Physical and Cognitive Development in Early Childhood

Physical Development in Early Childhood

• Body growth slows, and the child's shape becomes more streamlined and similar to an adult's.
• Individual differences in size become more apparent.
• Posture and balance improve, supporting gains in motor coordination.
• Skeletal growth:
  • New epiphyses emerge.
  • Children lose baby teeth, highlighting the importance of early dental care.

Brain Development

• Cognitive capacities increasingly localize in distinct neural systems.
• Rapid growth of prefrontal-cortical areas devoted to executive function.
• The left hemisphere is especially active, supporting language skills and handedness. For about 90% of people, language is housed in the left hemisphere.
• Right hemisphere activity steadily increases; spatial skills develop gradually through adolescence.

Handedness

• Reflects dominant cerebral hemisphere:
  • Right-handed (90%) – language housed in the left hemisphere.
  • Left-handed (10%) – language often shared by both hemispheres.
• Influences:
  • Prenatal and early damage to the left hemisphere may result in left-handedness.
  • Genetic bias for right-handedness.
  • Practice at complex skills.
  • Cultural variation in schooling.

Other Advances in Brain Development

• Increased links between the cerebral cortex and select brain structures lead to gains.
• Cerebellum: Motor coordination.
• Reticular formation: Sustained, controlled attention.
• Amygdala: Processing of novelty and emotional information.
• Hippocampus: Memory and spatial understanding.
• Corpus callosum: Communication between hemispheres, enabling more complex, coordinated movements and thinking.

Heredity and Hormones

• Genes control the body's production of hormones.
• Growth hormone (GH): Development of body tissues.
• Thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH): Brain development and GH support.

Nutrition in Early Childhood

• Appetite declines due to slowed growth.
• Require a high-quality diet in smaller quantities.
• A poor-quality diet is associated with tooth decay, obesity, cognitive defects, and behavior problems.
• Wariness of new foods is adaptive.
• Children imitate others' food choices.
• Repeated, unpressured exposure to new foods promotes acceptance.

Infectious Disease and Malnutrition

• Poor diet depresses the immune system.
• Illness reduces appetite and limits nutrient absorption.
• Hinders physical growth and cognitive development.
• Diarrhea is a danger in developing countries; helped by:
  • Oral rehydration therapy.
  • Zinc supplements.

Immunizations

• Widespread immunization has led to a dramatic decline in childhood diseases in industrialized nations.
• Reasons why many U.S. children lack immunizations:
  • Cost.
  • Parents' stressful daily lives.
  • Misconceptions about vaccine safety (mercury-free available).
  • Parents' religious or philosophical objections.

Unintentional Childhood Injuries

• Leading cause of childhood death in industrialized nations.
• Largely preventable.
• Most common:
  • Auto and traffic accidents.
  • Suffocation.
  • Drowning.
  • Poisoning.

Factors Related to Childhood Injuries

• Gender and temperament.
• Single parenthood, low parental education, parents' daily stresses.
• Societal conditions:
  • Poverty and rundown, crowded homes and neighborhoods.
  • Shortage of high-quality childcare.
  • Teenage parents.
  • Developing nations' overcrowding and weak safety measures.

Motor Development

• Gross-motor skills:
  • Walking, running, jumping, catching, swinging, riding.
  • Balance improves.
  • Gait is smooth and rhythmic.
  • Upper- and lower-body skills combine in more refined actions.
  • Greater speed and endurance.
• Fine-motor skills:
  • Self-help: dressing, eating.
  • Drawing and printing.

Progression of Drawing Skills

• Scribbles: during the second year.
• First representational forms: 3-4 years.
  • Draws first recognizable pictures.
  • Uses lines for object boundaries, figure in simplest form (universal “tadpole” image).
  • Adds features.
• More complex drawings: 5–6 years.
• Early printing: 4–6 years.
  • Evolves as child realizes writing stands for language.

Cultural Influences

• Why are children from Asian cultures advanced in drawing skills?
  • China has art curriculum standards for age 3 on:
  • Encourages mastering specific steps and skills.
  • Parents and adults teach and model drawing.
  • Mastering Chinese writing characters enhances ability.
  • In contrast, U.S. education emphasizes independence, finding one's own style, and not imitating others.

Individual Differences in Motor Skills

• Gender:
  • Boys excel in skills using force and power.
  • Girls excel in skills using balance and agility.
• Practice:
  • Gross-motor skills develop through play.
  • Fine-motor skills develop through daily routine.
• Adult encouragement.

