Stages of Development

Life Stage

Brain & Nervous System

Physical Development

Sensory & Cognitive Capabilities

Behavior & Wellness

Infant

  • Synaptogenesis and synaptic pruning (growth and removal of synapses)

  • Neuroplasticity

  • Growth spurts

  • Ossification (growth and development of bones)

  • Muscle development

  • Survival (blinking, breathing) and primitive (stepping, grasping) reflexes

  • Vision: first few mins. can detect changes in brightness and track slower moving objects six months can determine boundaries of stationary objects 3-5 months perceive faces … visual cliff experiment: infants of crawling age aware of depth

  • Hearing: more developed than vision at birth 2-3 months can distinguish between consonant sounds and recognize vowel sounds

  • LAD: increased sensitivity to native language sounds in the first year … biologically prepared to learn any language

  • Others: can distinguish between sweet, bitter, sour at birth (pref. sweet), sense of smell also developed at birth

  • Fussy and irritable with sleep disruptions during growth spurts

  • REM heavy sleep (half sleeping hours here → learning and memory processes)

Child

  • Brain lateralization (logic vs creativity in hemispheres)

  • Asymmetry and specialization of functions evident at birth

  • Master ability to move capably in a changing environment

  • Acquire gross motor (large muscles, whole limb movement) before fine motor (precise, hands and fingers)

  • Early motor development follows cephalocaudal and proximodistal principles

  • Dynamic systems theory: developments take place over time through a “self-organizing” process

  • Longer attention span and more selective attention

  • Better able to plan and carry out systematic strategies for using senses to achieve goals

  • Physical activity linked to academic achievement

  • >60 min. of moderate/vigorous physical activity daily for ages 6-17

Adolescent

  • Grey matter: volume increases, peaks, then decreases through teen years

  • White matter: increases in linear fashion

  • Growth spurts and gender differences

  • Girls experiencing puberty become self-conscious about appearance

  • Boys welcome weight gain and voice changes

  • Sexual maturation

  • Longer attention spans, more efficient at ignoring relevant info

  • More distractions in the environment

  • Illusion of being productive

  • Display poor judgement and decision making

  • Risky behaviors

  • two reward systems/contrasting theories: hypo-responsive teens need more stimulation to achieve the same level of satisfaction hyper-responsive adolescent brain has greater need for reward, leading to more reward-seeking behaviors

  • 25% get recommended daily physical activity

  • obesity rates increasing over the past years, which may affect brain function

  • most do not get optimal sleep → decreased motivation, higher levels of depression, irritability, lack of tolerance + difficulty in emotional regulation

Adult

  • Fewer neurons, decreasing brain weight/volume, slower neurogenesis, lower plasticity, harder recovery from traumas

  • Neurocognitive maintenance (physical and mental exercise) and neurocognitive reserve (stockpile of neural resources saved up over lifetime)

  • Compensation: ability to enlist help of other neural resources

  • Changes in chromosomes: telomeres which are stretches of DNA forming the tips of chromosomes shorten with every cell division

  • Rise in sensory threshold and decline in perceptual abilities leading to overall decline of sensory and perceptual capacities with age

  • Older adults have greater difficulty processing complex and novel visual info

  • Hearing impairment 3x as prevalent as visual (degeneration of cochlear hair cells, their surrounding structures, and the neurons leading from them to the brain)

  • Difficulty understanding conversation

  • Exercise is important in emotional wellbeing as well as the delaying of the onset of physical disabilities

Infant

Child

Adolescent

Adult

Sensorimotor Stage

  • 6 substages

  • unable to use symbols to solve problems mentally but gradually develops symbolic representation towards the end

Substage 1: Reflexes

  • 0-1 month: survival and primitive reflexes, active exercise and refinement of reflexes

Substage 2: Primary Circular Reactions “first habits”

  • 1-4 months: sensorimotor schemes, developed by exploration (accommodation) ex. random acts of pleasure and repetition

  • greater range of action

Substage 3: Secondary Circular Reactions

  • 4-6 months

  • cause-and-effect relationships

  • emergence of object concepts

Substage 4: Coordination of Secondary Schemes

  • 8-12 months

  • infants combine secondary actions to achieve simple goals

  • i want it now, i get it now

  • tendency to search for an object in the place they last found it rather than its new hiding place

Substage 5: Tertiary circular reactions

  • 12-18 months

  • trial-and-error experimentation: invention of new methods of problem-solving or responding

