ALL ch. 5, 6 & 7 terms
Sensorimotor Period (birth to age 2)
"Thinking" consists of coordinating sensory information with motor activity Infants are busy discovering the relationships between their body and the environment
influences on motor development
(1) central nervous system development, (2) the body's movement capacities, (3) the goals the child has in mind, and (4) environmental supports for the skill.
Self-Awareness
(rouge test with mirror) Self-awareness occurs when the infant/toddler recognizes that their bodies and actions are separate from other people. Gains in self-awareness result from: acting on the environment sensitive caregiving Another form of self-awareness is body awareness, which is explained in the embedded video and tested with the shopping cart task.
Scaffolding: (Child Life Handbook, Pg 27)
- The use of appropriate guidance techniques that allow for the presentation of enough challenge to advance the child to the next level (think zone of proximal dev) - Adapt characteristics of the environment to promote learning or information processing
Zone of Proximal Development (Vygotsky, 1978)
...the distance between a child's "actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving" and the "potential development determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers."
critical/sensitive periods
A brief period where specific experiences have significant +/- consequences for development & behavior Ex) Konrad Lorenz's research on imprinting- This idea stemmed from ethological theory
Temperament
A child's personal "style" - the way he or she experiences the world
A-not-B error
According to Piaget and many modern cognitive theorists, the A-Not-B error is an error in the mental perception of objects seen in infants before the age of one year. While infants this age do understand object permanence, this ability is considered fragile and can be manipulated easily. Infants still under the age of one will commit the A-Not-B error.
phoneme recognition
All infants initially are "universal listeners" After a period of exposure to a single language, infants become responsive only to phonemes, or units of sound, used by caregivers in their environment
Gene (Temperament) x Environment Interaction
As a reminder, gene- environment interactions describe ways our responses to our environment depend on our genes. Temperament is believed to be largely hereditary. Thus, in temperament x environment interactions, the effect of an environmental exposure on health and behavior is conditional upon a person's temperament
Substage 2 First habits and primary circular reactions
At this age infants begin to coordinate what were separate actions into single, integrated activities. An infant might combine grasping an object with sucking on it, or staring at something with touching it.
Substage S: Tertiary circular reactions
At this age infants develop what Plaget regards as the deliberate variation of actions that bring desirable consequences. Rather than just repeating enjoyable activities, infants appear to catty out miniature experiments to observe the consequences
Attachment
Attachment can be defined as a deep and enduring emotional bond between two people in which each seeks closeness and feels more secure when in the presence of the attachment figure. This relationship strongly influences subsequent development.
imitation and deferred imitation
Babies are born with primitive ability to copy behaviors of caregivers.
Non-verbal communication
Babies can communicate with us far before their first birthday: Eye-contact and looking away Joint attention Give-and-take games Gesturing Serve-and-return scenarios
During the Sensorimotor Period, babies develop an understanding of:
Causality: Certain actions produce certain results Object permanence: Understanding that an object exists even when it cannot be sensedThe first step toward being able to hold mental representations of objects
physical growth trends
Cephalocaudal Trend - "head to tail": head develops more rapidly than lower part of the body Proximodistal Trend - "Near to far": head, chest, and trunk grow ahead of extremities
perception and action
Differentiation Theory of Infant Perception: Acting on the environment is crucial for perceiving affordances. Perception is guided by discovery of affordances. Affordances: Action possibilities offered by a situation (visual cliff experiment)
Substage 3: Secondary circular reactions
During this period, infants take major strides in shifting their cognitive horizons beyond themselves and begin to act on the outside world.
Substage 1: Simple reflexes
During this period, the various reflexes that determine the infant's interactions with the world are at the center of its cognitive life
possible factors that impact attachment relationships
Early availability of consistent caregiver Quality of caregiving Infant characteristics Family circumstances Parents' internal working models
synaptogenesis
Early in development synapses are overproduced in expectation of particular sensory stimulation These synapses are activated and strengthened by experience (e.g., repeated exposure to the stimulus), laying a foundation for later learning.
