A study in behavior and development in relation to child G, aged 2 years, 8 months.
Child G was chosen as the subject of six observational sessions after discussions with her primary care giver in relation to her aggressive behavior. Various research results in child development have indicated that cognition, physical, emotional, speech, communication skills and their knowledge of the world evolves through a process of the building of information available in the child's immediate environment. Vygotsky and Bruner, (Bruner, and Ross's (1976) idea of scaffolding parallels the work of Vygotsky(1978) agree, through this process'; that adults should play an active part in assisting a child's learning. Wood et al. (1976, p. 90) offer the following definition of scaffolding: .
"Those elements of the task that are initially beyond the learner's capacity, thus permitting him to concentrate upon and complete only those elements that are within his range of competence ". .
J. B Watson (1878-1958) was one of the first psychologists to argue for the impressive cognitive competence of infants. "Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select - doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations and the race of his ancestors"" (Watson, 1924, p. 104) When born our mind is 'tabula rasa' (a blank slate).
For Watson, emotional development is made up of diverse parts; of building a group of interconnecting reactions through conditioning from simpler reactions; for example a newborns' unlearned reactions of fear, rage, and love can be conditioned through the process of various stimuli. The so-called Little Albert Experiment; where Watson used conditioning methods with an eleven-month-old boy to show fear when confronted in controlled conditions with a white rat, using sound association to invoke fear; visually demonstrated that it is possible.
