developmental psychology

Infancy and Childhood: Cognitive Development
• Changes in the Brain
• The development of increasingly complex and efficient neural networks in various regions of the brain provides the “hardware” for the increasingly complexcognitive abilities that arise during infancy and childhood.
• Information Processing During Childhood • Psychologists who explain cognitive development in terms of information processing have documented age-related improvements in children’s attention, their abilities to explore and focus on features of the environment, and their memories. • Culture and Cognitive Development • The specific content of cognitive development, including the development of scripts, depends on the cultural context in which children live. • Improving or Endangering Cognitive Development • How fast children develop cognitive abilities depends to a certain extent on how stimulating and supportive their environments are. Children growing up in poverty are likely to have delayed or impaired
Developmental psychology
Bernstein, D. A., Penner, L. A. Clarke-Stewart, A., Roy, E. J.(2008).
Psychology(8th).
US:Houghton Mifflin Company.
what is developmental psychology?
The Development of Knowledge: Piaget’s Theory
• According to Piaget, cognitive development occurs in a fixed sequence of stages, as schemas are modified through the complementary processes of assimilation (fitting new objects or events into existing schemas) and accommodation (changing schemas when new objects will not fit existing ones). • During the sensorimotor period, infants progress from using only simple senses and reflexes to forming mental representations of objects and actions. Thus the child becomes capable of thinking about objects that are not present. The ability to recognize that objects continue to exist even when they are hidden from view is what Piaget called object permanence(客体永久性). • During the preoperational period, children can use symbols, but they do not have the ability to think logically and rationally. Their understanding of the world is intuitive and egocentric. They do not understand the logical operations of reversibility or complementarity.
• The Newborn
• Newborns have limited but effective senses of vision, hearing, taste, and smell. They exhibit many reflexes, which are swift, automatic responses to external stimuli. Motor development proceeds as the nervous system matures, muscles grow, and the infant experiments with and selects the most efficient movement patterns.
• Individual Temperament • Most infants can be classified as having easy, difficult, or slow-to-warm-up temperaments. Whether they retain these temperamental styles depends to some extent on their parents’ expectations and demands. • The Infant Grows Attached • Over the first year of life, infants form a deep and abiding emotional attachment to their mothers or other primary caregivers. This attachment may be secure or insecure.
• Developmental psychology is the study of the course and causes of agerelated changes in mental abilities, social relationships, emotions, and moral understanding over the life span.
Infancy and Childhood: nfants and their caregivers, from the early months, respond to each other’s emotional expressions. When an infant’s behavior in an ambiguous situation is affected by the caregiver’s emotional expression, social referencing is said to have occurred.
Beginnings
• Prenatal Development
• Development begins with the union of an ovum and a sperm to form a zygote, which becomes an embryo. The embryonic stage is a critical period for development, a time when certain organs must develop properly or they never will. Development of organs at this stage is irrevocably affected by harmful teratogens, such as drugs and alcohol. After the embryo develops into a fetus, adverse conditions during the fetal stage may harm the infant’s size, behavior, intelligence, or health. Babies born to women who drink heavily have a strong chance of suffering from fetal alcohol
• When children develop the ability to think logically about concrete objects, they enter the period of concrete operations. At this time they can solve simple problems. They also have an understanding of conservation, recognizing that, for example, the amount of a substance is not altered even when its shape changes. • The formal operational period begins in adolescence and allows a wide range of complex executive functions, including planning, imagining consequences, and thinking logically about abstract ideas.