Child Development

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Child Development
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Child Development

• Lecture Outline
• What develops?
• How does it develop?
• How do we know?
• What drives development?
• ----- break-----
• Nature vs. Nurture?
• How to make a better baby?

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What Develops?
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What do babies have at the start?

• Reflexes
• grasp, sucking
• Perception
• hearing (loudness, pitch, mom)
• vision (brightness, color, faces?) lt 4ft.
• integration of both (head-turns)

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So, where do they have to get to?
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How does it develop?
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How does development happen?

• Differentiation
• cell division
• behavior
• Growth
• bigger brain, bigger body
• more connections

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How does development happen?

• Orderly and Sequentially
• Motor Development (sit up, crawl,
• walk, etc.)
• LanguageDevelopment (coo, babble, one-word,etc.)

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How does development happen?

• In stages?
• According to Piaget
• sensory-motor stage (0-2)
• preoperational stage (2-7)
• concrete operations (7-11)
• formal operations (11-on)

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Sensory-Motor Stage (0-2)

• Child is dealing with
• object permanence (peek-a-boo)
• A not B problem (objects--actions)
• lay physics (magic Baillargeon)
• beginning of representational thought (words
  gestures)

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Preoperational Stage (2-7)

• Child is dealing with
• conservation (liquid, mass, number)
• egocentrism (not in an obnoxious way)
• theory of mind (false-belief, a/r)
• What do these have in common?

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Formal Concrete Operations

• Child (adolescent) is working on
• mentally relating representations
• (41 odd 61 odd)
• then abstract and hypothetical thoughts
• (any even number 1 odd)
• plus, puberty

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How do we know?
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How do we know?

• Sucking (HAS)
• Looking (preferentially)
• Habituation (distinction)
• Pointing
• Answering questions (task demands)
• Affective response (qualitative?)
• Brain imaging (ERPs)

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What drives development?
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Mechanisms

• Biological maturation
• gene expression (proteins)
• information processing (packing the trunk)
• Learning
• Piaget-- assimilation and accomodation
• Vygotsky--scaffolding

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THE BIG DEBATE

• NATURE VS. NURTURE

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NATURE?

• GENETIC TRANSMISSION
• 23 PAIRS OF CHROMOSOMES
• EACH HAS CA. 1,000 GENES
• GENE PAIRS--recessive/dominant
• POLYGENIC INHERITANCE

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NATURE?

• FROM GENOTYPE TO PHENOTYPE
• GENES --gt PROTEINS --gt BIOCHEM SEQUENCES --gt
• TRAITS, HORMONES, NEUROCHEMICALS --gt
• CHARACTERISTICS BEHAVIOR

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What is inherited?
tiger
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Twin studies
dizygotic
monozygotic
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NURTURE?

• EARLY EMBRYONIC DEVELOPMENT
• How does each cell with same genes develop
  into different parts?
• Physical environment! (salamander)
• How does each baby with same structures develop
  into different people?

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NURTURE?

• AFTER BIRTH
• Social environment (family, peers)
• Economic environment
• Cultural environment
• Etc

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HOW TO MAKE A BETTER BABY
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In parents the genes
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Or in the parents hands
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BETTER?

• Smarter?
• Happier?
• Healthier?
• More creative?
• More athletic?
• Earlier?

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How?
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How?

• From rat studies to baby toys
• (Turner Greenough, 1985)
• What about pre-natal Mozart?
• (UC Irvine, 1993)

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What does the child need?

• nutrition
• stimulation
• care interaction from parent
• certain exposure during sensitive (critical?)
  periods
• good childcare social interaction

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What doesnt the child need?

• The perfect experiment
• your homework.