Lifespan overheads, chapter 7: physical and cognitive development in early childhood
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Chapter 7: Physical & Cognitive Development in Early
Childhood (ages 2 - 6)
Physical Development
Body growth: 2-3 inches and 5 lbs a year.
skeletal growth: 45 new epiphyses (growth centers where
cartilage hardens into bone) emerge in various parts of the
skeleton.
 By tend of preschool years, start to lose baby teeth.
Girls start sooner than boys.
Brain development
brain increases from 70 to 90% of its adult weight.
Myelinization and pruning continue
 LH has a growth spurt between 3 and 6 years of age;
RH develops slowly
Lateralization and handedness: by age 2, hand preference
is stable
 right handed people have language in the LH.
 For the 10% who are left handed, language may be
in the RH, but is typically shared between the 2
hemispheres.
 is handedness genetic? Apparently not! The way most
fetuses lie - turned toward the left - may promote
greater postural control by the right side of the body
 left or mixed-handedness is more frequent among
severely retarded and mentally ill people
 most left handers are normal in every respect and are
more likely to develop outstanding verbal and
mathematical talents by adolescence.
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The rest of the brain:
 the cerebellum, aiding in balance and body movement
control, finishes myelinization by age 4, leading to big
gains in motor control
 the reticular formation, aids in alertness and
consciousness, myeliates throughout early childhood
and into adolescence. This leads to improved ability for
sustained, controlled attention
 the corpus callosum begins to myelinate at about 1 year
old, and by age 4-5, it is well-myelinated, contributing to
a more efficient brain
Influences on Physical Growth and Health
Heredity & Hormones:
 growth hormone (GH): necessary for physical
development from birth on
 Thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH): stimulates the
thyroid gland to release thyroxine, necessary for normal
development of the nerve cells of the brain and for GH
to have its full impact on body size
Emotional well-being:
 stressful home lives  more respiratory and intestinal
illnesses and unintentional injuries.
 deprivation dwarfism: very short stature, light weight
relative to height, immature skeletal age, decreased GH
secretions.
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Nutrition:
 Wariness of new foods is probably adaptive
 Repeated exposure to new food increases kids’
acceptance of it.
 The tofu study: there is no need to sweeten or add salt
to food to make kids eat it
Infectious disease
 infectious disease and malnutrition: Poor diet
suppresses the immune system, making kids more
susceptible to disease.
Disease, in turn, causes malnutrition ad hinders growth.
 Immunization:
o Immunization rates in the US lag behind other
industrialized nations
o due to a lack of affordable health care plus
misconceptions about the safety of immunization.
Childhood Injuries
the leading cause of death in children (40-50% of deaths in
early and middle childhood; 75% of deaths in adolescence).
 boys are more likely to be injured than girls
 temperament
 poverty and low parental education
 the US ranks among the highest in industrialized
nations in childhood injury mortality
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Motor Development
Gross motor development: as bodies get less top heavy
and more streamlined, the center of gravity shifts
downward, improving balance.
 by 2, walking is smooth and rhythmic, secure enough
that they soon are able to run, hop, jump, skip, gallop
 arms and torsos get freed up, so they start learning new
skills like throwing, catching, swinging on bars
 by 5-6, can steer & pedal a tricycle at the same time
Fine motor development
 self-help skills: By 2-3, can use zippers, and put on and
take off simple clothing. By 3-4, begin to fasten and
unfasten large buttons, serve themselves food on their
own. By 6, master tying their shoes
 Drawing and writing:
o From scribbles to pictures: at first,
 around 18 months, art is gestural
 By 3, the scribbles become pictures.
 use lines to represent the boundaries of
objects.
 draw their first person around age 3 or 4,
which typically looks like a tadpole
o Early printing: young children of 3 or 4 copy
printing, often beginning with their own name.
Individual differences in motor skills
 Taller, stronger kids move faster, acquire skills sooner.
 African American children tend to have superior
performance running and jumping, due to longer limbs.
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 Boys are slightly ahead of girls in skills that emphasize
force and power
 Girls tend to be better in fine motor skills and gross
motor skills that require good balance and foot
movement, like hopping and skipping
Cognitive Development
Piaget’s preoperational stage: ↑ in symbolic activity.
 Language: Piaget believed that sensorimotor activity
provides the foundation for language
 Make-believe play: Piaget believed that through
pretending, young children practice and strengthen
newly acquired representational schemes.
o play becomes increasingly detached from the reallife conditions associated with it.
o The way the child participates in play changes with
age (from self-directed to acting on objects to
objects as active agents)
o gradually includes more complex scheme
combinations
o By 2 ½, kids begin to combine schemes in
sociodramatic play, make-believe with others.
o Piaget saw make-believe as mere practice of
representational schemes.
o
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 Preschoolers who spend more time at sociodramatic
play are advanced in general intellectual development
and seen as more socially competent by their teachers.
 Make-believe play strengthens memory, logical
reasoning, language, imagination, creativity, and the
ability to take on another’s perspective.
