User:KathrynMA/Milicent Shinn

where she became the first woman ever to receive a Ph.D.

and prompted Shinn to return home to act as a caretaker for her aging parents after receiving her Ph.D.

Shinn also cared for her brother’s other three children, and frequently corresponded with her extended family

Influence on Developmental Psychology
While German philosopher Dietrich Tiedemann is credited with writing the first baby biography in 1787, followed by a German biologist Wilhelm Preyer in 1882, Shinn published one of the most well-known baby biographies in the United States in 1900, based largely on her observations of her niece, Ruth. Shinn had what she described as, “the notebook habit from college and editorial days, and jotted things down as I watched, till quite unexpectedly I found myself in possession of a large mass of data.” Her observations were delivered as a paper titled, “The First Two Years of the Child” which were presented at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 where it was recognized as the first of its kind in the United States.

Shinn’s focus on ontogenetic evolution was relatively new for her time and paved the way for more studies on infants since children were studied far more than infants in the 19th century. Shinn noted that, “Thus it has come to pass that while babies are born and grow up in every household, and while the gradual unfolding of their faculties has been watched with the keenest interest and intensest joy by intelligent and even scientific fathers and mother from time immemorial, yet very little has yet been done in the scientific study of this most important of all possible subjects-the ontogenetic evolution of the faculties of the human mind.” It follows that Shinn enabled infant development to have since been studied in numerous unique contexts: medical correlates of infant development (Littman & Parmelee, 1978), the impact of postnatal depression on infant development (Murray, 1992), the development of infant-father relationships (Lamb, 1997), infant development of wariness of strangers (Sroufe, 1977), and in-depth books on general infant development like Osofsky’s (1987) handbook of infant development to name a few. Shinn’s work also laid the foundation for Jean Piaget’s renowned child development research.

Shinn noted how practical intelligence appears around the middle of the first year of an infant's life, giving the example of how her niece first used her intelligence to place her toe into her mouth in a different motion than the one she used to put her rattle in her mouth. Thus, Shinn acted as a pioneer for other researchers like Bar-On and Parker (2000) and Sternberg and Grigorenko (2000) to study the development of practical intelligence. Causality research via experiments with infants such as Newman et al.’s (2008) study on the origins of causal perception and Yale University’s habituation studies have also stemmed from Shinn’s research.

Infant imitation was recognized by Shinn, laying the foundation for later studies such as Ryalls et al.’s (2020) research in which 14–18-month-old infants watched a peer or adult model complete a 3-step sequence and then demonstrated significant ability to imitate what they saw immediately and one week later, more successfully for the peer than adult condition.

Shinn also exemplified the beginnings of intercommunication by speech in Ruth when she stood behind Ruth and neutrally listed off different names until saying “Ruth” and noticing how she turned and looked at Shinn only when her name was spoken. Mandel et al. (1995) was able to expand on Shinn’s name recognition observations by using a head-turn preference procedure. This procedure indicated that 4–5-month-old infants recognize the patterns of their names and can distinguish them from noises with both different and the same stress patterns.

Emotional dependence was another topic discussed by Shinn. She observed that Ruth grew anxious upon separation from her mother and would cry while being carried around corridors, stopping to see if her mother was around the corner, and continuing crying once she saw that she was not. Noting emotional dependence paved the way for studies about attachment types, for example, by Mikulincer and Nachshon (1991), and even the study of the neurobiology of infant attachment as discussed by Moriceau and Sullivan (2005).