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  Experimenting with Babies

  “Experimenting with Babies is a wonderful book, giving parents a hands-on way to understand their baby’s emerging mind. The experiments are easy, fun, and nicely annotated with the real science behind them. What a fabulous way for parents to get to know their new child!”

  —Lise Eliot, PhD, associate professor of neuroscience at the Chicago Medical School of Rosalind Franklin University and author of What’s Going On in There? How the Brain and Mind Develop in the First Five Years of Life

  “With the marketplace urging parents to buy all manner of things to make their babies ‘smart,’ Gallagher’s book offers parents a view based in science on how much babies really know and figure out on their own. Parents will have fun with this book and gain new respect and awe for their babies’ amazing capabilities.”

  —Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, PhD, H. Rodney Sharp Professor at the University of Delaware and coauthor of How Babies Talk, Einstein Never Used Flash Cards, and A Mandate for Playful Learning in Preschool

  A PERIGEE BOOK

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

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  A Penguin Random House Company

  Copyright © 2013 by Shaun Gallagher

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

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  eBook ISBN: 978-1-101-59969-3

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Gallagher, Shaun, 1948–

  Experimenting with babies : 50 amazing science projects you can perform on your kid / Shaun Gallagher.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-0-399-16246-6 (pbk.)

  1. Parent and child. I. Title.

  HQ755.8.G346 2013

  306.874—dc23 2013021018

  First edition: October 2013

  A portion of the author’s royalty earnings will be donated to Show Hope, a nonprofit organization that offers adoption grants to families and medical care to orphans around the world. Learn more at ShowHope.org.

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, Internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Most Perigee books are available at special quantity discounts for bulk purchases for sales promotions, premiums, fund-raising, or educational use. Special books, or book excerpts, can also be created to fit specific needs. For details, write: [email protected].

  To my children,

  who are my favorite

  science projects.

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  INTRODUCTION

  1. Soothing Scents

  Age range: 0–1 month

  2. Baby Blueprints

  Age range: 0–1 month

  3. En Garde

  Age range: 0–3 months

  4. Happy Feet

  Age range: 0–3 months

  5. A Penchant for Patterns

  Age range: 0–3 months

  6. Feet Lead the Way

  Age range: 0–6 months

  7. Response Under Pressure

  Age range: 0–6 months

  8. I’m Hip to That

  Age range: 0–9 months

  9. This Little Piggy Was Named Babinski

  Age range: 0–24 months

  10. A Memorable Smile

  Age range: 2–4 months

  11. Out on a Limb

  Age range: 2–4 months

  12. Grasping Prep

  Age range: 2–6 months

  13. Tongue Testing

  Age range: 2–6 months

  14. Picture: Impossible

  Age range: 3–6 months

  15. Pitch Patterns

  Age range: 3–9 months

  16. Spider Sense

  Age range: 4–5 months

  17. Put an Age to That Face

  Age range: 4–7 months

  18. The Face Matches the Feeling

  Age range: 4–12 months

  19. Stress Busting

  Age range: About 6 months

  20. Propulsive Perceptions

  Age range: 5–8 months

  21. Body Stretches

  Age range: 5–9 months

  22. A Cappella Strikes a Chord

  Age range: 5–11 months

  23. Natural Interference

  Age range: 6–8 months

  24. The Gestation of Gestures

  Age range: 6–9 months

  25. Sizing Things Up

  Age range: 6–9 months

  26. Mirror, Mirror

  Age range: 6–9 months

  27. Capturing the Cup

  Age range: 6–9 months

  28. Grabby Hands

  Age range: 6–10 months

  29. I Want What You Want

  Age range: 6–12 months

  30. Be Still, My Face

  Age range: 6–24 months

  31. The In-Plain-Sight Switcheroo

  Age range: 6–24 months

  32. The Goldilocks Effect

  Age range: 7–9 months

  33. The Importance of an Audience

  Age range: 7–11 months

  34. A Gazy Connection

  Age range: 9–10 months

  35. Shapes or Kinds?

  Age range: 10 months

  36. Demonstration and Deduction

  Age range: 9–15 months

  37. Defending What’s Mine

  Age range: 9–24 months

  38. Taking Cues

  Age range: 10–12 months

  39. Walking Tour

  Age range: 10–16 months

  40. Familiarity and Foods

  Age range: 12 months

  41. The Retriever

  Age range: 11–13 months

  42. I Know Something You Don’t Know

  Age range: 13–15 months

  43. Using Your Head

  Age range: 13–15 months

  44. A Questioning Look

  Age range: 13–18 months

  45. Power Napping

  Age range: 15 months

  46. Same or Similar?

  Age range: 14–20 months

  47. The Ambiguous “One”

  Age range: 16–18 months

  48. Helping the Helper

  Age range: 18–24 months

  49. Punishing the Bad Guy

  Age range: 19–23 months
/>   50. Don’t You Know?

