Child Development Exam 2

Chapter 4: Physical Development and Health

Motor development: fine motor vs gross motor skills

Fine motor skills (ex. Reaching, grasping, drawing)
Gross motor skills (ex. Crawling, walking, jumping)

Dynamic-systems theory

Master of motor skills involves acquiring increasingly complex systems of action
A new skill is the product of the following:
Central nervous system development
Movement possibilities of the body
Motivation/goals
Environmental support

The “gap” study

Children learn to judge what is safe/unsafe for each posture (sitting, crawling, cruising, walking) via experience
Very little transfer of knowledge

Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS)

Greatest risk at 2-4 months of age
May represent transition from reflex behavior to intentional behavior
Risk factors:
Sleeping stomach-down or on side
Low birth weight
Low APGAR score
Having a mother who smoked during pregnancy
Too soft of bed
Overheating (warm room; too many layers)

Chapter 5: Cognition – Stages, Processes, and Social Learning

Piaget’s Theory

Studied cognitive development through observing children and how they thought about different things
Observed behavior and made assumptions about how they thought
Development happened in stages according to him, not continuously
What you are in one stage is not the same as you are in the next stage
How you made sense of things when you were 4, then your cognition when you were 2 or 3 years old
Continuous is building on skills you already have
Looked at cognitive development being influenced by the maturation of a person physically and mentally
4 year old can ride a bike (has mental and physical capabilities) 1 year old cannot even learn how to do this (does not have mental and physical capabilities)
Children are active in their own development, not passive learners, actively searching for things that will help them understand the world around them

Critiques

Vague about the underlying mechanisms that give ride to cognitive development
Infants and young children are more sophisticated
Understates sociocultural influences
Stage theory (discontinuous)

Sensorimotor

Stage 1: Simple Reflexes

Birth to 1 month
Innate reflexes are excercised

~Ex. Sucking reflex

Stage 2: Primary Circular Reactions

1 to 4 months
All about accidental movement
Very much centered on the baby’s own body
Circular reaction: the repetition of an action to experience pleasure
Primary circular reactions: actions are centered on the baby’s own body

~Ex. Thumb-sucking

Stage 3: Secondary Circular Reactions

4 to 8 months
Secondary circular reactions: actions that are focused on events or objects outside of the body

~Ex. Infant plays with a rattle and shakes it repeatedly

Only act on what they see

~They don’t have object permanence: the understanding that people and objects exist even when they cannot be seen

Stage 4: Coordination of Secondary Circular Reactions

8 to 12 months
Infants can remove a cover to retrieve a hidden object

~They do have object permanence: the understanding that people and objects exist even when they cannot be seen

A not B error: when you try to hide an object on the other side of the baby, they will make a mistake about where to find the object, thinks it is in the original hiding spot

Why do young infants fail to search for hidden objects?

They don’t have object permanence
Motor skills and the way that the body moves tell them something different
Infants have worse memory compared to older children and adults

Stage 5: Tertiary Circular Reactions

12 to 18 months
Trial and error
Tertiary circular reactions: actions that are varied through trial and error to produce desirable consequences

~Ex. Dropping toys from different heights

Stage 6: Enduring Mental Representations

18 to 24 months
Start to have good memory and imitate the things that the see hours or days before
Pretend play
Deferred imitation: imitating people and scenes that were witnessed in the past

Preoperational

Age 2-7
Not yet able to perform mental operations

~Conservation: quantity, volume, or mass, remain the same even when their appearance changes, so long as no additional objects are added or removed

~Egocentrism: believes that the world revolves around them, what they think and see is what other people think and see

~Perspective taking: can’t understand what other people are thinking, can’t put themselves in other people’s shoes

Concrete operations

Age 7-11
Better grasp of what the physical world is really like
Become systematic and logical thinkers
Start to learn how to problem solve and learn how to get what they want

Adaptation: assimilation vs accommodation

Assimilation: making the environment fit you; preserving existing scheme

~Ex. Child calls a “cat” a “dog”

Accommodation: making yourself fit the environment; modifying existing scheme

~Ex. Child no longer puts “cat” in “dog” category

Information-processing approaches

Focus on cognitive processes that exist at all ages, rather than viewing cognitive development in terms of discontinuous stages
Compared our brain to a computer

~Can process and retain information

Attention: what are you paying attention to at certain times

~Ex. Babies pay attention to things that are new and unique when they are younger, attention eventually becomes more social, will start paying attention to what other people are paying attention to around them

Memory: short term/working memory and long term memory, as you grow older you have better memory

~Can remember 7 numbers at a time

Executive function (cognitive regulation): problem solving, inhibitory control (can you stay focused on your task and not get distracted), how quickly you can recover when a task changes (flexibility and pivoting)

Sociocultural theories

Emphasize that other people and the surrounding culture contribute greatly to children’s cognitive development

Lev Vygotsky: Sociocultural Theory

1896-1934
Cognitive development is very much social
Learn through interactions with other people

Key concepts:

Social scaffolding: more competent people provide temporary framework that supports children’s thinking at a higher level than children could manage on their own
Zone of proximal development (ZPD): the gap between what children can do unsupported and what they can do with support

