Know thyself

Does a baby know its a baby?

When a baby looks in a mirror does it see what it thinks is another baby, or does a baby recognize itself in the mirror? At what age does consciousness of self emerge?

These are just a few of the questions that we've asked ourselves and discussed with friends. But because of decades of great work by developmental psychologists, there are answers. Humans don't generally interact with mirrors (reaching out to touch the reflection, locking in on reflected eyes) until 4 or 5 months of age. They don't typically recognize themselves until 18 months of age. There is some evidence that other apes also are capable of recognizing themselves in mirrors (as opposed to thinking the reflection is just another animal), however most monkeys don't, nor do other animals (except elephants and dolphins...).


Know thyself, is an aphorism traced back to the Greeks. Knowing how it is that we know about ourselves is something that is really worthwhile knowing. An essay titled "Me" in the mirror., by Tetsuro Matsuzawa of Kyoto University, discusses some of the insights and theory, which i also write about below, that have come out of both developmental and evolutionary studies of our behavior. (You can read Matsuzawa's essay here).

When compared to other primates, humans' cognitive abilities (e.g. face recognition, self recognition) needed for "consciousness" develop much more rapidly inside bodies that still appear immature. There is a fundamental trade-off between an organism's investments in body growth and its investments in brain growth. Biologists generally agree that humans are unique species in the sense that they have undergone heavy selection for "brains" over "guts" and "muscles". Quite possibly the advantages that fire (and cooking), textiles, and stone tools provided allowed reductions in guts and muscles.

Elise impressed me with her cognitive abilities today, which seem rather advanced for her age -- even relative to the average human babies. Elise is now two days short of 3 months, but today, while sitting contently in her sling, I brought her in front of the large mirror we have in our master bath and noticed she was totally entranced by the reflection. I watched her stare at her eye gaze regardless of how i moved her. I then turned her 90 degree to the right to face the other mirror on our medicine cabinet, and, again, she locked in on her eyes and raised her eyebrows - as she often does when something catches her interest. Next, to my complete amazement she reached out and touched the reflection of her finger tip- like when E.T. first makes contact with a human. She continued to touch and feel the "other little baby" which she saw in front of her. This probably lasted for a good 5 minutes before she got bored and didnt want to look or even orient towards the mirror anymore.

I wonder when she'll start using the mirror to interact with herself (which is really one of the first signs of self-recognition)? Will it be relatively early... like soon after 12 months? I'm looking forward to finding out.

Here is a national geographic episode on self-recognition in apes, for anyone who made it through this blog entry and is still kind of curious about self-knowledge and would like to nosce te ipsum.

Shake it, Baby

Life has gotten pretty busy, and there has been little precious time for blogging and picture posting, though we have managed to shoot a couple pix and vids along the way. Elise has been growing a lot recently, and as a result keeping us busy with her constant hunger and loud vocalizations. She is really changing in many exciting ways! She most definitely smiles and makes silly faces more now than before, and also has found out how to max-out the resonant frequencies in our house. Sometimes she produces such a volume that it surprises her.

Here is some video that was put together showing her having a good time - being a baby! In this video, you can see her silly play faces, see her playing, making noise, and splashing around in the tub.

Growth spurts and goofy smiles

Elise had her two month doctor appointment today and her first round of shots. Considering that she got five shots total (3 in one leg and 2 in the other), she did really well. She cried for only a minute or two, then that was it. Her poor little legs are swollen and sore where she got the shots and she's seemed to be more sleepy today than usual, but even so we managed to get a couple pictures of her smiling today. She has a lot to be happy about - she's been growing like crazy! At 2 months old, she now weighs 13 pounds 2 ounces and is 23.5 inches long.

Here's her happy bathtime smile...

And her goofy smile...

Speaking of growing and goofy smiles, Jake has also been growing like crazy lately. We've been keeping track of his height on his door frame, and he's recently gone through a growth spurt. While he grew 3 inches from March 2007 to February 2008, just this past month (from February 2008 to March 2008) he's grown a whole other inch! As you can see, at a little over 5'7", he has definitely outgrown me and is quickly catching up with Eric!

Family and friends

Jake, Elise, and I recently returned from Cincinnati. It was Elise's first big adventure away from home and out of California, and she did really well. I think every time she woke up, she was in a new place -- and, for the most part, she met all the new faces and places with a smile on her face. As typically happens with vacations, time flew by. Although we were there for a week, it didn't quite seem long enough to hang out with family and friends there. I wasn't able to get as many pictures as I would have liked, but I did get a few. Here's a pic of Jake and Elise in her bear pram suit, which definitely came in handy on those few cold, snow flurry days in Cincy...

