Exam 2 - Developmental Psych - Chapter 4 INFANCY

Adaption

involves building schemes through direct interaction with the environment. It consists of two complementary activities - ASSIMILATION & ACCOMMODATION.

The Formal Operational Stage: 11 Years and Older

around 11 young people enter the formal operational stage, in which they develop the capacity for abstract, systematic, scientific thinking. Operate on operations. Can come up with new, more general logical rules through internal reflection.

Males Develop More Slowly Than Females

Early m-f differences In utero, males are heavier & longer, but: From age 7 months - 3 years females grow faster

Adaptive Value of Reflexes

- Some reflexes have survival value. - Rooting reflex helps a breastfed baby find the mother's nipple. - Swimming reflex helps a baby who is accidentally dropped into water stay afloat, increasing the chances of retrieval by the caregiver. -Moro or embracing reflex - is believed to have helped infants cling to their mothers when they were carried about all day. If the baby happened to lose support, the reflex caused the infant to embrace and along with the palmer grasp reflex, regain her hold on the mother's body. Several reflexes help parents and infants establish gratifying interactions. A baby who searches for and successfully finds the nipple, sucks easily during feedings, and grasps when her hand is touched which encourages parents to respond lovingly and feel competent as caregivers. Reflexes also help parents comfort the baby because they permit infants to control distress and amount of stimulation.

Reflexes

A reflex is an inborn, automatic response to a particular form of stimulation. Reflexes are the neonate's most obvious organized patterns of behavior. When a father is changing his new born baby's diaper, bumps the side of the table, the infant flings her arms wide, then brings them back toward her body. As a mother talks softly, the baby turns his head in her direction.

In females only:

One X chromosome in each cell nucleus "shuts down" Barr Body - dark stain (under microscope) Kleinfelter XXY (1) Barr body Turner XO (0) No Barr bodies XXX (3) (X's - 1) Barr Bodies 3-1 = 2

The course of Physical Growth

Humans experience a prolonged period of physical growth. Growth takes about 7 years - or 16% of the lifespan. Physical immaturity is even more exaggerated in humans, who devote about 20 percent of their total years to growing. This prolonged physical immaturity is adaptive 0

Piaget

1. Wrong answers 2. Standard tests too rigid & clinical method 3. Development of logic Stage Theorist: Grasp of certain concepts occurs in an invariant fashion Attainment of a more advanced stage is associated with completing less advanced stage

Decision Making

1) Identifying pros and cons of each alternative 2) Assessing the likelihood of various outcomes 3) Evaluating one's choice in terms of whether one's goals were met, and, if not 4) Learning from the mistake and making a better future decision. Adolescents, relative to adults, are more influenced by the possibility of immediate reward - more willing to take risks and less likely to avoid potential harm. Teenagers are less effective than adults at decision making even under "cool" circumstances/conditions. Adults more often consider alternatives, weighing benefits and risks, and suggest advice seeking, especially in areas where they had little experience. Adolescents, more often than adults, often fall back on well-learned intuitive judgments. Consider a hypothetical problem requiring a choice, on the basis of two arguments, between taking a traditional lecture class and taking a computer-based class. One argument contains large-sample information: course evaluations from 150 students, 85 percent of whom liked the computer class. The other argument contains small-sample personal reports: complaints of two honor-roll students who both hated the computer class and enjoyed the traditional class. Many adolescents, even though they knew that selecting the large-sample argument was "more intelligent" still based their choice on the small-sample argument, which resembled the informal opinions they depend on in everyday life. In sum, in the heat of the moment, when making a good decision depends on inhibiting "feel-good" behavior and the appeal of immediate rewards, the brain's emotional/social network tends to prevail, and adolescents are far more likely than adults to emphasize short-term goals. Processing skills governed by the prefrontal cognitive-control system develop gradually, into the early twenties. Like other aspects of brain development, the cognitive-control system is affected by experience. As "first-timers" in many situations, adolescents do not have sufficient knowledge to consider pros and cons and predict likely outcomes. After engaging in risky behavior without negative consequences, teenagers rate its benefits higher and its risks lower than peers who have not tried it.

Abuse

If a parent cannot sooth a baby's cry, they may become angry and resentful and even end up harming the baby.

Neuron - 3 Developmental Steps

1. Cell production - in neural tube of embryo 2. Cell migration - done by end of 2nd trimester 3. Cell differentiation -Connections -Programmed cell death = during peak periods -Synaptic pruning (Synapse - gap between neuron-info passes across) 4. Increased myelination 5. Increase in neurotransmitters

Motor Development - 4 Advantages

1. Control environment 2. understanding of world 3. Improves social relations 4. Locomotion

Brain Growth Spurt: last trimester - 1st 2 yrs.

1. Increasing connections among neurons 2. Increasing differentiation 3. Increasing brain weight & size 4. Increased myelination 5. Increase neurotransmitters

Four Stages

1. Sensorimotor (0-2yrs) ---Reflexes - Object Permanence & Intentional Behavior 2. Preoperational (2-7yrs) Use of mental symbols 2-4 yrs. Language acquisition Logic is intuitive, not rational Individual monologues Egocentric behavior Animism = giving life to inanimate objects 3. Concrete Operational (7-11yrs) Reasoning is more logical Perspective-taking - collaboration No abstract thought 4.Formal Operations (11-15 yrs) Abstract thinking Adolescent egocentrism Metacognition = thinking about thinking

Conditioned Stimulus

If learning has occurred, the neutral stimulus alone produces a response similar to the reflexive response. Neutral Stimulus ----> Conditioned Stimulus

Brain - 3 major parts

1.) Forebrain - cortex 2.) Midbrain - visual systems & auditory systems 3.) Hindbrain - balanced motor coordination Cortex - 2 hemispheres (L & R); last structure to stop growing Connected by corpus callosum

Newborn Sleep States- Wolff- 7 States

1.) Regular sleep- full rest, little motor activity 2.) Periodic sleep- between regular sleep & irregular state 3.) Irregular sleep- limb motion, facial expressions, irregular breathing. 4.) Drowsiness- (eyes opening & closing) between sleep & wakefulness 5.) Alert Inactivity- eyes open, attentive, inactive breathing is even 6.) Waking Activity- uneven breathing, motor activity, verge of crying 7.) Crying- crying, vigorous motor activity

Turner's Syndrome

1/3,000 females 45, XO Non-disjunction Short Webbed neck No menstruation (no menarche) Primitive gonadal streaks Feminine identities Space-form blindness

Brain Growth Spurts

10-12 years: expanding connections 12-15 years: emergence & improvement of abstract thought 18-20 years: reflective thought There is increasing brain weight, skull size, & EEG activity

Guevodoces - "penis at 12" XY

2 androgens involved in male sexual differentiation In embryo genesis: Need testosterone - dihydrotestosterone Testosterone at puberty Dominican Republic: Salinas - male pseudohermaphroditism

Extinction

If the conditioned stimulus is presented alone enough times, without being paired with the UCS, the CR will no longer occur, an outcome called extinction.

Scaffolding

Adjusting the support offered during a teaching session to fit the child's current level of performance. When the child has little notion of how to proceed, the adult uses direct instruction, breaking the task into manageable units, suggesting strategies, and offering rationales for using them. As the child's competence increases, effective scaffolders - like Sammy's mother - gradually and sensitively withdraw support, turning over responsibility to the child. Then children take the langauge of these dialogues, make it part of their private speech, and use this speech to organize their independent efforts.

Taste & Smell

A taste previously disliked can come to be preferred when it is paired with relief of hunger. Certain order preferences are present at birth. The amniotic fluid is rich in tastes and smells that vary with the mother's diet - early experiences influence newborns' preferences. Alsatian region of France - researchers tested newborns for their reaction to the anise odor. The mothers of some babies had regularly consumed anise during the last two weeks of pregnancy; the other mothers had never consumed it. When presented with the anise odor on the day of birth, the babies of the anise-consuming mothers spent more time turning toward the smell.

Reciprocal Teaching

A teacher and two to four students form a collaborative group and take turns leading dialogues on the context of a text passage. Within the dialogues, group members apply four cognitive strategies: Questioning, Summarizing, Clarifying, and Predicting. The dialogue leader will ask questions - students offer answers, raise additional questions - and in case of disagreement, reread the original text. The reader summarizes the passage, and children discuss the summary and clarify unfamiliar ideas. Finally, the leader encourages students to predict upcoming content based on clues in the passage.

Play becomes less self-centered

At first, make believe is directed toward the self; for example, children pretend to feed only themselves - but soon children direct pretend actions toward other people or objects - pouring tea for a parent or feeding a doll. Early in the third year - they become detached participants - assigning make-believe intentions to objects - making a doll feed itself or pushing a button to launch a rocket. Make believe becomes less self-centered as children realize that agents and recipients of pretend actions can be independent of themselves.

Chromosomal & Anomalies (Genetics)

AGS = adrenogenital syndrome -Recessive, autosomal -Excess of androgen -AGS - progestin-induced (gestagen) -Interest due to: DZOs cattle twins/free martin effect -SPOE - Spontaneous otoacoustic emission • AIS = Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome XY only

Infant Learning

Operant Conditioning - infants act on their environments—the consequences affect the probability that the behavior occurs again Operant Conditioning Dr. Carolyn Rovee-Collier- Rutgers Univ. 2-3 month old babies Infants respond to novelty & can interact w/ environment to maintain novelty "action- consequent learning"

2 Types of Sleep

REM = rapid eye movement nREM = non-rapid eye movement Babies spend more time in REM than adults Premature babies spend more time in REM than non-premmies. At age 4 months—regular sleep, 8 hrs/day

Cognition

Act of knowing, in particular, how knowledge is acquired & how problems are solved Jean Piaget - Swiss, 1896 - 1980 Lev Vygotsky - Russian, 1896 -1934 1. Child is an active participant in the process 2. Cognitive development occurs in stages

What causes the dramatic increase in brain size during infancy and early childhood?

About half the brain's volume is made up of glial cells, which are responsible for myelination, the coating of neural fibers with an insulating fatty sheath that improves the efficiency of message transfer.

Piaget's Cognitive Developmental Theory

According to Piaget, human infants do not start out as cognitive begins. Instead, out of their perceptual and motor activities, they build and refine psychological structures - organized ways of making sense of experience that permit them to adapt more effectively to the environment. Children develop these structures actively, using current structures to select and interpret experiences, and modifying those structures to take into account more subtle aspects of reality. Because Piaget viewed children as discovering, or CONSTRUCTING, virtually all knowledge about their world through their own activity, his theory is described as a constructivist approach to cognitive development.

Propositional Thought

Adolescents' ability to evaluate the logic of propositions (verbal statements) without referring to real-world circumstances. In contrast, children can evaluate the logical of statements only by considering them against concrete evidence in the real world. In a study of propositional reasoning, an adult showed children and adolescents a pile of poke chips and asked whether statements about the chips were true, false, or uncertain. In one condition, the adult hid a chip in her hand and then presented the following propositions: "Either the chip in my hand is green OR it is not green" "The chip in my hand is green and it is not green." Researchers also asked the questions with the chips visible in their hands. When the chip was hidden, they replied that they were uncertain about both statements. When it was visible,they judged both statements to be true if the chip was green and false if it was red. Formal operations require langauge-based and other symbolic systems that do not stand for real things. Formal operational thought also involves verbal reasoning about abstract concepts. Adolescents show that they ca think in this way when they ponder the relations among time, space, and matter in physics or wonder about justice and freedom in philosophy.

