PSYC 2400 Exam 2

Infantile marasmus (wasting)

• starvation due to a lack of calories and protein

• breastfeed babies are at lower risk

Kwashiorkor (wasting)

• Diets deficient in protein (children no longer breastfeeding)

• Loss of appetite and swollen abdomen

Failure to Thrive (FTT)

Nutritional intake is insufficient to sustain typical growth and weight gain

synaptogenesis

increases neuronal connections (3-12 months)

Myelination

synapses used regularly are strengthened

Synaptic pruning

synapses that are not used die out

experience-expectant process

• expected in ALL environments

• critical for normal development

• ex. sounds of language, nutrition, affection

Experience-dependent process

• Initiated in response to unique environmental experiences

• Ex. Motor cortex skills for hunting/fishing (Mozambique) or video games (US)

Rats raised in enriched environments

• rats raised in two environments

  1. enriched (bright, communal, novel rat toys)

  2. impoverished (dark, solitary, low stimulation)

Active interaction with environment

• rats in enriched env. but in small cages

  • could observe, but no interact with environment

• Learning capacity same as animals housed in individual cages away from the enriched environment

involuntary responses to external stimulation (reflex)

• controlled by brain stem

• if not present at birth → neurological problems

• some are permanent (e.g. eye blink)

• others disappear btwn 3-6 months

Types of Baby Reflexes

• stepping

• sucking

• grasping

• rooting (turning head when touching cheek)

• moro (drop baby and limbs spread out)

• babinski (touching foot caused it to spread)

• tonic neck (When lying on the back with the head to one side infants will extend the arm and leg on that side while flexing the limbs on the opposite side (looks like a fencer pose))

How do babies loose the reflexes?

• ex. object permanence: test to see if the baby fully believed the object is gone

• use experiments to learn more about babies

• brain development

Fine Motor Skills

• involve development and coordination of small muscles

• reaching and grasping

  • manual dexterity

  • 2 years: fully developed

• delayed because of electronics

Physical Growth

• Greatest increase in height and weight occurs during the first year of life

• During the first year, babies:

  • triple in weight

  • grow about 10 inches

• changes in body proportions

  • head, legs, center of gravity

Breastfeeding and Growth

• nutrition is critical for proper development

• Breastfeeding:

  • Convenience, less expensive, closeness

  • Higher IQ, promotes health

  • SES may be a confounding factor

Cultural Variations: “Baby in a Box”

• Finland

• all expectant mothers given a maternity pack in cardboard box

  • after visiting a doctor or pre-natal clinic before 4th month of pregnancy

• rates of infant mortality have dropped steadily

selective serotonin intake (SSRI)

increases serotonin in brain

axon, dendrite

___is producing and the ___ is receiving

Gross Motor Skills

• involve large muscles of body make locomotion possible

• crawling

  • by 8-10 months

• walking

  • occurs around 1 year

• a parent’s face (happy, fear) influence baby’s behavior, role of nonverbal behavior

Habituate

bore baby with repeated exposure of something

Dishabituate

see if baby notices/perks up, e.g., sucking rate, look

Hearing

• Babies are good listeners

• Can distinguish human voices from other sounds, and prefer human voices
  ▪ Especially “baby talk” or motherese
  ▪ By 2 days old: prefer language they have heard before

• Sensitivity to phonemes
  ▪ Infants can distinguish sounds used in all the world’s languages
  ▪ Fades in 1st year of life

Vision

• Newborns are very nearsighted

  • Vision of infants less than 1 year ranges from 20/200 to 20/300

Preference for Patterns and Faces

• Infants show a preference for patterned stimuli & faces

• 2- 7 hours old: show preference to mothers face (vs. stranger)

Still Face Paradigm

Babies become distressed when an adult become unresponsive and maintains a neutral face

Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development

Made by Jean Piaget, believed that children actively seek knowledge

• cognition

Cognition

Human mental activity

Piaget’s Stages

1. Infancy (birth-2): Sensorimotor

   1. thinking based on overtly physical acts

2. Early Childhood (2-6): Preoperational

   1. overcoming limitations to logical thinking

   2. The inability to keep 2 aspects of a problem in mind

3. Middle childhood (6-12): Concrete Operational

   1. Use of symbols and internalized mental operations. Combine/separate/transform information logically.

4. Adolescence (12-19): Formal Operational

   1. Systematic thinking about logical relations in a problem;
      keen interest in abstract ideas

Sensorimotor stage: Infancy

1. Reflexive schemas

2. Primary circular reactions

3. Secondary circular reactions

4. Coordination of secondary circular reactions

5. Tertiary circular reactions

6. Beginning of symbolic representation

Reflexive schemas (0-1 month)

Involuntary reflexes

Primary circular reactions (1-4 months)

