Chapter 3

1. Chapter 3 Physical and Cognitive Development in Infancy PowerPoints developed by Nicholas Greco IV, College of Lake County, Grayslake, IL (c) 2012 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

2. Physical Growth and Development in Infancy • Head • large relative to the rest of the body • flops around uncontrollably • Infant becomes capable of • sitting • standing • stooping • climbing • usually walking (c) 2012 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

3. Cephalocaudal and Proximodistal Patterns • Cephalocaudal -- sequence in which the earliest growth always occurs at the top, beginning with the head • physical growth and differentiation of features gradually works down from top to bottom • Proximodistal -- sequence in which growth starts at the center of the body and moves toward the extremities • infants control the muscles of their trunk and arms before they control their hands (c) 2012 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

4. The First Year • Average North American newborn -- 20 inches long; 7½ pounds • Most newborns lose 5 to 7 percent of their body weight adjusting to feeding • They double their birth weight by the age of 4 months; nearly triple it by their first birthday • Infants grow about 1 inch per month during the first year (c) 2012 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

5. From Age 1 to 2 Years • At 2 years of age, children weigh approximately 26 to 32 pounds • gaining a quarter to half a pound per month • attain about one-fifth of their adult weight • At 2 years, the average child is 32 to 35 inches tall • nearly half of their eventual adult height (c) 2012 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

6. The Brain • Cerebral cortexcovers the forebrain like a wrinkled cap • Two halves, or hemispheres, based on ridges and valleys in the cortex • Four main areas, lobes, in each hemisphere • frontal lobes, occipital lobes, temporal lobes, parietal lobes • Lateralization -- specialization of function in one hemisphere or the other (c) 2012 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

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8. Neuron • Parts of the neuron • Axon carries signals away from the cell body • Dendrites carry signals toward it • Myelin sheath -- a layer of fat cells -- provides insulation and helps electrical signals travel faster down the axon • At the end of the axon are terminal buttons, which release chemicals called neurotransmitters into synapses • Synapses -- tiny gaps between neurons' fibers (c) 2012 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

9. Changes in Neurons • Chemical interactions in synapses connect axons and dendrites, allowing information to pass from neuron to neuron • The pace of myelination also varies in different areas of the brain • The infant’s brain is literally waiting for experiences to determine how connections are made (c) 2012 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

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11. Changes in Regions of the Brain • Both heredity and environment influence synaptic overproduction and subsequent retraction • “Blooming (development) and pruning” vary considerably by brain region • Pruning -- unused connections are replaced by other pathways or disappear • Prefrontal cortex -- the area of the brain where higher-level thinking and self-regulation occur (c) 2012 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

12. Sleep • Considerable individual variation in how much infants sleep • typical newborn sleeps 16 to 17 hours a day • preferred times and patterns of sleep also vary • Infants spend a greater amount of time in REM (rapid eye movement) sleep • by 3 months of age,the percentage of time in REM sleep decreases (c) 2012 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

13. SIDS • Sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) -- condition that occurs when infants stop breathing, usually during the night, and die suddenly without an apparent cause • SIDS is the highest cause of infant death in the United States • Risk of SIDS is highest at 2 to 4 months of age (c) 2012 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

14. Risk Factors for SIDS • SIDS decreases when infants sleep on their backs • More common in low birth weight infants • Infants who are passively exposed to cigarette smoke are at higher risk • More frequent in infants who sleep in soft bedding • Less likely in infants who use a pacifier when they go to sleep (c) 2012 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

15. Benefits of Breast Feeding • Appropriate weight gain and lowered risk of childhood obesity • Fewer allergies • Prevention or reduction of diarrhea, respiratory infections, bacterial and urinary tract infections, and otitis media • Denser bones in childhood and adulthood • Reduced childhood cancer and reduced incidence of breast cancer in mothers and their female offspring • Lower incidence of SIDS (c) 2012 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

16. When Mother Should Not Breast Feed • If she is infected with AIDS or any other infectious disease that can be transmitted through her milk • If she has active tuberculosis • If she is taking any drug that may not be safe for the infant (c) 2012 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

17. Nutritional Needs • Nutritionists recommend that infants consume approximately 50 calories per day for each pound they weigh • This is more than twice an adult’s requirement per pound • Many U.S. parents are feeding their 4- to 24-month-old babies too few fruits and vegetables, and too much junk food (c) 2012 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

18. Dynamic Systems Theory • Infants assemble motor skills for perceiving and acting, which are coupled together • When infants are motivated to do something, they might create a new motor behavior • Mastering a motor skill requires the infant’s active efforts to coordinate several components of the skill (Adolph et. al, 2010; Thelen & Smith, 2006) (c) 2012 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