Self-Consciousness and Self-Focusing

Adolescents' ability to reflect on their own thoughts, combined with physical and psychological changes they are undergoing, leads them to think more about themselves. Piaget believed that a new form of egocentrism arises, in which adolescents again have difficulty distinguishing their own and others' perspectives. Piaget's followers suggest that two distorted images of the relationship between self and others appear.

Imaginary Audience

Adolescents' belief that they are the focus of everyone else's attention and concern. Leads to self-consciousness - going to great lengths to avoid embarrassment.

Cultural Variations in Development of Drawing

Adults encourage young children in drawing activities by offering suggestions, modeling ways to draw, and asking children to label their pictures. Peers, as well, discuss one another's drawings and copy from one another's artwork. These are usually characteristics found in cultures enriched with artistic interest. Cultures without artistic interest, simpler forms of artwork are produced.

Adult responsiveness to Infant Cries

Although parents do not always interpret their baby's cry correctly, their accuracy improves with experience. Different cries help parents figure out exactly what it is that is wrong. Could be hunger, sleepiness, pain (sharp, piercing cry).

Play includes more complex combinations of schemes

An 18-month old can pretend to drink from a cup but does not yet combine pouring and drinking. Later, children combine pretend schemes with those of peers in sociodramatic play - the make-believe with others is under way by the end of the second year and increases rapidly in complexity during early childhood. By age 4 -5, children build on one another's play ideas, create and coordinate several roles, and have a sophisticated understanding of story lines. Children as young as 2 display awareness that make-believe is a representational activity. They distinguish make-believe from real experiences and grasp that pretending is a deliberate effort to act out imaginary ideas - an understanding that strengthens over early childhood.

Adolescence

Aristotle 384-322 BC Impulsive Sexually unrestrained Self-confident Bashful 17th century Need religious guidance Locke Need to shape Rationality to a higher purpose 1904 - Hall "Sturm und Drang" (Stress and Strain) Biological urgings vs. cultural restrictions

Novelty Preference

Assesses infants' recent memory. For example, when you return to a place you have not been to in a long time, you typically will pay attention to that in which you are familiar with first. Like adults, infants shift from a novelty preference to a familiarity preference as more time intervenes between the habituation and test phases in research. That is, babies recover to the familiar stimulus rather than to a novel stimulus. By focusing on that shift, researchers can also use habituation to assess remote memory, or memory for stimuli to which infants were exposed weeks or months earlier.

Vygotsky and Education

Assisted discovery: teacher guides learning tailors assistance to each child's zone of proximal development Peer collaboration Make-believe play Vygotsky's educational message for the preschool years is to provide socially rich, meaningful activities in children's zones of proximal development and a wealth of opportunities for make-believe play - the ultimate means of fostering the self-discipline required for later academic learning. Once formal schooling begins, Vygotsky emphasized literacy activities.. As children talk about literature, mathematics, science, and social studies, their teachers inform, correct, and ask them to explain. As a result, children reflect on their own thought processes and shift to a higher level of cognitive activity in which they think about how to symbolize ideas in socially useful ways. Gradually they become proficient in manipulating and controlling the symbol systems of their culture.

Development of Reaching & Grasping

At about 3-4 months, as infants develop the necessary eye, head, and shoulder control, reaching reappears as purposeful, forward arm movements in the presence of a nearby toy and gradually improves in accuracy. Babies will still reach for an object even if the light has been switched off and the room is dark - which indicated the baby does not need to use vision to guide the arms and hands in reaching. Rather, reaching is largely controlled by PROPRIOCEPTION. - our sense of movement and location in space, arising from stimuli within the body. When vision is freed from the basic act of reaching, it can focus on more complex adjustments, such as fine-tuning actions to fit the distance and shape of objects. Reaching improves as depth perception advances and as infants gain greater control of body posture and arm and hand movements. Four-month-olds aim their reaches ahead of a moving object so they can catch it. Around 5 months - babies reduce their efforts when an object is moved beyond their reach. By 7 months - the arms become more independent: Infants reach for an object by extending one arm, rather than both. During the next few months, infants become more efficient at reaching for moving objects - ones that spin, change direction, and move sideways, closer, or farther away.

Context Dependent

At first, infants' memory for operant responses is highly context dependent - which means if 2 to 6 month olds are not tested in the same situation in which they were trained- with the same mobile an situation in which they were trained - with the same mobile and crib bumper and in the same room - they remember poorly. This specificity of infant memory also applies to imitation - young babies will imitate adult-modeled actions on a toy only when given a toy identical in color and features to the one the adult used. After 9 months - the importance of context declines. Infants & toddlers can remember how to push a button to make a toy train move or how to make a toy animal emit a sound even when the toy's features are altered and testing takes place in a different room

Living Sculpture

Brain development is like a sculpture. First, neurons and synapses are overproduced, then, cell death and synaptic pruning sculpt away excess building material to form the mature brain - a process jointly influenced by genetically programmed events and the child's experiences. The resulting sculpture is a set of interconnected regions, each with specific functions.

Motion

Babies find motion so captivating that they attend to and remember an action far better than the features of the person engaging in it. Babies are excellent at discriminating faces in static displays. However, infants' memory for the faces of unfamiliar people and for other static patterns is short-lived - at 3 months, only about 24 hours, and at the end of the first year, several days to a few weeks. In comparison, 3-month olds' memory for the unusual movements of objects persists for at least 3 months.

Motor Development in Infancy

Babies' motor achievements have a powerful effect on their social relationships. Once infants can crawl, parents start to restrict their activities by saying "no" and expressing mild impatience.

Crying

Basic cry- associated with hunger Anger Pain 3 weeks- attention High-pitched, shrill cry CNS = distress

Idealism and Criticism

Because abstract thinking permits adolescents to think about possibilities, it opens up to the world of ideals. Teenagers can imagine alternative family, religious, political, and moral systems, and they want to explore them. Envisioning a perfect family against which their parents and siblings fall short - adolescents become fault- finding critics. Overall, these are advantageous - Once adolescents come to see other people as having both strengths and weaknesses, they are better able to work for social change to form positive, lasting relationships.

Why is a single neonatal assessment score not a good predictor of later development?

Because newborn behavior and parenting combine to influence development - changes in scores over the first week or two of life (rather than a single score) - provide the best estimate of the baby's ability to recover from the stress of birth. Some hospitals use NBAS OR NNNS to help parents get to know their newborns through discussion or demonstration of the capacities these instruments assess. Parents who participate in these programs, compared with no-intervention controls, interact more effectively with their babies - more often establishing eye contact, smiling, vocalizing, and soothing in response to infant signals.

Unconditioned Stimulus

Before learning takes place. Must consistently produce a reflexive, or unconditioned response -

Melatonin

Begins to secrete during the middle of the first year.

Classification`

Between ages 7 and 10, children pass Piaget's class inclusion problem. This indicates that they are more aware of classification hierarchies and can focus on relations between a general and two specific categories at the same time - That is, on three relations at once. Collections, stamps, coins, rocks, bottle caps, become common in middle childhood. At age 10 - one boy I know spent hours sorting and resorting his large box of baseball cards, grouping them first by league and team memberships - then by playing position and batting average. He easily separated the players into various classes and subclasses and could rearrange them.

biopsychosocial model

Biological, psychological, and social forces combine to influence adolescent development.

Infancy

Birth - 2 years Language explosion Reflexes: General involuntary response to stimulation. Examples: Reflexes = generally involuntary responses to stimuli Optical Blink = eyes will shut in response to bright light Rooting Reflex = tickle corner of mouth turns head to source of stimulation Sucking Reflex also: Grasping Reflex / Automatic Walk

Brain Growth Spurts

Birth==25% of adult brain weight Infant-brain = 30% adult brain weight 3-4 mos to 1 yr: auditory & visual perception 1.5-2 yrs: representation & language Age 2 = 70% adult brain weight Age 5-6 = 90% adult brain weight Age 7-10 = continued myelination and synaptic pruning

Development of Neurons

Brain has 100 - 200 billion neurons - store and transmit information. Between them are tiny gaps, or synapses, where fibers from different neurons come close together but do not touch. Neurons send messages to one another by releasing chemicals called neurotransmitters, which cross synapses. Programmed cell death - which makes space for these connective structures: As synapses form, many surrounding neurons die - 20 to 80 percent - depending on the brain region. As neurons form connections, stimulation becomes vital to their survival. Neurons that are stimulated by input from the surrounding environment continue to establish synapses, forming increasingly elaborate systems of communication that support more complex abilities. At first stimulation results in massive overabundance of synapses, many of which serve identical functions, thereby ensuring that the child will acquire the motor, cognitive, and social skills that our species needs to survive. Neurons that are seldom stimulated soon lose their synapses, in a process called SYNAPTIC PRUNING that returns neurons not needed at the moment to an uncommitted state so they can support future development,. About 40 percent of synapses are pruned during childhood and adolescence. For this process to go forward, appropriate stimulation of the child's brain is vital during periods in which the formation of synapses is at its peak

Habituation

Brain is set up to be attracted to novelty from birth. Infants tend to respond more strongly to new element that has entered their environment, an inclination that ensures that they will continually add to their knowledge. Habituation refers to a gradual reduction in the strength of a response due to repetitive stimulation. Looking, heart rate, and respiration rate may all decline, indicating a loss of interest. Once this has occurred, a new stimulus - a change in the environment - causes the habituated response to return to a high level, an increase called recovery.

Sexual Maturation in Girls

Budding of the breasts and growth spurt. Menarche, or first menstruation, occurs relatively late in the sequence of pubertal events. Sexual maturity continues until the girl's body is large enough to bare children. Menarche takes place after the peak of the height spurt. For the 12 to 18 months following menarche, the menstrual cycle often occurs without the release of an ovum from the ovaries.

Eye Movements

Cause the vitreous (gelatine-like substance within the eye) to circulate, thereby delivering oxygen to parts of the eye that do not have their own blood supply. During sleep, when the eye and the vitreous are still, visual structures are at risk for anoxia. As the brain cycles through REM-Sleep periods, rapid eye movements stir up the vitreous, ensuring that the eye is fully oxygenated.

Patterns of Motor Development

Cephalocaudal trend - head to foot Proximo-distal trend - center ---> outward

Personal Fable

Certain that others are observing and thinking about them - teenagers develop an inflated opinion of their own importance- a feeling that they are special and unique. Many adolescents view themselves as reaching great heights of omnipotence and also sinking to unusual depths of despair - experiences others cannot possibly understand. Certain aspects of imaginay audience may serve positive, protective functions. They answered that the opinions of others have important REAL consequences - for self-esteem, peer acceptance and social support. The idea that others care about their appearance and behavior also has emotional value - helping teenagers hold onto important relationships as they struggle to separate from parents Personal fable - viewing the self as highly capable and influential helps young people cope with the challenges of adolescence. In contrast, sense of personal uniqueness was modestly associated with depression and suicidal thinking. - Focusing on the distinctiveness of one's own experiences may interfere with forming close, rewarding relationships, which provide social support in stressful times. Young people with high personal-fable and sensation seeking scores tend to take more sexual risks, more often use drugs, and commit more deliquent acts than others.

