1. Agenda To Get: To Do: Handout for guided notes
Turn in questions from last class (if not already completed)
Lecture – Infancy and Childhood development
Video – Human Spark

2. Opener
At what age is most of the ground work set for a child’s future development?
What two things greatly influence a person’s ability to be happy, healthy and successful later in life?
Name something you can do to make yourself happy/healthy regardless of upbringing…

3. Infancy and Childhood Study of Development
Developmental Psychology – study of how people grow and change throughout the life span – from conception, through infancy, childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, and until death
-experiences affect people as adolescents and adults
-learn what causes and how to treat developmental problems
-study stages as well as types of development (physical, social and/or cognitive)
-longitudinal or cross-section
-how heredity and environmental factors affect development
-study if development is gradual or in stages

4. Roles of Nature and Nurture
-Behavior is biologically programmed as long as a child receives adequate nutrition and social experience
Maturation – automatic and sequential process of development that results from genetic signals
Critical Period – point in development during which a person or animal is best suited to learn a particular skill or behavior pattern (language acquisition)
Key to physical and motor development

5. Stages Versus Continuity Debate
Stages – developing in distinct levels (stairs) with noticeable and dramatic changes – walking vs. crawling
Continuity – development is gradual (incline) can occur unnoticed – addition of new words to a child’s vocabulary

6. Physical Development
Height and weight increase with time and nourishment
Reflex – involuntary reaction/responses to stimuli– fade with growth or are retained, like swallowing and breathing, others are lost or replaced by motor and perceptual development

7. Height and Weight
– greatest period of growth is in utero – nearly microscopic to 20 inches, a growth rate of about a billion times in 9 months!
Infancy – double birth weight in 5 months, triple in a year, add 10 inches to height
Childhood – 2-adolescence – add 2-3 inches and 4-6 pounds each year.

8. Motor Development
Newborn’s random movements replaced by purposeful motor activity
Varies among infants and cultures
American babies – more time in cribs (walk at 12 months)
Ugandan babies – more time vertical with parent (walk at 10 months)

10. Reflexes
Essential to survival for infants – sucking, rooting, swallowing to get nourishment right after birth
React to pain, loud noises (startle reflex), elimination of waste (keep that covered up!)

11. Perceptual Development
Months in warm, wet, dark environment – suddenly all senses get stimulated at once
Perceptual development creates understanding of outside world – stimulates brain activity and development (occipital lobe)
Visual Perception - Infants preprogrammed to prefer complex patterns (5-10 weeks) then as they age, human faces (15-20 weeks) – combination of nature/nurture
Question:
What was the Visual Cliff Experiment originally created to study? What do researchers now think it is a better test of?
Hearing is much better developed early on…

12. The Human Spark Viewing Questions
velchild/the-developing-child/
Scroll down on page to get video links for questions
Language Error and Brain Activity
the-brain-in-action/