Infancy and Childhood

Physical Development REVIEW

Maturation: biological growth processes leading to orderly changes in behavior, independent of experience Critical Period: a period early in life when exposure to certain stimuli or experience is needed for proper development orderly, predictable process of development specific times during development when something is learned, or it doesn’t happen at all

Use it or lose it? After puberty, our brains begin to shut down unused links and strengthens others

What is a major difference between brain development and motor development in infants? (hint: think about potty training) Experience has little effect on motor development, but has a significant impact on brain development. Remember the experiment on rats?

Cognitive Development

How do our cognitive abilities develop?

Cognition: all the mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating

Baby Mobile Experiment

Scale Errors

Jean Piaget Newborn’s reflexes Adults abstract reasoning Believed the force driving us up this ladder is our struggle to make sense of our experiences. Piaget believed a child’s mind develops through a series of stages

What assumptions would you make about this animal?

Schemas: a concept or framework that organizes and interprets information Doggie!Big doggie! X Pony!

Piaget’s Experiments

Object Permanence the awareness that things continue to exist even when they cannot be seen

Conservation the principle that properties such as mass, volume, and number remain the same despite changes in the form of objects

Egocentric difficulty taking another’s point of view

Theory of Mind people’s ideas about their own and other’s mental states – about their feelings, perceptions, and thoughts, and the behaviors these might predict

Piaget’s Stages of Cognition Believed that children construct their understanding of the world from interactions with it. Children’s minds go through bursts of change followed by stability as they move from one level to the next

StageTypicalAgeDescriptionNew Developments SensorimotorBirthto nearly 2 years Experience the world through senses and actions (looking, hearing, touching, mouthingand grasping)  Object Permanence  Stranger Anxiety Preoperational2 to about 6 or 7 years Representing things with words and images; using intuitive reasoningrather than logical reasoning  Pretend Play  Egocentrism  Begin forming a theoryof mind Concrete Operational About 7 to 11 years Thinking logically about concrete events; grasping concrete analogies and performing arithmetical operations  Conservation  Mathematical transformations  Inner speech (Vygotsky) Formal Operational About 12 through adulthood Reasoningabstractly; no longer limited to concrete reasoning based on actual experiences; can use if…then thinking  Abstract Logic  Potential for mature moral reasoning

Piaget’s core belief: Children are active thinkers, using their developing schemas and abilities to gain new information and figure things out

 Cognitive development is continuous; new abilities don’t simply “pop up” when a child reaches a certain age  Children understand far more than Piaget gave them credit for  Cognitive development depends on the child’s education and culture What we know now

How do our cognitive abilities develop? Process of maturation

One more test for conservation….

Imagine that you have a cup of coffee and a cup of milk, with equal amounts of liquid in each cup. You transfer a large spoonful of milk from the cup of milk to the cup of coffee, stirring until the milk is mixed thoroughly and evenly with the coffee. Then you transfer exactly the same amount of the mixture From the coffee cup back to the milk cup. Which statement is TRUE? 1. There is more milk in the coffee cup than coffee in the milk cup. 2. There is more coffee in the milk cup than milk in the coffee cup. 3. The amount of milk in the coffee cup is the same as the amount of coffee in the milk cup. 4. There is no way to know.