Self-Regulation
Early in development, young infants depend on caregivers to soothe them (see embedded video on co-regulation to the right) In the second year, brain development, growth in representation and language leads to new ways of regulating emotions Caregivers contribute to their child's self-regulation style. As babies develop into toddlers and children, caregivers can help them learn effective coping skills
Self-Control
Effortful control: ability to inhibit impulses and manage negative emotion Compliance (12-18 months): Toddlers show clear awareness of caregivers' wishes and expectations Assertiveness and opposition occur alongside eager, willing compliance
experience-expectant brain growth
Experiences build brain architecture The young brain's rapidly developing organization, which depends on ordinary experiences—opportunities to explore the environment, interact with people, and hear language and other sounds. The early experiences necessary for healthy brain development exist almost everywhere: Social interaction, physical movements, patterned light, sounds, gravity, etc.
goodness of fit
Goodness of fit happens when an adult's expectations and methods of caregiving match the child's personal style and abilities. Goodness of Fit in systems theory: Development occurs in very specific set of nested contexts, which interact with each other. Thus, temperament and environment may interact and produce favorable outcomes.
habituation/dishabituation
Habituation: a gradual reduction in the strength of a response due to repetitive stimulation. loss of interest. once this has occurred, a new stimulus—a change in the environment—causes responsiveness to return to a high level, an increase called recovery.
cross-cultural differences in motor development
Here's an excerpt from Adolph & Hoch (2018) where they explain some cross-cultural differences in motor development: "Cultural differences in handling and bathing can affect infant motor development. Although most Western caregivers believe that newborns are fragile and should be handled with care, some African and Caribbean cultures consider rough handling and deliberate exercise to be necessary for healthy motor development. As part of their daily bathing routine, caregivers hold young infants by an arm, an ankle, or even the head. They toss infants into the air and catch them. Starting from the newborn period, caregivers train sitting by propping infants upright and encouraging them to resist gravity. Caregivers also encourage newborn upright stepping movements to train walking. In these "natural experiments," infants sit and walk at younger ages than nonexercised infants and some skip crawling altogether (Hopkins & Westra, 1988, 1990; Super, 1976). Similarly, in true experiments with random assignment, a few weeks of daily practice with upright stepping results in early walking onset in Western infants (Zelazo, Zelazo, & Kolb, 1972). A few weeks of daily postural training leads to faster improvements in prone and sitting skills and earlier onset of crawling and walking (Lobo & Galloway, 2012)."
operant conditioning
In operant conditioning, infants act, or operate, on the environment, and stimuli that follow their behavior change the probability that the behavior will occur again. A stimulus that increases the occurrence of a response is called a reinforcer. For example, sweet liquid reinforces the sucking response in young infants. Removing a desirable stimulus or presenting an unpleasant one to decrease the occurrence of a response is called punishment.
How "schemes" are changed in Piaget's view
In order for schemas to develop with us, they have to grow and change. Piaget described two main processes at work in how people of all ages modify our schemas: Assimilation:Person interprets new ideas or experiences to fit existing schemes. Accommodation:Person changes existing schemes to fit new ideas or experiences. Assimilation + Accommodation = Adaptation (Development!)
classical conditioning
In this form of learning, a neutral stimulus is paired with a stimulus that leads to a reflexive response. Once the baby's nervous system makes the connection between the two stimuli, the neutral stimulus produces the behavior by itself. Breakdown with variables: 1. Before learning takes place, an unconditioned stimulus (UCS) must consistently produce a reflexive, or unconditioned, response (UCR). In Caitlin's case, sweet breast milk (UCS) resulted in sucking (UCR). 2. To produce learning, a neutral stimulus that does not lead to the reflex is presented just before, or at about the same time as, the UCS. Carolyn stroked Caitlin's forehead as each nursing period began. The stroking (neutral stimulus) was paired with the taste of milk (UCS). 3. If learning has occurred, the neutral stimulus by itself produces a response similar to the reflexive response. The neutral stimulus is then called a conditioned stimulus (CS), and the response it elicits is called a conditioned response (CR). We know that Caitlin has been classically conditioned because stroking her forehead outside the feeding situation (CS) results in sucking (CR).