Educational Implications

Child is the "active explorer" Need appropriate materials Testing needs to be individually tailored Limitations on what kids of certain ages can learn Experience is more relevant if it is somewhat familiar

Limitations of Concrete Operational Thought

Children think in an organized, logical fashion only when dealing with concrete information they can perceive directly. Their mental operations work poorly with abstract ideas - ones not apparent in the real world. That logical thought is first tied to immediate situations helps account for a special feature of concrete operational reasoning: Children master concrete operational tasks step by step. For example, they usually grasp conservation of number first, then liquids and mass, then weight. This continuum of acquisition (gradual mastery) of logical concepts is another indication of the limitations of concrete operational thinking. Rather than coming up with general logical principles that they apply to all relevant situations, school-age children seem to work out the logical of each problem separately.

Guided Participation

Children's diverse opportunities to learn through involvement with others . A broader concept than scaffolding. It refers to shared endeavors between more expert and less expert participants, without specifying the precise features of communication.

Pubertal Change, Emotion, and Social Behavior

Common belief that puberty has something to do with adolescent moodiness and the desire for greater physical and psychological separation from parents.

Male Biological Vulnerability

Conception 120m 100f (Primary sex ratio) At term 110m 100f Live births 106m 100f (Secondary sex ratio) Sexual maturity 100m 100f (tertiary sex ratio)

Concrete Operations

Conservation—The idea that quantities remain the same despite their physical arrangements

Piaget looked at Intelligence in terms of:

Content Structure Function Content = specific intellectual acts that an individual is doing Structure = organized properties of intelligence that change with age They are the basis for intellectual activity e.g. conservation (appearance) Schemes - organized patterns of behavior that change with age. Function - ways in which development occurs Organization = tendency for individuals to organize processes into coherent systems Adaptation = adapting or coming to terms with the environment Assimilation = interpreting the world in terms of existing schemes (patterns of behavior) 7 1 7 Accommodation = revision of schemes depending on environmental events Equilibration = going back & forth between cognitive equilibrium & cognitive disequilibrium Equilibrium = assimilation > accommodation "Steady state" Disequilibrium = accommodation > assimilation "Cognitive discomfort"

Newborn Imitation

Coping the behavior of another person. Infant's capacity to imitate extends to certain gestures, such as head and index finger movements, and has been demonstrated in many ethnic cultures and groups. Some researchers think that the infants are not really imitating but just mouthing - which is a common early exploratory response to interesting stimuli. Automatic response that declines with age, much like a reflex? Others claim that newborns imitate a variety of facial expressions and head movements with effort and determination, even after short delays - when the adult is no longer demonstrating the behavior. Evidence has shown that young infants are remarkably adept at coordinating information across sensory systems.

Cultural variations in Motor Development

Cross-cultural research further illustrates how early movement opportunities and a stimulation environment contribute to motor development

Formal Operations

David Elkind: Neo-Piagetian Imaginary audience Personal fable Vertical decalage = sequential movement thru the 4 stages (across) Sens Preop Conc Formal "across stage conecept" Horizontal decalage = development within a stage "within stage concept" Normal Development - optimal level of ability for kids at certain ages. NOT concerned w/ individual differences. NOT concerned w/ the role of emotion in learning

REM Sleep

Declines at the end of the first year - allowing infants to move in the direction of an adultlike sleep-waking schedule.

Vision System

Develops rapidly over the first few months. 2 months - infants can focus on objects about as well as adults - 4 months - color discrimination is adultlike. Visual acuity improves rapidly, reaching 20/80 by 6 months and an adult level of about 20/20 by 4 years.

Lev Vygotsky - Russian1896-1934 (1960's -translated)

Dialectical Theory Dialetical = discussion & reasoning through cooperative dialogues Learning was socially mediated Zone of proximal develoment Verbal scaffold = support system that helps child learn

Egocentric, Animistic, and Magical Thinking

Do young children really believe that a person standing elsewhere in a room sees exactly what they see? Researchers have found, through other methods, that 4-year-olds show clear awareness of others' vantage points. Nonegocentric responses also appear in young children's conversations. For example, preschoolers adapt their speech to fit the needs of their listeners. Four year olds use shorter, simpler expressions when talking to 2 year olds - than to agemates or adults. However, Piaget described preschoolers' egocentrism as a tendency rather than an inability. Overestimation of preschoolers' animistic beliefs - Infants & toddlers have begun to distinguish animate from inanimate - as indicated by their remarkable categorical distinctions between living and nonliving things. By age 2 1/2, children give psychological explanations ("he likes to" or "she wants to") for people and occasionally for animals, but rarely for objects. And 3 to 5 year-olds asked whether a variety of animals and objects can eat, grow, talk, think, remember, see, or feel mostly attribute these capacities to animals, not objects. Preschoolers often say that robots have perceptual and psychological capacities - seeing,l thinking, remembering. Results from incomplete knowledge about certain objects. Most 3 and 4 year olds believe in the supernatural powers of fairies, goblins, and other enchanted creatures. But their notions of magic are flexible and appropriate. For example, older 3 year olds and 4 year olds think that violations of physical laws and mental laws require magic more than violations of social conventions. They are more likely to say that a magical process - wishing - caused an event when a person made the wish before the event occurred, the event was consistent with the wish and no alternative causes were apparent. Between ages 4 - 8 - magical beliefs decline. They figure out who is really behind Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy - and they realize that magicians' feats are due to trickery. And increasingly, children say that characters and events in fantastical stories aren't real. But children still entertain the possibility that something magical might happen - in which they react with anxiety to scary movies, TV shows and nightmares.

Changes in Body Size

During infancy, changes in body size are rapid - faster than at any other time after birth. By the end of the first year, the typical infant's height is 50% of what it was a birth - by 2 years, 75% greater. Birth weight also typically doubles by age 5 months, triples by 1 year, ad quadruples by age 2. Growth slows in early and middle childhood, where children add about 2 to 3 inches in height and 5 pounds in weight each year. Then, puberty brings a sharp acceleration. Adolescents gain 10 to 11 inches in height and about 50 - 75 pounds in weight.

Puberty: The physical Transition to Adulthood

During puberty, young people attain an adult-sized body and become capable of producing offspring. PRIMARY SEXUAL CHARACTERISTICS - Involve the reproductive organs (ovaries, uterus, and vagina in females; penis, scrotum, and testes in males) SECONDARY SEXUAL CHARACTERISTICS - Are visible on the outside of the body and serve as additional signs of sexual maturity (for example, breast development in females and the appearance of underarm and pubic hair in both sexes. These characteristics develop in a fairly standard sequence. Pubertal development takes about 4 years, but some complete it in 2 - whereas others take 5-6 years.

Disequilibruim

During times of rapid cognitive change, children are in a state of disequilibruim, or cognitive discomfort. Realizing that new information does not match their current schemes, they shift from assimilation to accomodation - after modifying their schemes - they move back toward assimilation - exercising their newly change structures until they are ready to be modified again.

Early Experience and Reaching

Early experiences affect reaching. In cultures where mothers carry their infants on their hips or in slings for most of the day, babies have rich opportunities to expore with their hands. Some babies become more developed with reaching and grasping because their mothers wore elaborate jewelry in which they would reach at and swipe. Babies visual surroundings are also influential. When infants were given a moderate amount of visual stimulation at first, such as simple designs, but later a mobile which hung over their crib, they learned to reach for objects six weeks earlier than infants given nothing to look at. If a baby is overly stimulated, is can turn to less advancement of reaching and grasping than babies who are moderately stimulated.

Sexual Maturation in Boys

Enlargement of testes, accompanied by changes in the texture and color of the scrotum. Pubic hair emerges soon after, about the same time the penis begins to enlarge. Boys general go through puberty much later than girls. Boys height gain is more intense & lasts longer. Facial and body hair also emerge just after the peak in body growth and increase gradually for several years. Voice also deepens. While the penis is growing, the prostate gland and seminal vesicles enlarge. Around 13 1/2, spermarche - or first ejaculation - occurs. For awhile, the seman contains few living sperm .

Biology & Philosophy

Epistemology = branch of philosophy concerned with the origin, nature, methods, & limits of human knowledge 1920- Paris -Binet & Simon -Binet Lab

Make Believe Play

Example of representation in early childhood. Through pretending, children practice and strengthen newly acquired representational schemes.

Infant Learning- Cont'd

Extinction: decline of CR due to presenting CS alone, without UCS Contrast with Habituation: decline in response strength due to repeated stimulation

Crying

First way babies communicate letting parents know that they need food, comfort & stimulation. Most of the time - the nature of the cry, combined with the experiences that led up to it, helps guide parents toward its cause. The baby's cry is a complex auditory stimulus that varies in intensity - from a whimper to a message of all-out distress. As early as the first few weeks, infants can be identified by the unique vocal "signature" of their cries - which helps parents locate their baby from a distance.

Vision

For exploring the environment, humans depend on vision more than any other sense. At birth, however, vision is the least developed of the senses. Visual structures in both the eye and the brain are not yet fully formed. Cells in the retina, the membrane lining the inside of the eye, are not as mature or densely packed as thy will be in several months. The optic nerve that relays these messages, and visual centers in the brain that receive them, will not be adultlike for several years. And the muscles of the lens - which permit us to adjust our focus to varying distances, are weak. As a result, newborns cannot focus their eyes well, and their visual acuity or fineness of discrimination is limited. At birth, infants perceive objects at a distance of 20 feet about as clearly as adults do at 600 ft. Newborn babies see unclearly across a wide range of distances. Images such as a parents face will appear blurry upclose. Babies are also not good at discirminating colors.

BASIC CHARACTERISTICS OF PIAGET'S STAGES

Four Stages: 1) Sensorimotor 2)Preoperational 3) Concrete Operational 4) Formal Operational - during which infants' exploratory behaviors transform into the abstract, logical intelligence of adolescence and adulthood. Provides a general theory of development - in which all aspects of cognition change in an integrated fashion, following a similar course. The stages are invariant - they always occur in a fixed order - and no stage can be skipped. The stages are universal - they are assumed to characterize children everywhere. Piaget regarded the order of development as rooted in biology of the human brain. But he emphasized that individual differences in genetic and environmental factors affect the speed with which children move through the stages.

Drawings

From Scribbles to Pictures - 1.) Scribbles start off first. Children's intended representation is contained in their gestures rather than in the resulting marks on the page. For example, one 18-month old made her crayon hop around the page and, as it produced a series of dots, explained "Rabbit goes hop hop." By the middle of the second year, toddlers treat realisitc looking pictures symbolically - but they have difficulty interpereting line drawings. 2) First Representational Forms: Around age 3, children's scribbles start to become pictures, although a few 3-year olds spontaneously draw so others can tell what their picture represents. Often children make a gesture with the crayon, notice that they have drawn a recognizable shape - and then they label it - as with a child who made some random marks on a page and then, noticing that his scribbles resembled noodles, called his creation "chicken pie and noodles" A major milestone in drawing occurs when children use lines to represent the boundaries of objects. This enables 3 and 4 year olds to draw their first picture of a person. Fine-motor and cognitive limitations lead the preschooler to reduce the figure to the simplest form that still looks human. "tad pole" image first, then around 4 years old features are added such as eyes, nose, mouth, hair, fingers, and feet 3) More realistic drawings: Greater realism in drawings develops more gradually, as perception, language, memory, and fine-motor capacities improve. Five and 6 year olds create more complex drawings, like the one on the right containing more conventional human and animal figures - with the head and body differentiated.

The Sequence of Motor Development

Gross-Motor Development - refers to control over actions that help infants get around in the environment, such as crawling, standing, and walking. Fine-Motor Development - has to do with smaller movements, such as reaching and grasping Motor skills are interrelated. Each is a product of earlier motor attainments and a contributor to new ones. Children acquire motor skills in highly individual ways.

