Infant Brain Development

The Unfinished Brain

The Infinite Array

The brain and nervous system contain billions of interconnected neurons. Neurons form trillions of connections and the pathways. The number and organization of these connections influence everything, from the ability to recognize letters to the maintenance of relationships.

Making Connections
Neurons develop rapidly before birth. At birth, infants have all, or most, of the brain cells they will ever have. Connections or "wiring" between these cells is incomplete - connections have to be built. Between birth and 8 months synapses form rapidly. One neuron can connect with 15,000 other neurons. In the first 3 months of life, the synapses multiply more than 20 times. At 3 months, the baby has more than 1,000 trillion synapses.

Brain Plasticity in Early Childhood

Connections are made permanent from early infancy to early childhood As we mature, the brain physically changes due to outside experiences. The first three years see the most rapid changes due to the bombardment of experience (everything is new!). At this time, the brain is most flexible and prepared to learn. (plasticity)

Pruning
Connections that are not used are removed by "pruning" After the first birthday, pruning occurs more quickly. A 3-year-old child has twice as many connections as an adult. By 10 years, a child has nearly 500 trillion synapses, which is the same as the average adult.

Experience Builds Connections

Early childhood experiences physically determine how the brain is "wired." Early sensory experiences create new synapses. Repetition of experiences strengthen them. The number of connections can go up or down by 25 % or more, depending on the enrichment of the environment. Those synapses that aren't used are pruned.

Window of Opportunity
At about age 10, the brain begins to dramatically prune extra connections and make order of the tangled circuitry of the brain. Pruning occurs for about 12 years but the brain maintains flexibility for future learning New synapses grow throughout life Adults continue to learn, but they do not master new skills so quickly Learning language is an example of this principle.

Language Acquisition
At 3 months the brain has the potential to distinguish several hundred spoken sounds. Over the next few months the brain organizes itself to recognize only the sounds it hears. During early childhood the brain retains plasticity for this information
The ability to discriminate sounds it has discarded

After age ten, this plasticity is lost This is why young children can easily learn foreign languages accent-free.
Older children & adults can still learn language, but more effort is required.

Genetics & Environment Interact

There is mounting evidence that early experiences can dramatically alter the way genes are expressed in the developing brain.

Sensory Stimulation
Touch, sound, sight, taste, smell, all build connections . Some researchers, believe "the number of words an infant hears each day is the single most important predictor of later intelligence, school success, and social competence." Touch also is key to brain development
Research on infant massage suggests that in preemies, massage causes faster growth and development.

Security
The most fundamental task of an infant is to learn how to meet his needs If adults respond predictably to his cries and provide for his needs, the infant feels secure.
He then focuses his attention on exploring, allowing his brain to develop.

If his needs are met only sporadically, the infant will focus his energies on meeting his needs.
He will have more and more difficulty interacting with people and objects in his environment His brain will shut out the stimulation it needs to develop healthy cognitive and social skills.

Deprivation
Infants in environmentally deprived facilities have brains smaller than those of children who grow up in sensually rich environments Studies of over 1,000 abused and neglected children found that children who were rarely touched or spoken to had brains 20-30% smaller than most children their age. In some cases the brains of children from deprived environments resemble the brains of Alzheimer's patients. Animals raised in zoos have brains that are 2030% smaller than animals raised in the wild.

Trauma
Childhood trauma can directly affect the way the brain functions. Traumatized children continue to show physical symptoms of fear even in the absence of threatening stimuli
have high resting heart rates, high levels of stress hormones in their blood, and problems sleeping suggests that their brains are in a permanent state of "high alert".

These children tend to develop emotional, behavioral and learning problems.

The Role of Cortisol

Studies examined the effect of the stress hormone, cortisol, on brain development. Amount of cortisol in the body can be measured in the saliva allowing testing on infants & children. If levels of cortisol are high, the heart rate, digestive system and ability to think are affected. At birth, the human adrenocortical system is highly responsive to stimulation.

Cortisol & Brain Development

The brain is the major target of cortisol. Frequent and prolonged exposure to elevated cortisol may affect the development of brain areas involved in memory, negative emotions, and attention regulation. High cortisol levels in preschool children coincide with poor "effort control" and selfregulatory competencies.

Learning to Cope With Stress

Research on neural plasticity demonstrates that experience shapes the developing brain Early experiences affect later emotional, behavioral and hormonal stress reactivity. This is accomplished by preventing elevations in cortisol in reaction to threatening and mildly painful events. A sense of control is the key factor in modulating cortisol response to potentially threatening o painful events.
The presence of a trusted caregiver during stress reduces the production of cortisol.