Substage 4: Coordination of secondary circular reactions
In this stage infants begin to une more calculated approaches to producing events, coordinating several schemes to generate a single act. They achieve abject performance during this stage.
early learning capacities
Includes: Imitation, Habituation, Classical and Operant conditioning, Implicit Learning, Perceptual Learning, and Statistical learning.
Social Support (language)
Infants are prepared for some aspects of conversational behavior Aspects of early caregiver-child interactions that can be viewed as pre- linguistic conversations Aspects of social interaction can promote vocabulary development and phonological learning (e.g., infant-directed speech, joint attention, contributes to later academic abilities, especially reading)
Social Interactionist Perspective (language development)
Language emphasizes the central role of children's: Social skills Language experiences In this view, an active child strives to communicate, which cues her caregivers to provide appropriate language experiences, which in turn help her relate the content and structure of language to its social meanings.
Nativism (language development)
Linguist Noam Chomsky proposed that all children are born with a language acquisition device (LAD), an innate system containing a universal grammar, or set of rules common to all languages. In this view, the LAD enables children, no matter which language they hear, to speak in a rule-oriented fashion as soon as they pick up enough words. Children everywhere reach major language milestones in a similar sequence—evidence that provides support for the nativist perspective. However, research suggests that language development involves more experimentation, learning, and gradual refinement than Chomsky assumed.
dynamic systems theory of motor development
Motor development is a joint product of biological, psychological, and environmental factors. According to the dynamic systems theory of motor development, mastery of motor skills involves acquiring increasingly complex systems of action. Each new skill is a joint product of the following factors: (1) central nervous system development, (2) the body's movement capacities, (3) the goals the child has in mind, and (4) environmental supports for the skill. (think back to the baby walking on the treadmill from earlier this semester)
Gene (Temperament) x Environment Correlation
Our temperaments influence the environments to which we are exposed Consider possible passive, reactive/evocative, and active (niche-picking) links
Schemes (Piaget's Cognitive-Developmental Theory)
Schemes: - Organized pattern of thought or behavior - For acting on or reasoning about the world - Used to interpret experience - Become qualitatively reorganized and more complex each stage of development Change over time as a result of: -Adaptation -Organization
synaptic pruning and retention
Synapses that are not stimulated are pruned away and eliminated -- Active connections become stronger and more refined.
Attachment: An Ethological Approach
The emotional bond that typically forms between infant and caregiver Close child-caregiver interactions are necessary, as they are the means by which the helpless infant gets primary needs met Children need to explore and play, and use the caregiver as a secure base It then becomes the engine of subsequent social, emotional, and cognitive development Attachments are most likely to form with those who respond accurately to the baby's signals, not the person they spend more time with.
Substage 6: Beginnings of thought
The major achievement of Substage 6 is the capacity for mental representation, or symbolic thought. Piaget argued that only at this stage can infants imagine where objects that they cannot see might be.
Vygotsky's Sociocultural Theory
The social context of cognitive development Concerned with the way experience is shaped by culture Focuses on how children learn culturally valued knowledge through guided participation and scaffolding within the zone of proximal development Mental functions exist first on the interpersonal plane
self-conscious emotions
These develop later in childhood compared to basic emotions because they require self-awareness. Self-conscious emotions are affected by how we see ourselves and how we think others perceive us. Examples include guilt, shame, embarrassment, envy, and pride.
The Role of Parental Responsiveness
To promote language development, parental responsiveness behaviors should: Be.. Contiguous with infant actions (connected within a brief time window) and Contingent (conceptually dependent) on those actions. Use didactic language—labeling, describing, or asking about objects or events ("There's the ball!")—and embodied, coordinating verbal and physical cues, as when a parent simultaneously labels and points to an object immediately after the infant has engaged with the object. Scaffold infants' development, as parents adapt their responses to accommodate their babies' advancing skills.
Complex emotions
Usually comprised of two or more basic emotions. For example, fear, anger, and disgust, when combined, make the complex emotion of hate. Complex emotions are also expressed very differently across different cultures of the world. Some examples include jealousy, regret, and grief. They require more cognitive processing than basic emotions. For example, happiness and surprise might be combined to form the complex emotion of awe.