Habituation & Later Mental Development

Habituation & recovery to visual stimuli are among the earliest available predictors of intelligence in childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood. They assess memory as well as quickness and flexibility of thinking , which underlie intelligent behavior at all ages. Compared with infants who habituate and recover quickly, infants who are "long lookers" on these tasks have difficulty redirecting their attention from one spot to another.

Operant Conditioning Continued

Has been used to study babies' ability to group similar stimuli into categories. It plays a formation of social relationships as well. As the baby gazes into the adult's eyes, the adult looks and smiles back, and then the infant looks and smiles again. The behavior of each partner reinforces the other, so both continue their pleasurable interaction.

Arousal Patterns

Have implications for early cognitive progress. Babies who spend more time quietly awake/alert probably receive more social stimulation and opportunities to explore and, therefore, may be slightly ahead in mental development. Sleep enhances the baby's learning and memory. Napping can facilitate retention of higher-order word patterns - a skill essential for language development.

Evaluation of Vygotsky's Theory

Helps us understand cultural variation in cognition Focuses on language, deemphasizes other routes to cognitive development Says little about how basic elementary capacities (motor, perceptual, attention, memory, and problem-solving skills) contribute to higher cognitive processes Underscores the vital role of teaching in cognitive development. According to Vygotsky, from communicating with more expert partners, children engage in verbalized self-observation, reflecting on, revising, and controlling their own thought processes. In this way, parents and teachers engagement with children prompts profound advances in the complexity of children's thinking Elevated language to highest importance. But in some cultures, verbal dialogues are not the only or most important means through which children learn. Vygotsky said little about biological contributions to children's cognition. His theory does not address how basic motor, perceptual, memory, and problem solving capacities spark changes in children's social experiences, from which more advanced cognition springs. Nor does it tell us how children internalize social experiences to advance their mental functioning. Vague in the view of cognitive change.

Individual and group differences in Pubertal Growth

Heredity contributes substantially to the timing of pubertal changes. Indentical twins are more similar than fraternal twins in attainment of most pubertal milestones, including growth spurt, menarche, breast development, body hair, and voice change. Nutrition and exercise also make a difference - In females, sharp rise in body weight and fat trigger sexual maturation. Fat cells release a protein called leptin, which is believed to signal the brain that the girls' energy stores are sufficient for puberty - Girls who are athletic and eat less usually start puberty later. In poverty stricken regions of the world, menarche is greatly delayed. Girls from developing countries and higher income families consistently reach menarche 6 - 18 months earlier than those from economically disadvantaged homes. Breast and pubic hair growth begins first for African American girls than it does for Caucasian girls. Early family experiences may also affect pubertal timing. Humans have evolved to be sensitive to the emotional quality of their childhood environments. When children's safety and security is at risk , it is adaptive for them to reproduce early. Harsh environments with abuse or neglect generally causes boys and girls to start puberty early.

Adolescent Moodiness

Higher pubertal hormones are linked to greater moodiness, but only modestly so. What other factors might contribute? More negative moods found in adolescence than in school age children, but most of the negative feelings came from negative life events, such as breaking up with a boy/girlfriend, arguing with parents, etc. Ages 12-16 reported having a sad and happy up and down type mood. Mood swings. Related to situational changes. Change in sleep schedules. Sleep less. Frequent reports of negative mood level off in late adolescence - and overall, teenagers with supportative family and peer relationships more often report positive and less often negative moods than their agemates with few social supports. In contrast, poorly adjusted young people- with low self-esteem, conduct difficulties, or delinquency - tend to react with stronger negative emotion to unpleasant daily experiences, perhaps compounding their adjustment problems.

1) Discovery Learning

In a Piagetian classroom, children are encouraged to discover for themselves through spontaneous interaction with the environment. Instead of presenting ready-made knowledge verbally, teachers provide a rich variety of activities designed to promote exploration and discovery, including art, puzzles, table games, dress-up clothing, building blocks, books, measuring tools, natural science tasks, and musical instruments.

2) Sensitivity to children's readiness to learn

In a Piagetian classroom, teachers introduce activities that build on children's current thinking, challenging their incorrect ways of viewing the world. But they do not try to speed up development by imposing new skills before children indicate they are interested and ready.

The Organized Infant

In relating to their physical & social worlds, babies are very active from the very start.

Intentional Behavior

In substage 4: 8 to 12 months combine schemes into new, more complex action sequences. Now, behaviors leading to new schemes no longer have a random, hit-or-miss quality - accidentally bringing the thumb to the mouth or happening to hit the dol. Instead, 8-12 month olds can engage in intentional or goal-directed behavior - coordinatng schemes deliberately to solve simple problems. Retrieving hidden objects is evidence that infants have begun to master OBJECT PERMANENCE which is the understanding that objects continue to exist when they are out of sight. But this awareness is not yet complete. Babies still make the a-not-b search error: If they reach several times for an object at one hiding place: A) Then see it moved to another B) They still search for it in the first hiding place. Infants can try to better anticiapte events in substage 4 - a 10 month old might crawl after his mother when she is putting on her coat, whimpering to keep her from leaving.

Mental Representation

In substage 6, sensorimotor development culminates in mental representation. One sign of this capacity is that 18 to 24-month-olds arrive at solutions to problems suddenly rather than through trial and error behavior, apparently experimenting with actions inside their heads. Seeing her doll carriage stuck against a wall, Piaget's daughter Lucienne paused for a moment, as if to "think" then immediately turned the toy in a new direction. Representation also enables older toddlers to solve advanced object-permanence problems involving invisible displacement - finding a toy moved while out of sight, such as into a small box while under a cover. Second, it permits DEFERRED IMITATION - the ability to remember and copy the behavior of models who are not present. And it makes possible MAKE-BELIEVE PLAY - in which children act out everyday and imaginary activities. As the sensorimotor stage draws to a close, mental symbols have become a major instrument of thinking.

Physical DevelopmentXXf XYm

In utero, in mammals , Y speeds up cell division in the zygote & embryo At 7th week testis (fetal gonad) but without a Y chromosome -> ovary Hemizygosity - males are hemizygous XX XY

infantile amnesia

Inability to recall events that occurred before age 3 years Imitation 12-21 days- babies can imitate faces

Night Wakings

Increased around 6 months and again between 1 1/2 - 2 years and then declined.

memory

Infantile Amnesia = inability to recall specific events during the 1st few years of life (1, 2, 3 years) Imitation = copying behavior (12 - 21 days old) Two Kinds of Memory: 1. Recognition Memory: 2-4 months recognize something when it appears again 2. Production Memory: recall something that is absent (it should be there) 8 -12 months

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. Removing a desirable stimulus or presenting an unpleasant one to decrease the occurance of a response is called PUNISHMENT.

Habituation Research

Infants retain certain information over much longer time spans than they do in operant conditioning studies Habituation & Recovery - been used to assess a wide range of infant perceptual and cognitive capacities - speech perception, musical and visual pattern perception - object perception, categorization, and knowledge of social world. Learning is not as CONTEXT DEPENDENT. Infant's detection of relationships - for example, speech sounds that often occur together, objects that belong to the same category, and the match between an object's rhythm and tempo of movement and its sounds. As early as 3 months, infants use their current awareness of relationships to make sense of new information.

Observation of sleep states can help identify central nervous system abnormalities.

Infants who are brain-damaged or who have experienced birth trauma, disturbed REM-NREM sleep cycles are present. This will lead to behavior disorganization, and thus the baby will experience difficulty learning and eliciting caregiver instructions that enhance their development. Delayed motor, cognitive, and langauge development. This could ultimately lead to sudden infant death syndrome.

Neonatal Behavioral Assessment

Instrument to assess the organized functioning of newborn babies. Evaluates the baby's reflexes, muscle tone,state changes, responsiveness to physical and social stimuli, and other reactions. NEONATAL INTENSIVE CARE UNIT NETWORK NEUROBEHAVIORAL SCALE (NNNS) - specifically designed for use with newborns at risk for developmental problems because of low birth weight, preterm delivery, prenatal substance exposure, or other conditions. Scores are used to recommend appropriate interventions and to guide parents in meeting their baby's unique needs.

Learning Capacities

LEARNING refers to changes in behavior as the result of experience. Babies come into the world with built-in learning capacities that permit them to profit from experience immediately. INFANTS ARE CAPABLE OF TWO BASIC FORMS OF LEARNING: 1) CLASSICAL 2) OPERANT Also learn through their natural preference for novel stimulation. Shortly after birth, babies also learn through observation of others. Imitate facial expressions and gestures of adults.

Advances in Mental Representation

Language is our most flexible means of mental representation. By detatching thought from action, it permits far more efficient thinking than was possible earlier. When we think in words, we can deal with past, present, and future at once and combine concepts in unique ways, as when we imagine a hungry caterpillar eating bananas or monsters flying through the forest at night. However, Piaget did not regard language as the primary ingredient in childhood cognitive change. Instead, he believed that sensorimotor activity leads to internal images of experience, which children then label with words. In support of Piaget's views, children's first words have strong sensorimotor basis, usually referring to objects that move or can be acted on or to familiar actions. And as we have seen, infants acquire an impressive range of categories long before they use words to label them. Piaget underestimated the power of language to spur children's cognition.

Infant Learning

Learning = behavioral change over time due to experience Classical Conditioning 1. UCS UCR Sugar ---> Sucking 2. Sugar ----> Sucking + Touch (neutral) 3. Touch alone (CS)---->Sucking (CR)

Aging Brain

Loss of neurons Brain weight level of neurotransmitters connections -Crystallized intelligence -Fluid intelligence New data: 1998 Areas of brain concerned with learning & memory - cells still dividing & regenerating!

X-Inactivation

Lyonization = random X inactivation in every female cell. Occurs early in gestation, day 7-16. Does not occur in normal males

Sleep

Made up of at least 2 states IRREGULAR or Rapid-eye movement (REM) Sleep - Brain-wave activity, measured with the EEG, is remarkably similar to that of the waking state. The eyes dart beneath the lids; heart rate, blood pressure, and breathing are uneven; and slight body movements occur. REGULAR - Non-Rapid-Eye movement (NREM) Sleep: The body is almost motionless, and heart rate, breathing, and brain-wave activity are slow and even. Like children & adults, newborns alternate between REM and NREM sleep. However, they spend far more time in REM state than they ever will again. REM sleep accounts for 50 percent of the newborn baby's sleep time. By 3 - 5 years, it has declined to an adultlike level of 20 percent.

Early Sex Differences

Males: more spontaneous startles Males: irritability : cry more, sleep less Females: 12-72 hours smiling Females: smile more; eventually more socially responsive

The Dynamic Systems Perspective

Many influences that are both internal and external to the child - and join together to influence the vast transformations in motor competencies of the first two years

Logical Thought

Many studies show that when preschoolers are given tasks that are simplified and made relevant to their everyday lives, they do not display the illogical characteristics that Piaget saw in preoperational stage. Preschoolers can engage in impressive reasoning by analogy about physical changes - when presented with the picture-matching problem - "Play dough is to cut-up play dough as apple is to..?" even 3 year olds choose the correct answer - (a cut up apple) - from a set of alternatives - several of which share physical features with the right choice. These findings indicate that in familiar contexts, preschoolers can overcome appearances and think logically about cause and effect.

