Chapter 5

• First type of brain development:

  The volume of grey matter peaks during early childhood, and the volume of white matter continues to increase until early adulthood
• Second Type of Brain Development:

  Dramatic increase in cortical surface area during childhood- especially in regions of the temporal and frontal cortex
• Third type of brain development:

  The brain is reorganized and fine-tuned in a dynamic process shaped by environmental input.
• Cortical surface area – the surface area of the cortex when gyri (ridges) and sulci (grooves) are flattened
• Low socioeconomic status (SES) is associated with reduced volume in the hippocampus and amygdala (areas involved in memory), and reduced cortical surface area
• Children from the poorest home had significant maturational lags in their frontal and temporal lobes – the lags are associated with lower school-readiness skills
• Developmental Coordination Disorder:

  a neurodevelopment disorder characterized by impairment in gross or fine motor skills
• Children with developmental coordination disorder struggle with gross and/or fine motor skills; they may appear clumsy due to poor coordination and balance. Difficulties are often mistaken to oppositional behaviour, learning/attention difficulties, or simple laziness
• Obesity and poor fitness in childhood tend to track into adulthood. Motor deficits continue over time into adulthood
• Children should get an average of 15 or more minutes of physical activity per hour over a 12 hour period – 3 hours total per day
• Benefits of physical activity: enhanced bone health, better attention, memory, goal-directed thinking and behaviour, creativity, academic success, and executive function
• Preoperational stage – age 2-7

  • Children begin to represent the world with words, images, and drawings. They form stable concepts and begin to reason.
• Egocentrism

  • The inability to distinguish between one’s own perspective and someone else’s perspective
• Animism

  • The belief that inanimate objects have life-like qualities and are capable of action. Failure to distinguish between appropriate and inappropriate occasions for using human perspectives.
• Failure to conserve quantities

  • Lack of awareness that altering an object’s appearance doesn’t change its basic properties. Attributed to centration, the focusing of attention on one characteristic (e.g., height( to the exclusion of all others (e.g., width)
• Substages in the development of conservation:

  1. Recognize the two amount are initially the same. After the transformation the judge the two amounts as different
  2. Children can focus on two dimensions but not simultaneously, only successively
  3. Succeed in conservation task. Use Identity, inversion, and compensation
• Identity in conservation: “nothing has changed, it’s the same”
• Inversion in conservation: “if you poured the milk back it would be the same”
• Compensation in conservation: “the milk isn’t as high but its more spread out (wide)”
• Concrete operations (7-11y/O)

  Operation are internalized mental actions that fit into a logical system. Such as mental operations that allow children to combine, order, and transform objects in their minds
• Class inclusion:

  Understanding that in comparing the superordinate class (A: animals) includes its subclasses (b1: cat or b2: dogs)

  Tested by children’s understanding that the superordinate class (a: animals) is larger that the larger subclass B
• Operations required in class inclusion:

  Addition and subtraction
• Seriation:

  • The ability to order stimuli along a quantitative dimension (such as length) 
  • Arranging stick smallest to largest from groups into a logical order 
• Genetic Law of cultural development:

  Movement from the inter- to the intra- psychological (social —> individual)
• Function of egocentric speech:

  • Piaget
  • children often talk but don’t communicate “collective monologues”
  • Vygotsky
  • help guide behaviour, used when tasks are difficult
• Scaffolding: adjusting support to fit child’s level of performance (teaching context)
• Zone of proximal development:

  • The range of tasks are too difficult for the child to master alone but can be learned with the guidance and assistance of adults or more skilled children 
  • Difference between solitary performance and assisted performance 
• Early childhood education - 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
• Working memory: holding things in mind and operate in the

  • Measure - Forward digit span, backward digit span
• Inhibition: suppressing a prepotent response

  • measured - Simon says, Day and night task
• Flexibility: shifting between responses or goals

  • measured - Dimensional change card sort task (DCCS), Wisconsin card sorting task
• Working memory:

  • Memory that involves storing, focusing attention on, and manipulating information for a relatively short period of time 
  • Develops with strategies and rehearsal 
• Delay of gratification:

  • They placed young children alone with an alluring treat in reach. The children were told either ring a bell at any time an they can have the treat or wait until the experimenter returns and receive two of the treats. Some children waited; others could not
  • Children who waited distracted themselves from marshmallow or thought about the marshmallow in non appetitive ways
• Tools of mind Class room:

  • Make-believe play is key. It facilitated inhibition by requiring children to remain in character 
  • Scaffolding children’s literacy. Ex, provide children with line drawings to help them take turns while reading, the child hold a drawing of ears is reminded to listen; the child holding a drawing of lips is allowed to read 
  • Learning is heads on. Allows children to work within their zone of proximal development and foster cooperation 
• Factors that influence children’s eyewitness testimony:

  • There are age difference in children’s susceptibility to suggestion
  • Interviewing techniques can produce substantial distortions in children’s reports about highly salient events
• Future-oriented Thinking:

  • children’s predictions about the future preferences were affected by their current physiological state
• Theory of Mind:

  • understanding that others have different mental states (desires, beliefs, goals)
• age 4: central is Faslse Belief — distinction between mind and word 

  • Transfer location task 
  • Unexpected context or unexpected identity task with (1) self question (“what did you think was inside the box before it was opened?”)and (2) False Belief question (“What would your best friend, who has never looked inside this box, think is inside?”)

  o   Closely tied to deception, keeping a secret, hide and seek
• Passing false belief task:

  • Beyond the age of 5 
  • Understanding that people who have the same information may come up with different interpretation of the same event
  • Second order or recursive false belief understanding