things i dont know

Developmental cascades

Change in one domain at one time are not separate from everything else

Downstream effects that affect other aspects of development down the line

Brain basics

Organized into 3 major sections (forebrain, midbrain, hindbrain)

Forebrain is where thinking happens

The cerebral cortex (forebrain) has 4 lobes, 2 hemispheres with distinct, but overlapping and connected, functions

Neurons are the primary functional unit in the brain

There are many technologies to indirectly non-invasively study the brain in infants and children

-fMRI- -stands for functional magnetic resonance

-detects blood flow via oxygen

-good spatial resolution

-bad temporal resolution

very sensitive to movement

-EEG- stands for electroencephalography

-records electrical activity from the scalp

-bad spatial resolution

-good temporal resolution

-works well on infants because it's not very sensitive to some movement

-NIRS or fNIRS- -(functional) Near-Infrared Spectroscopy

-detects blood flow and oxygen metabolism changes

-better temporal resolution than fMRI

-better spatial resolution than EEG

-more tolerant to some movement than fMRI

- Major processes contributing to brain changes in infancy:

Neurogenesis- Rapid growth of new neurons, made through mitosis

-begins during 3rd or 4th week of gestation

-occurring mostly between 3rd-18th week gestation

Neural migration- neurons move to their "proper" location in the brain, taking on specialized functions

Synaptogenesis--synapse is the small space between axons and dendrites that allow the flow of neurotransmitters between neurons

-creation of synapses, allowing the connection between neurons

-begins in the 2nd trimester, continues throughout life (to different degrees)

-surges in first 2-years of life and in adolescence

Myelination- -begins during 3rd trimester and continues into early adulthood

-happens for different parts of the brain at different times

-allows signals to travel down the axon quicker

-formation of the myelin sheath surrounding axons (only in some neurons)

synaptic pruning- synaptogenesis leads to hyperconnectivity

-neurons are connected that don't need to be connected

pruning removes those superfluous connections

if you don’t use it, you lose it

o Plasticity- -the brain changes and adapts due to experience

-some kinds of experience are expected and are necessary for typical developments to occur (called experience-expectant plasticity)

-the brain also adapts to a person's unique experience (called experience-dependent plasticity)

Dr. Romeo

Language input and ASD diagnosis in at risk children

Choices about who to include and exclude from a research sutdy

Dr. Kibbe

Infants’ memory of object features and categories

How to interpret looking time in a violation-of-expectation paradigm

Poyraz

TOM and inhibition

Using computational modeling as a tool for understanding cognitive development

JULIA LECTURE

Estimation task for children, before estimating, were told there’s two people with different estimations.

2 different conditions

Female over-estimate condition

Male over-estimate condition

There is an immediate effect of informant gender

Kids tend to trust the male informant more than the female informant

Approximate Number System

Mental system that you use to track numerical information without the use of symbols

Approximately knowing there’s _ many more dots than the number of dots next to it

Comparing 5 vs. 7 is harder than 5 vs. 10

Innate, born with the ability to represent numbers this way

Becomes more automatic and precise as we age

Lots of species have this ability

Theory-theory

A developmental theory that people have internal theories of how the world works

Determines predictions you will make about the world

Kids fail false belief tasks because their theory of the world does not include the idea that people can have false beliefs

Explanation for why children fail Theory of mind

Phonological development → learning speech sounds

Semantic development → learning word meaning

Syntactic development → putting words together

Pragmatic development → learning communication norms

Microgenetic Study- Intensive observations over short, frequent intervals

Phenotype- Observable traits resulting from genotype and environment

Genotype- Genetic makeup of an organism inherited from parents

Birth Stages-Contractions open cervix, propel fetus, expel placenta

Explaining language development- By 10-12 months, their ability to perceive other-language phonemes has decreased. Some mechanism that may support language learning:

Statistical learning

Figure out patterns/trends from data

Whole object bias

Syntactic bootstrapping

Mutual exclusivity

The expectation that an entity has only one name

Infant Perception Methods- Studying infants through sucking, looking, moving, reaching

Preferential Looking Paradigm- Infants' visual preference assessment method

Contingent Reinforcement- Reward delivery for desired behavior in infants

Executive function:

A collection of skills involved in controlling and coordinating attention, memory, and other behaviors involved in goal-directed actions

Inhibitory control

Cognitive flexibility

Working memory

Planning

Strategies for remembering

Self-monitoring

Cognitive flexibility- is the ability to adapt and switch between different tasks, rules, or strategies in response to changing demands or situations.

Perceptual Integration- Infants linking information from different senses

OAE-Measures inner ear responses in infants

ABR- Measures auditory nerve responses in infants

Prehension-Act of grasping or seizing objects using hands or body parts

Gesell scales- Established by Gesell to track infant motor development

Pincer grasp- Adapting hand shape to grip objects around 9 months

Habituation- stage 1:

repeatedly show a stimulus (or different stimuli that are similar in some way) until the baby looks less

premise: infants look less when they get bored, and they get bored when things are too familiar

used to measure:

-natural preferences

-change detection (discrimination)

-language comprehension

stage 2:

show something different and see what baby's looking is like

premise: if babies notice that it's different, their looking will rebound, because they'll be interested in this novel thing

contingent reinforcement-is a behaviorist term that refers to the delivery of a reward or reinforcement specifically when a desired behavior occurs

The infant's behavior controls the stimulus

It takes them some time to learn this, and then you can use it to look at natural preferences

Or, combine it with habituation to look at discrimination

- Vision

o Acuity: basic developmental timeline

to see fine detail with clarity and sharpness

Biological immaturity of the eye contribute to low visual acuity and contrast sensitivity at birth

Which improves over the first several months

< 6 months, infants have 20/591 vision

o Colors

2 months: see some colors•

4 months: see the full color range that adults can see

What about different color shades within a category?

Infants seem to perceive colors categorically by 4- months-old, using similar categories to those found in languages across the world!

o Size & Shape

We perceive objects to be the same size at different distances and angles, even though the actual image on our retina changes

Newborns seem to do this too!

o Object tracking

• First 2 months:

• jerky eye movements • slow tracking

• Between 2-5 months:

• Substantially smoother & faster

• Around 6-months:

• Anticipatory eye-movements: looking ahead of the actual stimulus

• E.g., moving your eyes to where an object will be, before it gets there

o Depth perception

- Depth perception is the ability to see the world in three dimensions and to perceive the distance of objects from oneself and from each other.

-Not present at birth

- By around 5 months, infants can perceive depth - but require

binocular cues, they cannot rely exclusively on monocular cues

By around 7 months, infants can use both monocular and binocular cues

o Face perception-

Infants' early experiences involve a lot of faces!

• But even newborns seem to prefer "normal" faces over distorted faces!

- Hearing

o Acuity: basic developmental timeline

Hearing begins to develop during the prenatal period

By around 36 weeks, sounds heard in utero are remembered after birth!

Still - hearing improves rapidly over the first year of life, but does not reach adultlike thresholds until much later in childhood

3-months-old:

must be as loud as a humming fridge

6-months-old:

must be as loud as a whisper

Adults:

must be as loud as rustling leaves

o Music and speech

• Infants seem to be predisposed to the features of music and speech

-And preferences & abilities become more culturally specific

over time

Speech: Neonates prefer speech vs. synthetic

sounds

They also prefer monkey vs. synthetic

AND no difference between monkey vs. human!

But by 3 months, they prefer human

o Perceptual integration

• When you perceive information from two sense simultaneously (intermodal perception), we sometimes link them together

• Infants seem to do this too, using synchrony as a cue