Mental Representation
When we develop mental representation, we create and understand internal models of information. Later in childhood, more complex skills are supported by mental representations: Deferred imitation Problem solving Make-believe play Understand the symbolic functions of pictures
perceptual learning (form of implicit learning)
a form of implicit learning in which infants analyze streams of perceptual information for consistent patterns. Perceptual learning means our perception skills improve with experience.
implicit learning
any type of learning that occurs without our awareness.
structure of the neuron
cell body: The cell body carries genetic information, maintains the neuron's structure, and provides energy to drive activities. axon: a long, tail-like structure which sends neural signals to other neurons. myelin: a fatty, insulating substance which helps neurons to conduct electrical signals by speeding up transmission. dendrite: receives and processes signals from other neurons.
experience-dependent brain growth
occurs throughout our lives. It consists of additional growth and the refinement of established brain structures as a result of specific learning experiences that vary widely across individuals and cultures. happens through: synaptogenesis, synaptic pruning and retention, phoneme recognition, sensitive/critical periods.
social referencing
searching for and recognizing others' emotions to interpret experiences.
Basic Emotions
thought to be universally recognizable (i.e., expressed in similar ways) in humans and shared with other primates. They are produced automatically and become apparent early in development. Basic emotions include: happiness, interest, surprise, fear, anger, and disgust
6.5a Describe theories of language development, and indicate the emphasis each places on innate abilities and environmental influences.
■ According to Chomsky's nativist theory, language is a uniquely human capacity made possible by a language acquisition device (LAD), an innate system containing a universal grammar underlying all languages. ■ Evidence for specialized language areas in the brain and for a sensitive period of language development support Chomsky's theory. Challenges include the inability to specify the rules of universal grammar and evidence that children's language development involves more experimentation and learning than Chomsky assumed. ■ Interactionist theories suggest that language development results from interactions between inner capacities and environmental influences. Some interactionists apply the information processing perspective to language development. Others emphasize the importance of children's social skills and language experiences.
7.4 Describe the development of self-awareness in infancy and toddlerhood, along with the emotional and social capacities it supports.
■ At birth, infants sense that they are physically distinct from their surroundings, an implicit self-awareness that serves as the foundation for explicit self-awareness. Toward the end of the second year, self-recognition is evident in toddlers' awareness of their own unique facial appearance. ■ Soon after, body self-awareness is apparent in toddlers' ability to locate and name body parts. However, they make scale errors, attempting to do things their body size makes impossible. ■ Self-awareness leads to toddlers' first efforts to appreciate others' perspectives, including expectations of fairness in dividing resources and early signs of empathy. Between 18 and 30 months, as language develops, children develop a categorical self, classifying themselves and others on the basis of age, sex, physical characteristics, and competencies. ■ Self-awareness also contributes to gains in self-control. Compliance emerges between 12 and 18 months, followed by delay of gratification, which strengthens between 1½ and 4 years. Toddlers who experience parental warmth and gentle encouragement are likely to be advanced in self-control.
chapter review 5.2: describe brain development during infancy and toddlerhood, current methods of measuring brain functioning, and appropriate stimulation to support the brain's potential.
■ At birth, the brain is nearer its adult size than any other physical structure. Neurons rapidly form synapses and release neurotransmitters to send messages to one another. During the peak period of synaptic growth in any brain region, many surrounding neurons die through programmed cell death. Neurons that are seldom stimulated lose their synapses in a process called synaptic pruning. Glial cells, responsible for myelination, multiply rapidly through the second year, contributing to large gains in brain weight. ■ Measures of brain functioning include those that detect changes in electrical activity in the cerebral cortex (EEG, ERPs), neuroimaging techniques (PET, fMRI), and NIRS, which uses infrared light. ■ The cerebral cortex is the largest, most complex brain structure and the last to stop growing. Its regions develop in the general order in which various capacities emerge in the growing child. The frontal lobes, including the prefrontal cortex (responsible for complex thought) have the most extended period of development. The hemispheres of the cerebral cortex develop specialized functions, a process called lateralization. Brain plasticity, which decreases with age, enables other parts of the brain to take over functions of damaged areas. ■ Stimulation of the brain is essential during sensitive periods. Prolonged early deprivation like that experienced by infants in impoverished orphanages, can disrupt brain growth and interfere with the brain's capacity to manage stress, with long-term psychological consequences. ■ Appropriate early stimulation promotes experience-expectant brain growth through ordinary experiences. No evidence exists for a sensitive period in the first few years for experience-dependent brain growth, which relies on specific learning experiences. In fact, environments that overwhelm children with inappropriately advanced expectations also interfere with the brain's potential.
