Domains of change or continuity: Why is infancy so important?

70 DOMAINS OF CHANGE OR CONTINUITY: WHY IS INFANCY SO IMPORTANT? Nathan A. Fox Department of Human Development, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742- 1131 It is almost a given that developmental psychologists place great emphasis upon the first year of life as a critical time for the development of social, emotional and cognitive processes that will influence future psychological life. We think of the period of infancy as providing the building blocks for cognitive skills that will mature during the school years; we describe emotional development as having its origins in the range of affects expressed during the first year of life; and we place great emphasis upon the mother-infant relationship as the prototypical one, upon which subsequent relationships are to be modeled, and around which the child’s security and sense of basic trust will emerge. Finally, recent pronouncements regarding brain development describe the critical nature of the first year with regard to the building and sculpting of neural connections upon which the foundations of later brain functioning rests. We have, as a field, been studying change and continuity from the infancy period for a large number of years. While all of the answers are not in, we should be able to provide data which support or refute the claims regarding the importance of the first year of life across different domains of psychological development. And, the knowledge of these data should allow us to re-think and perhaps modify (or discard) models of development which we utilize in our research endeavors. The purpose of this symposium is to present across a set of domains the most recent thinking with regard to change and continuity in the development of psychological key processes. The domains to be covered by the four speakers include: cognition, emotion, temperament, and neuro-development. Each speaker will directly present their own data on the issue of continuity from infancy through childhood. Each speaker will also review, briefly, the model(s) that are currently prominent in the domain they are covering with regard to this issue. There will be a discussant who will comment on the diverse positions of the four speakers.