The Concrete Operational Stage: 7 to 11 years

Marks a major turning point in cognitive development. Thought becomes far more logical, flexible, and organized, more closely resembling the reasoning of adults than that of younger children.

Recall

More challenging. Remembering something not present. By the middle of the first year, infants can indicate their ability to find hidden objects and imitate the actions of others hours or days after they observed the behavior.

The Importance of Assessing Reflexes

Most newborn reflexes disappear during the first six months. Researchers believe this is due to a gradual increase in voluntary control over behavior as the cerebral cortex develops. Reflexes can determine the health of the baby's nervous system. Weak or absent reflexes, overly rigid or exaggerated reflexes, and reflexes that persist beyond the point in development when they should normally disappear can signal brain damage. An observer must assess newborn reflexes along with other characteristics to distinguish normal from abnormal central nervous system functioning.

Emergence of Depth Perception

Motion is the first depth which infants are sensitive. Babies 3 - 4 weeks old blink their eyes defensively when an object moves toward their face as if it is going to hit. 3 months - motion has helped babies figure out that objects are not flat but 3 dimensional. Binocular Depth Cues - Arise because our two eyes have slightly different views of the visual field. In a process called stereopsis, the brain blends these two images, resulting in perception of depth. Research in which two overlapping images are projected before the baby, who wears special goggles to ensure that each eye receives only one image, reveals that sensitivity to binocular cues emerge between 2 and 4 months and improves rapidly over the first year. Last to Develop - PICTORIAL DEPTH - the ones artists use to make a painting look three-dimensional .Examples include receding and overlapping lines and line junctions (as in the drawing of a cube) that create the illusion of perspective, changes in texture (nearby textures are more detailed than faraway ones), overlapping objects (an object hidden partially by another object is perceived to be more distant), height in the picture plane (objects closer to the horizon appear farther away) and shadows cast on surfaces. Habituation research indicates that 3-4 month old babies are sensitive to cues of overlapping lines and line junctions.

Physical Maturity

New born girl is equivalent to a 4-6 wk old boy Males have higher metabolic rates Males have proportionally larger hearts & larger & stronger muscles Females have more body fat Males excel in spatial skills; females in verbal

Hearing

Newborn infants can hear a wide variety of sounds - sensitivity that improves greatly over the first few months. Infants as young as 3 days old will turn their head in the direction of a sound. The ability to identify the precise location of a sound improves greatly over the first six months and shows further gains through the pre-school years. @ birth infants prefer complex sounds, such as noises & voices, compared to tones. Can recognize tones in ascending to descending order, tone sequences with a rhythmic downbeat, utterances with two verses three syllables; the stress patterns of words, such as ma-ma, and even two languages spoken by the same bilingual speaker. Over the first year, the infant organize sounds into increasingly elaborate patterns. Around 2-4 months, they can distinguish changes in tempo - the same tone sequence played slightly faster.Between 4 - 7 months, they showed a sense of musical phrasing. Mozart minuets with pauses btwn phrases to those with awkward breaks. 6-7 months, can distiguish musical tones on the basis of variations in rhythmic patterns, beat structure. At the end of the first year, infants recognize the same melody when it is played in different keys. As we will see shortly, 6- 12 month olds make comparable discriminations in human speech - the readily detect sound regularities that will facilitate later language learning.

Sensorimotor Development

Newborn reflexes = building blocks of sensorimotor intelligence. Repeating change behaviors - Around 1 month - as babies enter substage 2 - they start to gain voluntary control over their actions through the primary circular reaction - by repeating chance behaviors largely motivated by basic needs. The leads to some simple motor habits, such as sucking the fist or thumb. Babies in this substage also begin to vary their behavior in response to environmental demands. For example - they open their mouths differently for a nipple than for a spoon. And they start to anticipate events. Substage 3: From 4 - 8 months. Infants sit up and become skilled at reaching for and manipulating objects - motor achievements that strengthen the secondary circular reaction - through which they try to repeat interesting events in the surrounding environment that are cause by their own actions.

Classical Conditioning

Newborn reflexes make classical conditioning possible in the young infant. 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 new stimulus produces the behavior itself. Classical conditioning helps infants recognize which events usually occur together in the everyday world, so they can anticipte what is about to happen next. This helps the environment become more orderly and organized and predictable.

Studied by Esther Thelen

Normal sample 10 males, 10 females Long. During 1st year event sampling ("bout") Results: 40% of infants show stereotypical behavior 6 months = peak - no sex differences Mostly - lower frequency of [carried & jiggled] by caretaker

Intervention at reducing Colic

Nurses made periodic home visits, providing parents with help in identifying their baby's early warning signs of becoming overly aroused. In using effective soothing techniques, and in modifying light, noise, and activity in the home to promote predictable sleep-wake cycles. Colickly infants who received the intervention spent far less time crying than no-intervention controls.

Smell - Olfaction

Olfactory cues - McFarlane Russell 26 moms w/ baby 13 - ½ hr, 6 hrs 13 - ½ hr, 6-48 hrs 61% correct 10 fathers (24-48hrs) 1/3 correct

Ulnar Grasp

Once an infant can reach, the grasp reflect is replaced by this ulnar grasp. Which is a clumsy motion in which the baby's fingers close against the palm. By the end of the first year, infants use the thumb and index finger in a well-coordinated pincer grasp - then the ability to manipulate objects greatly expands - and the 1 year old can pick up raisins and blades of grass - turn knobs, and open and close small boxes. Between 8 - 11 months, reaching and grasping are well-practiced. As a result, attention is released from the motor skill to events that occur before and after obtaining the object. This is when children also search and try to find hidden toys.

Ethological Theory

Parental responsiveness is adaptive in that it ensures that the infant's basic needs will be met. It brings the baby into close contact with the caregiver, who encourages the infant to communicate through means other than crying. Two studies showed that mothers who cried more at the end of the first year. In many tribal and village societies and in non-Western developed nations, where babies are in physical contact with their caregivers nearly continuously, infants show shorter bouts of crying than their American counterparts . When Westerners choose to practice "proximal care" by holding their babies extensively, amount of crying in the early months is reduced by 1/3.

Reasoned Choices

Parents must make reasoned choices about what to do on the basis of culturally accepted practices - the suspected reason for the cry, and the context in which it occurs. As the baby ages, crying becomes more psychological (demands for attention, expressions of frustration). Researchers believe that parents can lessen older babies' need to cry by encouraging more mature ways of expressing their desires, such as gestures and vocalizations.

Changes in Body Proportions

Parts of the body grow at different rates. Two growth patterns describe these changes - CEPHALOCAUDAL TREND: From the latin for "head to tail" During the prenatal period, the head develops first from the primitive embryonic disk, followed by the lower part of the body. After birth, the head and chest continue to have a growth advantage, but the trunk and legs gradually pick up speed. PROXIMODISTAL TREND: Growth proceeds, literally, from "near to far" from the center of the body outward. In the prenatal period, the head, chest, and trunk grow first, then the arms and legs, finally the hands & feet. During infancy and childhood, the arms and legs continue to grow somewhat ahead of the hands and feet. During puberty, growth proceeds in the reverse direction. The hands, legs, and feet accelerate first, followed by the torso, which accounts for most of the adolescent height gain. This pattern helps explain why young adolescents often appear awkward and out of proportion. During puberty, the similarities of males and females begin to dissipate due to sex hormones.

Preoperational Child (2-7)

Perception - bound Focused on detail States vs. transformations A A B B B Irreversibility Reasoning that is transductive Link particular events together

Milestones: Some cognitive attainments of middle childhood and adolescence

Pg. 253

Piaget

Philosophy: 1. What is knowledge? 2. How is it acquired?

Private Speech (4-7 years)

Piaget = monologues - egocentric speech; it reflected problems w/ perspective-taking Vygotsky = occurs in problem-solving situations "communication with the self" - for guidance & direction

Limitations of Preoperational Thought

Piaget also described preschoolers in terms of what they cannot understand - According to Piaget, young children are not capable of OPERATIONS - mental representations of actions that obey logical rules. Rather, their thinking is rigid - limiting to one aspect of a situation at a time - and strongly influenced by the way things appear at the moment.

Follow up Research on concrete operational thought

Piaget believed that brain development combined with rich and varied experiences should lead children everywhere to reach the concrete operational stage - Yet already we have seen that specific cultural and teaching practices affect children's task performance. In tribal and village societies, conservation is often delayed. Among the Hausa of Nigeria, even basic conservation tasks - number, length, and liquid - are not understood until age 11 or later. This suggests that participating in relevant everyday activities helps children master conservation and other Piagetian problems. Children in Western nations think of fairness as equal distribution - because they see the same quantity arranged in different ways - they grasp conservation early. School can promote pastery of Piagetian tasks and also certain informal, nonschool experiences can also foster operational thought. Investigators have concluded that the forms of logic required by Piagetian tasks do not emerge spontaneously but are heavily influenced by training, context, and cultural conditions.

Children's Private Speech

Piaget called children's utterances EGOCENTRIC SPEECH - Reflecting his belief that youngchildren have difficulty taking the perspectives of others. Their talk, he believed is often "talk for self" in which they express thoughts in whatever form they happen to occur, regardless of whether a listeener can understand. Piaget believed that cognitive development and certain social experiences eventually bring an end to egocentric speech. Specifically, through disagreements with peers, children see that others hold viewpoints different from their own. As a result, egocentric speech declines in favor of social speech - in which children adapt what they say to their listeners. Vygotsky disagreed strongly with Piaget's ideas. Because langauge helps children think about mental activities, and behavior and select courses of action, Vygotsky saw it as the foundation for all higher cognitive processes, including coontrolled attention, deliberate memorization and recall, categorization, planning, problem solving, abstract reasoning and self-reflection. In vygotsky's view - children speak to themselves for self-guidence. As they get older and find tasks easier - their self-direted speech is internalized as silent, inner speech. This self-directed speech is now called PRIVATE SPEECH. More often used when tasks are challenging, or when errors are made, or when confused on how to proceed with a process. With age, Vygotsky predicted that private speech goes underground, changing into whispers and silent lip movements. Furthermore, children who freely use self-guiding private speech during a challenging activity are more attentive and involved and show better task performance than their less talkative agemates. Children with learning and behavior problems engage in higher rates of private speech over a longer period of development.

Children's Private Speech

Piaget called this "egocentric speech." Vygotsky viewed as foundation for all higher cognitive processes. Helps guide behavior Used more when tasks are difficult, after errors, or when confused Gradually becomes more silent Children with learning and behavior problems use longer.

The sensorimotor Stage - Birth to 2 years

Piaget's belief that infants and toddlers "think" with their eyes, ears, hands, and other sensorimotor equipment. They cannot yet carry out many activities mentally. The circular reaction - Provides a special means of adapting their first schemes. It involves stumbling onto a new experience caused by the baby's own motor activity. The reaction is "circular" because, as the infant tries to repeat the event again and again, a sensorimotor response that originally occurred by chance strengthens into a new scheme.

Overall Evaluations of Piaget's Theory

Piaget's contributions have been greater than those of any other theorists. He awakened psychologists and educators to a view of children as curious knowledge seekers who contribute active to their own development. His efforts contributed to the current focus on MECHANISMS OF COGNITIVE CHANGE - precise accounts of biological, psychological, and environmental factors that lead children to modify their thinking Piaget's theory offers a "road map" of development that is accurate in many respects - though incorrect in others. His cognitive milestones remain powerful aids to understanding emotional, social, and moral development.

