U of T at Mississauga Granting Degrees to Infants!
- September 17, 2008
The University of Toronto at Mississauga's Infant and Child Studies Centre is granting FREE Junior Scientist Degrees to infants!
Forty-five years ago, scientists thought that babies were born virtually blind and had little understanding of the world around them. Today developmental psychologists know that this is not true. At birth, babies recognize human faces as special. Infants younger than one month of age visually track pictures of moving faces over pictures of scrambled faces, and prefer to look at their mother’s face rather than the face of a stranger. Infants even imitate facial expressions. If you stick your tongue out at a six-week-old, they are likely to stick their tongue out back at you!
Infants’ precocious perceptual skills are not limited to the visual domain. During the third trimester of fetal development, infants can hear their mother’s voice. At birth, infants prefer to listen to their mother’s voice over the voice of an unfamiliar woman. Newborns also prefer to listen to the language spoken by their mother.
At the Infant and Child Studies Centre at UT Mississauga, researchers study how children’s understanding of music and language develops. For example, Dr. Sandra Trehub and her colleagues have shown that infants’ music perception skills are surprisingly similar to those of adults, even though they have far less experience. Researchers at the Infant and Child Studies Centre are also interested in how infants learn to understand language. For example, Dr. Elizabeth Johnson’s research team has shown that infants know a great deal about the sound structure and grammar of their native language long before they begin speaking.
In short, researchers have learned a great deal about early infant development over the course of the past half of a century. But there is always more to learn! The families who participated in the above mentioned studies made these scientific advancements possible. If you live in the Greater Toronto Area and have a child ranging in age between 1 and 36 months, you are invited to get involved with research currently underway at UTM. All participants receive a small toy and a junior scientist degree. For more information, call us at 905-828-5446.
Or visit the Infant and Child Studies Centre Website.
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