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There is lack of agreement among psychologists concerning the learning capacity of the newborn human infant. Several investigators (9,12,20) have presented evidence showing that it is not impossible to establish conditioned responses during the neonatal period. Most of this evidence suggests that such responses are unstable, variable, and difficult to establish. Other investigators (10) deny that conditioning can take place before the third or fourth month, because of the immaturity of cortical function in the newborn. A recent study (21) has proposed that a process of 'sensitization' rather than true conditioning occurs during this early period. In spite of this lack of agreement, few observers of a newborn baby, I believe, would deny that behavior is modified by environmental stimuli during the first weeks of life. The human infant is born into a time-regulated world. From the moment of his birth he must begin to adapt to schedules set up not on the basis of his precise physiological needs but regulated as well by parental activities and by other cultural demands calculated to be on the average best suited to his survival. He is granted only a few years leeway to adapt himself completely to the twenty-four-hour diurnal rhythm of activity which in our culture has been adopted as the basis of social participation.An attempt was made in this study not to study behavioral modification in a conditioned response situation, which must of necessity be subject to 'artificial' laboratory control, but to observe signs of behavioral adaptation in a situation common to most newborn infants: the feeding schedule imposed in the pediatrics ward of a modern hospital. Specifically, do infants adapt to \ji.e., 'learn'2 o. feeding 263 * That the above feeding procedures were satisfactory was 6hown by the fact that the subjects in the experiment took more food and gained more weight than a control group of infants under standard hospital routine.

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