Piaget's Preoperational Stage

• Ages 2 to 7.
• Significant gains in representational activity:
  • Make-believe play.
  • Symbol-real-world relations.
• Limitations in thinking:
  • Egocentrism.
  • Lack of conservation.
  • Lack of hierarchical classification.

Development of Make-Believe Play

• With age, make-believe play gradually:
  • Detaches from real-life conditions.
  • Becomes less self-centered.
  • Becomes more complex.
• Sociodramatic play develops: coordinating a plot and several roles with others.

Benefits of Make-Believe

• Contributes to cognitive and social skills.
• Predicts cognitive capacities:
  • Executive function.
  • Memory.
  • Logical reasoning.
  • Language and literacy.
  • Imagination and creativity.
  • Emotion regulation.
  • Taking another's perspective.

Dual Representation

• Viewing a symbolic object as both object and symbol.
• Emerges age 3.
• Adult teaching helps:
  • Pointing out similarities of symbols to the real world.
  • Experiences with maps, photos, drawings, and make-believe play.

Preoperational Thought Limitations

• Egocentrism:
  • Failure to distinguish others' viewpoints from one's own.
  • Leads to animistic thinking (believing inanimate objects have lifelike qualities) and magical beliefs.
  • Prevents reflecting on and revising faulty reasoning.

Preoperational Thought Limitations (continued)

• Inability to conserve:
  • Does not grasp that an object's physical characteristics remain the same, even when appearance changes.
  • Centration: focuses on one aspect, neglecting others.
  • Irreversibility: inability to mentally reverse a series of steps.
• Lack of hierarchical classification:
  • Cannot organize objects into classes and subclasses based on similarities and differences.

Educational Principles Derived from Piaget's Theory

• Discovery learning.
• Sensitivity to children's readiness to learn.
• Acceptance of individual differences.

Vygotsky's Sociocultural Theory

• Expert guidance gradually leads to self-guidance:
  • Private speech.
  • Zone of proximal development.
• Scaffolding: support of an "expert".

Private Speech

• Children's self-directed speech:
  • Piaget: "egocentric speech".
  • Vygotsky: foundation for all higher cognitive processes.
• Used for self-guidance, often following scaffolding.
• Increases during challenging tasks.
• Becomes silent, inner speech with competence.

Social Origins of Early Childhood Cognition

• Zone of proximal development: a range of tasks too difficult for the child to do alone but possible with the help of others.
• Scaffolding:
  • Adults aid learning by adjusting support to the child's performance level.
  • Varies by culture.

Vygotsky and Education

• Assisted discovery: the teacher guides learning, tailoring assistance to each child's zone of proximal development.
• Peer collaboration.
• Make-believe play.

Cultural Influences

• Children in Village and Tribal Cultures Observe and Participate in Adult Work.
• Western cultures:
  • Emphasis on child-focused activities.
  • Little access to adult work.
  • Adults focus on preparing children for school success.
• Village and tribal cultures:
  • Participation in adult work.
  • Observation of adult tasks (rarely converse or scaffold).
  • Self-sufficiency and strong self-care skills.
  • Assumption of additional responsibility without adult prompting.

Evaluation of Vygotsky's Theory

• Focuses on verbal dialogues; deemphasizes other routes to cognitive development.
• Guided participation: a broader concept.
  • Helps us understand cultural variation in cognition.
  • Says little about how basic capacities (perceptual, motor, etc.) contribute to higher cognitive processes.

Gains in Information Processing

• Executive function: inhibition, flexible shifting, working memory, planning.
• Memory: recognition and recall; episodic memory.
• Theory of mind: false belief.
• Emergent literacy.
• Mathematical reasoning.

Flexible Shifting and Working Memory

• Flexible shifting of attention:
  • Studied through rule-use tasks.
  • Around age 4, can switch rules.
• Working memory:
  • Can hold in mind and manipulate more information.
  • Contributes to flexible shifting of attention.
  • Increasingly important in problem-solving.

Planning

• Significant gains in early childhood.
• A complex executive function activity.
• By the end of early childhood, can postpone action in favor of planning:
  • Mapping out a sequence of future moves.
  • Evaluating consequences.
  • Adjusting the plan to fit requirements.

Fostering Executive Function

• Parental sensitivity and scaffolding.
• Cultural tools with adult guidance aid planning (e.g., directions for playing games, recipes for cooking).
• Poverty negatively affects executive function because of maladaptive parenting practices and chronic stress.

Memory: Recognition and Recall

• Recognition:
  • Noticing that a stimulus is identical or similar to one seen before.
  • 4- and 5-year-olds perform very well.
• Recall:
  • Generating a mental image of an absent stimulus.
  • Much poorer than recognition.
  • Strongly associated with language development.
  • Preschoolers lack sufficient memory strategies.