Benefits of Make-Believe

Play not only reflects but also contributes to children's cognitive and social skills. Sociodramatic play has been studied most thoroughly - Compared with social nonpretend activities - during sociodramatic play preschoolers' interactions last longer, show more involvement, draw more children into the activity, and are more cooperative. Make believe strengthens a wide variety of mental abilities, including sustained attention, memory, logical reasoning, language and literacy, imagination, creativity, understanding of emotions, and the ability to reflect on one's own thinking and take another's perspective. Between 25 - 45 % of preschoolers and young school age children spend much time in solitary make-believe, creating imaginary companions -

Is Piaget's Account of Cognitive Change Clear and Accurate?

Piaget's explanation of cognitive change focuses on broad transformations in thinking through equilibration and its attendant processes of adaption and organization. But exactly what the child does to equilibrate is vague. Recall our description of organization - that the structures of each stage form a coherent whole. Recall our description of organization - that the structures of each stage form a coherent whole - Piaget was not explicit about how the diverse achievenments of each stage are bound together by a single, underlying form of thought - and efforts to confirm this coherence have not succeeded. On a variety of tasks, infants and young children appear more competent, and adolescents and adults less competent, than Piaget assumed. Today, researchers agree that the child's efforts to assimilate, accomodate, and reorganize structures cannot adequately explain these patterns of change. Furthermore, Piaget's belief that infants and young children must act on the environment to revise their thinking is too narrow a notion of how learning takes place. We have seen that as early as 2 to 3 months, babies group objects into categories and have some awareness of hidden objects - findings inconsistent with manual activity as the principal means of cognitive change. Without explicit adult teaching, including verbal explanations, children may not always notice or come to understand aspects of a situation necessary for building more effective schemes.

Inability to Conserve

Piaget's famous conservation tasks reveal several deficiencies of preoperational thinking - Conservation refers to the idea that certain physical characteristics of objects remain the same - even when their outward appearance changes. For example, in the conservation-of-liquid problem - the child is shown two identical tall glasses of water and asked if they contain equal amounts - once the child agrees - the water in one glass is poured into a short, wide container, changing the water's appearance but not its amount. Then the child is asked whether the amount of water is the same or has changed. Preoperational children think the quantity has changed. The inability to conserve highlights several related aspects of preoperational children's thinking. First, their understanding is centered - or characterized by centration - they focus on one aspect of a situation, neglecting other important features - In conservation of liquid - the child centers on the height of the water - failing to realize that changes are easily distracted by the perceptual appearance of objects. Third, children treat the initial and final states of the water as unrelated events, ignoring the dynamic transformation between them.

3) Acceptance of individual differences

Piaget's theory assumes that all children go through the same sequence of development, but at different rates. Therefore, teachers must plan activities for individual children and small groups - not just for the whole class. In addition, teachers evaluate educational progress in relation to the child's previous development, rather than on the basis of normative standards, or average performance of same-age peers.

Vygotsky's Sociocultural Theory

Piaget's theory emphasizes the biological side of cognitive development - Ly Vygotsky, on the other hand, emphasized the profound effects of rich social and cultural contexts in children's thinking. Sociocultural Perspective. Vygotsky's theory lies mainly in his rejection of an individualistic view of the developing child in favor of a socially formed mindset. Believed that infants are endowed with basic perceptual, attention, and memory capacities that they share with other animals. These develop during the first two years through direct contact with the environment. Then rapid growth of language leads to a profound change in thinking. It broadens preschoolers' participation in social dialogues with more knowledgeable individuals, who encourage them to master culturally important tasks. Soon children begin to communicate with themselves as much as they communitcate with others.

Development of Make-Believe Play

Play detaches from the real-life conditions associated with it. In early pretending, toddlers use only realistic objects - a toy telephone to talk into or a cup to drink from. Their earliest pretend acts usually imitate adults' actions and are not yet flexible. Children younger than age 2, for example, will pretend to drink from a cup but refuse to pretend a cup is a hat. They have trouble using an object that already has an obvious use as a symbol for another object. After age 2 - children pretend with less realistic toys (a block for a telephone receiver). Gradually, they can imagine objects and events, without any support from the real world. And by age 3, they flexibly understand that an object may take on one fictional identity in one pretend game (a toothbrush) and another fictional identity (a carrot) in a different pretend game.

Velocity Curve

Plots the average amount of growth at each yearly interval, revealing the exact timing of growth spurts.

Some Motor Milestones

Pre-reaching - newborn until 2 mos. -At 2 months. pre-reaching declines -By 3 months. infant reaching is guided by what they see: "visually guided reaching" 3-4 months. ulnar grasp 4-5 months. reach to midline & opposite side 4-5 months. grasp with both hands Palmer grasp - infant's fingers close around your finger Ulnar grasp - 3-4 mos. fingers close against palm (clumsy) Pincer grasp - end of 1st year (x = 9 months)

New research on touch - Dr. Tiffany Field

Premature babies massaged 3x/day, 15 min. session Gain weight - 47% faster Rapid nervous system maturation More active Greater responsibility to faces & rattles

Lack of Hierarchial Classification

Preoperational children have difficulty with hierarchical classification - the organization of objects into classes and subclasses on the basis of similarities and differences. Preoperational children center on the overriding feature, red. They do not think reversibly, moving from the whole class (flowers) to the parts (red and blue) and back again.

Follow-up Research on Preoperational Thought

Preschooler's responses do not always reflect their true abilities. Piaget also missed many naturally occurring instances of effective reasoning by preschoolers.

Categorization

Preschoolers organize their everyday knowledge into nested categories at an early age. By the beginning of early childhood, children's categories include objects that go together because of their common function, behavior, and natural kind, despite varying widely in perceptual features. 2-5 year olds readily draw inferences about nonobservable characteristics shared by a category of members - For example, after being told that a bird has warm blood and a stegosaurus has cold blood, preschoolers infer that pterodactul has cold blood, even though it closely resembles a bird. During the second and third years, children's categories differentiate. They form many basic-level categories, ones at an intermediate level of generality, such as "chairs" "tables" "Dressers" and "beds". By the third year, preschoolers easily move back and forth between basic level catergoies and general categories - such as "furniture". And they break down basic-level categories into subcategories - such as "rocking chairs" and "desk chairs" Preschoolers rapidly expanding vocabularies and general knowledge support their impressive skill at categorizing. As they learn more about their world, they devise theories about underlying characteristics shared by a category members, which help them identify new instances. For example, they realize that animals have an inborn potential for certain physical characteristics and behaviors that determine their identity - In categorizing, they look for causal links among these features. In one study - researchers invented two categories of animals - one with horns, armor, and a spiky tail; the other with wings, large ears, long toes, and a monkeylike tail. Four year olds who were given a theory that identified an inner cause for the coexsitence of animals' features - animals in the first category "like to fight" those in the second category "like to hide in trees" easily classified new examples of animals. But 4 year olds for whom animal features were merely pointed out or where given a separate function for each feature could not remember the categories. Adults' explanations are a major source of young childnren's categorical learning. Picture book reading is an especially rich context for understanding categories.

Neutral Stimulus

Presented (paired with the UCS) just before or about the same time as the unconditioned stimulus - does not lead tot he reflex yet.

Why do infants spend so much time in REM Sleep?

REM sleep is associated with sleeping, and babies probably do not dream - at least not in the same way we do. Researchers believe the stimulation of REM sleep is vital for growth of the central nervous system. Young infants seem to have a special need for this stimulation because they spend little time in an alert state, when they can get input from the environment. In support of this idea, the percentrage of REM sleep is especially great in the fetus and in preterm babies, who are even less able than full-term nerborns to take advanage of external stimulation.

Fine-Motor Development: Reaching & Grasping

Reaching may play the greatest role in infant cognitive development. By grasping things, turning them over, and seeing what happens when they are released, infants learn a great deal about the sights, sounds, and feel of objects. Reaching & grasping starts off as gross, diffuse activity and move toward mastery of fine movements. Newborns will actively work to bring their hands into their field of vision: In a dimly lit room, they keep their hand within a narrow beam of light, moving the hand when the light beam moves. Newborns also make poorly coordinated swipes - called PREREACHING, toward an object in front of them, but because of poor arm and hand control they rarely contact the object. Like newborn reflexes, prereaching drops out around 7 weeks of age, when babies improve in eye movements involved in tracking and fixating on objects, which are essential for accurate reaching.

Infant Learning continued

Recovery: A new stimulus is presented; dishabituation occurs when the response returns to its initial level, or close to the initial level

Cognition

Refers to the inner processes and products of the mind that lead to "knowing". It includes all mental activity - attending, remembering, symbolizing, categorizing, planning, reasoning, problem solving, creating, and fantasizing. Humans must rely on thinking so that they can adapt to their environments and even transform them. Researchers studying cognitive development address three main issues: 1) They chart its typical course, identifying transformations that most children undergo from birth to maturity. They ask: Do all aspects of cognition develop uniformly, or do some develop at faster rates than others? 2) They examine INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES. At every age, some children think more or less maturely, and differently, than others. 3) They uncover MECHANISMS of cognitive development - How genetic and environmental factors combine to yield patterns of change.

Criticism of Piaget's educational applications

Regarding his insistence that young children learn mainly through acting on the environment and his neglect of other important avenues - such as verbal learning and corrective feedback. Nevertheless, Piaget's influence on education has been powerful. He gave teachers new ways to observe, understand, and enhance young children's development and offered strong theoretical justification for child-oriented approaches to teaching

As infants get older & Operant Conditioning

Researchers hung special mobiles over the cribs of 2-to-6 month olds. When the baby's food is attached to the mobile with a long cord, the infant can, by kicking, make the mobile turn. Under these conditions, it takes only a few minutes for infants to start kicking vigorously. This technique has yielded important information about infant memory. Two-month olds remember how to activate the mobile for 1 to 2 days after training, and 3 month-olds for 1 week, by 6 months, memory increases to two weeks. By the middle of the first year, babies can manipulate switches to buttons to control stimulation. Even after 2-to-6 month-olds forget an operant response, they need only a brief prompt- an adult who shakes the mobile- to reinstate the memory. When 6 month olds are given a chance to reactivate the response themselves, for just a couple minutes -jiggling the mobile by kicking or moving the train by lever-pressing - their memory not only returns but extends dramatically, to about 17 weeks.

Window into Early Attention, Memory & Knowledge

Researchers study infants understanding of the world by looking at habituation and recovery more than any other learning capacities. Used to study the infant's or fetus' sensitivity to external stimuli - by measuring the changes in fetal heart rate when various repeated sounds are presented. Habiutation to an auditory stimulus is evident in the third trimester of pregnancy. Preterm & newborn babies - takes 3-4 minutes to habituate and recover to novel visual stimuli. By 4-5 months however, they need as little as 5-10 seconds to take in a complex visual stimulus and recognize it as different from a previous one. Exception to this trend: Two-month-olds actually take longer to habituate to novel visual forms than do newborns and older infants. By 4 months, attention becomes more flexible - a change believed to be due to development of structures in the cerebral cortex controlling eye movements.

Most important illogical feature of preoperational thought is IRREVERSIBILITY.

Reversibility - the ability to go through a series of steps in a problem and then mentally reverse direction - returning to the starting point - is the part of every logical operations. In the case of conservation of liquid, the preoperational child cannot imagine the water being poured back into its original container and so fails to see how the amount must remain the same.