7.3c Discuss factors that influence early attachment security, infants' and toddlers' formation of multiple attachments, and how attachment paves the way for peer sociability.
■ Attachment security is influenced by early availability of a consistent caregiver, quality of caregiving, the fit between the baby's temperament and parenting practices, and family circumstances. ■ Late adoption from institutionalized settings is associated with high rates of attachment insecurity and emotional and social difficulties. ■ In Western cultures that value independence, sensitive caregiving involves responding contingently to infant signals and "reading" the baby's mental states. In non-Western village communities and Asian cultures that value interdependence, proximal care is deemed sensitive because it promotes connection to the social group. ■ Babies genetically predisposed to emotional reactivity are at increased risk for insecure attachment, but only when exposed to negative parenting. With exposure to sensitive caregiving, these infants are more likely to be securely attached. ■ Parents' internal working models are modestly related to their sensitive caregiving and own infants' attachment security. However, parents' childhood experiences do not transfer directly to quality of attachment with their children. ■ Infants develop strong affectionate ties to fathers, who tend to engage in more exciting physical play than do mothers. In Western cultures, paternal warmth and secure attachment are associated with higher academic achievement, better social skills, and a reduction in child and adolescent behavior problems. ■ Despite highly stressful life circumstances, grandparents who serve as primary caregivers for grandchildren forge significant attachment ties that help protect children from worsening adjustment problems. ■ Early in the first year, infants start to form rich emotional relationships with siblings that combine rivalry and resentment with affection and sympathetic concern. Temperament, parenting, and marital quality affect individual differences in quality of sibling relationships. ■ Peer sociability begins in infancy with isolated social acts followed by reciprocal exchanges that promote peer engagement and increasing sensitivity to playmates' needs. A warm caregiver-child bond supports peer sociability.
ch review: 6.1a Explain how, in Piaget's theory, schemes change over the course of development.
■ By acting on the environment, children move through four stages in which psychological structures, or schemes, achieve a better fit with external reality. ■ Schemes change in two ways: through adaptation, which consists of two complementary activities—assimilation and accommodation; and through organization, the internal rearrangement of schemes into a strongly interconnected cognitive system.
7.2a Explain the meaning of temperament and how it is measured.
■ Children differ greatly in temperament. The pioneering New York Longitudinal Study identified three patterns: the easy child, the difficult child, and the slow-to-warm-up child. Rothbart's influential model of temperament includes dimensions representing emotion, attention, and action along with effortful control. ■ Temperament is assessed through parental reports, behavior ratings by others familiar with the child, and laboratory observations. Most neurobiological research has focused on distinguishing inhibited, or shy, children from uninhibited, or sociable, children.
7.3d Discuss the relationship of attachment patterns in infancy and of caregiving quality from infancy through adolescence to children's long-term adjustment.
■ Children's long-term, favorable adjustment is promoted by continuity of good caregiving and attachment security. With improved caregiving, insecurely attached infants show signs of developmental recovery.
chapter review 5.4: discuss infant learning capacities, the conditions under which they occur, and the unique value of each.
