Wednesday, May 13th, 2020 Child Development 2AA3

Prenatal Cont.
Neural Development
 Dendrites: propagate the
electrochemical signal from other
neural cells
 Information enters the dendrite through
neurotransmitters, message is then
relayed.

 Myelin sheath is made of glia cells – it

is a fatty sheath that insulates neuron.
Allows for information to translate
rapidly
 At axon terminal is where we release neurotransmitters for the next axon to pick up the
signal- neurotransmitters released into the synapse.

 Cerebral cortex is made of 10 billion neurons

 Two hemispheres connected by the corpus callosum
 Frontal lobe is responsible for planning and personality
 Amygdala controls fear emotion
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 Neuron proliferation (creation of new neurons) occurs prenatally and postnatally

 Most neurons are present by 7 months old
 After birth there is a large spurt of glial cell growth – this results in more myelination
and faster transmission of information
 Synaptogenesis is the production of more connections – brain increases in size rapidly
after birth due to new existing neurons and more connections
 Prenatally and postnatally we are seeing neural migration – neurons migrate to their
final position within the brain. Each part of the brain needs to have a sufficient number
of neurons
 Neuron migration occurs within the first two years
 Post 2 years the connections start to decrease
 In two ways: programmed neuronal death, synaptic pruning
 Programmed neuronal death: immature neurons are eliminated surrounding
new synapses
 Synaptic pruning: Underused axons and dendrites are eliminated – allows for increased
efficiency, speed, and complexity. Makes room for new connections to form throughout
a child’s life
 Underused connections are the first to go – “use it or lose it”, need to use pathways to
keep them
 There is a need for stimulation within the first 2 years
 Plasticity: children are thought to have plastic brains because connections are still
being pruned and also make connections more easily – children can recover from
traumatic brain injuries and surgeries without long-term effects

Neural development
Experience-expectant processes:
 experiences that are expected in normal environments – visual input, language,
nutrition, care and touch (most babies get these)
 When basic needs are not met – impairments associated with these needs occurs.
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 Example; cataracts are not removed until later in life then their visual acuity is stressed
and they can develop blindness
 Example: Genie had little experience with language, lack of care, not the best nutrition –
suffered in brain development and social development

Experience-dependent processes
 Experiences that are unique to individuals
 Example; brain development of children who grow up in tribes have specialized brain
connections in the motor cortex for hunting and fishing
 But in north America motor cortex is specialized in fine motor
 Its whatever we are exposed to

Infancy
 The first year of life

Looking at these types of development

 Perceptual development
 Motor development
 Cognitive development
 Social-emotional development
 Language development

Perceptual

3 months
 babies have a full range of colour
 By age 1 children have full adult vision
 Visual acuity: smallest pattern that can be
distinguished independently – present babies with two different stimuli – babies will
more often look at the pattern stimuli (because more stimulating). We can tell this if
they are looking longer and as the lines get narrower they baby will not be able to
distinguish the differences between the grey and patterned boxes
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 Thinner the stripes the better the acuity

4 months:
 Moving objects test: child use cues to tell items that move together are a part of the
same object (can tell the top and bottom of pencil move together,)

 If you were to take the box away and replace with a full pencil – the baby will look at the
stimuli that they are surprised by/not habituated with

 Color constancy: If different ends of object are different colours – baby distinguishes
they might not belong to the same object
 Size constancy: understand that the car is the same object regardless of distance from
retina
 Before 4 months they might’ve though it was two different objects

 If baby is habituated to object they would not stare at it as long

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Depth perception:
 Visual cliff: attempting to get the baby to crawl along the glass – babies who are
crawling and will not go over visual cliff, displays that they understand depth
 box with pattern on it. Glass floor, drop beneath glass with same pattern. Babies need to
crawl across the glass where depth is perceived. Babies that are crawling will not go over
the visual cliff. Indicates they do understand depth
 When you place a baby on the deep end of the visual cliff at 1.5 months, heart
 rate will decelerate. This occurs when something unexpected happens. Indicates
 babies understand depth at as young as 1.5 months
 HR will decelerate for a baby when something unexpected happens at age month
and a half – this shows they understand depth, but not fear it
 If you put a crawling baby around 7 months on deep end of visual cliff – HR will
accelerate and baby is fearing depth
 If you put a crawling baby around 7mo on deep end then heart will accelerate
 Occurs when a baby is scared
 Babies understand depth at 1.5 months but don’t understand to fear it until around
7months when they learn to fear heights
 When they are able to explore environment, they are able to learn to fear heights

