Child Development

The first two years of life, known as infancy, is universally recognized as an extremely important stage of human development, and is therefore distinguished from the later stages. Infancy witnesses the rapid growth of the child's cognitive, psychosocial, and biosocial development, and the infant's increasing responsiveness to the environment and the people within that environment.

Infants grow at a very rapid rate during the first one and a half years of life, developing not only physically, but also mentally, emotionally, and socially. The infant's brain is immature at birth, and the child's early behavior therefore involves the display of a set of reflexes: some that occur in response to the infant's adjustment to its new environment and stimuli and others that are present because the cerebral cortex is not yet mature enough to control them. Infants appear particularly attentive to visual stimuli, such as movement, contrast, color, and...
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