1. PSYC 206
Lifespan Development
Bilge Yagmurlu

2. Chapter Overview Physical Growth Brain Development Motor Development
Cognitive Development
Conceptual Development
The Growth of Attention and Memory

3. Physical Growth During the first year, babies:
Triple in weight
Grow about 10 inches
Changes in body proportions

4. Body Proportions
25%
12%

5. Musculoskeletal System
Bones ossify (harden)
Increase in muscle mass, length and thickness.
Sex difference in physical growth (e.g., skeletal development)

6. Brain Development Cerebral cortex development
Increased myelination of neurons
Development of prefrontal cortex
Myelination and growth of language-related areas
Attentional capacity increases
Increased synchrony among the brain areas

7. Brain and Behavior
Neural development: length and degree of branching of neurons approach adult status by the end of infancy
Myelination of neurons between prefrontal cortex, frontal lobes and brainstem

8. Brain and Experience Effects of prolonged deprivation
Example: Romanian orphans
Importance of first 6 months
Effects of lack of experience
Experience-expectant and experience-dependent neural connections

9. Development of the Brain
To what extent does experience or the lack of it enhance or impede brain development and function?
Experience-expectant process
Species-universal experiences are required for fine-tuning neural connections. When expected experiences lack in sensitive periods, then the brain will fail to develop normally
Experience-dependent process
Have evolved to allow the organism to take advantage of new and changing information in the environment.

10. Brain and Experience Effects of prolonged deprivation
Example: Romanian orphans
Limbic system
Vulnerability to high stress levels 10

11. Motor Development Development between 3 and 24 months:
Fine Motor Skills
Gross Motor Skills

12. Fine Motor Skills Fine Motor Skills: Reaching and grasping
Involve the development and coordination of small muscles
Reaching and grasping
Manual dexterity

13. Major Milestones

14. Reaching and Grasping

15. Fine Motor Skills By age 2, feed and dress themselves turn book pages
cut paper
string beads

16. Gross Motor Skills Gross Motor Skills:
Involve the large muscles of the body and make locomotion possible

17. Progression of Locomotion

18. Gross Motor Skills Crawling By 8 to 10 months Wariness of heights
Special aparatus that gives the illusion of a dangerous drop-off

19. Control of Elimination
Maturation of sensory pathways
From reflex to control
Must learn to associate sensory signals with the need to eliminate.

20. Cognitive Development: The Great Debate
When does conceptual understanding begin?
Piaget’s explanation
Other developmentalists’ explanation

21. Piaget’s Stage Theory
Sensorimotor intelligence at birth: understanding the world through one’s own actions and perceptions
Representational thinking begins around 18 months
Acquisition of knowledge

22. Alternative Explanation
Representational thinking begins as early as birth
The conceptual system develops separately from the sensorimotor system

23. Sensorimotor Substages

24. Sensorimotor Substages
Substage 6: Beginning of Symbolic Representation
18 to 24 months
Basing their actions on representations
Stage of Representation and Symbolizing: the child uses mental images that can represent actions that are not actually occurring and things not actually present
the child uses images, words and actions to stand for objects
Important for problem solving, symbolic play, deferred imitation, and the use of language 24

25. Problem Solving
Infant in substage 5 carries out deliberate problem solving, but still relies principally on trial and error
Infant in substage 6 pictures a series of events in her mind before acting (i.e., via inference)

26. Conceptual Development
Object Permanence
The understanding that objects maintain their identities when they change location, and ordinarily continue to exist when out of sight.
The existence of other objects is fundamentally independent of our psychological contact, that is, perception of and interaction with the object

27. Piaget’s Theory Object Permanence
Out of sight does not mean out of existence 27

28. Object Permanence

29. Piaget’s Theory Object Permanence Active searching starts at 8 months
A-not-B Error: when the child looks in place A, where the object had been previously found, even though the child just observed the object hidden at location B. 29

30. Alternative Explanation
Infants are capable to represent objects they cannot see. There are performance problems
tendency to perseverate:
memory limitations:
Success with 7.5 month old babies if not prevented to reach immediately 30

31. Alternative Research Methods
Violation of Expectations Method
Habituate babies to a particular event:
Habituation: the infant forms associations and develops specific expectations
Then present two variants of the event
“possible” under normal circumstances
“impossible” 31

32. Violation of Expectations 32

33. Other Physical Laws Violation of expectations method
Initial grasp of various physical laws
Example: law of gravity 33

34. Violations of Expectations34

35. Reasoning about Objects
Challenges to Piaget’s view of cognitive development: infants cannot reason about objects even if they are aware of their physical properties
Counting
Categorization 35

36. Counting 36

37. Categorization Ability to form categories As early as three months
Support from brain studies:
electrical activity of brain suggests that basic neurological processes that support early categorization have evolved 37

38. Eimas and Quinn study (1994)
Categorization
Trial 1
Trial 2
Test Trial
Eimas and Quinn study (1994) 38

39. Categorization Ability to form categories
Study of “generalized imitation” with 9-11-month old babies 39

40. Categorization Changes in categorization abilities
Study conducted with month-olds.
Birds with outstretched wings and airplanes had perceptual similarities. 40

41. The Growth of Attention and Memory
Significance of attention and memory
Each plays a role in previously discussed developments 41

42. The Process of Attention
Four distinct phases:
Stimulus-Detection Reflex: awareness of some change in the environment
Stimulus Orienting: attention becomes fixed on the stimulus
Sustained Attention: cognitive processing and paying attention (important for learning)
Attention Termination: breaks contact 42

43. Attention Processing information takes time
Younger children need more time to process
Show a picture of a puppy
Attention and IQ
Attention to simple vs. complex stimuli
Sesame street vs. computer generated geometric patterns 43

44. Memory Development of procedural memory
Time to forget procedure: kicking to start a mobile
Shift from relying on implicit memory to explicit memory 44

45. Memory Recognizing what has been experienced before Implicit Memory:
Explicit Memory:
Recalling absent objects and events without a reminder. Requires generating a representation for something that is not present to the senses. 45