Lifespan

1. Newborns who experience a full-term birth arrive with a number of capacities - reflexes, states of arousal, and sensory processing that are essential to the rapid growth and development that occur in the first two years of life.  Using specific terminology and examples from either your textbook or content slides, explain the nature of each of these and why each is important to an infant’s ability to adapt to its new surroundings and to begin the process of learning about the world. 

Newborns who experience full-term growth arrive with a variety of survival abilities, allowing these young individuals to stay in touch with their mothers and caregivers to properly adapt to their environment and development. Essential capacities such as reflexes, arousal states, and sensory processing are critical to a newborn's rapid growth and cognitive development in forming an understanding of how their new world operates. Primitive reflexes, such as the rooting reflex, assist infants in locating their primary source of nutrition, the mother who produces breast milk. The reflex helps the child turn their head automatically toward the touch of the cheek in response to the expectation that a food source will approach them soon. Along with this, the sucking reflex assists the child in collecting, allowing the child to be fed efficiently and obtain appropriate nutrients from the food source. Another reflex is the palmar and plantar reflexes, which enable the infant to grasp onto and bond with the caregiver by allowing the child to hang on and create neurological stimulation. The sleep-wake cycle regulates how infants interact with their environment. REM and non-REM sleep support critical neurological brain development and memory for these infants, as well as the physical growth and recovery period that young beings require to continue growing. Sensory processing also enables newborns to understand and respond to their new surroundings. With amodal sensory properties, a child can use two or more sensory systems to make connections with the sounds made by specific individuals. For example, it teaches the child that the touch of someone who is always nearby is their caregiver and that the voice of this person is associated with a motherly figure, as is her scent. This reinforces this bond and creates an early attachment to this figure in the infant's life.

2. The Habituation-Dishabituation paradigm has been an essential tool for developmental scientists as they seek to understand the abilities of infants and toddlers. Explain how the habituation-dishabituation paradigm works, why it is essential, and give three specific research examples of its use and, in each case, what scientists learned about infant abilities. 

The Habituation-Dishabituation paradigm is a key tool in developmental psychology for studying infant cognition and perception. Habituation happens when an infant sees the same stimulus repeatedly and loses interest, indicating that they understand and remember it. Dishabituation occurs when a new or altered version of the stimulus is introduced, regaining the infant's attention and indicating that they perceive a difference. This method is critical for understanding infant development because they cannot verbally communicate their knowledge, so researchers use it to assess their ability to perceive, learn, and remember stimuli. Face recognition tests, object permanence tasks, and speech perception studies are some examples of this type of memory. Face recognition studies show that young infants can distinguish a wide range of human faces but gradually lose sensitivity to faces of unfamiliar racial groups or animals, a phenomenon known as perceptual narrowing. With object permanence, young infants are shown objects that are then hidden or placed in spaces where they appear to have vanished. This hide-and-seek game demonstrates how young infants can learn that even when an object is no longer visible, it still exists. Finally, in terms of speech perception, researchers discovered that newborns can differentiate languages by hearing the rhythms and phrasing used, but lose this ability around six to twelve months as they focus on their native languages. These extensive findings show that infants have a wide range of cognitive abilities from birth, including memory, categorization, language sensitivity, and understanding.

3. Babies are born with the need to connect to others - explain how research  on imitation in newborns, Tiffany Fields’ work on the impact of touch on preterm babies, and Harry Harlow’s research with young monkeys demonstrate the importance of human bonding in early development. What implications does this research have for the caregiving (e.g., by parents, by medical staff) of infants?