Sleep
There is a strong correlation between the amount of sleep a child gets and normal brain development. The brain needs a period of deep, uninterrupted, physiological rest Children between birth and age twelve who do not receive enough sleep do poorly on extended performance testing, creativity and higher-level problem solving. May also relate to cortisol levels

The Basis of Learning

The past decade has seen a massive amount of research on infant brain development & learning Babies know more than we once thought

A Summary of Infant Skills

2-day-old infants recognize their mother's voice and prefer it over other sounds. 3-month-olds can discriminate primary colors, & prefer red & yellow over blue & green. 6-month-olds recognize a mobile 2 weeks after being exposed to it for 2, 15-min. intervals. 7-month-olds can match angry or happy facial expressions with the corresponding vocal expression. 9-month-olds will imitate simple actions which they see being performed on objects, one week later.

Formation of Memory
Two types of memory: (Restak) Wide sense" memory with acquired knowledge.
does not associate time or place

Strict sense memory

capable of association with time or place

Wide Sense Memory

Wide sense' memory seems to be present from birth. Infant can learn, modify reactions, and exhibit surprise when something new occurs We just know something Might appear to be innate Located in part of the brain that develops early.

Conditioned Learning
Newborns can be taught via conditioning operant conditioning is one type of associative learning in which there is a contingency between the response and the reinforcer. "Place a pair of earphones on a newborn baby and that baby will soon learn to suck in a pattern so as to hear her mother's voice over the earphones . . .

True Memory
Memory in the "strict sense" comes into being with the development of higher levels of the brain. The amygdala and frontal lobes are important in memory They develop relatively late in infancy, at about ten months of age.

Memory & Learning

Sound perception develops first and fastest Researchsearch by Jusczyk et al. at Johns Hopkins investigated infants' long-term memory for the sound patterns of words. This study shows that infants have a previously unknown type of unconscious memory for detailed sound patterns Even if infants don't understand what they hear, "their nervous system is paying attention."

The Research
Researchers studied 8-month-old infants over the course of 10 visits in 2 weeks. They played them a half-hour audio tape of children's stories. Two weeks after the last visit, the infants were brought to the lab. Researchers read them lists of words, some of which came from the stories Mixed in were foils that sounded similar but had not been mentioned in the stories. Story words kept the infants' attention about 15% longer than the foils, an indication that the infants remembered the story words. A control group of infants that had never heard the stories paid equal attention to words of either list.

Learning Language is Incremental

The same researchers found that infants first learn to distinguish sound patterns of their native languages. This ability develops faster than any other aspect of language. Infants listened longer to their own names than to any other name, even the ones with similar sound patterns.

Infant Brain Makes Sense of Language

A French study found that 3-month-old babies respond to spoken sentences Used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) visualize infants' reactions to speech. Measured brain activity as they spoke "sense" and "nonsense" to the 2- and 3-month-olds. The sense consisted of short French sentences; the nonsense of the same sentences, recorded and played back in reverse. Earlier studies found infants just 4 days old could distinguish between their native language and a foreign language.

The Language Spurt

At about 18 months there is a sudden dramatic increase in word use Vocabulary increases to about 100 words and quickly expands This change, called the naming explosion or vocabulary spurt, is a key stage in development Traditionally explained as the result of progressions in conceptual development Woodward et al at the University of Chicago investigated this phenomenon Showed that children comprehend words equally well at 13 months, when they use just five to ten words

The Research
They exposed 13- and 18-month-old infants to unfamiliar objects like a big plastic paper clip and a plastic strainer Called one of them by a made-up name, toma. One person repeated the word nine times in different situations Another person, unaware which object was the toma tested the child's comprehension through a play activity Presented two objects on a tray and asked the child to 'put the toma in the box. Found little difference in rates of word learning and retention between the two groups of infants.

Categorizing
Babies can also categorize words A study from Johns Hopkins: "New findings suggest that infants as young as 9 months use words to begin shaping their view of the world, arranging objects into mental categories, in a process previously associated more with preschoolers than with mere babes."

Development of Reasoning Skills

Babies know more than we believe Children begin to develop reasoning skills as young as seven months of age. Study conducted at the University of Chicago on seven-month-old babies to assess their reasoning skills Used visual habituation to determine infant understanding of the actions of inanimate objects. Measured their attention span to different events.

The Research Study

The longer a baby watches, the more likely he is trying to understand something unexpected The first test - babies watch a videotape of an object that moves behind a screen blocking the babies' view of the action. Another object moves off the screen after the first object enters. The second test - the screen is removed to show the two objects colliding or not colliding before the second object moves.

Results
Babies watch longer when objects don t collide Researchers concluded that they are surprised because it violates a principle they have learned: for objects to cause other objects to move, they must touch each other. If babies are surprised when humans move without touching, that would indicate that they expect humans and objects to react to each other in the same way. The findings support the conclusion that by seven months, infants differentiate between people and objects in their reasoning about simple causal sequences