 Kinetic cues: motion used to estimate depth – example is visual expansion – apparent in
the first few weeks of life
 Visual expansion: as object moves closer, it fills greater proportion of the retina, baby
understands depth of object is changing
 Fears object coming closer to them and might hit them in the face. this is a bit diff from
size constancy b/c size constancy has a different goal (baby is determining what
elements of the object is a part of the object) while visual expansion is used to estimate
depth
 Motion parallax: nearby objects move across visual field faster than those at a distance
– babies understand this in the first couple weeks of life

Babies have an attraction to objects that resemble faces:

 Adaptive characteristic to be attracted to people

 Will look at the objects that resemble eyes and a mouth – will fine tune this recognition
to people available in their environment
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 More likely to look at the object that looks

more like the face
 Children of the same race will better
recognize the same race they are surrounded
by on the daily basis (African recognize
African better than non-African)

Other senses
 Newborns are already expert smellers, tasters, and feelers
 Attracted to sweet smelling things (honey, chocolate), will turn away from gross smelling
things
 Prefer salty and sweet tastes
 Babies are sensitive to changes in their mother’s breast milk
 Will consume more after mom consumes something like vanilla
 Newborns respond reflexively when touched

Hearing
 Auditory threshold: the quietest sound a person can hear
 Quietest sound a person can hear
 Adults can hear quieter sounds than babies can
 Test: baby sits on parent’s lap and wears headphones – baby listens to sounds. Third
party observer cannot hear the sounds but rate the facial expressions and other cues
of baby when they believe they recognize the baby has heard a sound
 Babies can best hear sounds that have pitch in the range of human speech
 By 4.5 months babies can recognize their own name
 Babies prefer melodies over jumbles sounds – can distinguish between new and old
sounds

Motor development in young children

 Locomotion: moving around (from point A to B)
 Fine motor skills: grasping, holding, and manipulating objects
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 7/8 months they are crawling

 By 1 year babies can walk
 Dynamic systems theory: motor skills are organized and reorganized over time to meet
demands of specific tasks (baby walkers)
 Posture: visual cues and inner ear used to adjust posture
 Balance: must be relearned for sitting, crawling, walking
 Infants are top heavy – they need to build strength in their arms and legs
 Baby can judge if a surface is suitable to walk on – skill required for locomotion
 Walking requires balance
 Differentiation: mastery of component skills – reflexive stepping (example; posture, leg
strength, balance)
 Ex. Baby's inherit ability for stepping. Babies are able to step automatically on a treadmill
even when they are unable to stand if held over treadmill. Reflexive stepping. Even if they
are on two separate treads where two treads moving at different paces babies able to
keep up with two separate feet. Inherit stepping ability.
 In order to walk they require integration
 Integration: combining skills in proper sequence into coherent, working
whole (example; babies inherent ability for stepping on a treadmill), ie, for
locomotion.

Reaching and grasping

 4 months: baby can reach arm at an approximate spot, when they get close they slow
down to attempt to grasp – not integrated/fluid motion
 6 months: baby might use both arms and legs to grasp an object, coordinate two arms
 7/8 months: baby starts to use their thumbs, and fingers to pick something
 1 year: reaching and grasping is more fluid – can use a spoon, more integrated- arm
movement mixed with wrist, etc. smoother. Able to use spoon.

