 Chapter 1: An Introduction to Child Development

o Romanian adoption study

o Seven themes in child development
 Nature vs nurture
 Continuity vs discontinuity
 Active child
 Mechanism of dev
 Social environment
 Individual differences
 Research and children welfare
o Methods for studying child development and when to use them

 Chapter 2: Prenatal Development and the Newborn Period

o Fetal experience and behavior
 Germinal, embryonic, fetal
o Teratogens (what are they and how to study them)
 Environmental agents that cause damage during the prenatal period
 Most risk at embryonic stage
 Impact depends on length and amount of teratogen (present or absent)
 Observational (prospective or retrospective) || experimental animal
o Sensitive periods
o Cumulative risk model
 More adverse factors will lead to worse development

 Chapter 3: Biology and Behavior

o Nature and nurture
o Brain development
o Experience-expectant (expecting stimulus input) and -dependent plasticity
(experience, learning throughout life)
o Cross-cultural differences

 Chapter 4: Theories of Cognitive Development

o Piaget’s Theories
 Assimilation - new information is being put into existing schemas
 Accommodation – new schemas are created and old ones are adjusted to
produce a better fit with the environment
 Equilibration
 Discontinuity
 Four stages: sensorimotor (reflexive schemas, actions at interesting things,
object permanence, ), preoperational (centration, ego, conservation,
irreversibility), concrete operational (hypothetical, abstract, ), formal
operational (scientific, abstract, adult-like)
o Information-processing theory
 Short term memory, working memory, long term memory, executive
functioning, inhibition
 o Core-knowledge theory
 4 systems (inanimate objects, animate creatures or agents, sets of
countable thing, spatial geometry)
 Nativism vs constructivism
o Socio-cultural theories
 Vygotsky
 Guided participation – assist as they perform adult-like activities
 Scaffolding – experts provide some form of guidance or structure in the
zone
 zone of proximal development – can do with and without assistance

 Chapter 5: Perception, Action, and Learning in Infancy

o Methods
 Preferential looking technique
 Habituation
 Violation of expectation
o Visual acuity and color perception
o Innate core processing theories
 Face perception
 Object knowledge
 Depth perception
o Perceptual narrowing
o Motor development
 What does the motor system afford for cognitive development?
 Reaching (sticky mittens)
o Learning and memory
 Understanding and examples of: habituation, statistical learning, classical
conditioning, instrumental conditioning, observational learning/imitation,
rational learning, active learning, memory

 Chapter 6: The Development of Language and Symbol Use

o Is there a sensitive period? Evidence from case study Genie, deaf children, and
bilingualism
o Receptive language
 Assumptions: whole object, mutual exclusivity
 Social referencing
 30-million-word gap: what is it and what is crucially important for
developing
 language?
o Expressive language
 Developmental trajectory of language expression

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