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 Sensitive periods in Brain development

o Children born with cataracts and orphanage children
o Appropriate stimulation
 Experience expectant brain growth: the young
brain’s rapidly developing organization, which depends
on ordinary experiences—opportunities to see and touch
objects, to hear language and other sounds, and to
move about and explore the environment.
 Experience dependent brain growth :consists of
additional grown and refinement of established brain
structures as a result of specific learning experiences
that vary widely across individuals and cultures.
 Changing states of arousal
o Affected by the social environment

Influences on Early physical Growth

 Heredity
o Heredity is important in physical growth
 Nutrition
o Crucial for development in the first two years
o Breastfeeding versus bottle-feeding
 Breast milk is ideally suited to their needs
 Breastfed babies in poverty stricken regions of the
world are much less likely to be malnourished
 Small advantage in intelligence test performance for
children and adolescents who were breastfed.
o Are chubby babies at risk for later overweight and obesity?
Infants and toddlers can eat nutritious food freely
without risk of becoming overweight.
 But recent evidence does indicate a strengthening
relationship between rapid weight gain in infancy and
later obesity
o Malnutrition
 Marasmus : disease usually appearing in the first year
of life, caused by a diet low in all essential nutrients,
that leads to a wasted condition of the body
 Kwashiorkor : a disease caused by a diet low in
protein that usually appears after weaning, with
symptoms including an enlarged belly, swollen feet, hair
loss, skin rash, and irritable, listless behavior.
 Learning and behavior are seriously affected.
o Emotional Well-being
 Nonorganic failure to thrive : growth disorder
resulting form lack of parental love(affection and
stimulation), is usually present by 18 months of age

Learning Capacities
 Classical Conditioning
o Classical conditioning: a form of learning that involves
associating a neutral stimulus with a stimulus that leads to a
reflexive response.
o Unconditioned stimulus (UCS) : leads to a reflexive
response
o Unconditioned response(UCR): reflexive response that is
produced by an unconditioned stimulus
o UCS  UCR
o Neutral stimulus + UCS  UCR
o CS  CR
o Conditioned stimulus(CS) : a neutral stimulus that through
paring with an unconditioned stimulus, leads to a new
response
o Conditioned response(CR) : an originally reflexive
response that is produced by a conditioned stimulus
o Young infants can be classically conditioned most easily when
the association between two stimuli has survival value.
o After age 6 months, fear is easy to condition
 Operant Conditioning
 o Operant Conditioning : a form of learning in which a
spontaneous behavior is followed by a stimulus that
influences the probability that the behavior will occur again.
o Reinforcer: a stimulus that increases the occurrence of a
response
o Punishment : removal of a desirable stimulus of a desirable
stimulus or presentation of an unpleasant stimulus , which
decreases the occurrence of a response
 Habituation
o Habituation : a gradual reduction in the strength of a
response due to repetitive stimulation.
o Recovery: following habituation, an increase in
responsiveness to anew stimulus
o Recovery to a new stimulus, or novelty preference, assesses
infants’ recent memory.
 Imitation
o Imitation : learning by copying the behavior of another
person.
o Newborns also have a primitive ability to imitate adults’ facial
expressions and gestures.
o Newborns imitation as a voluntary capacity is controversial

Motor Development
 The sequence of Motor Development
o In general, motor development follows the cephalocaudal and
proximodistal trends, although some milestones deviate
sharply from these patterns.
 Motor Skills as dynamic systems:
o Dynamic systems theory of motor development : a
theory that views new motor skills as reorganizations of
previously mastered skills, which lead to more effective ways
of exploring and controlling the environment. Each new kill is
a joint product of central nervous system development, the
body’s movement possibilities, the child’s goals, and
environmental supports for the skill.
 o According to dynamic systems theory of motor development,
mastery of motor skills involves acquiring increasingly
complex systems of action
o Each new skill is a joint product of the following factors
 Central nervous system development
 The body’s movement capacities
 The goals the child has in mind
 Environmental supports for the skill
 Dynamic motor systems in action
 Cultural variations in motor development
o Movement opportunities and a stimulating environment
profoundly affect motor development, as shown by research
on infants reared in deprived institutions.
o Cultural values and child-rearing customs contribute to the
emergence and refinement of early motor skills
 Fine motor development: reaching and grasping
o Presearching : the poorly coordinate, primitive reaching
movement s of newborn babies.
o During the first year, infants perfect their reaching and
grasping.
o The poorly coordinated prereaching of the newborn period
drops out.
o As depth perception and control of body posture and of arm
and hand movements improve, reaching becomes more
flexible and accurate, and the clumsy ulnar grasp is
transformed into refined pincer grasp by the end of he first
year
o Ulnar grasp :the clumsy grasp of the young infant, in which
the fingers close against the palm
o Pincer grasp : the well coordinated grasp that emerges at
the end of the first year, involving thumb and index finger
opposition
 Bowel and Bladder
o Young children are not physically and psychologically ready
for toilet training until the months following their second
birthday.
 o Effective training techniques include regular toileting routines,
gentle encouragement and praise

