Until very recently, almost all books on infancy assumed basic infant immaturity. Remarkably, as Tiffany Field shows in her survey of recent research, investigators are discovering that infants possess sophisticated perceptual skills, such as hearing, even before birth. Newborns can sense touch and motion, discriminate tastes and smells, recognize their mother's voice, and imitate facial expressions. In fact, the newborn is an active learner, looking, reaching, sucking, and grimacing from its first moments in its new environment.

Field provides a readable account of our current knowledge about infant development. She looks at the emergence of sensorimotor and cognitive skills, which play an important role in social and emotional development in the months following birth as the infant experiences the world. In a chapter with important implications for working mothers, Field reviews the literature on infants in nursery and daycare programs, countering negative assessments with studies that show an enhancement of infants' social interaction in good care settings. In the concluding chapter, she pays particular attention to infants at risk because of disease (including AIDS), maternal drug use, prematurity, or maternal depression, and describes possible intervention strategies. The bibliography provides an invaluable summary of significant primary reference papers for professional researchers, students, and parents.

Here is a major new work on human infancy written by one of the country's leading developmental psychologists and two distinguished colleagues. At its core is the long-awaited report of the authors' six-year study of infant daycare. Important in its own right, this experiment becomes the occasion for a wide-ranging discussion of cognitive and emotional processes in infancy, of the effects of early experience on later growth, and of the deep-seated cultural and historical assumptions that underlie our views of human development.

For those concerned with social policy, the book provides the best empirical assessment now available of the effects of group care on the psychological well-being of infants. It also supplies a blueprint for quality daycare that may well stand as a model for future nurseries.

For those interested in the course of cognitive and emotional development, the book provides rich information about the major growth functions that characterize human infancy. It also outlines an explanation of these growth functions that links changes in emotional behavior to the maturation of underlying cognitive processes in a new and provocative way.

And for everyone interested in human nature, the book of offers a controversial thesis about the discontinuity of psychological growth that challenges some of our most fundamental assumptions about the nature of individual development.

Here is a major new work on human infancy written by one of the country’s leading developmental psychologists and two distinguished colleagues. At its core is the long-awaited report of the authors’ six-year study of infant day care. Important in its own right, this experiment becomes the occasion for a wide-ranging discussion of cognitive and emotional processes in infancy, of the effects of early experience on later growth, and of the deep-seated cultural and historical assumptions that underlie our views of human development.

For those concerned with social policy, the book provides the best empirical assessment now available of the effects of group care on the psychological well-being of infants. It also supplies a blueprint for quality daycare that may well stand as a model for future nurseries. For those interested in the course of cognitive and emotional development, the book provides rich information about the major growth functions that characterize human infancy. It also outlines an explanation of these growth functions that links changes in emotional behavior to the maturation of underlying cognitive processes in a new and provocative way. And for everyone interested in human nature, the book of offers a controversial thesis about the discontinuity of psychological growth that challenges some of our most fundamental assumptions about the nature of individual development.

For this paperback edition, the statistical summary has been removed from the appendix to shorten the work and make it even more appealing to the general reader.

This is the story of Natchiq, the ringed seal pup, growing up in her snow cave on the sea ice in northern Alaska with her mom Siku. Interwoven with Indigenous Knowledge from Qikiktagruk Elders from northwest Alaska, Iñupiaq terms, and scientific findings, readers follow Natchiq’s daring escapes from predators and seal dogs specially trained to help biologists find ringed seals.
 
Beginning in the 1980s, scientists started traveling to northwest Alaska to research the lives of ringed seals, bringing Labrador retrievers who could sniff out seals and their snow cave homes (called lairs) on the sea ice. Decades later, scientists partnered with the Iñupiaq people of
Qikiktaġruk (Kotzebue) to learn more about ringed seals. They relied on a combination of Indigenous Knowledge and scientific techniques to capture and apply tags to understand the movements and behavior of ringed seals.
 
But the Arctic homes of ringed seals are changing, and the long history of ringed seal science in the Kotzebue Sound proved to be just the beginning of long and cooperative relationships melding science and Indigenous knowledge. During 2018 and 2019, with unprecedented sea ice conditions, Qikiktagrumiut Elders and scientists returned to the ice to measure changes in the habitat available for ringed seal pups in the region.
 
 

Beginning in 1956, Stella Chess and Alexander Thomas tracked the lives of 133 children from infancy to young adulthood, examining in detail their psychological development over a twenty-five-year period. The result was the groundbreaking New York Longitudinal Study. This book, first published in 1984, presents a complete report of the study, including analyses of the data and exploration of such fundamental questions as gender differences, antecedents of adult behavior patterns, and factors that contribute to depression and other disorders. Special emphasis is given to the clinical evaluation and treatment of patients with behavioral abnormalities. The authors discuss key findings: the important role of parental guidance, the continuities and discontinuities across developmental stages, the crucial effects of temperament on psychological development, and the usefulness of a “goodness of fit” model for understanding the relationship between person and environment and for describing the evolution of behavior disorders.