■ Classical conditioning helps infants associate events that usually occur together in the everyday world. Infants can be classically conditioned most easily when the pairing of an unconditioned stimulus (UCS) and a conditioned stimulus (CS) has survival value. ■ In operant conditioning, infants act on their environment and their behavior is followed by either reinforcers, which increase the occurrence of a preceding behavior, or punishment, which either removes a desirable stimulus or presents an unpleasant one to decrease the occurrence of a response. In young infants, interesting sights and sounds and pleasurable caregiver interaction serve as effective reinforcers. ■ Habituation and recovery reveal that at birth, babies are attracted to novelty. Novelty preference (recovery to a novel stimulus) assesses recent memory, whereas familiarity preference (recovery to the familiar stimulus) assesses remote memory. ■ Infants have a built-in capacity for statistical learning, the ability to extract frequently occurring patterns—in speech, music, and visual shapes—from the complex flow of information in their surroundings. ■ Although hotly contested, the capacity for imitation, a powerful means of learning that contributes to the parent-infant bond, may be present at birth, as reflected in the apparent ability of newborns to imitate adults' expressions and gestures. Scientists have identified specialized cells called mirror neurons that may underlie early imitation.
ch. review: 7.1a Describe the development of basic emotions over the first year, noting the adaptive function of each.
■ During the first half-year, basic emotions gradually become clear, well-organized signals. The social smile appears between 6 and 10 weeks, though its frequency thereafter varies by culture. Laughter emerges around 3 to 4 months. Happiness strengthens the parent-child bond and fosters physical, cognitive, and social competencies. ■ Anger and fear increase in the second half of the first year. Stranger anxiety varies with infant-rearing practices. Newly mobile babies use the familiar caregiver as a secure base. Sadness often occurs when infants are deprived of a loving caregiver.
7.3a Describe the features of ethological theory of attachment and its view of the development of attachment during the first two years.
■ Ethological theory of attachment recognizes the infant's emotional tie to the caregiver as an evolved response that promotes survival. In early infancy, built-in signals help bring infants into close contact with other humans. ■ Around 6 to 8 months, separation anxiety and use of the caregiver as a secure base indicate a true attachment bond. As representation and language develop, separation anxiety declines. From early caregiving experiences, children construct an internal working model that guides future close relationships.
chapter review 5.1: describe major changes in body growth over the first two years.
■ Height and weight gains are greater during the first two years than at any other time after birth. Body fat develops quickly during the first nine months, whereas muscle development is slow and gradual. ■ Body proportions change as growth follows the cephalocaudal and proximodistal trends. ■ Assessments of skeletal age reveal that girls are ahead of boys in physical maturity, and African-American children tend to be ahead of European-American and Hispanic children.
ch review: 6.1b Describe major cognitive attainments of the sensorimotor stage.
■ In the sensorimotor stage, the circular reaction provides a means of adapting first schemes, and the newborn's reflexes gradually transform into the more flexible action patterns of the older infant. Around 8 months, infants develop intentional, or goal-directed, behavior and begin to understand object permanence. ■ Twelve- to 18-month-olds engage in more deliberate, varied exploration and no longer make the A-not-B search error. Between 18 and 24 months, mental representation is evident in sudden solutions to sensorimotor problems, mastery of object-permanence problems involving invisible displacement, deferred imitation, and make-believe play.
6.5b Describe major language milestones in the first two years, individual and cultural differences, and ways adults can support early language development.
■ Infants begin cooing at 2 months and babbling around 6 months. Around 10 to 11 months, their skill at establishing joint attention improves, and at the end of the first year they use preverbal gestures. ■ Around 12 months, toddlers say their first word. As they learn new words, they make errors of underextension and overextension. At all ages, comprehension develops ahead of production. Vocabulary typically increases at a steady rate, and once it reaches about 200 to 250 words, toddlers begin producing two-word utterances called telegraphic speech. ■ Girls acquire early vocabulary faster than boys, and both shy and emotionally negative toddlers acquire language more slowly than others. LowSES children, who receive less verbal stimulation than higher-SES children, have smaller vocabularies—a strong predictor of later weak literacy skills and academic performance. ■ The vocabularies of most toddlers consist mainly of words that refer to objects. A smaller number produce more social phrases, and their vocabularies grow more slowly. These differences are linked to toddlers' individual attributes and to culture. ■ Adults in many cultures speak to babies in infant-directed speech (IDS), a simplified form of communication that is well-suited to their learning needs. Live interaction with a responsive adult is better suited to early spurring language progress than are media sources, which are effective only if they permit contingent interaction.
chapter review 5.5: describe dynamic systems theory of motor development, along with factors that influence motor progress in the first two years.
