Chapter 3

• From birth until children are 1 year old:

  • Height increases by 75%
  • Weight is quadrupled
• Cephalocaudal trend:

  • Top-down growth pattern
  • At birth, the head is 25% of body length and legs are 33%
  • At age 2, the head is 20% and legs are 50% of body length
• Proximodistal trend:

  • Center-outward growth
  • Arms and legs grow ahead of hands and feet
• Synaptic pruning:

  • Process of synaptic connections being reduced to increase efficiency
  • Myelination:
  • Formation of myelin sheath around nerve fibers for faster transmission
  • Developmental pattern:
  • Synaptic pruning and myelination occur first in the back of the brain and last in the front
  • Factors determining synaptic pruning include experience and learning
• Lateralization:

  • Specialization of functions within each hemisphere of the brain
• Neuroconstructivist view:

  • Brain development is influenced by biological processes and environmental conditions
  • Brain has plasticity and is context-dependent
  • Cognitive development is closely linked with brain development
• Benefits of breastfeeding:

  • Appropriate weight gain and reduced risk of obesity
  • Reduced risk of sudden infant death (SIDS)
  • Fewer gastrointestinal and respiratory tract infections
• Reflexes:

  • Built-in reactions to stimuli
  • Most disappear at a certain age
  • Assessment of reflexes is important for monitoring development
• Dynamic systems theory:

  • Motor skill development doesn't follow a fixed sequence
  • Factors include CNS development, physical properties, motivation, and environmental support
• Walking development:

  • Gross motor skill
  • Infants do not transfer learning from one motor skill to another (e.g., crawling to walking)
• Reaching development:

  • Fine motor skill
  • Young infants reach by swinging their entire arm, older infants reach more precisely
  • Sticky mittens influence motor development by promoting more sophisticated object exploration
• Methods of studying perceptual development:

  • Visual preference method: preference for objects with contrast/pattern
  • Habituation/dishabituation method: decrease/increase in attention to stimuli
  • Eye tracking: measurement of eye movements
• Visual acuity development:

  • At birth: 20/600
  • 2 weeks: 20/300
  • 6 months: 20/40
  • Color vision around 2 months
• Depth perception development:

  • Birth-1 month: sensitivity to motion cues
  • 2-4 months: sensitivity to binocular cues
  • 5-12 months: sensitivity to pictorial cues, wariness of heights, visual cliff
• Intermodal perception:

  • Combining information from two or more sensory systems
  • Develops through experience and exposure to different stimuli
• Face perception:

  • Preference for simple, face-like features
  • Perceptual narrowing: tuning of perceptual abilities based on experience
• Piaget's theory:

  • Assimilation: incorporating new information into existing schemes
  • Accommodation: adjusting existing schemes based on new information
  • Sensorimotor development: practical intelligence, differentiation, coordination of action schemes
• Object permanence:

  • Understanding that objects continue to exist even when not seen
  • Development occurs through different substages with varying characteristics
• Baillargeon's drawbridge experiment:

  • Infants tend to look at the impossible event longer then one that make sense
  • Violations of expectation paradigm
• Human language:

  • Distinguished by verbal communication compared to animal systems of communication
  • Uses complex grammar
• Phonology:

  • Studies the sound system of a language
  • Phonemes: smallest linguistic units
  • Phoneme perception develops in the first year of life through co-occurrence patterns of phonemes and syllables
• Visual cliff: used to measure depth perception in infants, comprising of drop-off is covered by a sheet of glass, so that it is safe for the baby to crawl over
• Core Knowledge approach:

  • infants are born with domain-specific innate knowledge systems 
  • four systems:
  • involving space
  • number sequence
  • object permanence 
  • language
• Infant-directed speech: language spoken with a higher pitch, slower tempo, and more exaggerated intonation than normal

  • simple words and sentences
• Sensorimotor stage:

  • First of Piaget’d stages, 0-2 years old.
  • Infants construct an understanding of the world by coordinating sensory experiences with motoric actions
• What is a major criticism of Piaget’s theory of object permanence?

  • Piaget tend to underestimate the abilities of children, as they can do more at an earlier age
• A not B error: tendency of infants to reach toward where an object was located earlier, rather that where the object was most recently hidden.
• Substages in object permanence:

  • 1 + 2) Passive expectations (0-4 months)
  • 3) recovery of partially hidden objects (4-8 months)
  • 4) retrieval of hidden objects, and A not B error (8-12 months)
  • 5) failure to understand invisible displacement (12-18 months)
  • 6) success at invisible displacement (18 months+)