Infancyand

Childhood

PhysicalDevelopmentREVIEW

Maturation: biological growthprocesses 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, predictableprocess of development

specific times during developmentwhen 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?

CognitiveDevelopmen

t

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 througha series of stages

What assumptions would you make about this animal?

Schemas: a concept or framework thatorganizes and interprets information

Doggie! Big doggie!X

Pony!

Piaget’sExperiments

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 theirunderstanding of the world from

interactions with it.

Children’s minds go through bursts of changefollowed by stability as they move from one

level to the next

Stage Typical Age Description New Developments

Sensorimotor Birth to nearly 2 years

Experience the world through senses and actions (looking, hearing, touching, mouthing and grasping)

Object Permanence Stranger Anxiety

Preoperational 2 to about 6 or 7 years

Representing things with words and images; using intuitive reasoning rather than logical reasoning

Pretend Play Egocentrism Begin forming atheory of 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

Reasoning abstractly; no longer limited to concrete reasoning based on actual experiences; can use if…then thinking

Abstract Logic Potential formature moralreasoning

Piaget’s core belief:

Children are active thinkers,using their developing schemas andabilities 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 thanPiaget gave them credit for

Cognitive development depends on thechild’s education and culture

What we know now

How do our cognitive abilities

develop?

Process of maturation

One more test forconservation….

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.