■ Infants organize sounds into increasingly complex patterns. In the middle of the first year, as part of the perceptual narrowing effect, they become more sensitive to the sounds of their own language. Infants' capacity for statistical learning enables them to detect speech regularities for which they will later learn meanings. ■ Rapid maturation of the eye and visual centers in the cerebral cortex supports the development of focusing, color discrimination, and visual acuity during the first few months. The ability to scan the environment and track moving objects also improves. ■ Motion is the first depth cue to which infants are sensitive, followed by sensitivity to binocular and then to pictorial depth cues. Experience in crawling enhances depth perception, but babies must learn to use depth cues for each body position in order to avoid drop-offs. ■ Newborns prefer to look at patterned rather than plain stimuli. Once able to take in all aspects of a pattern, infants integrate its parts into a unified whole. With age, they prefer more complex, meaningful patterns. ■ Newborns prefer to look at photos and simplified drawings of faces with features arranged naturally. They quickly learn to prefer their mother's face to that of an unfamiliar woman, and at 3 months, they make fine-grained distinctions among the features of different faces. At 5 months, they perceive emotional expressions as meaningful wholes. Early experience promotes perceptual narrowing with respect to gender and racial information in faces.
chapter review 5.6a: identify changes in hearing and in depth, pattern, object, and intermodal perception during infancy.
■ Infants organize sounds into increasingly complex patterns. In the middle of the first year, as part of the perceptual narrowing effect, they become more sensitive to the sounds of their own language. Infants' capacity for statistical learning enables them to detect speech regularities for which they will later learn meanings. ■ Rapid maturation of the eye and visual centers in the cerebral cortex supports the development of focusing, color discrimination, and visual acuity during the first few months. The ability to scan the environment and track moving objects also improves. ■ Motion is the first depth cue to which infants are sensitive, followed by sensitivity to binocular and then to pictorial depth cues. Experience in crawling enhances depth perception, but babies must learn to use depth cues for each body position in order to avoid drop-offs. ■ Newborns prefer to look at patterned rather than plain stimuli. Once able to take in all aspects of a pattern, infants integrate its parts into a unified whole. With age, they prefer more complex, meaningful patterns. ■ Newborns prefer to look at photos and simplified drawings of faces with features arranged naturally. They quickly learn to prefer their mother's face to that of an unfamiliar woman, and at 3 months, they make fine-grained distinctions among the features of different faces. At 5 months, they perceive emotional expressions as meaningful wholes. Early experience promotes perceptual narrowing with respect to gender and racial information in faces. ■ From birth, size and shape constancy and perception of object unity help babies detect a coherent world of objects. At first, infants depend on motion and spatial arrangement to identify objects. After 4 months of age, they rely more on shape, color, and pattern. Soon they can monitor increasingly intricate paths of objects, and they look for featural information to detect the identity of moving objects. ■ From the start, infants are capable of intermodal perception—combining information across sensory modalities. Detection of amodal sensory properties, such as common rate, rhythm, or intensity, or texture and shape, provides the basis for detecting many intermodal matches. 5.6b Explain differentiation theory of perceptual development. ■ According to differentiation theory, perceptual development involves detecting increasingly fine-grained invariant features in a constantly changing perceptual world. Perceptual differentiation is guided by discovery of affordances— the action possibilities that a situation offers.
6.2a Describe the information-processing view of cognitive development and the general structure of the information-processing system.
■ Information-processing researchers generally assume that we hold and process information in three parts of the cognitive system: the sensory store; the short-term memory store; and the long-term memory store. The central executive joins with working memory—our "mental workspace"—to process information effectively. Well-learned automatic processes require no space in working memory. ■ Gains in executive function—including inhibition of impulses and irrelevant actions, flexible thinking, coordination of information in working memory, and planning—predict cognitive and social outcomes.
ch review: 6.1c Explain the implications of follow-up research on infant cognitive development for the accuracy of Piaget's sensorimotor stage.