1. Actions are focused on infant’s own body

2. Voluntary repetition

Secondary circular reactions (4 - 8 months)

1. Focus on things outside own body

2. Repetition of actions involving outside world

Coordination of secondary circular reactions (8 - 12 months)

1. early problem solving

2. achieve object permanence

Object permanence

understanding that objects continue to exist when they are out of sight

1. No object permanence

2. object permanence

3. Coincides with development of separation anxiety

Tertiary circular reactions (12 - 18 months)

1. Deliberate variation of problem-solving

2. Experimenting (trial-and-error)

Beginning of symbolic representation (18 - 24 months)

1. Base actions on memories of experiences

2. Deferred imitation

Prelinguistic Developments

• Birth: Preference for language; can differentiate basic sounds of all languages

• Neonate: Can distinguish sounds of their native language

• 2½ months: Social smiling; cooing; babbling

• Approx. 1 year: first words

Phonemes

Basic sounds in a language

Morphemes

Smallest units of meaning in the words of a language

Semantics: Words

• larger receptive vocabulary (i.e., what they understand)

  • first words (10-14 months)

• first words (in English, mostly nouns

  • refer to familiar people, objects, actions

• vocabulary spurt (18-24 months)

  • “fast mapping”

Syntax: holophrases

• single-word utterances that stand for entire phrases or sentences

  • “Up”, “Bottle”

• almost always accompanied by nonverbal elements (e.g., gestures, distinctive facial expressions)

Syntax: Sentences

• telegraphic speech (20-26 months)

  • e.g. “more cookie,” “mommy car”

  • not grammar, but follow important rules (e.g., English word order)

Overextensions

applying a verbal label too broadly (e.g., “Daddy” to all men)

Underextensions

applying the label too narrowly (e.g., “cat” only to the family’s cat)

Learning-Theory Explanation

• major casual factor

  • environment (nurture)

• mechanisms

  • conditioning

  • imitation

• critique: children can’t positively/negatively reinforce that, as well as they’re capable of putting the sentences together themselves

Language Acquisition Device (LAD)

innate language-processing system programmed to recognize universal rules of language

Broca’s areas

speech production

Wernicke’s area

language and comprehension

Genie: “The Wild Child”

• kept in near-total isolation for first 13 yrs of life

  • No language exposure & restricted mobility

  • Able to learn words (vocab same as other
    children)

• most difficulty with grammar & syntax

• Critical period for language exists!

Temperament

An individual’s consistent patterns of arousal and emotionality

• Classifications

• Easy: Positive disposition; bodily functions are regular

• Difficult: Negative moods, volatile behavior; withdraw

from new situations

• Slow-to-warm: Negative, but calm; inactive

• “Goodness-of-fit”

• Degree to which an environment matches an individual’s

temperament

• Related to later outcomes (e.g., behavioral problems,

expressivity)

Sense of Self

Self-Recognition

• Ability to recognize oneself in a mirror

• Who can pass the “rouge test?”

Social Referencing

Looking to others for help understanding new or confusing situations

Primary Intersubjectivity

• Focused, face-to-face interaction between an infant and caregiver

• Improves child’s ability to recognize & regulate emotions.

Family’s Roles in Emotions

• Parent’s talk about emotions help children figure out
  emotions of self & others

• Talk with mother & sibling at age 3 predicts better
  understanding of other’s emotions at age 6

Mirror Neurons

Brain cells that fire when an individual sees or hears another perform an action (just as they would fire if the individual were performing the same action)

Still Face Experiment

Usually causes negative response

The Effect of Maternal Depression

• Obstacle to intersubjectivity

• Mothers are less emotionally responsive

• Infants disengage

• Still-face reaction for these babies is weaker

Emotional Milestones

• Stranger weariness
  • response to unfamiliar people
  • Emerges 6-8 months

• Separation anxiety
  • response to being away from caregiver
  • peaks 13-15 months

Attachment

• Closely related to emotional development

• Strong emotional bond between child & caregiver

Freud’s Drive-Reduction Explanation

• Attachment to the mother originates in the satisfied need for nourishment

• Not well-supported by research

• Harlow’s monkeys

John Bowlby’s Ethological Explanation

Explanation:

• Attachment provides a sense of security and safe base from which to explore the world

• Evolutionary basis

• Strongly supported by research

• Harlow’s monkeys

Harlow’s Monkeys

• The cloth mother, which does not provide
  nourishment, acts as a secure base.
  • The wire mother, which provides
  nourishment, does not.
  • Monkeys preferred cloth mom: Supports
  Bowlby’s theory

• Totally isolated for first 3 months → no permanent effects

Social Interactions

• Tactile sensations = security (more than food), but are not sufficient

• Social interactions are necessary for healthy emotional development

Recovery from Isolation Effects

A critical period?

