Infancy
Human Development Across the Lifespan
DEP 2004
Guiding Questions
 What is brain plasticity?
 How do infants think and understand?
 How do infants develop emotions?
 How do infants use the emotions of other people?
Emerging Nervous System
 Neuron - basic cellular unit of brain and
nervous system specialized In receiving and
transmitting information
 Cell body - center of neuron that keeps it alive
 Dendrite - end of neuron that receives
information
 Axon - tubelike structure that emerges from cell
body and transmits information to other
neurons
Adapted from Kail & Cavanaugh’s Human Development: A Life-Span
View, 5th Ed.
Emerging Nervous System
 Terminal buttons - small knobs at the end of the axon that
release neurotransmitters
 Neurotransmitters - chemicals released by terminal buttons
that allow neurons to communicate
 Cerebral cortex - wrinkled surface of brain that regulates
many functions distinctly human
 Hemispheres - right and left halves of cortex
 Corpus collosum - thick bundle of neruons that connects
hemispheres
 Frontal cortex - brain region that regulates personality and
goal-directed behavior
Adapted from Kail & Cavanaugh’s Human Development: A Life-Span
View, 5th Ed.
Emerging Brain Structures
 Neural plate - group of cells present in prenatal
development that becomes brain and spinal
cord
 Myelin - fatty sheath that wraps around neuron
and enables them to transmit information more
rapidly
 Synaptic pruning - gradual reduction in number
of synapses, beginning in infancy, continuing
until early adolescence
Adapted from Kail & Cavanaugh’s Human Development: A Life-Span
View, 5th Ed.
Brain Plasticity
 Neuroplasticity – extent to which brain
organization is flexible
 Experience-expectant growth - process by
which the wiring of the brain is organized by
experiences that are common to most humans
 Experience-dependent growth - process by
which individual’s unique experiences affect
brain structures and organization
Adapted from Kail & Cavanaugh’s Human Development: A Life-Span
View, 5th Ed.
Jean Piaget’s Perspective
on Children’s Thinking
 Children desire to make sense of
their experiences.
 Children construct their
understanding of the world
 Children create theories like
scientists
 Though these theories are
incomplete, they make the world
seem more predictable.
Piaget’s Basic Principles of Cognitive Development
 Schemes: Psychological structures that organize experience.
 Assimilation: Taking in information that is compatible with
what one already knows.
 Accommodation: Changing existing knowledge based on
new knowledge.
 Equilibration: A process by which children reorganize their
schemes to return to a state of equilibrium when that is
broken.
Jean Piaget’s
Stages of Cognitive Development
Sensorimotor
Infancy
0-2 years
Preoperational
Preschool & early elementary
2-7 years
Concrete Operational
Middle & late elementary
7-11 years
Formal Operational
Adolescence & adulthood
11 years & up
Stage One: Sensorimotor
Infancy (0-2 years)
 Sensorimotor Period: First of Piaget’s stages of cognitive
development, which lasts from birth to approximately
2 years.
 Object Permanence: understanding that objects exist
independently of oneself.
 8-18 months.
Children’s Thought from an
Information-Processing
Perspective
 Thought involves mental hardware
and mental software
 This combination allows children to
complete a task
 Mental hardware—built-in neural
structures that allow the mind to operate
 Mental software—mental “programs”
that are the basis for performing
particular tasks
• As children develop their mental software is more
complex and efficient
• Development of thought is viewed as relatively
continuous
• Cognitive processes such as attention, learning, and
memory become more sophisticated as children
develop
Attention—processes that
determine which info. will be
processed further
 Orienting Response--an individual views a strong or
unfamiliar stimulus, and changes in heart rate and
brain-wave activity occur
 Makes us aware of dangerous situations and important
events
 Habituation--the diminished response to a stimulus as it
becomes more familiar
 Helps us to preserve our cognitive resources
Learning
 When an infant is born they already have the
mechanisms that help them learn from experience
 Some forms of learning are:
-Habituation (mentioned earlier)
-Classical Conditioning
-Operant Conditioning
-Imitation
Classical Conditioning
 A form of learning that involves pairing a neutral
stimulus and a response originally produced by another
stimulus
 Gives infants a sense of order
 They learn that a certain stimulus is a signal for what is
going to happen next
 Infants more often show classical conditioning when the
stimulus is associated with something good and less
likely with something unpleasant
Operant Conditioning
 Focuses on the relation between the consequences of
behavior and the likelihood that the behavior will recur
 When a child behaves a certain way and is met with a
positive consequence for that behavior, the child will
most likely act that way again
 When the child’s behavior has an unpleasant
consequence they are less likely to repeat what they
did
Imitation
 Older children,
adolescents, and
young adults learn a
lot just by watching
others perform a task
 There is even some
evidence that infants
may imitate facial
expressions
Memory
 Young babies can remember events
for days or weeks at a time
 Rovee-Collier’s experiment shows
that there are 3 important features
exist at 2-3 months:
1.) an event from the past is remembered
2.) over time, the event can no longer be
recalled
3.) a cue can serve to dredge up a
memory that seems to have been
forgotten
Learning Number Skills
 Infants have basic number skills even before they know
the names of numbers. They experience variations in
numbers everyday
• An infant learns that quantity is one of the ways that
their world differs
• Experiments have shown that babies can even perform
simple addition and subtraction
Learning Number Skills Cont’d
• Also infants have shown to be able to compare
quantities
•
6 month olds are sensitive to ratio’s. When shown stimuli that features two
blue circles for every yellow circle they will look longer when they are
shown four blue circles for every yellow circle next
• When adults placed two crackers in one container and three
crackers in the next, the baby reached for the one with three
crackers
Erikson’s Early Stages of Psychosocial Development
 Stage 1: Trust vs. Mistrust
 Infancy (Birth to 1 year)
 Goal to obtain hope—
healthy balance between
openness and caution
Development of Basic Emotions
 Social Smiles - smile that infants produce when they
see a human face
 Stranger Wariness - first distinct signs of fear that
emerge around 6 months of age when infants become
wary in the presence of unfamiliar adults
Complex Emotions & Later
Developments
 Complex emotions usually emerge between 18 and
24 months of age
 Not universally expressed in similar ways
 Various experiences contribute to emotions
 Cultural context plays a large role in emotional
expression
Measuring Emotions
 Facial expressions are strong
indicators of emotions
 Some evidence we are
biologically programmed to
express basic emotions
 Similarities between adults’ and
infants’ expressions of emotions
Recognizing and Using Other’s
Emotions
 Social Referencing
 Behavior in which infants in unfamiliar or ambiguous
environments look at an adult for cues to help them
interpret the situation