Iatrogenic Retardation: A Syndrome of Learned Incompetence

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Abstract
In 1974, Philip Zelazo and I joined the Pediatric Department of the New England Medical Center Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. We established the Center for Behavioral Pediatrics and Infant Development and began to examine the clinical and diagnostic utility of a set of laboratory procedures 1 used in our prior research to monitor cognitive development in normal children between the ages of 3 and 30 months (Kagan, Kearsley, & Zelazo, 1978; Kearsley & Zelazo, 1975). These procedures had revealed age-related changes in such elicited responses as visual fixation, smiling, vocalization, and heart-rate acceleration and deceleration among normal children. We believed that they might offer a more direct probe of processes associated with early cognitive behavior than that provided by neurological examinations or traditional tests of infant development. Moreover, since these measures placed minimal reliance on either gross-motor performance or productive speech, they allowed us to assess cognitive behavior in physically handicapped infants and explore the possiblity that mental and motor development, although mutually facilitating, can proceed independent of one another.

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