I have two nephews, one who is turning three in May and one who is turning one in June. I help watch them while I am home for breaks, so I have been able to see them grow up a lot. While discussing infant and childhood development, I was able to connect a lot of the class material to experiences I’ve had with my nephews.
One example is that I have noticed their ability to recognize faces at an extremely young age. My older nephew was watched more by my mother than my younger nephew has been. I could see the difference in how my younger nephew reacted compared to my older nephew when they were both young. My older nephew would become immediately happy when he saw my mother, while my younger nephew did not have that connection with her, since they did not spend as much time together, so his reaction was not as strong. This reaction is fueled by infants’ ability to recognize the faces of people from an extremely young age. I also saw how my nephews would act around family members they had never met before. They appeared much warier to those family members than to anyone they had spent a significant amount of time around, because they did not recognize those faces.
I have also seen the development of schemas, although only in my older nephew. I have seen him countless times trying to assimilate new information into existing schemas and eventually accommodating for the new information if needed. For example, one of my nephew’s first books was about animals, with an entire section of it devoted to birds. He assimilated all birds under the name of the first type of bird he learned: a hawk. He called every bird in that book a hawk the first couple of times he looked through it. As he continued to look at the book, and we continued to correct him on all the different types of birds, he began to accommodate new schemas for those new species of birds. What was once a hawk was now a hummingbird, a cardinal, a goose and so on.
For me, having seen some of the childhood development material first hand through watching my nephews develop helped me understand the material much better. I was able to immediately connect it with a past experience.
I have experienced similar situations with my younger cousins (age 3 and 5) to the one’s you describe with your young nephews. My sister and I, as well as my mom saw my cousins the most when they were younger (and still do now) compared to the rest of my aunts, uncles and cousins. While at family gatherings, you could tell by their behavior towards my sister and I, that they recognized us the most. At times, they would tend to veer towards us or my aunt and uncle (their mom and dad) when surrounded by other family members. You could tell that they were somewhat uncomfortable being around all these people who they knew very little or not at all. Like you stated above, this demonstrates how even at a young ages children recognize faces. Additionally, their reactions to people who they are unfamiliar with also demonstrate the concept of Stranger anxiety that can be seen in some children as the develop.