Reflexes and the Development of Motor Skills

Some reflexes form the basis for complex motor skills that will develop later. The tonic neck reflex may prepare the baby for voluntary reaching. When infants lie on their back in the fencing position, it causes them to look at arm movements of adults, and can eventually lead to reach for objects. Certain reflexes - such as the palmer grasp, swimming, and stepping - drop out early, but motor functions involved are renewed later. Stepping drops out due to the leg and calf muscles being under-developed - unless the baby is placed in water.

Organization

SCHEMES also change through organization - a process that occurs internally, apart from direct contact with the environment. Once children form new schemes, the rearrange them, linking them with other schemes to create a strongly interconnected cognitive system. Eventually the babies relate dropping to throwing.

SIDS

SIDS = Sudden Infant Death Syndrome under age one, but peaks at 2-4 months Prematurity Apgar score Birth weights Leading cause of infant mortality- 20% U.S. infant deaths. Other Neonatal Scales: Brazelton, Bayley Cross-Cultural diffs. Irritability - response to loud noise - Daniel Freedman (film)

REM Sleep

Safegaurds the central nervous system - and the rapid eye movements protect the health of the eye

Mirror Neurons

Scientists have identified specialized cells in many areas of the cerebral cortex of primates - that underlie these capacities. Mirror neurons fire identically when a primate hears or sees an action and when it carries out that action on its own. Mirror neurons are believed to be the biological basis of a variety of interrelated, complex social abilities, including imitation, empathic sharing of emotions, and understanding others' intentions Brain imagining findings support a functioning mirror-neuron system as early as 6 months of age. Researchers found that the same motor areas of the cerebral cortex were activated in 6-month-olds and in adults when they observed a model engage in a behavior that could be imitated as when they themselves engaged in a motor neuron. Motor neurons undergo an extended period of development.

NBAS

Scores change depending on cultural context. NBAS scores of Asian and Native-American babies reveal that they are less irritable than Caucasian infants.

Recognition

Simplest form of memory. All the baby has to do is indicate whether a new stimulus is identical or similar to a previous one.

1962 - Mary Lyon

Skewing of X - inactivation in female children XD XM XD XM Dad Mom 50% 50% But sometimes: XD XM 80% 20%

Piaget's Ideas about Cognitive Change

Specific psychological structures called schemes - organized ways of making sense of experience - change with age.At first, schemes are sensorimoto action patterns - watch a 6-month old baby catch sight of, grasp, and release objects. By 18 months, her dropping scheme has become deliberate and creative. Given an opportunity, she might toss all sorts of objects down the basement stairs, throwing some up in the air, etc. Soon - instead of just acting on objects, the toddler shows evidence of thinking before she acts. For Piaget - this change marks the transition from a sensorimotor approach to a cognitive approach based on MENTAL REPRESENTATIONS - internal depictions of information that the mind can manipulate. Our most powerful metal representations are IMAGES - mental pictures of objects, people, and spaces - and CONCEPTS - categories in which similar objects or events are grouped together. In Piaget's theory, two processes account for this change from sensorimoto to representational schemes and for further changes in representational schemes from childhood to adulthood - ADAPTION & ORGANIZATION.

Crawling

Strongly associated with 9-month-old's formation of an increasingly context-free memory. As babies move on their own and experience frequent changes in context, they apply learned responses more flexibly, generalizing them to relevant situations.

Perceptual Development in Infancy

Studies of infant perception reveal in what ways babies are biologically prepared to perceive their world, and how brain development and experience expand their capacities. Infant perception sheds light on other aspects of development - because touch, vision, and hearing enable us to interact with others, they are bassic to emotional and social development. Through hearing, language is learned. And because knowledge of the world is first gathered through the senses, perception provides the foundation for cognitive development. Challenging because babies cannot describe their experiences.

Substage 5

TERTIARY CIRCULAR REACTION In which toddlers repeat behaviors with variation, emerges. Recall the example on page 227 of the child dropping objects over the basement steps in diverse ways - this deliberately exporatory approach makes 12 to 18 month old babies better problem solvers. THEY can figure out how to fit a shape through a hole - by turning and twisting the shape -

Dutch vs U.S. Babies

The Dutch parents viewed sleep regularity as far more important than the U.S. parents did. And whereas the U.S. parents regarded a predictable sleep schedule as emerging naturally from within the child, the Dutch parents were convinced - on the basis of Dutch infant care traditions - that a schedule had to be imposed, or the baby's development might suffer. At age 6 months, the Dutch babies were put to bed earlier and slept, on average, 2 hours more per day than their U.S. counterparts.

Depth Perception

The ability to judge the distance of objects from on another and from ourselves. Visual Cliff - consists of a plexiglas covered table with a platform at the center, a shallow side with a checkerboard pattern just under the glass, and a "Deep" side with a checkerboard several feet below the glass. The researchers found that crawling babies readily crossed the shallow side, but avoided the deep side. By time infants crawl, they distinguish deep from shallow and avoid drop offs.

Seriation

The ability to order items along a quantitative dimension, such as length or weight. To test for it, Piaget asked children to arrange sticks of different lengths from shortest to longest. Older preschoolers can put the sticks in a row to create the series, but they do so haphazardly, making many errors. In contrast, 6 to 7 year olds create the series efficiently, moving in an orderly sequence from the smallest stick to the largest, and so on.

Conservation

The ability to pass conservation tasks provides clear evidence of operations- mental actions that obey logical rules. In conservation of liquid, for example, children state that the amount of liquid has not changed, and they are likely to offer an explanation something like this: "The water's shorter but it's also wider. Pour it back- you'll see it's the same amount." The child is capable of decentration, focusing on several aspects of a problem and relating them, rather than centering on only one. This explanation also illustrates reversibility - the capacity to imagine the water being returned to the original container as proof of conservation.

Brain Development

The brain reaches its adult size earlier than any other organ. We can understand brain growth by looking at it from two vantage points 1) the microscopic level of individual brain cells 2) The larger level of the cerebral cortex, the most complex brain structure and the one responsible for the highly developed intelligence of our species.

Transitive Inference

The concrete operational child can seriate mentally. Piaget showed children pairings of sticks of different colors - From observing that stick A is longer than stick B and that stick B is longer than stick C, children must infer that A is longer than C. Like Piaget's class inclusion task, transitive inference requires children to integrate three relations at once: A-B, B-C, A-C. When researchers take steps to ensure that children remember the premises, 7 year olds grasp transitive inference.

Consequences of Adolescent Cognitive Changes

The development of increasingly complex, effective thinking leads to dramatic revisions in the way adolescents see themselves, others, and the world in general.

Abnormal Crying

The infant's cry offers a clue to central nervous system distress. The cries of brain-damaged babies are often shrill, piercing, and shorter in duration than those of health infants. Even neonates with a fairly common problem -Colic - or persistent crying - tend to have high-pitched, harsh-sounding cries. Although the cause of colic is unknown, certain newborns, who react especially strongly to unpleasant stimuli, are suspeptible. They find it harder to calm down than other babies. Colic generally subsides between 3 and 6 months.

Egocentric & Animistic Thinking

The most fundamental deficiency of preoperational thinking is egocentrism - which is the failure to distinguish others' symbolic viewpoints from one's own. He believed that when children first mentally represent the world, they tend to focus on their own viewpoint and assume that others perceive, think, and feel the same way they do. Piaget's most convincing demonstration of egocentrism involves his three-mountains problem - He also regarded egocentrism as responsible for preoperational children's animistic thinking - the belief that inanimate objects have lifelike qualities - such as thoughts, wishes, feelings, and intentions. Piaget argued that young children's egocentric bias prevents them from accommodating, or reflecting on and revising their faulty reasoning in response to their physical and social worlds.

The Psychological Impact of Pubertal Events

The overall rate of serious psychological disturbance rises only slightly - from childhood to adolescence. Although some teenages encounter difficulties, it is not routine for all teens.

Intersubjectivity

The process whereby two participants who begin a task with different understandings arrive at a shared understanding. In order for cognitive development to be promoted, social interaction must have certain features. Intersubjectivity creates a common ground for communication, as each partner adjusts to the other's perspective. Adults try to promote it when they translate their own insights in ways that are within the child's grasp. As the child stretches to understand the adult, she is drawn into a more mature approach to the situation. Capacity for intersubjectivity is present early, in parent-infant mutual gaze, exchange of vocal and emotional signals, imitation and joint play with objects and in toddlers' capacity to infer others' intentions. Later, language facilitates intersubjectivity. As conversational skills improve, preschoolers increasingly seek others' help and direct that assistance to ensure that it is beneficial. Between 3 - 5, children strive for intersubjectivity in dialogues with peers - as when they affirm a playmate's message, add new ideas, and contribute to ongoing play to sustain it.

Conditioned Response

The response that is elicited from the conditioned stimulus.

Soothing a crying infant

There are many ways to soothe a crying baby when feeding and diaper changing does not work. -Lifting the infant to the shoulder and rocking or walking. -Swaddling -Covering baby in blankets to keep warm (The Quechua)

The Preoperational Stage: 2 - 7 years

This stage comes after the sensorimotor stage, which includes the most obvious changes in increases in representational, or symbolic activity.

Piaget and Education

Three educational principles derived from Piaget's theory continue to influence teacher training and classroom practices, especially during early childhood.

States

Throughout the day and night, newborn infants move in and out of five states of arousal, or degrees of sleep and wakefulnesss. The most fleeting is quiet alertness, which usually moves quickly toward fussing and crying. Must to the relief of their fatigued parents, newborns spend the greatest amount of time asleep - about 16 to 18 hours per day. Because the fetus tends to synchronize periods of rest and activity with those of the mother, newborns- even those who are 4 to 6 weeks preterm - sleep more at night than during the day. Nevertheless, young babies' sleep-wake cycles are affected more by fullness-hunger than by darkness-light.

Depth Perception-

To judge the distance of objects from the self & from each other Kinetic Depth Cues - "blink" - 3 weeks depth cues created by movement of body or object Binocular Depth Cues - 2-3 months to 6 months - They rely on each eye getting different info...brain creates 3-D by blending the 2 images Pictorial Depth Cues - 7 months - cues (shading) artists use to create depth in a drawing or painting

Symbol-Real-World Relations

To make believe and draw - and to understand other forms of representation - such as photographs, models, and maps - preschoolers must realize that each symbol corresponds to something specific in everyday life. Grasping this correspondence grants children a powerful cognitive tool for finding out about objects and places they have not experienced directly. Earlier in this chapter, we saw that by middle of the second year - children grasp the symbolic function of realistic-looking pictures (such as photos). In one study, 2 1/2 and 3 year-olds watched an adult hide a small toy in a scale model of a room and then were asked to retrieve it. Next, they had to find a larger toy hidden in the room that the model represented. Not until age 3 could most children use the model as a guide to finding Big Snoopy in the real room. The 2 1/2 year olds did not realize that the model could be both a TOY ROOM and a SYMBOL OF ANOTHER ROOM. They had trouble with dual representation - viewing a symbolic object as both an object in its own right and a symbol. In support of this interpretation, when researchers made the model room less prominent as an object, by placing it behind a window and preventing children from touching it, more 2 1/2 year olds succeeded at the search task. Recall also that in make believe play 1 1/2 - 2 year olds cannot use an object that has an obvious use (cup) to stand for another object (hat). When preschoolers are presented with objects disguised in various ways and asked what each "looked like" and what each "is really and truly" - preschoolers have difficulty. For example, when asked whether a candle that looks like a crayon "is really and truly" a crayon, children young than 6 often responded "yes". But simplify these appearance-reality tasks by permitting children to solve them nonverbally, by selecting from an array of objects the one that really has a particular identity, most 3 year olds perform well. They realize that an object can be one thing while symbolizing another Exposing children to diverse symbols - picture books, photos, drawings, models, make-believe, and maps - helps children appreciate that one object can stand for another.

