infants
sastyk | March 23, 2011In the latest news from Fukushima, water in Tokyo has been deemed unfit for babies to consume because of high radiation levels. Not surprisingly, shortages of bottled water are emerging, as people buy up larger quantities.
A top Japanese official urged residents of the nation's capital not to hoard bottled water Wednesday after Tokyo's government found that radioactive material in tap water had exceeded the limit considered safe for infants.
"We have to consider Miyagi and Iwate and other disaster-hit areas," Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said. "I'd like to again urge consumers not to…
gregladen | November 3, 2009We have an interesting conundrum. Our offspring (______) is due on November 20th. This places the likely date of birth just prior to Thanksgiving. This causes many people to get very excited because they get to see and play with the new baby. I wonder how mad at me all those people are going to get when they find out I might not let that happen?
I'm not entirely sure what we are going to do postpartum. I'm quite interested in advice, so please do make your suggestions below. I'd especially like the advice of the MD's and Public Health Scientists in the vicinity. Or anyone with relevant…
edyong | September 4, 2009Domestic dogs are very different from their wolf ancestors in their bodies and their behaviour. They're more docile for a start. But man's best friend has also evolved a curious sensitivity to our communication signals - a mental ability that sets them apart from wolves and that parallels the behaviour of human infants. Dogs and infants are even prone to making the same mistakes of perception.
Like infants less than a year old, dogs fail at a seemingly easy exercise called the "object permanence task". It goes like this: if you hide an object somewhere(say a ball under a cup) and let the…
edyong | April 14, 2009Learning a new language as an adult is no easy task but infants can readily learn two languages without obvious difficulties. Despite being faced with two different vocabularies and sets of grammar, babies pick up both languages at the same speeds as those who learn just one. Far from becoming confused, it seems that babies actually develop superior mental skills from being raised in a bilingual environment.
By testing 38 infants, each just seven months old, Agnes Melinda Kovacs and Jacques Mehler have found that those who are raised in bilingual households have better "executive functions…
edyong | February 17, 2009Babies can say volume without saying a single word. They can wave good-bye, point at things to indicate an interest or shake their heads to mean "No". These gestures may be very simple, but they are a sign of things to come. Year-old toddlers who use more gestures tend to have more expansive vocabularies several years later. And this link between early gesturing and future linguistic ability may partially explain by children from poorer families tend to have smaller vocabularies than those from richer ones.
Vocabulary size tallies strongly with a child's academic success, so it's striking…
amillikan | December 27, 2008This week's Bloggingheads.tv episode features philosopher Joshua Knobe and psychologist Elizabeth Spelke discussing the cognitive abilities of infants.
Here are some more clips of the "diavlog" in addition to the one you can view on the ScienceBlogs home page.
What do you think of this week's Bloggingheads feature?