Infancy
and
Childhood
Physical
Development
Maturation: biological growth
processes leading to orderly changes
in behavior, independent of experience
orderly, predictable
process of development
Critical Period: a period early in life when
exposure to certain stimuli or experience is
needed for proper development
specific times during development
when something is learned, or it
doesn’t happen at all
Use it or lose it?
After puberty, our brains begin to
shut down unused links and
strengthens others
What is a major difference
between brain development and
motor development in infants?
(hint: think about potty training)
Experience has little effect on motor
development, but has a significant
impact on brain development.
Remember the experiment on rats?
Cognitive
Development
How do our
cognitive abilities
develop?
Cognition: all the mental activities
associated with thinking, knowing,
remembering, and communicating
Baby Mobile Experiment
Scale Errors
Jean Piaget
Believed
Piaget believed
the force
a child’s
drivingmind
us updevelops
this ladder
through
is our
struggle to make
a series
sense
of stages
of our experiences.
Adults abstract reasoning
Newborn’s reflexes
What assumptions would you make about this animal?
Schemas: a concept or framework that
organizes and interprets information
Pony!
Big doggie!
X
Doggie!
Piaget’s
Experiments
Object Permanence
the awareness that things continue to
exist even when they cannot be seen
Conservation
the principle that properties such as
mass, volume, and number remain the
same despite changes in the form of objects
Egocentric
difficulty taking another’s point of view
Theory of Mind
people’s ideas about their own and other’s
mental states – about their feelings,
perceptions, and thoughts, and the
behaviors these might predict
Piaget’s Stages of Cognition
Children’s minds go through bursts of change
followed by stability as they move from one
level to the next
Believed that children construct their
understanding of the world from
interactions with it.
Stage
Typical Age
Description
Experience the world through
senses and actions
(looking, hearing, touching,
mouthing and grasping)
New Developments
 Object Permanence
 Stranger Anxiety
Sensorimotor
Birth to nearly
2 years
Preoperational
2 to about 6 or Representing things with words
7 years
and images; using intuitive
reasoning rather than logical
reasoning
 Pretend Play
 Egocentrism
 Begin forming a
theory of mind
Concrete
Operational
About 7 to 11
years
Thinking logically about concrete
events; grasping concrete
analogies and performing
arithmetical operations
 Conservation
 Mathematical
transformations
 Inner speech
(Vygotsky)
Formal
Operational
About 12
through
adulthood
Reasoning abstractly; no longer
limited to concrete reasoning
based on actual experiences;
can use if…then thinking
 Abstract Logic
 Potential for
mature moral
reasoning
Piaget’s core belief:
Children are active thinkers,
using their developing schemas and
abilities to gain new information and
figure things out
What we know now
 Cognitive development is continuous;
new abilities don’t simply “pop up” when
a child reaches a certain age
 Children understand far more than
Piaget gave them credit for
 Cognitive development depends on the
child’s education and culture
How do our
Process of
cognitive abilities
maturation
develop?
One more test for
conservation….
Imagine that you have a cup of coffee and a cup of milk,
with equal amounts of liquid in each cup.
You transfer a large spoonful of milk from the cup of milk
to the cup of coffee, stirring until the milk is mixed thoroughly
and evenly with the coffee.
Then you transfer exactly the same amount of the mixture
From the coffee cup back to the milk cup.
Which statement is TRUE?
1. There is more milk in the coffee cup than coffee in the milk cup.
2. There is more coffee in the milk cup than milk in the coffee cup.
3. The amount of milk in the coffee cup is the same as the amount
of coffee in the milk cup.
4. There is no way to know.