Skip to main content

Who's that cute baby?

Luke is endlessly fascinated by his own reflection. When I hold him up to a mirror, he kicks and squeals, and then he tucks his head down onto my chest and cuddles and is shy. It is quite clear that he doesn't know that the reflection is of himself yet, I forget when he gets that idea... Perhaps if there were a developmental psychologist reading the blog, she could post a comment =)

So I shouldn't have been surprised this morning as he was crawling around the floor when he caught a glimpse of himself in the stainless steel garbage can and stopped to play with the cute baby. Our garbage can is round, and not shiny clean anymore, but he still recognized another person and was still interested in talking, waving his hands up and down, and so forth. I let this go on until he tried to kiss the other baby =) he probably played for about 5 minutes. What fun!
Labels:

Comments

Anonymous said…
Around 12-18 months most babies start to figure out that that is their own reflection. 21-24 month old babies reliably do so.

You test this by putting a red dot or sticker on hisnose when they aren't looking and then show him his reflection; if the baby touches his own nose, then he knows that is his reflection. If he is amused that that cute baby in the mirror has a red nose and tries to grab the reflection, then he has developed this skill of self-recognition.

Once self-recognition is in place it sets the ground work for socialization, as well as a set of emotions that involved the self (e.g., pride, shame, guilt).

Chimps and dolphins seem to have self-recognition... I wonder if they feel guilty at times...

Love,
Your handy neighborhood developmental psychologist
November 7, 2007 at 12:02 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Things that are true

"Axial tilt is the reason for the season." (Picture a globe with the northern hemisphere tilted away from the sun...) I believe this is meant to be an anti-theist slogan, although I would point out that I believe there is a reason for the axial tilt. This is a runner up to my favorite true science picture, the "Gravity Forecast." I linked to this when I was a graduate student, but the site is long since down. Picture a weather forecast graphic, but instead of clouds and temperatures, the 5-day forecast predicts 9.8 m/s^2 down. Even the idea still makes me laugh, perhaps I will reproduce it someday. Luke cut his 4th tooth today (Finally!). So far they haven't caused us too much trouble. We'll see what happens when he gets his canines.
8 comments
Read more

Science at home

We had a fun "experiment" yesterday. We took a 2 liter bottle of diet Coke and some Mentos, put 4 Mentos at the same time into the bottle, and shot a huge jet of soda into the air about 8 feet high! It was quite exciting, although I think the warnings that you might want to use eye protection were a bit overblown. I suppose that it was an experiment only in the loosest sense of the term, but Michael forsees lots of fun in the future: using other types of soda, other methods for adding the mentos to the soda, and so on. It did get us out of the house for a while, and had Eleanor and Amanda dropping mentos into the used soda bottle and watching to see what happened---so cute!
2 comments
Read more

A day at the fair

Yesterday afternoon the whole family went to the NC state fair. We had a good enough time that I think we are going back next year, although perhaps we will leave Luke at home with a sitter. We went right after Eleanor's school. Michael picked up Eleanor, I drove Luke and Amanda. Through an amazing bit of timing, we met in the parking lot and walked to the fair together, about a 10 minute walk (not bad at all, really). I had meant to get to the fair much earlier and see the parts that Eleanor and Michael claimed not to be interested in (the animals and crafts, mostly) but I was running a little late. Our area has been in a serious drought for the past few months, so I am not complaining that it rained (hard) on us as we were getting to the gate. But it does seem a bit hard that we planned to go to the fair on the one day in the past 3 months that we had a rainstorm. Fortunately, the rain was scattered, and the clouds soon moved off to water another area. We took the opportun...
5 comments
Read more