Developmental Issues, Prenatal Development, and the Newborn

Developmental Psychology’s Major Issues

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:

• Nature and nurture: How does our genetic inheritance (our nature) interact with our experiences (our nurture) to influence our development?

• Continuity and stages: What parts of development are gradual and continuous, like riding an escalator? What parts change abruptly in separate stages, like climbing rungs on a ladder?

• Stability and change: Which of our traits persist through life? How do we change as we age?

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.

• various stages may be quick or slow

• everyone passes through the stages in the same order.

Stability and Change

We experience both stability and change. Some of our characteristics, such as temperament, are very stable

• We cannot predict all aspects of our future selves based on our early life

• social attitudes, for example, are much less stable than our temperament

Life requires both stability and change.

• Stability provides our identity, enabling us to depend on others and on ourselves.

• Potential for change gives us our hope for a brighter future, allowing us to adapt and grow with experience.

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.)

• Your father begins producing sperm cells nonstop at puberty

Prenatal Development

Fewer than ½ of the zygotes concieved make it past 2 weeks

• 10 days after conception, the zygote attaches to the mother’s uterine wall starting the pregnacy term

• 9 weeks after conception the embryo starts showing human like features

• Two months before birth, fetuses demonstrate learning in other ways, as when they adapt to a vibrating

Learning of language begins in the womb

• Fetus’ prefer hearing their mother’s language

Teratogens, agents such as viruses and drugs, can damage an embryo or fetus.

• one reason pregnant women are advised not to smoke or to drink alcohol.

• Light drinking or even ocassional binge drinking can affect the fetus’s development

  • This damage may occour because alcohol has an epigentic effect

• Smoking also can be an epigenetic effect cuasing developmental problems

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

• Ex. withdrawing our limbs to escape pain, turneing our head from side to side and swiped the cloth off our face

Habituation: decreasing responsiveness with repeated stimulation. As infants gain familiarity with repeated exposure to a stimulus, their interest wanes and they look away sooner.

Infancy and Childhood

Maturation: biological growth processes that enable orderly changes in behavior, relatively uninfluenced by experience.

Physical Devleopment

LOQ: During infancy and childhood, how do the brain and motor skills develop?

Brain Development

The developing brain cortex actually overproduces neurons

• Peaks at 28 weeks

• You have the most amount of brain cells you will ever have when you are born

• Rapid development helps explain why infant brain size increases rapidly

Brain’s  association areas—those linked with thinking, memory, and language are the last cortical areas to develop.

Motor Development

Physical coordination's is enabled by the developing brain

• These skills emerge during infancy

  • This exercises their maturing muscles and nervous system

• Genes guide motor development

• Maturation creates our readiness to learn walking at about age 1

Brain Maturation and Infant Memory

We typically do not remember much if anything from before age 4

• infantile amnesia wanes as children get older

• hippocampus and frontal lobes, continue to mature during and after adolescence

• Traces of forgotten childhood languages may also persist

  • English-speaking British adults who had no conscious memory of the Hindi or Zulu they had spoken as children

    • They could relearn subtle sound contrasts in these languages that other English speakers could not learn even at 40 years old,

Cognitive Development

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

• core idea was that our intellectual progression reflects an unceasing struggle to make sense of our experience

  • the maturing brain builds schemas to end this process

• proposed two more concepts

  • we assimilate new experiences by interpreting them in terms of our current understandings (schemas)

  • we accommodate, our schemas to incorporate information provided by new experiences.

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.

Piaget’s Theory and Current Thinking

• believed that children construct their understanding of the world while interacting with it

  • minds experience spurts of change

• cognitive development consisted of four major stages:

  • sensorimotor

  • preoperational

  • concrete operational

  • formal operational

Sensorimotor Stage