LIFESPAN DEVELOPMENT

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LIFE-SPAN DEVELOPMENT
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A Topical Approach to
Motor, Sensory, and Perceptual Development
John W. Santrock
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Motor, Sensory, and Perceptual Development

• Motor Development
• Sensory and Perceptual Development
• Perceptual-Motor Coupling

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Dynamic Systems View
Motor Development

• Seeks to explain how motor behaviors are
  assembled for perceiving and acting
• Motivation leads to new motor behavior a
  convergence of
• Nervous system development
• Bodys physical properties
• Childs motivation to reach goal
• Environmental support for the skill

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Sample Reflexes
Motor Development
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Gross Motor Skills
Motor Development

• Motor skills that involve large-muscle activities
• Infancy
• Development of posture
• Locomotion and crawling
• Learning to walk
• No set sequence of development help
• of caregivers important
• more skilled and mobile in second year

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Milestones inGross Motor Development
Motor Development
Fig. 5.3
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Gross Motor Skills
Motor Development

• Childhood
• Improved walking, running, jumping,
• climbing, learn organized sports skills
• Positive and negative sport outcomes
• Adolescence - Skills continue to improve
• Adulthood
• Peak performance of most sports before 30
• Biological functions decline with age

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Guidelines for Parents and Coaches of Children in
Sports
Motor Development
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Movement and Aging
Motor Development
Fig. 5.4
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Fine Motor Skills
Motor Development

• Involves more finely tuned movements, such as
  finger dexterity
• Infancy Reaching and grasping
• Size and shape of object matters
• Experience affects perceptions and vision
• Early Childhood Pick up small objects
• Some difficulty building towers
• Age 5 hand, arm, fingers move together

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Fine Motor Skills
Motor Development

• Childhood and adolescence
• Writing and drawing skills emerge, improve
• Steadier at age 7 more precise movements
• By 10-12, can do quality crafts, master
  difficult
• piece on musical instrument
• Adulthood speed may decline in middle and late
  adulthood, but most use compensation strategies
• Older adults can still learn new motor tasks

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Origin and Development of Handedness
Motor Development

• Genetic inheritance
• Right-handedness dominant in all cultures
• Right hand preference in thumb-sucking begins in
  the womb
• Head-turning preference in newborns
• Preference later leads to handedness

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Handedness and Other Characteristics
Motor Development

• 85 to 95 percent of right-handed primarily
  process speech in left hemisphere
• Left handed
• Are more likely to have reading problems
• Show more variation
• Have better spatial skills
• More common among mathematicians,
• musicians, artists, and architects

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What Are Sensation and Perception?
Sensory and Perceptual Development

• Sensation occurs when information contacts
  sensory receptors
• Perception interpretation of sensation

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The Ecological View
Sensory and Perceptual Development

• People directly perceive information in the world
  around them
• Perception brings people in contact with the
  environment to interact with it and adapt to it
• All objects have affordances opportunities for
  interaction offered by objects necessary to
  perform activities

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Studying Infant Perception
Sensory and Perceptual Development

• Visual preference method to determine if
  infants can distinguish between various stimuli
• Habituation and Dishabituation
• Habituation decreased responsiveness to
  stimulus
• Dishabituation recovery of habituated response
  
• Tracking moving eyes and/or head to follow
  moving objects
• Videotape equipment, high-speed computers

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Infants Visual Perception
Sensory and Perceptual Development
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Perceptual Constancy
Sensory and Perceptual Development
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Vision in Childhood
Sensory and Perceptual Development

• Improved color detection, visual expectations,
  controlling eye movements (for reading)
• Preschoolers may be farsighted
• Signs of vision problems
• Rubbing eyes, blinking, squinting
• Irritability at games requiring distance vision
• Closing one eye, tilting head to see, thrusting
• head forward to see

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Aging Vision In Adulthood
Sensory and Perceptual Development

• Loss of Accommodation presbyopia
• Decreased blood supply to eye smaller visual
  field, increased blind spot
• Slower dark adaptation
• Declining color vision greens, blues, violets
• Declining depth perception problems with steps
  or curbs

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Glare Vision and Aging
Sensory and Perceptual Development
Fig. 5.12
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Diseases of the Eye
Sensory and Perceptual Development

• Cataracts thickening eye lens that causes
  vision to become cloudy, opaque, distorted
• Glaucoma damage to optic nerve because of
  pressure created by buildup of fluid in eye
• Macular degeneration involves deterioration of
  retina

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Hearing
Sensory and Perceptual Development
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Hearing
Sensory and Perceptual Development

• Fetus hears in last 2 months of pregnancy
• Newborns
• cannot hear soft sounds well
• display auditory preferences
• sensitive to human speech
• Infants less sensitive to sound pitch
• Most childrens hearing is inadequate
• otitis media middle ear infection

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Hearing
Sensory and Perceptual Development

• Adolescence
• Most have excellent hearing
• Adulthood
• Decline begins about age 40
• Males lose sensitivity to high-pitched sounds
• sooner than females
• Gender differences may be due to occupation

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Other Senses
Sensory and Perceptual Development
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Intermodal Perception
Sensory and Perceptual Development

• Ability to relate and integrate information about
  two or more sensory modalities, such as vision
  and hearing
• Exists in newborns

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The End
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