Marshall M. Haith
Professor Emeritus, Developmental

We study perceptual and cognitive development in infants and children. Much of the current work is concerned with how infants and children come to understand the future and begin to organize their behavior around future events. One phase of this work involves infants that vary in age from 1 month of age to 8 months of age. Here, the focus is on infants' formation of expectations and what they know about what will happen next. The research involves advanced infrared video-recording equipment to track the eye movements of infants, because visual activity is well-organized from birth and provides a good indicator of what the baby knows and what the brain is processing.

Another component of this work uses a very different, questionnaire, approach to learn about the variety of future-oriented behaviors that babies manifest in the natural context of the home. These studies involve babies who vary in age from 9 months to 36 months of age. We are developing a sense of the range of activities that fall in this future-oriented domain as well as a theoretical structure to guide more laboratory-based investigations.

Our laboratories contain state-of-the-art equipment for studying visual and auditory development in infants as well as several high-level computers for data processing, animation programming, and graphical analysis and representation of data. These computers house the major statistical, graphics, database and spreadsheet packages available. We are currently adding provisions for measuring heart rate. Our computers are part of the AT&T psychology-wide computer network that links to the DU campus computers and to the international NSF internet and bitnet backbone.

Representative Publications:

Haith, M.M., & Campos, J.J. (1983). Infancy and biological development. (Eds.). Volume II of Mussen's manual of child psychology. New York: Wiley.

Haith, M.M., Hazan, C., & Goodman, G.S. (1988). Expectation and anticipation of dynamic visual events by 3.5 month-old babies. Child Development, 59, 467-479.

Haith M.M. & MaCarty, M. (1990). Stability of visual expectations at 3.0 months of age. Developmental Psychology, 26, 68-74.

Haith, M.M. (1990). Perceptual and sensory processes in early infancy. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 36, 1-26.

Haith, M.M., Wentworth, N., & Canfield, R.L. (1993). The formation of expectations in early infancy. In C. Rovee-Collier and L.P. Lipsitt (Eds.), Advances in infancy research, Norwood, NJ: Ables.

Haith, M.M., Benson, J.B., Roberts, R.J., Jr., & Pennington, B.F. (1994). The development of future-oriented processes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Canfield, R.L. & Haith, M.M. (1991). Active expectations in 2- and 3-month-old infants: complex event sequences. Developmental Psychology, 27, 198-208.

Dougherty, T. & Haith, M.M (1997). Infant expectations and reaction time as predictors of childhood speed of processing and IQ. Developmental Psychology, 33, 146-155.

Haith, M.M (1997). The development of future thinking as essential for the emergence of skill in planning. In S. Friedman and E. Scholnick (Eds.). Why, how and when do we plan? The Developmental Psychology of planning. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum Associates.

Haith, M.M. & Benson, J.B. (1997). Infant cognition. D. Kuhn and R. Siegler (Eds.), Handbook of child psychology (5th edition), volume 2: Cognition, perception, and language development. New York: Wiley.

Haith, M.M., Wass, T.S., Adler, S.S. (1997). Infant visual expectations: Advances and issues. Commentary. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 62, 150-162.

Haith, M.M. (1998). Who put the cog in infant cognition: Is rich interpretation too costly? Infant Behavior and Development, 21, 167-179.

Haith, M.M. (1999). Some thoughts about claims for innate knowledge and infant physical reasoning. Developmental Science, 153-156.

Wentworth, N., & Haith, M.M. (1998). Infants' acquisition of spatiotemporal expectations. Developmental Psychology, 34, 247-257.

Wentworth, N., Benson, J.B., & Haith, M.M. (in press). The development of infants' reaches for stationary and moving targets. Child Development.

Vasta, R., Haith, M.M., & Miller, S.A. (1999). Child psychology: The modern science. New York: Wiley.

Marshall M. Haith
Ph.D. University of California at Los Angeles, 1964

Professor Emeritus, Developmental
office: Frontier Hall,
Rm. 245
phone: 303.871.3777
e-mail: mhaith@du.edu
website