Episodic Memory for Everyday Experiences

• Scripts:
  • Descriptions of familiar, routine events.
  • Help children organize, interpret, and predict events.
• Autobiographical memory:
  • For meaningful, one-time events.
  • Improves with cognitive and conversational skills.
  • Influence of adult interaction styles:
  • Elaborative: adds to child's statements (scaffolding), fosters organized, detailed personal stories.
  • Repetitive: weak at promoting autobiographical recall.

The Young Child's Theory of Mind

• Coherent set of ideas about mental activities.
• Early awareness through nonverbal tasks (implicit).
• Mastery of false belief tasks (explicit), around age 4: influenced by language, executive function, and social experiences.
• Limitations:
  • Without obvious cues, unaware people are thinking.
  • Confused by subtle distinctions between mental states.
  • View the mind as a passive container.

Early Emergent Literacy

• Strong predictors of literacy development:
  • Phonological awareness.
  • Vocabulary and grammatical knowledge.
• Knowledge built through informal experiences (e.g., signs, games, interactive reading, writing).
• Teacher training and books, plus guidance to parents, help low-SES families.

Early Childhood Mathematical Reasoning

• Ordinality (ages 14–16 months): grasps order relationships between quantities.
• Counts five objects (age 3).
• Cardinality (ages 3½-4): understands that last number in a counting sequence indicates the quantity of items in a set.
• Uses counting to solve simple math problems (age 4).

High-Quality Home Environment

• Fosters intellectual growth.
• Features include:
  • Rich in educational toys and books.
  • Warm and affectionate parenting.
  • Language and academic stimulation.
  • Reasonable demands for socially mature behavior.
  • Healthy conflict resolution.
  • Use of reason, not physical force and punishment.

Types of Preschool and Kindergarten

• Child-centered programs:
  • Children select from a wide variety of activities.
  • Learning through play.
• Academic programs:
  • Teachers structure learning.
  • Formal lessons: repetitive drill of letters and numbers.
  • Evidence suggests large-group, teacher-directed learning undermines motivation.

Early Intervention for At-Risk Preschoolers

• Project Head Start: high parent involvement.
• Head Start REDI: extensive teacher training.
• High/Scope Perry Preschool Project:
  • University-based cognitively enriching preschool.
  • Life-success benefits extend into adulthood.

Child Care

• Important features of good care:
  • Physical setting.
  • Group size.
  • Adult-child ratio and interactions.
  • Enriching activities.
  • Teacher qualifications.
• Substandard care-long hours in crowded centers:
  • Score lower in cognitive and social skills.
  • Display behavior problems.
• Center-based care is associated with the greatest cognitive gains.

Educational Media

• Slow-paced, narrative TV shows are most effective.
• However, excessive TV detracts from vital skill-building play, as does the excessive use of tablets, phones, computers, etc., even when focused on "educational" content.
• Time spent watching prime-time shows and cartoons are linked to poorer academic skills.

Language Development

• Vocabulary: fast-mapping.
• Grammar: overregularization.
• Conversation: pragmatics.
• Supporting language development:
  • Recasts.
  • Expansions.

Vocabulary Development

• From age 2 (250 words) to age 6 (10,000 words), acquiring five new words daily!
• Fast-mapping:
  • Object names.
  • Verbs.
  • Modifiers.
• Draw on multiple cues: perceptual, social, linguistic.

Strategies for Word Learning

• Mutual exclusivity bias.
• Shape bias.
• Children draw on a coalition of cues that shift in importance with age.
• Rich social information.
• Adult explanations.
• Filling in for words not yet learned:
  • Coin new words.
  • Metaphors to extend language meanings.

Grammatical Development

• Basic rules:
  • Simple subject-verb-object word order (ages 2-3).
  • Small changes to express meanings flexibly: add -ing for ongoing actions and -s for plural.
• Overregularization: overextends rules to exceptions.
• Complex structures: question asking, subject-verb agreement, passive voice, embedded sentences, indirect objects.

Conversation

• Pragmatics: effective and appropriate communication.
• Skilled face-to-face interaction and turn-taking (age 2).
• Infers speaker's intention, indirectly expressed (age 3).
• Adjusts speech to fit listener age, sex, status (age 4).
• Converses and gives directions on the phone (ages 4-8), gradually overcoming a lack of conversational aids.

Supporting Early Childhood Language

• Conversations with adults stimulate children to talk and promote correct word usage.
• Recasts: restructuring inaccurate speech to correct grammatical form.
• Expansions: elaborating on children's speech, increasing its grammatical complexity.