1. PSYC 206
Lifespan Development
Aylin Küntay

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 (about 25 cm.)
Changes in body proportions

4. Body Proportions
70% of adult size
25% of height
12% of height

5. Musculoskeletal System
Bones ossify (harden)
Hands and wrist
Increase in muscle mass, length and thickness.
Continues till late adolescence
Sex difference in physical growth (e.g., skeletal development)
20 weeks gestation: 3 weeks more advanced
Birth: 4-6 weeks more mature
Puberty: 2 years more advanced

6. Brain Development Growth of different brain areas
Areas functioning together
Cerebral cortex development
length and degree of branching of neurons approach adult status by the end of infancy
Increased myelination of neurons
Pace then becomes slower

7. Brain Development Development of prefrontal cortex
Voluntary behavior and regulation
Attentional capacity increases
New way of functioning at 7-9 months of age
inhibition
Myelination and growth of language-related areas
frontal lobe and temporal lobe

8. Brain Development Increased synchrony among the brain areas
Myelination of neurons between prefrontal cortex, frontal lobes and brainstem
cognition and emotion
As a result,
More systematic problem solving
Voluntary control of behavior
Acquisition of language

9. Brain and Experience Effects of prolonged deprivation
Example: Romanian orphans
Importance of first 6 months
Effects of lack of experience
Periods of plasticity: 24 months
Considerable development in 6-24 months
Experience-expectant and experience-dependent neural connections
Significant deficits in areas in limbic system.

10. Brain and Experience Effects of prolonged deprivation/early trauma
Limbic system (emotional brain)
emotion and motivation
Vulnerability to high stress
paralimbic system dysfunction: psychopathy (lack of empathy, guilt or remorse, shallow affect and behavioral characteristics such as impulsivity, poor behavioral control) 10

11. Motor Development Development between 3 and 24 months:
Fine and Gross Motor Skills
Gross Motor Skills
Fine Motor Skills:
Involve the development and coordination of small muscles
Reaching and grasping, manual dexterity

12. Major Milestones

13. Reaching and Grasping Exploration becomes more refined with increased reaching and grasping.

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

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

16. Progression of Locomotion
Role of maturation:

17. Gross Motor Skills Crawling By 8 to 10 months Experience to move
Wariness of heights
Visual Cliff (Campos et al., 1992)
Special aparatus that gives the illusion of a dangerous drop-off

18. Control of Elimination
Maturation of sensory pathways
From reflex to control
Must learn to associate sensory signals with the need to eliminate.
When to “hold it”: maturation of sensory pathways

19. Cognitive Development: The Great Debate
When does conceptual understanding begin?
Representational thinking:
thinking about objects and people that are not immediately present.
Forming mental images
Reasoning about them
Piaget’s explanation
Other developmentalists’ explanation

20. Can Önalan-Office Hours
Midterm
Today, November 6, 12:30-14
SOS-Z 33

21. Piaget’s Stage Theory
Sensorimotor intelligence at birth: understanding the world through one’s own actions and perceptions
Sensorimotor vs. conceptual intelligence
Representational thinking
begins around 18 months (as a result of sensorymotor knowledge)
Acquisition of knowledge
Motor actions, directed at environment, guided by senses

22. Alternative Explanation
Representational thinking begins very early
The conceptual system develops separately from the sensorimotor system
Closely related but separated systems

23. 23

24. Sensorimotor Substages

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

26. 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 26

27. Substage 6: Symbolic Representation
symbolic play: pretent (fantasy) play
Related with theory of mind (ToM)
deferred imitation: imitation of actions observed in the past
Important for learning
language: words stand for people, objects, and events 27

28. 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

29. Piaget’s Theory Object Permanence
Out of sight does not mean out of existence
Active searching for the absent object shows object permanence: starts at 8 months 29

30. Object Permanence
Infant fails to track the motion of toy train when it enters the tunnel
Infant shows no surprise when the train is a different color or shape

31. Piaget’s Theory Representational competence
Forming mental images
Reasoning about them
Mature at substage 6 (late in 2nd year).
A-not-B Error:
The task requires making mental operations with the mental representation
common mistake till 12 months 31

32. A-not-B Error:
when the child looks in location A, where the object had been previously found, even though the child just observed the object hidden at location B.
Shows that baby cannot reason systemetically about the object

33. Alternative Explanation
Infants are capable to represent objects they cannot see. There are performance problems
tendency to perseverate: repeating the same movement or same successful strategy.
Ex: babies may look at location B but reach toward location A. They cannot modify their movement
memory limitations: A-not-B task imposes demands on memory system. Success with 7.5 month old babies if not prevented to reach immediately 33

34. 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”
Child looks longer at events that violate expectations
Result: Infants are capable of representation as young as 2 ½ months 34

35. Violation of Expectations 35

36. Eye tracking research with infants

37. Other Physical Laws Violation of expectations method
Initial grasp of various physical laws
Example: law of gravity 37

38. Violations of Expectations
Infants stare longer at a block remaining suspended in air 38

39. 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 39

40. Counting 40

41. Categorization Ability to form categories As early as 3 months
Support from brain studies:
Changes in brain activity: electrical activity of brain suggests that basic neurological processes have evolved that support early categorization 41

42. Eimas and Quinn study (1994)
Categorization
Trial 1
Trial 2
Test Trial
Eimas and Quinn study (1994) 42

43. Categorization Ability to form categories
Study of “generalized imitation” with 9-11-month old babies 43

44. Changes in Categorization
Do children rely primarily on perceptual similarities? (sensorimotor intelligence)
Study conducted with month-olds.
Birds with outstretched wings and airplanes had perceptual similarities.
Shift from perceptual cues to more general object features 44

45. The Growth of Attention and Memory
Significance of attention and memory
Each plays a role in previously discussed developments 45

46. 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 (visual fixation)
Sustained Attention: cognitive processing and paying attention. important for learning. (visual attention)
Attention Termination: breaks contact
Distinguished by changes in heart rate 46

47. Attention Processing information takes time
Younger children need more time to process
Show a picture of a puppy
Attention and IQ:
Staring longer at simple patterns
Attention to simple vs. complex stimuli
Computer generated geometric patterns vs. Sesame street 47

48. Memory Development of procedural memory
Time to forget procedure: kicking to start a mobile
2 months: 1-2 days
6 months: 2 weeks
End of the 1st year: Shift from relying on implicit memory (observing another shake the mobile) to explicit memory. 48

49. Memory 6-18 month old infants
How to make a train move by pressing a lever
Steady increase

50. 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. 50 50 50