■ Many studies suggest that infants display a variety of understandings earlier than Piaget believed. Some awareness of object permanence, as revealed by the violationof-expectation method and object-tracking research, may be evident in the first few months. ■ Furthermore, young infants display deferred imitation, an attainment that requires mental representation. Older infants and toddlers even imitate rationally, by inferring others' intentions. Around the middle of the second year, toddlers begin forming mental representations of how to use an unfamiliar tool to secure a desired object. ■ The capacity for displaced reference—use of words to cue mental images of things not physically present—is a major advance in symbolic understanding that emerges around the first birthday. The use of language to modify mental representations improves from the end of the second into the preschool years. Awareness of the symbolic function of pictures emerges in the first year and strengthens in the second. Around 2½ years, the video deficit effect declines, and children grasp the symbolic meaning of video.
7.1b Summarize changes during the first two years in understanding of others' emotions, expression of self-conscious emotions, and emotional self-regulation.
■ Social referencing appears at 8 to 10 months as infants' ability to detect the meaning of emotional expressions improves. By the middle of the second year, toddlers realize that others' emotional reactions may differ from their own. ■ During toddlerhood, self-awareness and adult instruction provide the foundation for self-conscious emotions: guilt, shame, embarrassment, envy, and pride. ■ Emotional self-regulation emerges as the prefrontal cortex functions more effectively, as caregivers sensitively assist infants in adjusting their emotional reactions, and as infants' ability to shift attention improves. In the second year, growth in representation and language leads to more effective ways of regulating emotion. Berk, Laura E.. Infants and Children (p. 276). Pearson Education. Kindle Edition.
7.2b Discuss the roles of heredity and environment in the stability of temperament, including the goodness-of-fit model.
■ Temperament has low to moderate stability: It develops with age and can be modified by experience. Long-term prediction from early temperament is best achieved after age 3, when effortful control improves substantially. ■ Temperament has a genetic foundation, but child rearing and cultural beliefs and practices have much to do with maintaining or changing it. ■ Children with self-regulation difficulties function worse than other children when exposed to ineffective parenting but benefit more from good parenting. Parents' tendency to exaggerate siblings' differences also affects development of temperament. ■ According to the goodness-of-fit model, parenting practices that fit well with the child's temperament help children achieve adaptive functioning.
chapter review 5..3: cite evidence that heredity, nutrition, and parental affection all contribute to early physical growth.
■ Twin and adoption studies reveal that heredity contributes to body size and rate of physical growth. ■ Breast milk is ideally suited to infants' growth needs. Breastfeeding protects against disease and prevents malnutrition and infant death in poverty-stricken areas of the world. ■ Most infants and toddlers can eat nutritious foods freely without risk of becoming overweight. However, the relationship between rapid weight gain in infancy and obesity at older ages is strengthening, perhaps because of a rise in unhealthy early feeding practices.
7.3b Describe techniques for measuring attachment security, the stability of attachment patterns, and cultural variations in attachment behavior.
■ Using the Strange Situation, a laboratory technique for assessing the quality of attachment between 1 and 2 years of age, researchers have identified four attachment patterns: secure, insecure-avoidant, insecure-resistant, and disorganized/disoriented attachment. The Attachment Q-Sort, based on home observations of children between ages 1 and 5, yields a score ranging from low to high security. ■ Securely attached babies in middle-SES families with favorable life conditions more often maintain their attachment pattern than insecure babies. However, the disorganized/disoriented pattern is highly stable. ■ Wide cultural variations in infants' ways of expressing attachment reflect cultural differences in child-rearing beliefs and goals.
6.3 Explain how Vygotsky's concept of the zone of proximal development expands our understanding of early cognitive development.
■ Vygotsky believed that children master tasks within the zone of proximal development— ones just ahead of their current capacities— through the support and guidance of more skilled partners. As early as the first year, cultural variations in social experiences affect mental strategies.
