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Biomedical subjects

M H Bornstein

Publications and source records attributed to M H Bornstein.

70 records · Page 4Linked to original sources
PubMed1976

The categories of hue in infancy.

Infant looking time was monitored during habituation to the repeated presentation of a wavelength stimulus selected from one basic adult hue category and after a change in stimulation. Recovery from habituation was greater to a wavelength selected from an adjacent hue category than to a wavelength from the same category even though these two stimuli were equally distant (in nanometers) from the habituation wavelength. Differential responding evidenced infants' categorical perception of hue; that is, infants see the physically continuous spectrum as divided into the hue categories of blue, green, yellow, and red. These results help to resolve the long-standing controversy surrounding the primacy of perception over language in the organization of hue.

Color Perception↗
PubMed1976

Color vision and hue categorization in young human infants.

Two studies examined the organization of color perception in 4-month-old human infants. In Study 1, infants looked at selected spectral stimuli repeatedly until their visual attention waned. The stimuli represented instances of basic adult hue categories - blue, green, yellow, and red. Following habituation, infants were shown a series of wavelengths which were the same as or different from the stimuli first seen. Analyses of infant attention during this dishabituation phase of the study indicated that infants categorize wavelengths by perceptual similarity; that is, they see hues in the spectrum much as adults do. In Study 2, a group of infants who looked at the alteration of two wavelengths from the same hue category habituated as did the group of infants who looked at the repitition of a single wavelength from that category, but a group of infants who looked at two wavelengths from different categories habituated at a slower rate. Data from the two studies suggest a high degree of organization of the color world prior to language acquisition.

Association↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Play in two societies: pervasiveness of process, specificity of structure.

The present study compared Argentine (N = 39) and U.S. (N = 43) children and their mothers on exploratory, symbolic, and social play and interaction when children were 20 months of age. Patterns of cultural similarity and difference emerged. In both cultures, boys engaged in more exploratory play than girls, and girls engaged in more symbolic play than boys; mothers of boys engaged in more exploratory play than mothers of girls, and mothers of girls engaged in more symbolic play than mothers of boys. Moreover, in both cultures, individual variation in children's exploratory and symbolic play was specifically associated with individual variation in mothers' exploratory and symbolic play, respectively. Between cultures, U.S. children and their mothers engaged in more exploratory play, whereas Argentine children and their mothers engaged in more symbolic play. Moreover, Argentine mothers exceeded U.S. mothers in social play and verbal praise of their children. During an early period of mental and social growth, general developmental processes in play may be pervasive, but dyadic and cultural structures are apparently specific. Overall, Argentine and U.S. dyads utilized different modes of exploration, representation, and interaction--emphasizing "other-directed" acts of pretense versus "functional" and "combinatorial" exploration, for example--and these individual and dyadic allocentric versus idiocentric stresses accord with larger cultural concerns of collectivism versus individualism in the two societies.

Adult↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Representational abilities and the hearing status of child/mother dyads.

Two representational abilities, expressive and receptive language and symbolic play, were assessed in multiple formats in hearing and deaf 2-year-old children of hearing and deaf mothers. Based on maternal report, hearing children of hearing and deaf mothers produced more words than deaf children of hearing mothers, hearing children of hearing mothers more words than deaf children of deaf mothers, and deaf children of deaf mothers more words than deaf children of hearing mothers. Based on experimenter assessments, hearing children in both groups produced and comprehended more words than deaf children in both groups. By contrast, no differences emerged among these groups in child solitary symbolic play or in child-initiated or mother-initiated child collaborative symbolic play; all groups also increased equivalently in symbolic play between solitary and collaborative play. Representational language and symbolic play were unrelated in hearing children of hearing mothers and in deaf children of deaf mothers, but the 2 abilities were associated in children in the 2 child/mother mismatched hearing status groups. These findings are placed in the context of a proposed developing modularity of verbal and nonverbal symbol systems, and the implications of hearing status in communicative exchanges between children and their mothers in diverse hearing and deaf dyads are explored.

Adult↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Physiological self-regulation and information processing in infancy: cardiac vagal tone and habituation.

This study investigates the role of physiological self-regulation (cardiac vagal tone) in information processing (habituation) in 81 infants. Nucleus ambiguus vagal tone (Vna, a measure of respiratory sinus arrhythmia) was used to index cardiac vagal tone. Physiological self-regulation was operationalized as the change in Vna from a baseline period of measurement to habituation. Decreases in Vna consistently related to habituation efficiency, operationalized as accumulated looking time (ALT), in all infants twice at 2 months and twice at 5 months; however, this relation was accounted for by infants who met an habituation criterion on each task. Among habituators, shorter lookers also had greater Vna suppression during habituation. Within-age and between-age suppression of vagal tone predicted ALT, but ALT did not predict suppression of vagal tone. Physiological self-regulation provided by the vagal system appears to play a role in information processing in infancy as indexed by habituation.

Child Development↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Maternal responsiveness and children's achievement of language milestones.

This prospective longitudinal study examined the contribution of dimensions of maternal responsiveness (descriptions, play, imitations) to the timing of five milestones in children's (N = 40) early expressive language: first imitations, first words, 50 words in expressive language, combinatorial speech, and the use of language to talk about the past. Events-History Analysis, a statistical technique that estimates the extent to which predictors influence the timing of events, was used. At 9 and 13 months, maternal responsiveness and children's activities (e.g., vocalizations, play) were coded from videotaped interactions of mother-child free play; information about children's language acquisition was obtained through biweekly interviews with mothers from 9 through 21 months. Maternal responsiveness at both ages predicted the timing of children's achieving language milestones over and above children's observed behaviors. Responsiveness at 13 months was a stronger predictor of the timing of language milestones than was responsiveness at 9 months, and certain dimensions of responsiveness were more predictive than others. The multidimensional nature of maternal responsiveness and specificity in mother-child language relations are discussed.

Achievement↗