  Age range: 24 months

  Appendix A

  PROJECTS BY COMPLEXITY

  Appendix B

  PROJECTS BY RESEARCH AREA

  REFERENCES

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Introduction

  When I was a kid, I begged Santa Claus for a Radio Shack 50-in-1 Electronic Projects Kit. The kit consisted of a “circuit board” with numerous capacitors, resistors, LEDs, and a buzzer for auditory output. For each project, you would connect various components with wires and then flip a switch and see what happens. It was great fun, and it contributed to my continued interest in science and engineering.

  Now that I’m a parent, though, I’ve outgrown the Radio Shack science kit and moved on to an experimental apparatus of significantly higher complexity: the baby.

  My kids are the most fun, intriguing, surprising (and exhausting) research subjects I have ever had the privilege to conduct weird and wacky experiments on. I’ve spent hours upon hours trying to figure out the optimal way to hold a baby to get him to fall asleep quickly—only to discover, as many parents have, that what works for one baby does not work at all for another. I’ve tried at least 20 different techniques to get a toddler to eat his peas. (The winner: “Please, whatever you do, don’t eat your peas.”) I’ve tracked my baby’s acquisition of fine motor skills based on how gently he touches my face—it progresses from painful scratching to awkward poking to soft whisker stroking. I’ve seen how early babies’ unique personalities emerge. Even at a few weeks old, you can already sense how their gears are turning by the way they look at you and observe the world around them. And there is something especially fascinating about conducting research on babies, who are themselves conducting experiments all the time—which typically take the form, “What is this thing, and what does it feel like in my mouth?”

  Before you begin experimenting on your own baby using the projects in this book, it’s important to be aware of a few caveats:

  The projects in this book are not designed to assess your baby’s physical or mental health, intelligence, or any other aspect of his motor, cognitive, or behavioral development, nor are they intended to tell you whether your baby is developmentally on schedule or whether he measures up. Rather, they’re intended to demonstrate principles of infant development in a fun, easy-to-digest way. So don’t approach these projects as challenges that your baby must complete in order to keep up with the Joneses’ kid (or the Einsteins’).

  Although suggested ages and age ranges are included in the projects, they should be considered fuzzy rather than firm, so don’t worry if your child is not able to perform a certain task described in one of the experiments. When possible, I’ve included milestone information instead of a strict age range, such as “once your baby is walking independently.”

  In many of the original studies cited in this book, a number of children were tested but excluded from the results due to common problems such as fussiness, crying, or inability to complete a qualifying requirement. In some cases, certain results were excluded because a child’s behavior was substantially different from the majority of those studied. So if you attempt an experiment, but your baby is not able to complete it or your results are quite different from those described in the study, don’t worry! It’s not out of the ordinary.

  In adapting published, peer-reviewed academic studies to parent-friendly exercises that require no special equipment or training, I’ve had to take some liberties that may affect the degree to which your results line up with those of the source material. For instance, in most published studies, children are separated into groups, and each group is assigned a different condition. One group is the “test” group, and another is the “control” group, allowing the researchers to compare the results across the two groups. In many of the projects in this book, you’ll instead conduct all of the conditions on the same child—your baby—separating each trial by a length of time. The former methodology is, of course, preferred in professional contexts, but because this is a book of at-home experiments, it’s more practical for parents to simply repeat the experiments, rather than recruit a bunch of neighborhood babies for a well-controlled study. (If you happen to have identical twins on hand, you can more closely replicate the control and test model. Then again, you might not have that much free time.)

  As you work through the 50 experiments in this book, I hope they give you new insight into the various fields of child development—but most important, I hope you come away with many new insights into your own amazing little science projects.

  1

  Soothing Scents

  Age range: 0–1 month

  Experiment complexity: Simple

  Research area: Sensory development

  THE EXPERIMENT

  Sometimes when your baby gets upset, nursing, which has a calming effect, isn’t an option (such as when Dad’s on baby duty while Mom takes a nap or a shower). If you have stored breast milk to use for a bottle, try placing a few drops on a cotton cloth. Then place the cloth a few inches from your baby’s nose.

