitude sense

The ability to learn complex, symbolic math is a uniquely human trait, but it is intricately connected to a primitive sense of magnitude that is shared by many animals, finds a study to be published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

"Our results clearly show that uniquely human branches of mathematics interface with an evolutionarily primitive general magnitude system," says lead author Stella Lourenco, a psychologist at Emory University. "We were able to show how variations in both advanced arithmetic and geometry skills specifically correlated with variations in our intuitive sense of magnitude."

Babies as young as six months can roughly distinguish between less and more, whether it’s for a number of objects, the size of objects, or the length of time they see the objects. This intuitive, non-verbal sense of magnitude, which may be innate, has also been demonstrated in non-human animals. When given a choice between a group of five bananas or two bananas, for example, monkeys will tend to take the bigger bunch.

"It’s obviously of adaptive value for all animals to be able to discriminate between less and more," Lourenco says. "The ability is widespread across the animal kingdom – fish, rodents and even insects show sensitivity to magnitude, such as the number of items in a set of objects."