INFANCY

• Brain and Reflex Behavior

  1. By age of 6, the brain is almost adult size but some parts are still continuously developing

  2. Brain Growth Spurts – brain’s growth occurs in fits and starts

  3. By birth, spinal cord and brain stem has nearly run its course (responsible for breathing, heart rate, temp, and sleep-wake cycle)

  4. Cerebellum (maintains balance and motor coordination) grows the fastest during the first year of life

  5. Lateralization – specialization of the hemispheres

  6. Left Hemisphere – concerned with language and logical thinking

  7. Right Hemisphere – concerned with visual and spatial functions

  8. Corpus Callosum – tough band of tissue that joins the two hemisphere which allows them to share info and coordinate commands

  9. Occipital – smallest; concerned with visual processing

  10. Parietal – involved with integrating sensory info from the body; movement and manipulation of objects

  11. Temporal – interpret smells and sounds and involved in memory

  12. Frontal Lobe – involved in high-order processes such as reasoning and problem solving

  13. Cerebral Cortex – outer surface of the cerebrum; grows rapidly in the first few months and are mature by age 6 months

  14. Brain Growth Spurt begins at about the third trimester of gestation and continues until at least the 4th year of life

  15. Neurons – send and receive info in the brain

  16. Glia or Glial Cells – nourish and protect the neurons

  17. Axon – sends signals to other neurons

  18. Dendrites – receive incoming messages

  19. Synapses – tiny gaps which are bridged with the help of chemicals

  20. Integration – neurons that control various groups of muscle coordinate their activities

  21. Differentiation – each neuron takes on a specific, specialized structure and function

  22. Cell Death – pruning of cells which is a way to calibrate the developing brain to the local environment and help it work more efficiently, begins during the prenatal period and continues after birth

  23. Myelination – enables signals to travel faster and more smoothly by coating the neural pathways with myelin

  24. Children who grew up in deprived environment may have depressed brain activity

  25. Neuroconstructivist View – biological process and environmental conditions influence development, the brain is plastic, and the child’s cognitive development is closely linked to development of the brain

  26. Emphasized the importance of considering interactions between experience and gene expression in the brain’s development

  27. Reflex Behavior – automatic, innate response to stimulation which are controlled by the lower brain centers that govern involuntary processes
• Physical Development

  1. Cephalocaudal Principle – growth starts from the top part of the body (i.e., brain to foot)

  2. Proximodistal Principle – growth proceeds from the center of the body outward (e.g., Palm (grasping) to fingers)

  3. Children grow faster during the first 3 years

  4. Teething usually begins around 3-4 months

  5. Growth slows in the second year of life

  6. Growth isn’t often smooth and continuous but rather is episodic, occurring in spurts
• Emphasized the importance of considering interactions between experience and gene expression in the brain’s development
• Locomotor Reflex


  Resemble voluntary movements appearing months after reflexes have disappeared
• Early Sensory Capacity
• Early Human Reflexes

  • Moro
  • Darwinian (Grasping)
  • Tonic Neck
  • Fencer Position
  • Babkin
  • Babinski
  • Rooting
• Primitive reflexes


  Including sucking, rooting, and the Moro reflex related to instinctive needs for survival, protection, or early connection to the caregiver
• Sleep restores, replenishes, and rebuilds our brains and bodies
• Motor Development Milestones

  • First Month: Turning head from side to side, Grasping Reflex
  • Second-Third Month: Lifting heads, Grasping moderate-sized things, Matching voice to faces
  • Fourth Month: Keeping heads erect, Rolling over, Beginning to reach objects
  • Sixth Month: Creeping or crawling, Localizing or detecting sounds
  • Seventh Month: Pincer grasp
• Motor Development
• Postural Reflexes


  Reactions to changes in position or balance
• Early reflexes disappear during the first 6-12 months
• Brain is plastic, living, changeable organs responding to environmental influences (Plasticity)
• Reflex Behavior


  Automatic, innate response to stimulation controlled by lower brain centers governing involuntary processes
• Early Sensory Capacity

  • Touch is the first sense to develop
  • Newborns can feel pain
  • Sense of smell and taste begin to develop in the womb
  • Newborns strongly dislike bitter flavors
  • Auditory Discrimination develops rapidly after birth
  • Infant’s brain responds preferentially to speech at 4 months
  • Vision is the least developed sense at birth
  • Binocular Vision does not develop until 4-5 months
  • Infants like attractive faces
• Positive link between infant sleep and cognitive functioning
• Denver Developmental Screening Test used to chart progress between ages 1 month and 6 years
• Babies can now localize or detect sounds from their origins
• Babies can start standing at the seventh month
• Babies can start creeping or crawling
• At the tenth month, babies can stand alone
• Developmental Psychology

  1. Infancy

  2. Crawling

  3. Social Referencing

  4. Sensory Perception

  5. Visual Guidance

  6. Clumsy corrective movements

  7. Depth Perception

  8. Kinetic Cues

  9. Haptic Perception

  10. Posture

  11. Swaddling

  12. Perceptual Constancy

  13. Ecological Theory of Perception

  14. Locomotor movement

  15. Affordances

  16. Thelen’s Dynamic Systems Theory

  17. Cognitive Development

  18. Behaviorist Approach

  19. Classical Conditioning

  20. Extinction

  21. Operant Conditioning
• At the thirteenth month, toddlers can pull a toy attached to a string and use their hands and legs to climb stairs
• At the eighth month, babies can assume a sitting position without help
• Infants actively put together skills to achieve a goal within the constraints set by the infant’s body and environment
• Newborns cannot see small things that are far away
• Infants can learn to pull themselves up and hold on to a chair at the eighth month
• Babies can now sit independently at the seventh month
• Babies could successfully reach for objects in the dark faster than they could in the light
• At the seventh month, pincer grasps could already manifest
• Babies cannot sit without support
• Babies were able to use contextual cues (e.g., odor) to retrieve memories
• At the eleventh month, babies can let go and stand alone well
• Babies modulate their movement patterns to fit a new task by exploring and selecting possible configurations
• From the eighteenth to twenty-fourth month, toddlers can walk quickly, run, and balance on their feet in a squatting position
• Infant memory is context-dependent and appears to be strongly linked to the original cues encoded during learning
• IQ Tests consist of questions or tasks that are supposed to show how much of the measured abilities a person has by comparing that person’s performance with norms
• Extinction

  If the conditioned learning is not reinforced by repeated association
• Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development components

  • Cognitive
  • Language
  • Motor
  • Social-Emotional
  • Adaptive Behavior
• Jean Piaget’s Sensorimotor Stage - Circular Reactions


  An infant learns to reproduce events originally discovered by chance