Abstract
The goal of developmental science is to describe and explain growth and change across time. There are challenges to doing this effectively during the prenatal period and in early infancy. Yet, it is imperative to examine the confluences of early experiences that occur during normative development as well as to identify factors associated with risk that may set the trajectory for future dysregulation in development. In this chapter, a review of the measures employed in fetal and infant developmental research is presented, including those that have been generated to assess infant temperament along with mother–infant affective and social interactive patterns. Moreover, physiological measures (i.e., electroencephalograms, EEG) that reveal notable brain and neuro-hormonal influences (i.e., cortisol and oxytocin) are discussed as they serve as potential biomarkers of future patterns of regulation and dysregulation. The benefits and limitations of behavioral and physiological measures for informing prenatal and infant development research are noted, including reliability and validity considerations. The overarching theme of this chapter is to inform the next generation of researchers as to the innovative designs in this field; to present relevant and meaningful methods for data collection and analysis; and to provide suggestions for future work that can serve to advance the field of fetus-to-infant developmental science.
Fetuses and infants are studied individually with measures of physical health as the overriding concern. There are two fundamental methodological ideas that have revolutionized developmental scientists’ study of pre- and postnatal development. First is the idea that prenatal experiences influence and interact with postnatal development and that the fetus transitions smoothly into postnatal life. Second idea that has changed methodologies used in developmental science is the adherence to the presence of neural plasticity, a process that cuts across fetal and infant development. Physiological measures have been fruitful to measure in infancy as they are viewed as less subjective than behavioral studies and unlikely to provide spurious outcomes. Infants definitely have an active and functioning intra-and inter-psychic life and many behavioral studies have uncovered amazing developmental processes that occur during the early days and months of postnatal life. Electroencephalograms data can be analyzed in number of ways depending on what the researcher is interested in learning from the infant’s brain activity.