19. Mastering a New Skill • The infant is motivated by a new challenge • Partially accomplishes the task • “Fine tunes” movements to make them smoother and more effective • “Tuning” is achieved through repeated cycles of action and perception of the consequences of that action (c) 2012 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

20. Reflexes • Reflexes -- built-in reactions to stimuli • Genetically carried survival mechanisms • automatic • involuntary • Allow infants to respond adaptively to their environment • Example reflexes • Rooting and sucking, Moro or startle reflex, coughing, sneezing, blinking, shivering, and yawning (c) 2012 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

21. Infant Reflexes • INSERT FIGURE 3.7 HERE (c) 2012 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

22. Gross Motor Skills • Skills that involve large-muscle activities • Sitting with support -- 2 months • Sitting upright without support -- 6 to 7 months of age • Pull themselves up and hold on to a chair -- 8 months • Stand alone – 10 to 12 months • With experience, babies learn to avoid risky situations, integrating perceptual information with the development of a new motor behavior (c) 2012 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

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24. Gross Motor Development in the Second Year • Toddlers become more mobile • 13–18 months • can pull a toy attached to a string • use their hands and legs to climb up a number of steps • 18–24 months • toddlers can walk quickly or run stiffly • walk backwards without losing their balance • stand and kick a ball without falling and stand and throw a ball • jump in place (c) 2012 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

25. Fine Motor Skills • Finely tuned movements • anything that requires finger dexterity • At birth, infants have very little control over fine motor skills • During the first two years of life, infants refine how they reach and grasp • Perceptual-motor coupling is necessary for the infant to coordinate grasping • Experience plays a role in reaching and grasping (c) 2012 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

26. Sensory and Perceptual Development • Sensation occurs when information interacts with sensory receptors -- the eyes, ears, tongue, nostrils, and skin • Perception is the interpretation of what is sensed • Ecological View -- Gibsons • Our perceptual system can select from the rich information that the environment provides • We directly perceive information that exists in the world around us (c) 2012 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

27. Studying the Infant’s Perception • Perception brings us into contact with the environment in order to interact with and adapt to it • Visual Preference Method -- Infants look at different things for different lengths of time • Orienting response -- to determine if an infant can see or hear a stimulus • Habituation -- decreased responsiveness to a stimulus after repeated presentations of the stimulus • Dishabituation -- is the recovery of a habituated response after a change in stimulation (c) 2012 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

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29. Visual Acuity and Color    • Newborn’s vision is estimated to be 20/600 on the well-known Snellan eye examination chart • By 6 months of age -- vision is 20/40 or better • By about the first birthday, the infant’s vision approximates that of an adult • By 8 weeks, possibly even by 4 weeks, infants can discriminate among some colors • (Banks & Salapatek, 1983; Aslin & Lathrop, 2008) (c) 2012 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

30. Perception of Pattern and Depth • Infants prefer to look at a normal human face rather than one with scrambled features • They prefer to look at a bull’s-eye target or black-and-white stripes rather than a plain circle • Depth perception -- visual cliff • Infants develop the ability to use binocular (two-eyed) cues to depth by about 3 to 4 months of age (Gibson & Walk, 1960) (c) 2012 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

31. Hearing, Touch, and Pain • Prenatally at 7 months, infants can hear sounds such as mother’s voice and music • Immediately after birth, infants cannot hear soft sounds or pitch as well as adults do • Newborns respond to touch and feel pain • Infants also display amazing resiliency • Within several minutes after the circumcision surgery (which is performed without anesthesia), they can nurse and interact in a normal manner with their mothers (c) 2012 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

32. Smell and Taste • Newborns can differentiate among odors • Sensitivity to taste might be present even before birth • At only 2 hours of age, babies made different facial expressions when they tasted sweet, sour, and bitter solutions • At about 4 months of age, infants begin to prefer salty tastes, which as newborns they had found to be aversive (Windle, 1940; Rosenstein & Oster, 1988; Harris, Thomas, & Booth, 1990) (c) 2012 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

33. Intermodal Perception • Involves integrating information from two or more sensory modalities, such as vision and hearing (c) 2012 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

34. Nature, Nurture, and Perceptual Development • Those who emphasize nature are nativists • The ability to perceive the world in a competent, organized way is inborn or innate • Those who emphasize learning and experience are called empiricists (c) 2012 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

35. Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development • Piaget thought we build mental structures that help us to adapt to the world • Adaptation involves adjusting to new environmental demands (c) 2012 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

36. Processes of Development • Developing brain creates schemes, which are actions or mental representations that organize knowledge • Assimilation -- children use their existing schemes to deal with new information or experiences • Accommodation -- children adjust their schemes to take new information and experiences into account • Organization -- is the grouping of isolated behaviors and thoughts into a higher-order system (Lamb, Bornstein, & Teti, 2002) (c) 2012 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