• Punishing monkeys for inappropriate behavior was ineffective

• Introducing them to new environment slowly was also ineffective

• Pairing with a younger monkey (2-3 months) resulted in all 1- year

isolates becoming well adjusted

“The Strange Situation” (Mary Ainsworth)

• Test the security of the mother-child relationship

• Observe how babies:

  • Use mother as a secure base

  • Respond to separation from mother

  • Respond to a stranger

  • tests attachment

Infant-Parent Attachment Classifications

• Secure Attachment (65% of US children)
  • Explore freely in caregiver’s presence
  • Often visibly upset when caregiver leaves
  • Greet caregiver warmly at reunion

• Insecure Attachment (~35% of US children)
  • Several different categories of insecure
  attachment

Insecure Attachment Classifications

Avoidant, ambivalent (resistant), disorganized

Avoidant Attachment

• Not distressed by separation

• Avoid contact with caregiver upon reunion

Ambivalent (Resistant) Attachment

• Very distressed and don’t settle easily upon reunions

• Mix proximity-seeking and angry behaviors

Disorganized Attachment

• No coherent strategy

Impact of Secure Attachment

• Secure attachment in infancy predicts better social and emotional
  outcomes later in life

• Early interactions seem to provide an internal working model for
  subsequent relationships

Attachment to Fathers

• Infants do develop attachments to their fathers

• U.S. fathers tend to be less involved in infant care

• Role of fathers as playmate

  • Rough-and-tumble play

Human Growth Hormone (HGH)

hormone which influences all growth except that in the Central Nervous System (CNS)

Thyroid Stimulating Hormone

hormone influencing growth in the CNS

Synaptic Blooming

period of rapid neural growth of connections between neurons

myelin

a coating of fatty tissues around the axon of the neuron

• insulate the nerve cell

• speed rate of transmission of impulses

  • enhances the building of neural pathways and improves coordination and control of movement and thought processes

Reflexes

involuntary movements in response to stimulation

milestones

behaviors or physical skills seen in infants and children as they grow and develop that typically occur within normal range

fine motor skills (small motor skills)

More exact movements of the feet, toes, hands, and fingers

pincer grip

Use of the thumb comes at about 9 months of age when the infant is able to grasp an object using the forefinger and thumb

circumcised

the surgical removal of the foreskin of the p*nis, without anesthesia experience pain as demonstrated by increased blood pressure, increased heart rate, decreased oxygen in the blood, and a surge of stress hormones

Colostrum

the first breast milk produced during pregnancy and just after birth has been described as “liquid gold”

Infantile marasmus

starvation due to a lack of calories and protein

kwashiorkor or “disease of the displaced child”

often occurring after another child has been born and taken over breastfeeding. This results in a loss of appetite and swelling of the abdomen as the body begins to break down the vital organs as a source of protein.

Milk Anemia

a condition in which milk consumption leads to a lack of iron in the diet

Failure to thrive (FTT)

occurs in children whose nutritional intake is insufficient for supporting normal growth and weight gain

causes

• physical or mental issues within the child

• caregiver’s actions

Colic

may cry inconsolably or scream, extend or pull up their legs, and pass gas. Their stomachs may be enlarged. The crying spells can occur anytime, although they often get worse in the early evening.

• crying gets worse and doesn’t stop

Shaken Baby Syndrome (SBS)

a severe form of physical child abuse. SBS may be caused from vigorously shaking an infant by the shoulders, arms, or legs. The “whiplash” effect can cause intracranial (within the brain) or intraocular (within the eyes) bleeding.

Jaundice

cause an infant's skin, eyes, and mouth to turn a yellowish color

• caused by a buildup of bilirubin, a substance that is produced in the body during the normal process of breaking down old red blood cells and forming new ones.

MMR

measles, mumps, and rubella

A-not-B error

challenges object permanence

• part of substage 4

• an infant’s inclination to search for a hidden object in a familiar location rather than to look for the object in a new location

Lev Vygotsky (1896–1934)

• thinking that children learned about the world through physical interaction with it

• claimed that adult or peer intervention was a much more important part of the developmental process

• concentrated more on the child’s immediate social and cultural environment and his or her interactions with adults and peers

holophrastic speech

using partial or one word expressions to convey thoughts (12-13 months)

telegraphic speech

two word sentences combined as old toddlers can express themselves further by using expressions (18 months)

nativism

suggests that infants are equipped with a neurological construct referred to as the language acquisition device or LAD that makes infants ready for language

language acquisition device (LAD)

neurological construct

Ivan Pavlov (1880-1937)

• created the idea of classical condition

• Pavlov’s Dogs

conditioned stimulus (CS)

learned trigger cue

• ringing of the bell

unconditioned stimulus (US),

naturally triggers response

• sight or smell of food itself