Can Conditioned Responses be Established in the Newborn Infant?

Conditioned sucking in the human newborn

“…These data agree with a much earlier experiment by Marquis (1931) and, more recently, with Papousek (1961) that conditioning of responses involving mouthstimulation can occur in newborns, and contrast with 30 reservations expressed by Kessen (1963) and Scott (1963). While age-determined changes in conditioning rate apparently occur (Kantrow, 1937;Morgan and Morgan, 1944;Papousek, 1961), failures to establish conditioning in neonates may be due as much to the use of ineffective experimental techniques as to chronological or neurophysiological deficiencies.…”

Conditioned Head Rotation Reflexes in Infants in the First: Months of Life

“…Among motor food-ingestion reflexes, the conditioned sucking reflex has been thoroughly studied (2, 6,8,10,19). Upon critical analysis we have observed several basic disadvantages of this method: it is not possible to employ conditioned sucking for estimation of more sensitive indicators of higher nervous activity, such as intensity of reaction and latent period; furthermore, from the methodological aspect, two contradictory trends are apparent with increasing age, regressive changes in the sucking reflex occurring at the same time as progressive development of higher nervous activity in infants (13,14).…”

A Historical Examination of Self-Regulation: Helping Children Now and in the Future

“…For the first time ''conscious character,'' judgment and determination, the ''will-temperament,'' incentives, and the origin of habitual behavior, became the objects of study, marking the development of the behaviorist era (Warden & Cohen, 1931). However, the formulation of behaviorism actually began in the 1930s, with examples of pivotal research such as the study by Dorothy Postle Marquis of conditioned responses in newborn infants, undertaken to investigate the contentions made by the Pavlovian school of Russian psychologists that the formation of conditioned responses in newborn infants was impossible (Marquis, 1931). By the 1940s perspectives on discriminative conditioning, ''persistence'' and relationship to learning, habit as a function of reinforcement, and repetition stimulating ''latent learning,'' were common topics of behavioral psychology.…”