LOQ: What three issues have engaged developmental psychologists?
Developmental psychology examines our physical, cognitive, and social development across the life span, with a focus on three major issues:
Developmental Psychology: a branch of psychology that studies physical, cognitive, and social change throughout the life span.
Continuity and Stages
Experience and learning typically develop as a slow, continuous shaping process.
Stability and Change
We experience both stability and change. Some of our characteristics, such as temperament, are very stable
Life requires both stability and change.
Prenatal Development and the Newborn
LOQ: What is the course of prenatal development, and how do teratogens affect that development?
Conception
The process started inside your grandmother—as an egg formed inside a developing female inside of her. (Your mother was born with all the immature eggs she would ever have.)
Prenatal Development
Fewer than ½ of the zygotes concieved make it past 2 weeks
Learning of language begins in the womb
Teratogens, agents such as viruses and drugs, can damage an embryo or fetus.
Zygote: the fertilized egg; it enters a 2-week period of rapid cell division and develops into an embryo
Embryo: the developing human organism from about 2 weeks after fertilization through the second month.
Fetus: the developing human organism from 9 weeks after conception to birth.
Teratogens: (literally, “monster makers”) agents, such as chemicals and viruses, that can reach the embryo or fetus during prenatal development and cause harm.
Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS):physical and cognitive abnormalities in children caused by a pregnant woman’s heavy drinking. In severe cases, signs include a small, out-of-proportion head and abnormal facial features.
The Competent Newborn
LOQ: What are some newborn abilities, and how do researchers explore infants’ mental abilities?
Having survived prenatal hazards, we as newborns came equipped with automatic reflex responses ideally suited for our survival
Habituation: decreasing responsiveness with repeated stimulation. As infants gain familiarity with repeated exposure to a stimulus, their interest wanes and they look away sooner.
Maturation: biological growth processes that enable orderly changes in behavior, relatively uninfluenced by experience.
LOQ: During infancy and childhood, how do the brain and motor skills develop?
The developing brain cortex actually overproduces neurons
Brain’s association areas—those linked with thinking, memory, and language are the last cortical areas to develop.
Physical coordination's is enabled by the developing brain
We typically do not remember much if anything from before age 4
LOQ: From the perspectives of Piaget, Vygotsky, and today’s researchers, how does a child’s mind develop?
Piaget’s studies led him to believe that a child’s mind develops through a series of stages, in an upward march from the newborn’s simple reflexes to the adult’s abstract reasoning power
Cognition: all the mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating.
Schema: a concept or framework that organizes and interprets information.
Assimilation: interpreting our new experiences in terms of our existing schemas.
Accommodation: adapting our current understandings (schemas) to incorporate new information.