Cognitive development
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 Infantile amnesia: inability to remember events from one’s early life (first two years)
 There are a lot of different theories – nothing has been proven
 Most people cannot remember first two years or more of life
 Some say language is not as developed so they can’t remember because they need
language to remember
 During these years there is a lot of brain reorganization, massive reorganization affects
memory
 Others day that since the baby has no sense of self (they have a hard time
understanding themselves in relation to others) so they lack an
autobiographical timeline
 All speculations, no proof

Social-emotional development
Basic emotions are accompanied by 3 things – regardless of how old the child is:
 Subjective feelings: cannot express their feelings to us
 Physiological change – every basic emotion is accompanied by physiological change (HR,
neurotransmitter, hormones)
 Overt behaviour – facial expression, cry, laugh (something observable)
 Six months or younger will elicit emotions either in a broadly positive or broadly negative
way, not much differentiation between emotions
 At six months we will see a full range of basic emotions – joy, anger, surprise,
sadness, disgust, fear, interest
 Before 2/3 months smiles are not indicative of joy/happiness but is a reflexive
response (automatically), does not represent how the baby is feeling
 Social smile @ 2 months: infants smile in response to others – might “coo” and moves
arms and legs in excitement
 4-6 months: understand and distinguish between others happy, sad, and neutral faces
 Played a recording of other babies, if they hearing crying they’ll look at sad face, if they
hear cooing or giggling they look at happy face.

Stranger Wariness
 Wariness in the presence of an unfamiliar adult – emerges around 7 months when
baby is crawling to about 2 years of age
 Before 7 months this is not evident
 Depends on two variables: novelty of environment ( feel more distressed when the
environment is new), and stranger’s behaviour (if stranger approaches babies space)
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Social referencing
 Infants will attend to caregiver cues to interpret the situation when in an unfamiliar or
ambiguous environment
 Around 1 year – mom presenting unfamiliar toy with a smile ... baby is more likely to
play with it compared to if she handed it to the baby with a disgusted face
 Third party social referencing: mom presents toy in a neutral manner but a third party
expressed disgust towards a toy will cause baby to withdraw from playing with that toy
 Third party social referencing occurs at 18 months
 Familiar toy, baby has preconceived feelings or notions

Language development
 Language: system that related sounds or gestures to meaning
 Phonemes: unique sounds that can be joined to create words: to produce
consonant sounds, vowel sounds
 Babies 1 month old can distinguish between phonemes – studied in lab via the rate
of babies sucking on a pacifier. Harder and faster sucking occurs during new stimuli
and sounds (habituate baby to one phoneme, then play another sound, if there’s an
increase in sucking they can distinguish)
 Native Japanese cannot distinguish between lip and rip because they can distinguish le
and re
 Before 10 months babies can recognize phonemes outside of native language
 By 10-12 months of age babies can distinguish their own phonemes
 6 months can recognize parent terms (mommy and daddy)
 Mothers will engage at all ages to infant-directed speech (motherese): adults speak
slowly and with exaggerated changes in pitch and loudness
 Attract babies attention
 Babies can pick up because its slow and exaggerated
 6 months: babies can distinguish between nouns and verbs, pay more attention to nouns
 7/8 months: picking up repeated words and multiple sentences and determine that the
words have meaning
 distinguish was syllable makes words
 Cooing: vowel-like sounds starting at 2 months
 Babbling: speech like sound that has no meaning – as they get older they start to
combine different types of sounds which is a precursor to speech and practice for
language, repeat sounds over and over again, practice speech – occurs at 6
months
 As they get older they combine sounds, precursor to speech
 When adults are speaking language they open their mouths larger on the right side as
language is controlled by the left hemisphere – babies are doing the same
 When adults speak gibberish both sides of mouths same
 When you look at babbling babies the right side of mouth is larger, meaning they are
trying to practice speech
 Intonation: pattern of rising or falling pitch – English will have a different intonation
compared to other languages – older babblers will use intonation of their mother
tongue- starts at 6 months
 When you declare a sentence pitch rises and lowers
 When asking question continues to rise
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Wednesday, May 13th, 2020 Child Development 2AA3
Wednesday, May 13th, 2020 Child Development 2AA3