In addition to introducing Elise to my family back home, we also got to meet Elise's newest cousin -- Brianna Cailin Patrick born on March 19th. Here's Brianna and Nana...

Its amazing how quickly babies change and grow. At birth, Brianna weighed exactly the same as Elise and was just a quarter inch shorter, but look at the difference seven weeks can make...

It was exciting to introduce the two girls to each other. The next time they see each other, they'll probably be chasing each other around. We also got a chance to hang out with some good friends - the Hooks. Here's Cathie and Elise, followed by a pic of Jake, India, and Jacob enjoying each other's company too...

Overall, although bittersweet since we were in town for Grandma's memorial service, it was a great trip. As hard as it was for me to get up and say a few words about what Grandma meant to me, I'm so happy I was able to be there to do it. It also makes me very happy to have been able to introduce Elise to people I love and who are important to me. Now, Jake and I are looking forward to the time when we can take Elise to Cincinnati and introduce her to Skyline Chili!

Happy squealing

There are some really happy and excited sounds coming out of our little girl. She's learning that she can do things with her voice besides grunt. We think she enjoys hearing herself. Check out this short video of Elise getting excited as she watches rainforest-creatures swinging overhead from her mobile.

To sleep, or not to sleep?

Sleep is good, certainly. So perhaps the questions are deeper.

We've been collecting data on Elise since she was born in the hospital, which should be no surprise, given our careers as behavioral scientists. Only this past week have we been collecting and analyzing data on Elise's sleep and wakeful states, though. The whole topic of baby sleep is very debated: how it should be done, where and with/without whom, how much is enough, relationship to feeding schedules, etc. For anyone who would like to explore some of the intricacies of relationships between culturally-specific values, social/ecological contexts, and our evolutionary history of adaptation, I highly recommend the following read:
http://www.nd.edu/~jmckenn1/lab/culturalarticle.html

There is so much contradictory evidence, and a lot of capitalizing on parent hysteria by people marketing their products, book, programs. And I won't shy away from pointing out that there are some really cruel, and theoretically unsubstantiated, proscriptions for parenting, such as the following which we DO NOT endorse (Douglas J., 1989. Behaviour Problems in Young Children. London: Tavistock/Routledge): "...The parents have to be firm and committed to returning the child to bed..parents have to learn to ignore crying until the child falls asleep. Sometimes children can cry for a couple of hours..Children may vomit with crying and so parents need to be prepared to go in to clean up the child and change the bedclothes quickly and, with the minimum of fuss, put the child back to bed, and walk out."


Anyway, enough discourse on the topic! What matters is that Elise has been doing great and her parents have been generally pleased with our abilities to sleep. Below are some interesting graphs to study, based on Elise's recent data.

(CLICK ON THE FIGURES BELOW TO VIEW THEM AT LARGER SIZE)

This first one shows the probability of Elise being asleep given the hour of the day.



These next graphs show data points representing spans of time awake/asleep, of various lengths, at various times of day. Though a little more difficult to interpret at first glance, these figures are important for showing evidence of repeated patterns of sleep and awake throughout the week.

Celebrating babies

Last night we had a group of friends over to meet Elise. Elise just turned 1 month old! And this was her first party. As she's been getting a little more settled into her routines, we've noticed her fussy time of the day has characteristically been early evening (when our guests were over), so we were concerned that maybe she'd have a hard time with all the party stimulus and excitement. Not at all! Elise loved the attention and activity and stayed content. We were really happy to be able to share some of our pride and joy with our friends.

Our friends Jeff and Jayne brought their baby boy Kurt. Kurt is exactly a month older than Elise. The last time I saw Kurt was the day he was born, at the same hospital that Elise made her arrival at. It so cool to see the quick development that infants speed through, and how much change there is month-to-month. It was so neat to see them side by side, 2 month-old, 1-month old; boy-girl....


It was too cute! Couldn't help but think of how neat it will be down to the line to see these two meet up at the age when they can actually hold the concept that the other one is there- and interact socially. It was also really neat to see other people we've known for a while, now in the same parent-newborn roles and reality. Cheers to all our great friends, and cheers to these moms and their beautiful babies!