37. Equilibrium and Disequilibrium • Cognitive conflict -- disequilibrium • the child is constantly faced with inconsistencies and counterexamples to existing schemes • An internal search for equilibrium creates motivation for change • the child assimilates and accommodates, develops new schemes, and organizes and reorganizes old and new schemes Equilibration -- mechanism by which children shift from one stage of thought to the next • Cognition is qualitatively different in one stage compared with another (c) 2012 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

38. Sensorimotor Stage • Infants construct an understanding of the world by coordinating sensory experiences (such as seeing and hearing) with physical actions • Lasts from birth to 2 years • At the end of this stage, 2-year-olds can produce complex sensorimotor patterns and use primitive symbols (c) 2012 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

39. Object Permanence • Object permanence -- understanding that objects continue to exist even when they cannot be seen, heard, or touched • One of the infant’s most important accomplishments • Watch an infant’s reaction when an interesting object disappears. If the infant searches for the object, it is inferred that the baby knows it continues to exist (c) 2012 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

40. Evaluating and Modifying Piaget’s Sensorimotor Stage   • The infant’s cognitive world is not as neatly packaged as Piaget portrayed it • Some of Piaget’s explanations for the cause of change are debated • Piaget's view of sensorimotor development needs to be modified • Some researchers conclude that infants’ perceptual abilities are highly developed very early in development (c) 2012 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

41. Evaluating and Modifying Piaget’s Sensorimotor Stage   • A-not-B error is the term used to describe the tendency of infants to reach where an object was located earlier rather than where the object was last hidden • The core knowledge approach states that infants are born with domain-specific innate knowledge systems (c) 2012 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

42. Learning, Remembering, and Conceptualizing • Infants can learn through operant conditioning • Attention is the focusing of mental resources on select information and improves cognitive processing on many tasks • Joint attention involves individuals focusing on the same object or event and involves: • The ability to track another’s behavior • One person directing another’s attention • Reciprocal interaction (c) 2012 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

43. Learning, Remembering, and Conceptualizing • Meltzoff (2007) concludes that infants don’t blindly imitate everything they see and often make creative errors • He argues that beginning at birth there is an interplay between learning by observing and learning by doing • Critics say the newborns simply engage in automatic responses to a stimulus (c) 2012 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

44. Learning, Remembering, and Conceptualizing • Memory involves the retention of information over time • Some infants as young as 2 to 6 months can remember some experiences through 1½ to 2 years of age • Implicit memory refers to memory without conscious recollection • Explicit memory refers to conscious memory of facts and experiences • Infantile or childhood amnesia -- few memories before age 3 (c) 2012 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

45. Concept Formation and Categorization • Concepts -- ideas about what categories represent • indispensable to competent cognitive development • Categories -- a way to group objects, events, and characteristics on the basis of common properties • By about 7 to 9 months of age, infants are able to form conceptual categories rather than just making perceptual discriminations between different categories (c) 2012 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

46. Language Development • Language -- a form of communication—whether spoken, written, or signed—that is based on a system of symbols • All human languages have some common characteristics • Rules describe the way the language works • Infinite generativity -- the ability to produce an endless number of meaningful sentences using a finite set of words and rules (Berko Gleason, 2009) (c) 2012 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

47. Key Milestones in Language Development • Babies' sounds and gestures go through this sequence during the first year • Crying: can signal distress, but there are different types of cries that signal different things • Cooing: about 1 to 2 months, gurgling sounds that are made in the back of the throat and usually express pleasure during interaction with the caregiver • Babbling: In the middle of the first year, babies babble -- strings of consonant-vowel combinations, such as “ba, ba, ba, ba” • Gestures: Infants start using gestures, such as showing and pointing, at about 8 to 12 months of age (c) 2012 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

48. Recognizing Language Sounds • Phonemes -- the basic sound units of a language • First words occur between 10 to 15 months (average is 13 months) • Overextension -- the tendency to apply a word to objects that are inappropriate for the word’s meaning • Underextension -- the tendency to apply a word too narrowly (c) 2012 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

49. Two-Word Utterances • Occurs by the time children are 18 to 24 months of age • “Big car” • “Where ball?” • Telegraphic speech is the use of short, precise words without grammatical markers such as articles, auxiliary verbs, and other connectives • “Mommy give ice cream” (c) 2012 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

50. Biological Influences • The ability to use language requires vocal apparatus as well as nervous system capabilities • Brain regions predisposed for language • Broca’s area -- an area in the left frontal lobe of the brain involved in producing words • Wernicke’s area -- a region of the brain’s left hemisphere involved in language comprehension • Aphasia -- a loss or impairment of language processing as a result of damage to brain (c) 2012 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.