Does cognitive development take place in stages?

Today, experts agree that children's cognition is less broadly stagelike than Piaget believed. Some theorists agree with Piaget that development is a general process - following similar course across the diverse cognitive domains of physical, numerical, and social knowledge. But they reject the existence of stages, believing instead that thought processes are alike at all ages- just present to a greater or lesser extent - and that variations in children's knowledge and experience largely account for uneven performance across domains. These assumptions form the basis of the INFORMATION-PROCESSING PERSPECTIVE. Some believe that stage notion is valid but needs to be modified. They point to strong evidence for certain stagelike changes, such as the flourishing of representation around age 2 and the move toward abstract, systematic thinking in adolescence. yet they also recognize smaller developments that lead up to these transformations. Neo-Piagetian Perspective - combines Piaget's stage approach with information processing ideas. In this view, Piaget's strict definition of stage is modified into a less tightly knit concept, in which related competencies develop over an extended period - depending on brain development and specific experiences. Many critics believe that remarkable competencies of infants and young children indicate that cognitive development begins with far more than sensorimotor reflexes. Infants come into the world with several basic, built in types of knowledge - each of which jump-start vital aspects of cognition.

Perception

Touch Taste Smell Hearing Vision: Depth Perception

Distance Curve

Tracks overall changes in body size. Plots the average size of a sample of children at each age, indicating typical yearly progress towards maturity. During infancy & childhood, the two sexes are similar, around 10 to 11, the typical North American and European girl becomes taller (and heavier) for a time because her pubertal growth spurt takes place two years earlier than the boy's. At age 14, she is surpassed by the typical boy.

Reactions to Pubertal Changes

Two generations ago, menarche was often traumatic. Today, girls commonly react with surprise - otherwise, a mixture of positive and negative emotions is usually expressed. Wide individual differences exist that depend on prior knowledge and support from family members which in turn are influenced by cultural attitudes toward puberty and sexuality. 1950s- girls were given to prior warning and given a negative "grin-and-bear-it" attitude. African American families may better prepare girls for menarche, treat it as an important milestone, and express less conflict over girls reaching sexual maturity. Boys also reflect mixed feelings to spermarche. Boys who are better prepared end to react more positively. Although girls share with others that they have been menstruating, few boys share that they are going through spermarche. Boys get less social support.

Spatial Reasoning

Understanding of space is more accurate. Children's cognitive maps - mental representations of familiar large-scale spaces, such as their neighborhood or school. Drawing a map of a large-scale space requires considerable perspective-taking skills. Because the entire space cannot be seen at once, children must infer it's layout by relating its separate parts. Preschoolers and young school-age children include landmarks on the maps they draw - but their arrangement is not always accurate. They do better when asked to place stickers showing the location of desks and people on a map of their classroom. But if the map is rotated to a position other than the orientation of the classroom, they have difficulty. Their use of a rotated map to find objects hidden in a room improves when the locations form a meaningful pattern, such as the outline of a dog. Pointing out the pattern helps children reason by analogy from the rotated map to corresponding locations in the room. Around 8 to 10, children's maps become better organized, showing landmarks along an organized route of travel. At the same time, children are able to give clear, well-organized directions from getting to places by using a mental walk strategy. By the end of middle childhood, children combine landmarks and routes into an overall view of a large-scale space. And they readily draw and read maps of extended outdoor environments, even when the orientation of the map and the space it represents do not match. Ten to 12 year olds also comprehend scale - the proportional relation between a space and its representation on a map. Map-related experiences enhance childnre's map skills. When teachers asked fourth graders to write down the clues they used to decide where stickers (signifying landmark locations) should go on a map of an outdoor space, children's accuracy improved greatly.

Imitation

Using imitation, young infants explore their social world, not only learning from other people but getting to know them by matching their behavior states. As babies notice similarities between their own and others' actions, they experience people as "like me" and,thus, learn about themselves. In this way, infant imitation may serve as a foundation for understanding others' thoughts and feelings.

Vestibular Sensitivity

Vestibular Sensitivity = awareness of body orientation & motion. Young babies respond to cues from vestibular system. Study - stereotypical behavior Definition: behavior that is rhythmical & repetitive Kicking, rocking, banging, rubbing Occurs in a bout

Social Origins of Cognitive Development

Vygotsky believed private speech came from within the zone of proximal development - a range of tasks too difficult for the child to do alone but possible with help of adults and more skilled peers. By questioning, prompting, and suggesting strategies, certain learning activities can be kept within the zone of proximal development.

Vygotsky's View of Make Believe Play

Vygotsky regards make-believe play as a unique, broadly influential zone of proximal development in which children advance themselves as they try out a wide variety of challenging skills. central source of development during the preschool years - leading development forward in two ways. First, as children create imaginary situations, they learn to act in accord with internal ideas, not just in response to external stimuli. While pretending, children continually use one object to stand for another - a stick for a horse, a folded blanket for a sleeping baby - this changes the object's usual meaning. Gradually they realize that thinking is separate from objects and that ideas can be used to guide behavior. Second, the rule based nature of make believe strengthen's children's capacity to think before they act. Pretend play, Vygotsy pointed out, constantly demands that children act against their impulses because they must follow the rules of the play scene. For example, a child pretending to go to sleep obeys the rules of bedtime behavior. A child imagining himself as a father and a doll as his child conforms to the rules of parental behavior. Through enacting rules in make-believe, children better understand social norms and expectations and strive to follow them. Vygotsky argued that the elaborate pretending of the preschool years has social origins.

Accommodation

We create new schemes or adjust old ones after noticing that our current way of thinking does not capture the environment completely. The baby who drops objects in different ways is modifying his dropping scheme to take account of the varied properties of objects - and the preschooler who calls a camel a lumpy horse has noticed that camels differ from horses in certain ways and has revised her scheme accordingly.

Assimilation

We use our current schemes to interpret the external world. The infant who repeatedly drops objects is assimilating them into his senorimotor droppig scheme. And the preschooler who, seeing a camel at the zoo, calls out "Horse" has sifted through her conceptual schemes until she finds one that resembles the strange-looking creature

Touch

Well developed at birth Infant pain sensitivity --Heel prick for PKU --Circumcision 1894- Galton- females have lower pain thresholds than males At birth - females more sensitive

Hypothetico-Deductive Reasoning

When faced with a problem, they start with a hypothesis, or prediction about variables that might affect the outcome, from which they deduce logical, testable inferences. Then they systematically isolate and combine variables to see which of these inferences are confirmed in the real world. Notice how this form of problem solving begins with possibility and proceeds to reality. Adolescents' performance on Piaget's famous pendulum problem illustrates this new approach - Suppose we present several school-age children and adolescents with strings of different lengths, objects of different weights to attach to the strings, and a bar from which to hang the strings. Then we ask each of them to figure out what influences the speed with which a pendulum swings through its arc. Formal Operational Adolescents hypothesize that four variables might be influential: 1) The length of the string 2) The weight of the object hung on it 3) How high the object is raised before it is released 4) How forcefully the object is pushed By varying one factor at a time- while holding the other 3 constant -they test each variable separately and, if necessary, also in combination. Eventually, they discover that only string length makes a difference.

Touch

Within the first few days, mothers can recognize their own newborn by stroking the infant's cheek or hand. Touch helps stimulate early physical growth. and it is vital for emotional development. The newborn baby responds to touch especially around the mouth, on the palms, and on the soles of the feet. During the prenatal period, these areas, along with the genitals, are the first to become sensitive to touch. Babies feel pain especially intensely due to the immaturity of the central nervous system. Physical touch release endorphins Allowing a baby to endure severe pain overwhelms the nervous system with stress hormones, which can disrupt the child's developing capacity to handle common, everyday stressors. The result is heightened pain sensitivity, sleep disturbances, feeding problems, and difficulty calming down when upset. Gentle touching, in contrast, enhances babies' positive responsiveness to their physical and social surroundings. An adult's soft caresses induce infants to smile and become more attentive to the adult's face. And parents vary their style of touching depending on whether the goal of their interaction is to comofrt, convey affection, or induce smiling, attention, or play in their baby. Using hands (palms) they can distinguish shapes and textures of small objects. Babies run their lips and tongue over new objects and surfaces. This exploratory mouthing peaks in the middle of the first year as hand-mouth contact becomes more accurate. Then it declines in favor of more elaborate touching with the hands.

Chromosomal & Anomalies (Genetics)

XXY Kleinfelter Syndrome male -47, XXY -2% of newborn males -20-30% mental retardation 48, XXXY -Gynecomastia = breast development -Sterile -Cell nucleus = one Barr Body XXY

Classical Conditioning continued

Young infants can be classically conditioned most easily when the association between the two stimuli has survival value. Learning which stimuli regularly accompany feeding improves the infant's ability to get food & survive. Fear is not easy to condition under about 6 months of age

Physical needs

Young infants usually cry because of physical needs. Hunger is the most common cause, but babies may also cry in response to temperature change when undressed, a sudden noise, or a painful stimulus. An infants state also affects proneness to cry. A baby who, when quietly alert, regards a colorful or noise-making object with interest may burst into tears when confronted with the same object while in a state of mild discomfort. Newborns often cry when other babies are crying. Inborn capacity to react to the suffering of others. Crying typically increases during the early weeks, peaks at about 6 weeks, and then declines.

Equilibration

back and forth movement between equilibrium and disequilibrium. Each time equilibration occurs, more effective schemes are produced.

Cooperative Learning

small groups of classmates work toward common goals. Conflict and disagreement seem less important than the extent to which peers achieve intersubjectivity - by resolving differences of opinion, sharing responsibilities, and providing one another with sufficient explanations to correct misunderstandings. And in line with Vygotsky's theory - children profit more when their peer partner is an EXPERT - especially capable at the task. Western children usually require extensive guidance for cooperative learning to succeed. Collectivistic children do much better than Western Children. Also enhances peer relationships generally, leading students to cooperate more in future group activities within and outside the classroom.

Violation of expectation method

researchers habituate babies to a physical event (expose them to the event until their looking declines). Then they determine whether infants recover to (look longer at) an expected event (a variation of the first event that follows physical laws) or an unexpected event (a variation that violates physical laws.) Recovery to the unexpected event suggests that the infant is surprised by a deviation from physical reality as indicted by heightened attention and therefore is aware of that aspect of the physical world.Heightened attention to the unexpected event suggests that the infant is "surprised" by a deviation from physical reality - and therefore, is aware of that aspect of the physical world.

Between birth & 2 years

the organization of sleep and wakefulness changes substantially. Total sleep declines slowly - the average 2-year old still needs 12 to 13 hours per day, but periods of sleep and wakefulness become fewer and longer, and the sleep-wake pattern increasingly conforms to a circadian rhythm, or 24 hour schedule. By 2-3 months, infants begin to respond to darkness-light. Babies who are exposed to more sunlight will sleep better at night. Most 6-9 month olds take two daytime naps; by about 18 months, children generally need only one nap. Betwen 3-5 years, napping subsides. These changing patterns are due to brain development and culturally influenced beliefs and practices and individual parents' needs.

cognitive equilibrium

when children are not changing much, they assimilate more than they accommodate - a steady, comfortable state