Gotgay -

results

● 1st area of the brain to mature were that associated with basic
functioning such as motor functions
● Brain development is from back to front
● The next area to develop is spatial orientation and language in the
parietal lobe (which develops when the child is around 2 – 2 and a half
years)
● A child might either walk first or talk first
● The prefrontal cortex starts developing completely once the person
reaches 20
● The MRI highlights sustained loss
● It does not fully develop until you reach early adulthood
● Gradual maturing of the brain

Strength

● The longitudinal design helps us track changes over time

● The internal validity of the study is high
● A reliable way of studying the increase in grey matter
● Helps us eliminate the researcher’s bias
● The findings of this research have also been supported by the research
of other studies
● Concurrent validity

Limitation

● A very clinical and objective method

● Lacks ecological validity
● Lacks an explanatory power (no answer to the why)
● Explains how the person develops as a learner but learner itself hasn’t
been operationalised
● Socio-economic status
● Sample size is too small and the results are not robust enough to draw
conclusions about how human brains develop
● MRI and fMRI is expensive, hence a small sample size
● Sample demographic limits the generalisability
● It potentially reduces the capacity to explain possible cross-cultural
differences in brain development