Limitations of preoperational thought
 egocentrism: e.g. the three-mountain problem
 animistic thinking
 failure to conserve: due to several features of
preoperational thinking:
o centration
o thinking is perception-bound
o they focus on states rather than transformations
o irreversibility
 lack of hierarchical classification: trouble with
organizing objects into classes and subclasses
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Recent research on preoperational thought
 egocentric, animistic, & magical thinking:
o when researchers change the nature of the 3
mountains problem, 4-year-olds show clear
awareness of others’ vantage points.
o Preschooler’s conversations show that they adapt
their speech to listeners, and adjust their
descriptions of objects to fit the context
o Piaget overestimated children’s animistic beliefs
 illogical thought
o When given a conversion of number task with only
3 items instead of 6 or 7, preschoolers respond
correctly
o can also reason by analogy
 categorization: as early as 1 ½ years old, kids have
begun to form a variety of global categories
 Appearance versus reality: in certain situations,
preschoolers are easily tricked by the outward
appearance of things.
o Flavell (1993; 1987)
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Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory: stresses the social
context of cognitive development
 private speech: Piaget called this “egocentric speech”,
and saw it as evidence that young children are unable
to take the perspective of others.
 Vygotsky: kids talk to themselves for self-guidance and
self-direction.
 Vygotsky saw language as the foundation for all higher
cognitive processes.
 As kids get older their self-directed speech gets
internalized as silent inner speech
o Private speech does go underground with age
o kids who use private speech are more attentive
and involved and do better
 social origins of early childhood cognition:
In early childhood, verbal dialogues are important as
adults and more skilled peers help children master
challenging activities.
o They do especially well in mastering tasks when
the person helping them is either an “expert” peer
or an adult
 education: a Vygotskian classroom promotes assisted
discovery
o Make-believe play is the ideal social context for
fostering cognitive development in early childhood
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Information Processing: focuses on mental strategies that
children use to transform stimuli flowing into their mental
systems.
 attention: Sustained attention improves and becomes
more planful throughout the preschool years.
 memory:
o recognition and recall: preschoolers’ recognition
memory is very good but recall is poor because
they are not good at using memory strategies like
rehearsal or organization.
o memory for everyday experiences involves
scripts: general descriptions of what occurs and
when it occurs in a particular situation. As kids get
older, scripts get more elaborate. Once a child has
a script, it can be used to predict what will happen
in similar situations in the future.
 young kids’ theory of mind (metacognition).
o Awareness of an inner mental life: “think”,
“remember”, and “pretend” are among the first
verbs in kids’ vocabularies.
 2-3 year-olds think that people always
behave in ways consistent with their desires.
 Between 3 and 4, they figure out that beliefs
and desires determine behaviour
 by age 4 they get that people can hold false
beliefs.
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o Limitations to their theory of mind:
 believe that all events must be directly
observed to be known
 unaware that people continue to think when
they are not doing something
 Early childhood literacy:
o believe that a single letter stands for a whole word
o eventually figure out that letters are parts of words
and are linked to sounds in systematic ways
o storybook reading with caregivers is related to
preschoolers’ language and reading readiness
 Young kids’ math reasoning:
o in the 2nd year, kids develop a beginning grasp of
ordinality: order relationships between quantities.
o Soon they attach verbal labels to different
amounts.
o Between 2-3, they begin to count
o by 3-4, they have established an accurate one-toone correspondence between number words and
the items they represent.
o Between 4-5 they grasp cardinality: the last
number in a counting sequence indicates the
quantity of items in a set.
o By late preschool years, they can count on and
count down
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Individual differences in mental development
Kids who develop well intellectually have:
 homes rich in toys and books;
 parents who are warm and affectionate,
 parents who stimulate language and academic
knowledge,
 parents who arrange outings to interesting places,
 parents who make reasonable demands for socially
mature behaviour,
 parents who use reason to resolve conflicts instead of
physical force and punishment
 preschool and child care
o types of preschools:
 child-centered
 academic teacher-directed
o 3-6 yr-olds in child-centered classes perceived
their abilities to be higher, preferred challenging
problems, were less likely to seek adult approval
or worry about school.
o 4 year olds in child-centered schools scored better
on assessments of academic, language, motor,
and social skills than kids in academic preschools
 Early intervention for at-risk preschoolers:
o Project Head Start, begun in 1965
 score higher in IQ and school achievement in
the 1st 2 years of school than controls.
 real-life school adjustment continued to be
superior well into adolescence.
 less likely to be in special education or fail a
grade; more graduated high school.
 better attitudes and motivation about school.
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 childcare: What makes for high quality child care?
o Group size, caregiver-to-child ratio, the caregiver’s
educational preparation, the caregiver’s personal
commitment to learning about and caring for
children.
o Spacious, well-equipped environments and
activities that meet the needs and interests of
preschool age kids
 educational TV: the average 2-6 year old watches 1 ½
to 3 hours of TV a day.
 The more kids watch Sesame Street, the
higher they score on tests; one study
reported gains in academic achievement
lasting into high school!
Language development
 vocabulary: learn about 5 new words a day, using fast
mapping: connecting a new word with an underlying
concept after only a brief encounter
o Ellen Markman (1992): principle of mutual
exclusivity
o rely on social cues to help understand words
o start using words creatively to fill in for ones they
haven’t yet learned.
Lifespan overheads, chapter 7: physical and cognitive development in early childhood
 Grammar:
o Between 2-3, simple sentences that follow a
subject-verb-object order, even if asking a
question
o additions (s for plural), prepositions (in or on),
various tenses.
o Overregularization by 3 or so
 conversation: must learn to engage in effective and
appropriate communication with others - the
pragmatics of language.
o In early childhood kids already take turns
o number of turns over which child can sustain a
topic increases with age
o By 4, kids know a lot about culturally accepted
ways of adjusting their speech to fit the age, sex,
and social status of their listeners
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