Critiques

Biological influences ignored (at least for Vygotsky)
Focus on the “group” not on the “individual”

Chapter 6: Learning Languages

Phonology

Phonological development: gaining knowledge about the sound system of language
Manipulating mouth to make sounds

Developmental Changes in Speech Perception

Phoneme: the smallest units of sounds that change the meanings of words

~The difference between “mop” and “pop” is caused by the difference between 2 phonemes: /m/ and /p/

~The difference between “led” and “red” is caused by the difference between 2 phonemes: /l/ and /r/

Conditioned head turning procedure

~At what age do babies stop being able to discriminate between sounds

Key figures: Janet Werker/Patricia Kuhl
Prosody: pattern of stress, rhythm, and intonation in a language

Phonology: Production of Sounds

Cooing: vowel-like utterances (around 2 months)

~“oo-ing” and “ah-ing”

Babbling: consonant-vowel utterances

~“da” and “ba”

~Eventually, strings of utterances liek “dadada” and “bababa”

Semantics

Meanings of words or combinations of words

~One-word stage (about 5 months (LEARNING)) first word around 1 year

~Nominals: words that label objects, people, or events

~Mama, Dada, Doggy, Kitty, Car. Moon, Hi, Bye, Ball, Milk

~Vocabulary spurt: period of rapid word acquisition (18-24 months)

Infants can understand far more words than what they can see (**receptive always over expressive**)

How do children learn the meanings of words?

Labeling: parents provide labels

~Joint attention: labeling things that the parent and child are looking at together

Mutual exclusivity bias: unfamiliar words label new objects
Whole object bias: caregivers will label objects, and child will look at whole instead of part of object (ex. Parent labels wheel on bicycle, child labels whole bicycle as the wheel)

Grammar (Morphology and Syntax)

Rules for creating words and sentences
Morphology: rules for forming a world
Overregularization: inappropriate application of syntactic rules
~“He goed” instead of “he went”

~“I losted my pencil and I can’t find it anywhere” 4-year-old

~“Foots” instead of “feet”

Syntax: grammatical rules that dictate how words can be combined

~Prior to 24 months, children use single words (holophrases)

~“bed” or “light”

~Two word stage consists of telegraphic speech

~“no bed” or “light off”

~Three word stage is still telegraphic

~“no bed now” or “turn light off”

Pragmatics

Rules for using language effectively within a social context
Turn-taking
Different situations call for different forms of speech

~Talking to a friend on campus vs. talking to a professor on campus

Sarcasm
Idioms

~“Hold your horses”, “Crack the window”, “Piece of cake”

Chapter 7: Emotions, Self and Identity

Primary emotions

Primary emotion: most basic emotions, such as anger, sadness, fear, disgust, surprise, and happiness
Newborns seem to experience distress, interest, and pleasure

~Distress becomes anger, sadness and fear

~Interest becomes surprise

~Pleasure becomes happiness

Happiness looks similar from newborn, 2-3 months, and 3-4 months
Perceive emotions by listening and looking
Emotional contagion: crying in response to hearing another infant cry
2 to 3-month-olds can discriminate different facial expressions
Still-face paradigm: no emotion leads to distress
Social referencing: looking to others for emotional cues

Secondary emotions

Secondary (or sociomoral) emotions: require social/cultural learning such as embarrassment, shame, guilt, pride, empathy
2 to 3 year old clearly display empathy

~Giving a hug, sharing a toy

Changes in emotional regulation

Temperament

A basic, innate disposition that is relatively stable over time

~Enduring emotional mood

Thomas and Chess: Patterns of Temperament

Easy

~Adapt well to new situations

~Reactions are proportional to the event

~Most babies fell into this level

Slow-to warm-up

~Chill, low in activity level

~React negatively to new situations

~Not a lot of extreme positive or negative reactions

~Once child enters school, becomes fearful (big change)

Difficult

~Did not adapt well

~Do not like change

~Intensely negative mood and emotions

~Later in life will have more problems socially (more aggressive, anxiety, etc.)

Rothbard and Bates: Temperament

Reactivity

Activity level
Attention span/persistence
Fearful distress: fear/distress in response to novel or intense situations
Irritable distress: expression of distress when frustrated
Positive affect: frequency of expression of happiness and other positive emotions

Self regulation

Effortful control

Measuring Temperament

Parents, teachers, or others rate the child

~Infant Behavior Questionnaire

~Child Behavior Questionnaire

Goodness of fit

Is the child’s temperament compatible with the environment (ex. parenting style)?

~A difficult child has well-rested/patient parents

~A difficult child has exhausted/frustrated parents

Children with frustrated parents may end up being more frustrated and angry when they get older

Emotional contagion

Emotional contagion: spontaneous spread of emotions and related behaviors (ex. crying in response to hearing another infant cry)

Social referencing

Social referencing: looking to others for emotional cues

Empathy

2 to 3 year old clearly display empathy
The ability to understand and share the feelings of another

~Giving a hug, sharing a toy

Emotion display rules

Emotion display rules: the social norms for when, where, how, and to whom to express emotions