Substage 6: Beginning of thoughts

  • 18-24 months

  • internalizing sensorimotor schemes and transforming them into mental symbols

  • inner experimentation: problem solving, delayed imitation, language and pictures as symbols

Preoperational Stage

  • capacity for symbolic thought developed (e.g., words)

  • egocentric thinkers easily fooled by appearances

  • failure to demonstrate conservation

Preschoolers

  • Greatest cognitive strength, can use words to refer to things, can refer to past/future, fantasy/pretend play

  • associated with advanced cognitive/social development and higher levels of creativity

  • perceptual salience: most obvious features of an object // unable to focus on two or more dimensions of a problem at once (decentration)

  • difficulties with logic based tasks

  • limitations in transformational thought (fixed on end states rather than changes

Concrete Operational Stage

  • trial-and-error approach to problem solving

  • difficulties with abstract/hypothetical problems, but good performance on problems involving concrete objects

School-Aged children

  • seriation: arranging items mentally along a quantifiable dimension

  • transitivity: describes the necessary relations among elements in a series

Formal Operational Stage

  • ability to think abstractly and hypothetically

  • can define justice abstractly

  • formulation of hypotheses/predictions in their head

  • systematic and scientific thinking about problems

  • hypothetical-deductive reasoning: reasoning from general ideas/rules to their specific implications

  • ability to decontextualize: separate prior knowledge/beliefs from demands of the task at hand

  • adolescent egocentrism: difficulty differentiating one’s own thoughts/feelings from others

  • imaginary audience: confusing own thoughts with those of a hypothesized audience

  • personal fable: tendency to think your thoughts/feelings are unique

Not all people achieve formal operations

  • many fail in deductive logic tests

  • formal operations used in fields of expertise

  • concrete operations used in less familiar areas

Growth beyond formal operations

  • postformal thought: more complex than formal-operational stage

  • relativistic thinking: knowledge depends on its context and subjective perspective of the knower

  • dialectical thinking: detecting paradoxes and inconsistencies among ideas and trying to reconcile them

Memory

Infant

Child

Adolescent

Adult

Assessing memory through:

  • deferred Imitation (as young as 6 months can imitate novel act after delay)

  • Habituation (using preferential looking time and physiological responses to see if they stop responding to repeated stimuli)

  • Operant conditioning (showing early memories are cue-dependent and context-specific)

Remember best when: repeated exposures, cues, meaningful/logical orders

Other evidence of memory

  • Prenatal memory: recognition of mother’s voice

  • The A-not-B task: signs of memory and limited memory capacity

Age-related changes in the length of time over which memory occurs

  • 6-months-old: 24 hours

  • 9-months-old: 1 month

  • 10/11-months-old: 3 months

  • 13/14-months-old: 4-6 months

  • 20-months-old: 12 months

Why does learning and memory improve?

  1. Changes in basic capacity

  2. Changes in memory strategies

  3. Increased knowledge about memory

  4. Increased knowledge about the world

  5. Increased use and accuracy of memory scripts

Changes in Basic Capacities

  • encoding, consolidation, and storage all improve as well as speed of mental processes because of myelination

Strategies and changes

  • Organization (clusters, chunking)

  • Elaboration (links, structure)

  • Younger children tend to use the same strategy successful in the past but not currently (perseveration errors)

  • 3-4 year olds rarely use rehearsal

Increased knowledge about memory and the world

  • Metamemory

  • Metacognition

  • Knowledge base

Increased use and accuracy of memory scripts

  • become more detailed, affecting how they form new memories and recall events

Using memory for problem solving

  • Adaptive strategy choice model

Strategies/Basic capacities

  • Mastery of elaboration

  • Perform cognitive operations faster

  • Greater functional use of WM

  • No differences on tasks of low complexity

  • New learning/memory strategies

Metamemory and Knowledge base

  • Continuous expansion

  • Better use of strategies, allocation of study time, and more selective in information intake

  • Advantages in female and high-SES (socioeconomic) students

Developing expertise

  • More organized knowledge base and ability to use special strategies

Autobiographical memory

  • determined by personal significance, distinctiveness, emotional intensity, life phase of event

Memory/learning and aging

  • Most older adults report minor difficulties with remembering and slower learning of new material

  • Metamemory: misjudging accuracy

  • Less spontaneous use of memory strategies

  • decline in basic processing capabilities like sensory

  • Contextual contributors: interaction among characteristics of the learner and the task

Learning and Problem Solving

  • Asking constraint-seeking questions to rule items our

  • Capable of using effect strategies, but this declines with age

SOC