Newborn imitation research, Tiffany Field's touch research, and Harry Harlow's monkey research all emphasize the importance of human bonding in early development. Newborns exhibit an early capacity for imitation, such as mimicking facial expressions, implying that babies are born with a natural desire to connect with others and demonstrating this powerful mode of learning. This ability facilitates early social interactions, allowing the infant to bond with their caregiver and form learning connections. Tiffany Field's research with preterm infants emphasizes the importance of touch in infant development. Her findings revealed that skin-to-skin contact accelerated physical growth, as evidenced by faster growth in those who received physical touch, lower stress levels, and improved parent-child attachment, particularly among vulnerable infants. In addition, Harry Harlow's studies with monkeys revealed that infants have a strong need to be emotionally comforted. In his study, baby monkeys preferred to stay with a clothed and soft surrogate mother over a wire surrogate who only provided food, demonstrating that attachment, warmth, and emotional bonding were important for physical care. These studies demonstrate that caregiver practices that prioritized physical closeness, affection, and responsive interactions were optimal for the infant's development and the formation of the strongest emotional and cognitive connections.

4. What are the key developmental changes in neurons and brain structures that occur during the first couple years of life? How does this development help to explain the patterns of change that we see in motor and cognitive ability? 

During the first few years of life, the brain experiences significant developmental changes that are critical for both motor and cognitive abilities. Essential processes such as programmed cell death, stimulation, synaptic pruning, and myelination play critical roles in the infant's development and ability to focus on activities as they grow. The processes that facilitate the formation of neurons, particularly in the hippocampus, play an important role in infant memory. Furthermore, this process leads to the rapid formation of synaptic connections between neurons. This procedure allows the child to think more complexly and retrieve information faster from memory without having to navigate multiple networks. Myelination and pruning are the processes that enable these quick responses to occur. Myelination occurs when nerve fibers are coated with myelin. This process speeds up the transmission of electrical signals and improves their quality, allowing the brain to function more efficiently. Simultaneously, pruning occurs, which eliminates unused or unnecessary neurons and synapses, allowing the brain to function more quickly and efficiently. These processes help to develop motor abilities like crawling and walking by strengthening neural connections in the brain's motor regions. Increased myelination in these and other areas, including the cerebellum, improves coordination and fine motor control. Infants can demonstrate these changes by grabbing toys, walking, or performing multiple actions at once, such as grasping an object while looking away. The behavior is consistent with cognitive abilities such as prefrontal cortex development, which allows for improvements in attention, memory, and problem-solving skills.

2. Extensive research has been done on the perceptual abilities of young children, and the extent to which those abilities reflect their growing understanding of the world.  Using research evidence, describe the perceptual abilities that have been identified in infants and toddlers, and then explain how these form the foundation for the development of conceptual and object understanding, attention and memory, and symbolic understanding.

Toddlers have several important perceptual abilities that lay the groundwork for their developing understanding of the world. Visual, auditory, sensory, and intermodal perceptions help the child further develop an understanding of how the world works. Newborns' auditory perceptions develop quickly as they learn to recognize familiar sounds, patterns, and the beat between music and speech. They can learn to recognize familiar sound beats in languages and music, as well as in their mother's voice, which is often the first person to begin speech recognition. Sensory integration combines information from multiple senses, such as the eyes (sight) and sounds, to create a cohesive blend of what is possible in their environment. Intermodal perception is a significant developmental milestone in which these infants begin to link sensory information. Perceptual abilities provide the foundation for cognitive development in a variety of ways. They aid in object comprehension, such as object permanence, which allows the toddler to recognize that an object exists even when hidden. Perceptual abilities also have an impact on attention and memory; as the toddler uses their senses, they will learn to focus better and remember important aspects of their surroundings. Visually, this sense aids in memory encoding, particularly in establishing familiarity with objects that the child is constantly exposed to. Finally, with symbolic understanding, toddlers begin to recognize, use, and comprehend what symbols mean, much like their word counterparts, which aids in language and pretend play.

3. Explain how the work of Judy DeLoache, Renee Baillargeon, and Alison Gopnik both highlight and expand on Piaget’s claims about development during the sensorimotor and pre operational periods. 