  THE HYPOTHESIS

  The scent of the breast milk, to which your baby has been naturally familiarized through nursing, will have a soothing effect on her. She will cry, grimace, and flail less than a baby who has been exposed to an unfamiliar scent or no scent at all.

  THE RESEARCH

  In a 2005 study, newborns were split into four groups. Babies in the first group had been naturally familiarized to the scent of their mother’s breast milk. The second group of babies were familiarized to a vanilla scent through repeated exposure. The other two groups were not familiarized to any scent.

  On the third day after birth, while getting blood drawn in a heel stick procedure, infants in the first two groups were exposed to the scents they had been familiarized toward (breast milk for the first group and vanilla for the second). Infants in the third group were also exposed to a vanilla scent—but for them, it was an unfamiliar smell. And infants in the fourth group were not exposed to any scent. The researchers found that the babies in the first two groups cried less and showed less distress after the heel stick procedure than the babies in the other two groups. They also found that babies in the milk condition exhibited fewer flailing movements.

  It should be noted, however, that infant formula does not appear to have the same effect as breast milk—at least not for breast-fed babies. In a 2009 study, newborns who were undergoing a routine heel stick procedure were exposed to the scent of their own mother’s breast milk, another mother’s breast milk, or formula. Only the infants exposed to the scent of their own mother’s milk showed lower distress compared with a control group.

  THE TAKEAWAY

  Using familiar scents to calm your baby is a great tool to have in your quiver of soothing techniques. But don’t let that be your only go-to move. Other effective ways to soothe your baby include skin-to-skin contact, nursing, shushing sounds, rocking movements, and mellow music.

  2

  Baby Blueprints

  Age range: 0–1 month

  Experiment complexity: Simple

  Research area: Cognitive development

  THE EXPERIMENT

  Gather two pieces of cardboard or poster board, each about the size of a large postcard. On one, draw Figure A (on the left in the following illustration) and on the other, draw Figure B (on the right in the illustration).

  While holding your awake, alert newborn, have a friend hold the two pieces of cardboard side by side in front of your baby, about a foot and a half away from his face. Ask your friend to observe which of the two shapes your baby looks at longest, and which your baby looks at most frequently. End the experiment when your baby stops looking at the images. After a short pause, repeat the experiment, but with the positions of the figures reversed.

  THE HYPOTHESIS

  Your b
aby will look longer and more frequently at Figure A.

  THE RESEARCH

  It’s well known that babies show a preference for faces not long after birth. But what is it about faces, exactly, that attracts babies? Do their brains have some sort of innate blueprint that describes human face structure in great detail, or are they attracted to more general structural properties that faces happen to have?

  A 2002 study found that one characteristic of faces, top-heaviness of features (two eyebrows and two eyes above, but only one nose and mouth below), attracted infants even when presented in non-facelike illustrations. A 2008 study attempted to determine whether another characteristic—congruency of face shape to the inner features—might also attract babies’ interest. Newborns between one and three days old were presented with the two shapes seen above, and a video recorder captured their eye movements. An analysis of the recording found that the babies looked longer and more frequently at Figure A, whose outer shape is congruent with the arrangement of the three inner elements, than at Figure B, whose outer shape is incongruent with the arrangement of the inner elements. The results of their study lend further weight to the hypothesis that more general structural characteristics, rather than a blueprint for faces specifically, could explain why babies are so drawn to faces.

  THE TAKEAWAY

  Could it be a mere twist of fate—or twist of face—that your gentle visage happens to have the properties that capture wee ones’ attention? From a parent’s perspective, that thought might be hard to countenance, but whether babies are drawn to faces specifically or just to their more general characteristics is a topic of interest only to developmental researchers. For you as a parent, the principal thing that matters is that your face delights your baby, so make sure to give her plenty of opportunities to see it.

  Tools of the Trade

  A high-tech pacifier has given researchers new insight into what grabs babies’ attention. The pacifier uses a pressure sensor to measure the frequency and pressure of a baby’s sucking. The sensor can be linked to a computer to generate auditory stimuli, such as speech sounds, each time the baby sucks. Babies as young as a couple of months old are able to learn that sucking the pacifier controls the sounds and will suck more forcefully to generate sounds they enjoy. Researchers have used these special pacifiers to determine whether a baby can tell the difference between two sounds. If a single sound is played repeatedly and then a new sound is introduced, babies tend to suck with renewed vigor when the new sound is played. This “high-amplitude sucking” technique has been used in numerous experiments and has yielded significant data, especially about how babies learn to recognize and then acquire language.