Chapter 5

• Brain development during childhood:

  1. total brain volume increases gradually during childhood
  2. fMRI scans reveal dramatic increases in cortical surface area during childhood- especially in the temporal and frontal cortex
  3. brain is reorganized and fine-tuned by environmental input (functional brain development)
• Poverty and parenting:

  • low socioeconomic status (SES) is associated with reduced volumes in cortical grey matter, hippocampus, and amygdala
  • reduced cortical surface area
  • significant maturational lags in frontal and temporal lobes
• Developmental coordination disorder: neurodevelopmental disorder

  • children have difficulty with gross/fine motor skills
  • Time perception: important for motor behaviour
  • children do not outgrow this disorder
• The Canadian physical activity guidelines' recommend an activity level of at least 60 minutes of moderate to vigorous activity a day
• Benefits of physical activity:

  • enhances bone health
  • benefits attention, memory, behaviour, creativity
  • academic success
• Preoperational stage general characteristics:

  1. Children learn to use symbolic representations and develop some ability and reason
  2. make believe, pretend play
  3. Centration: the tendency to consider only one piece of information when multiple pieces need to be processed
• Preoperational thought specific characteristics:

  1. Egocentrism
  2. inability to take the perspective of another person
  3. Animalistic thinking
  4. belief that inanimate objects have lifelike qualities
  5. Lack of conservation
  6. the idea that the amount of something remains the same
  7. Class inclusion
• Conservation: the idea that the amount of something remains the same despite changes in its form, shape , or appearance
• Development of conservation tasks:

  1. Recognize the two amounts are initially the same
  2. center on the perceptually salient dimension (height)
  3. Vacillate in their response
  4. Succeed in conservation task
  5. can coordinate both dimensions simultaneously
• Justifications for conservation judgments:

  1. Identity (nothing has really changed, it's still the same)
  2. Inversion (if you poured it back, it would be the same)
  3. Compensation (the milk is not as high, but more wide)
• Concrete operations main characteristics:

  • operations are internalized mental actions that fit into a logical system
  • such mental systems allow children to combine, order, and transform objects in their minds
  • concrete operations = tangible objects and thoughts about objects
• Class inclusion:

  • understanding that in comparing the superordinate class it includes its subclasses
  • operations required: addition, subtraction
• Seriation: ordering stimuli along a quantitative dimension
• Transitive inference: combines relations in a logical manner and makes inferences (A taller than B, B taller than C, is A taller than C?)

  • preoperational thinkers cannot understand
  • concrete operational thinkers can
• Genetic law of cultural development(Vygotsky):

  • movement from the inter- to the intra- psychological
  • social to individual
  • importance of social interactions and cultural tools (language, numbers, alphabet)
  • internalization of cultural tools (mediation) leads to higher forms of cognitions and control of own behaviour
• Egocentric speech:

  1. Piaget
  2. children often talk but do not really communicate (collective monologues)
  3. deficiency, part of their egocentrism
  4. disappears when children's cognition develops
• Egocentric speech:

  1. Vygotsky
  2. function: help guide behaviour
  3. used more when tasks are more difficult
  4. gradually becomes silent (basis of all higher cognitive processes)
  5. social speech, egocentric speech, inner speech
• Scaffolding: adjusting support to fit child's level of performance (teaching context)
• Zone of proximal development: range of tasks that are too difficult for the child to master alone but can be learned with the guidance and assistance of adults or more skilled children.
• Principles of early childhood cognition derived from Vygotsky:

  • assisted discovery
  • peer collaboration
  • importance of make-believe play for development of self-regulation
• Executive function: higher cognitive processes involved in the conscious control of action and thought

  • closely related to constructs of self-control and self-regulation
• Processes of executive function (lecture):

  1. Working memory
  2. Inhibition
  3. Flexibility
  4. Planning
• Processes of executive function (textbook):

  1. Updating information in working memory
  2. Inhibition of prepotent responses
  3. Shifting of attention
• Measures of executive function:

  1. Inhibition
  2. Simon says, Day-night task
  3. Working memory
  4. Forward digit span, backward digit span
  5. Flexibility
  6. Dimensional change card sort task, Wisconsin card sorting task
  7. Stroop test
• Working memory: The ability to hold information in mind and manipulate it.

  • working memory improves with age
  • use of strategies to improve processing of information
  • speed of cognitive tasks improves
  • associated with the development of medial-temporal cortex, prefrontal cortex, and white matter
• Delay of gratification: The ability to delay gratification in order to achieve a long-term goal.

  • Marshmallow test
  • Children who waited distracted themselves from marshmallow engaged in cool thoughts (non-temptation related thoughts)
  • singing songs, looking away
• Tools of the Mind classroom:

  • Make believe play
  • Scaffolding
  • Hands-on learning
  • Emphasizes children's development of self-regulation, cognitive foundations of literacy, and prosocial behaviour
• Eyewitness testimonies of children:

  • age differences in children's susceptibility to suggestion
  • individual differences in sucseptibility
  • interviewing techniques can produce substantial distortions in children's reports about highly salient events
• Future-oriented thinking:

  • 5 year olds: understand that they will prefer grown-up things when they are grown up despite liking child things now
  • 3 year olds: cannot understand future-oriented thinking; influenced by current physiological state
• Theory of mind: children's developing conceptions of their own and other people's mental life or their mental activities

  • theory because it is assumed to be a coherent framework for organizing facts and making predictions
• False belief:

  • children understand false belief by 5 years old
  • Measured with the Sally-Ann task
• Interindividual differences in Theory of Mind:

  • Language (mental state terms)
  • Social interactions
  • Pretend play/Imaginary play
  • Socioeconomic status
  • Executive function
  • Culture
• Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD):

  • disability in which children consistently show one or more characteristics over a period of time
  • Inattention (difficulty focusing on any one thing, gets bored easily)
  • Hyperactivity (high levels of physical activity)
  • Impulsivity (difficulty curbing reactions)
• Subtypes of ADHD:

  1. Combined subtype
  2. Hyperactive/ impulsive subtype
  3. Inattentive subtype
• ADHD treatments:

  1. Behaviour management
  2. Neurofeedback
  3. Mindfulness training
  4. Physical exercise
  5. Medication
• Core characteristics of autism:

  • Differences in:
  • social communication style
  • involving a range of verbal and nonverbal features
  • repetitive behaviour and focused/intense interests
  • sensory processing differences
• Social communication in autism:

  • speech
  • eye contact
  • gestures
  • facial expressiveness
• Interventions for ASD:

  • applied behaviour analytics (ABA)
  • well-structured classroom
  • early intensive behaviour intervention (EIBI)
• Social differences in ASD:

  • face processing
  • triadic interaction (shared attention, declarative pointing)
  • mindblindness
  • executive function differences
• Morphology development in children:

  • plural and possessive forms of nouns
  • appropriate endings on verbs (-s or -ed)
  • prepositions and articles
  • various forms of the verb to be
  • Wug test