Piaget proposed that during the sensorimotor stage, infants learn through direct interaction but lack object permanence until they are approximately 8-12 months old. Children could develop a symbolic thought process during the preoperational stages but remained egocentric and struggled with logical reasoning. However, Baillargeon's work challenges Piaget's timeline by demonstrating that infants as young as 4 months can demonstrate object permanence using the violation of expectation method, implying that infants have cognitive ability at an even younger age than Piaget believed was possible. DeLoache's research also calls into question Piaget's theory of symbolic representation in infants by examining young children who struggle with dual representation. This is when infants have difficulty understanding how a smaller model can represent something larger in the world. This study contributed to Piaget's theories about early symbolic thought. Last, Gopnik's work on infants' theory of mind contradicts Piaget's earlier statements by demonstrating that not all young children are egocentric, as Piaget once believed. In her research, 18-month-olds were able to recognize that others have different desires, indicating that these toddlers may have more advanced cognitive abilities than Piaget originally predicted. All of these new insights later helped to reshape Piaget's framework by revealing that infants and toddlers are more cognitively sophisticated than his previous stage-based theory gave them credit for.

4. Describe the three classic tasks that Piaget used to formulate his ideas about cognitive development during the preoperational period. Based on these tasks, what claims did Piaget make about thinking during this period. Explain which aspects of these claims have held up, as well as how they have been refuted. 

Piaget conducted three classic tasks to investigate cognitive development in preoperational stage children. The Three Mountain Task, Conservation Task, and Class Inclusion Task all show how he believed children had fewer cognitive abilities than they actually did. The Three Mountain Task discovered that young children struggled to describe the perspective of a doll sitting across from them because they couldn't understand someone else's point of view, leading him to believe that most children were egocentric. In the Conservation Task, he believed that children could not understand the importance of looking from another's perspectives or aspects of a situation. He demonstrated centration specifically in how a tall glass and a wide, short glass can still contain the same amount of water, by having to adjust one's view is what allows one to understand this difference. Finally, the Class Inclusion Task revealed that young children struggled to understand hierarchical categories, specifically that roses were a subset of flowers in the daisy and rose study. Based on these tasks, he concluded that preoperational children thought in a rigid, appearance-based, and less logical operational way. Recent research confirms that young children struggle with conservation and logical reasoning, but it challenges Piaget's timeline for reasoning and development. When researchers used simpler tasks, they discovered that children as young as three could demonstrate perspective-taking skills and understand basic conservation concepts. These findings suggest that children at this age develop more gradually than Piaget's stage concept, implying that children are smarter than Piaget originally proposed.

 5. Describe the information processing model of memory, and for each of the stages of the model, the developmental changes that occur from infancy through early childhood.

The information processing model of memory explains how memory develops in three stages: sensory memory, working memory, and long-term memory. At birth, sensory memory is present but only briefly stores incoming information, becoming more efficient as the infant learns to focus their attention on more common topics. With working memory, this memory is responsible for holding and processing the information the child is being exposed to. It is very limited in the infant phase but gradually improves as they grow into toddlerhood, developing better attention and problem-solving skills. Then with long-term memory, this memory stores information in a way that this information can be used in future retrieval, starting with implicit memory in infancy, while explicit memory gradually strengthens due to how often this memory is being recalled and used. Children quickly improve their ability to remember personal details as they learn to recognize faces. This improvement is boosted by teaching them working memory and memory strategies such as practicing and categorizing, which also helps them remember things better. This assists in the processing speed and the executive order function, allowing for better problem-solving and decision-making as the child grows older, allowing for quicker and more accurate responses, supporting and expanding the build of complex cognitive abilities.

1. Research shows that temperament is an excellent example of the complex interaction and correlation between genes and environment. First, describe how temperament is defined, originally by Chess and Thomas and more recently by Rothbart. Then, provide research evidence that temperament is influenced by an interaction of genes and environment, and that the correlations are both passive and evocative.