Perceptual development
 Hearing
o Over the first year, infants organize sounds into complex
pattern and readily detect sound regularities that facilitate
later language learning.
o They show a preference for listening to human speech over
nonspeech, and they gradually become more responsive to
the sounds of their own language and use their remarkable
ability to analyze the speech stream to detect meaningful
units of speech.
 Vision
o Rapid maturation of the eye and visual centers in the cerebral
cortex supports the development of focusing, color
discrimination and visual acuity during the first few months.
o The ability to scan the environment and track moving objects
also improves.
o Depth perception
 Research on depth perception reveals that
responsiveness to motion develops first, followed by
sensitivity to binoclular and then to pictorial depth cues.
 Experience in crawling enhances depth perception and
other aspects of three dimensional understanding.
 Babies must undergo new learning about depth as they
master new postures.
o Pattern Perception
 Contrast sensitivity accounts for infants’ early pattern
preferences.
 Contrast Sensitivity : A general principle accounting
for early pattern preferences, which states that if babies
can detect a difference in contrast between two or more
patterns, they will prefer the one with more contrast.
 At they thoroughly explore internal features of a pattern
and start to detect pattern organization.
  Over time, they discriminate increasingly complex and
meaningful patterns
 Newborns prefer to look at photos and simplified
drawings of faces, but whether they have a built in
tendency to orient toward human faces is a matter of
dispute.
 Newborns are sensitive to the broad outlines of their
mother’s faces; at 2 months, they recognize and prefer
her facial features.
 Around 3 months, they make fine distinctions between
the features of different faces.
 From 5 months on they perceive emotional expressions
as meaningful wholes.
 Object perception
o Size and shape constancy
At birth, size and shape constancy help babies build a
coherent world of objects.
 Size Constancy : perception of object’s size as the
same, despite changes in the size of its retinal image.
 Shape Constancy : perception of an object’s shape as
he same, despite changes in the shape projected on the
retina.
 At first, infants depend on motion and spatial
arrangement to identify objects.
 After 4 months of age, they rely increasingly on other
features, such as distinct shape, color, and texture.
o Perception of Object identity
 At 4 months, infants first perceive the path of a ball
moving back and forth behind a screen as continuous
 Between 4 and 5 months, they can monitor increasingly
intricate paths of objects
o Intermodal perception
 Intermodal perception : integration of simultaneous
stimulation form more than one sensory system,
resulting in perception of such input as an integrated
whole
  Amodal Sensory Properties : Information that
overlaps two or more sensory systems, such as
common rate, rhythm and duration in visual and
auditory input.
 From the start, infants are capable of intermodal
perception, quickly combining information across
sensory modalities, often after a single exposure to a
new situation.
 Detection of amodal sensory properties, such as
common rate rhythm, duration, and intensity, may
provide the basis for detecting many intermodal
matches
 Intermodal sensitivity facilitates processing of both the
physical and social worlds.
 And when provided with intermodal stimulation, babies
show faster learning
o Understanding Perceptual Development
 According to differentiation theory, perceptual
development is a matter of detecting increasingly fine
grained invariant features in a constantly changing
perceptual world.
 Perceptual differentiation is guided by discovery of
affordances—the action possibilities that a situation
offers the individual
 Differentiation Theory : The view that perceptual
development involves the detection of increasingly fine-
grained, invariant features in the environment
 Affordances: the action possibilities that a situation
offers an organism with certain motor capabilities
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Chapter 6. Cognitive Development in Infancy and Toddlerhood
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