Early Childhood Development

Physical Development 

  • Motor development: Order tends to be mostly universal, though time can vary depending on genetics/enviro

  • (1) Rollover (2) Sit (3) Crawl (4) Walk 

Neural development 

  • More than a million neurons are created per minute in the womb 

  • At birth, you have the most brain cells you will ever have in your entire life 

  • Synaptic pruning: the process of synapse elimination that occurs in early childhood 

  • Synapse: the gap between your neurons 

  • “Use it or lose it”

  • This is why talking, playing, and loving infants is so important

Brain maturation 

  • Infantile amnesia: lack of memory prior to ages 3-4 due to our underdeveloped memory system (aka the hippocampus) 

  • However, research has shown that babies can remember some things 

Cognitive development 

  • How we think, know, remember, and communicate 

  • Piaget’s Theory: a child's mind develops in a series of stages to help us make sense of our experiences 

Piaget 

  • Schemas:  a concept/framework that organizes and interprets information, like the beginnings of a blueprint 

  • Assimilation: interpreting new experiences in terms of our existing experiences 

  • Accommodation: adapting our current understanding to incorporate new information

Sensorimotor Stage

  • Ages birth- 2 years 

  • Taking in the world through senses and motor activity 

  • Object Permanence: awareness that objects exist even if you can't see them; opposite of out of sight out of mind 

  • This is why peekaboo works 

Preoperational Stage 

  • Ages 6-7

  • Represent things with words/images, but not mental operations 

  • Hallmarks of this stage: Pretend play, egocentrism- difficulty in taking in anothers POV

Concrete Operational Stage 

  • Ages 7-11

  • Start to grasp some mental operations 

  • Hallmarks of this stage: Conservation: change in area doesn’t mean a difference in volume 

Formal Operational Stage 

  • Ages 12+ 

  • Reasoning expands to encompass more abstract thinking 

Vygotsky’s Theory

  • How a child is shaped by their social environment 

  • Children learn best when it’s between too easy and too hard

  • Scaffolding: offering children temporary support as they develop higher levels of thinking 

Social development 

  • Stranger anxiety: “stranger danger” begins at about 8 months 

  • Attachment: having emotional ties with others, often with caregivers, and experiencing distress when not around them 

Attachment Styles 

  • Secure: Confident, reciprocal, nonreactive, resilient 

  • Anxious: Emotional, hunger, fantasy bond, lack of nurturing, turbulence 

  • Avoidant: Isolation, ambiguity, ambivalence, emotionally- distant 

  • Disorganized: Internal conflict, dramatic, unpredictable, ambivalence 

Parenting Styles: how responsive and demanding parents are 

  • 4 main types 

  • Authoritarian: Focus on obedience, punishment over discipline 

  • Authoritative: Create positive relationship, enforce rules 

  • Permissive: Don’t enforce rules “kids will be kids”

  • Neglectful: Provide little guidance, nurturing, or attention

Adolescence 

  • Puberty: period of sexual maturation for reproducing

  • Sequence is more predictable than the timing

  • Brain changes

  • Selective pruning of neurons

  • Limbic system development 

  • Frontal lobe development (somewhat) doesn't fully develop until 25

  • This explains why teens can be impulsive and emo asf

Cognitive Development

  • Piaget 

  • Formal operation stage

  • Moral reasoning (Piaget and Kohlberg) 

  • Discerning right from wrong

  • Growth of empathy

  • Moral action (Mischel)

  • Self-discipline and impulse control

  • Delay of Gratification- delaying something that will make you happy and showing self-discipline 

Social Development 

  • Erik Erikson’s Psychological Stages 

  • Each stage of life has its own crisis and needs resolution 

  • Mid-life crisis

  • Other stages of life that have a crisis 

Identity vs. Role Confusion

  • Who am I

  • What do I want to do with my life?

  • What do I believe in 

Young Adulthood

  • Intimacy vs. Isolation

  • Who am I connected to 

Adulthood 

Cognitive Development 

  • Do our cognitive abilities decline in the same way our physical abilities do? 

  • Its super variable 

  • Education is predictive of future cognitive abilities 

Social Development 

  • Teens mostly describe individual traits 

  • Young adults define self in terms of social roles (jobs, clubs, college, etc) 

  • Continues to be more socially oriented with aging (marriage, kids, etc)

Adulthood Stages 

  • No such thing as a mid-life crisis 

  • For most people, this is actually a really happy time 

Generativity vs. Stagnation 

  • Middle adulthood 

  • Being productive and supporting others, especially potential children 

Late Adulthood 

  • Self-esteem and well-being are mostly stable in older adulthood 

  • Older adults tend to have fewer social relationships but also report greater satisfaction with those relationships 

  • Remember the good more than the bad 

Death and Dying 

  • Erikson’s stage of integrity vs. despair 

  • Coping ranges widely, especially depending on the culture 

  • But one thing is almost universally true: getting support and leaning on loved ones does help

Consciousness and Sleep

What is Consciousness

  • Subject awareness of ourselves and our environment 

  • Reflect on the past, adapt to the present, plan for future

  • Focuses our attention

  • There are different stages of consciousness

Selective Attention

  • Does anyone think they are really good at multitasking

  • Everyone is bad at multitasking, and our brains are not wired for it 

  • We take in over 11 million bits of information per second but we only attend to 40 

  • Focusing conscious awareness on a particular stimuli 

  • Cocktail Pary Effect: the ability to focus on one stimulus while filtering out other stimuli in a noisy environment 

  • Inattentional Blindness: failing to see objects when our attention is directed elsewhere 

  • Change Blindness: failing to notice changes in the environment 

Dual Processing

  • Information is often processed on separate conscious and unconscious tracks

  • 80-90 percent of what we do is unconscious 

  • Blindsight: responding to visual stimulus without consciously experiencing it 

  • Circadian Rythm: our biological clock; bodily cycles for things like temperature and sleep that occur in a 24 hour cycle 

  • Alpha wave stage: beginning stages of sleep/ starting to fall asleep 

  • Delta wave: really slow and elongated brain waves 

  • Rem stage: Rapid eye movement where dreams commonly occur 

  • You dream every single night, but you only remember them if you wake up during a REM cycle 

Why do we sleep?

  • Evolutionary protection

  • Brain recuperation

  • Restore memories

  • Feeds creativity 

  • Supports Growth 

Sleep Disorders

  • Insomnia: Trouble falling/staying asleep 

  • Narcolepsy: “sleep attacks” that are sudden and unpredictable 

  • Sleep apnea: stopping breathing while sleeping 

  • Sleep walking: sitting, walking, or speaking during sleep 

  • Night terrors: appearing terrified, talking nonsense, or walking during sleep 

Cognition

  • Cognition: Mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communication 

  • Metacognition: tracking and evaluating mental processes; “thinking about thinking”

  • Concepts: grouping of similar objects, events, ideas, etc. 

  • Prototype: a prime example of a category

Problem-Solving 

  • Algorithm: 

  • Heuristics: Mental shortcut, speedier, but extremely error-proneSlow, step-by-step process, but less error-prone

Heuristics 

  • Representativeness: Judging the likelihood of events in terms of how well they represent prototypes. Ex: Can lead us to ignore other relevant information, and causes many stereotypes

  • Availability: Judging the likelihood of events based on their availability in memory. If things come to mind more easily we assume they are more common. Can lead to distortions of fear 

Cognitive Biases 

  • Confirmation bias: tendency to search for information that supports our preconceptions and ignore contradictory evidence 

  • Overconfidence: the tendency to be more confident than correct 

  • Belief perseverance: clinging to beliefs even after they have been discredited