Chess and Thomas defined temperament as patterns of behavior that are biologically based, such as in the types they described as easy, difficult, and slow to warm up. Rothbart expanded on this idea by breaking these categories down into dimensions such as with their activity level, emotional reactivity, and self-regulation, which emphasized that temperament is biologically rooted but can change based on development and one’s experiences. Both genetics and one's environment can influence temperament, according to research. Such as with how genetic factors can determine a child’s baseline emotional reactivity to stimuli, but in their environment, this response can be shaped to affect the traits development. Passive connections can occur when a child’s genetic trait matches that of the environment provided by the parents, such as with highly active kids growing up in households with active parents. Evocative connections happen when a child’s temperament does not match that of the family they are in, affecting how the family can respond to the child’s actions. For instance, a fussy child may attract more attention from the caregiver, which could either reinforce the behavior or calm the child.

2. The parenting (caregiving) context has critical influence on emotional and self development. Using Baumrind’s categorization of parenting style, explain the ways in which parenting style is important in emotional and self development according to Erikson and Ainsworth

Baumrind’s parenting styles of authoritative, authoritarian, permissive, and uninvolved play a significant role in shaping emotional and self-development in young children. Seen in Erikson’s psychosocial stages and Ainsworth’s attachment theory, all of these parenting theories can intertwine with one another. Erikson's stages suggested that the way a child is raised directly affects their ability to navigate important stages of development. For example, authoritative parenting is a warm and supportive style that can be combined with the right amount of control to help babies trust their parents and give toddlers the freedom they need to become independent adults. Children that develop a strong sense of self-confidence and are emotionally secure are set to become more independent compared to their counterparts who may fall into an authoritarian parent household. This authoritarian parenting style is characterized by high control and low warmth, which often hinders a child's emotional growth. This can lead to mistrust and shame in the child's early childhood, affecting their perception of support, which is often less supportive and heavily restricted. Such behaviors can result in children feeling ashamed or bashful in certain situations. With permissive parenting, it emphasizes the warmth parents will give, but these parents lack boundaries, which can lead children to act impulsively and feel guilty easily. According to Ainsworth's attachment theory, this development is further supported by the fact that children whose parents are authoritative are more likely to form secure attachments. These attachments help children control their emotions, have high self-esteem, and interact well with others as they grow up. In contrast, authoritarian or uninvolved parents can lead to insecure attachments, which can contribute to emotional challenges, the development of anxiety and depression, and feelings of self-worthlessness. These factors can directly impact the child's ability to manage their emotions and sense of self, as well as hinder future connections with others in their environment. This is just an example of how the theories can work together. 

3. As children mature emotionally and develop more self-awareness, they become more interactive and active; intentional and adaptive; organized and effortful. Discuss what this means, providing examples of emotional and self development for each category. 

As a child matures emotionally, they develop self-awareness and become more interactive, intentional, adaptive, organized, and effortful in how they create and manage their behaviors. Interactive development refers to how children start engaging in a meaningful manner with others. For example, a 3-year-old might begin to play cooperative games with their peers, learning the aspect of sharing and taking turns that comes with interacting and making connections to others their age. Intentional behavior emerges as the child begins to plan and make choices that will end with a specific goal in mind. An example is how a 4-year-old may clean up their toys because they know it is expected of them and want to receive praise or avoid a consequence that could be lurking. In adaptive growth, the child learns to adjust their behavior to fit the wide and different situations they can be placed in. For example, a child can feel frustrated after a toy breaks but can adapt to this situation by implementing problem-solving behavior like asking for help or finding another way to still play. Organized development shows through the way children improve their emotional regulation, like how a 5-year-old uses words to express their frustration instead of using their physical means, as in acting out in a situation. This ability to organize and manage thoughts and feelings helps them in school and social settings where needing to remain calm is important. Finally, a child's ability to exert effort in socializing and understanding social dynamics is demonstrated by their ability to self-regulate situations and enhance their behavior. For example, a child might become upset over a group activity but work hard to stay focused and calm, continuing to follow rules and showing they are putting the effort into controlling their emotion and behavior.