Ch. 4 Infancy and Childhood

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Ch. 4Infancy and Childhood

• What is the impact of physical maturation on
  infants memory capabilities and motor skills?
• Within the brain, nerve cells form before birth.
  After birth, the neural networks that enable us
  to walk, talk, and remember have a wild growth
  spurt. Maturation, the biological growth
  processes that enable orderly changes in
  behavior, sets the basic course of development
  and experience adjusts it.

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Continued

• The lack of neural connections in infancy
  explains our inability to remember events prior
  to our third birthday.
• The average age of earliest conscious memory is
  3.5 years.
• Experiments do, however, show that infants can
  retain learning over time.

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But waittheres more!

• As the infants muscles and nervous system
  mature, ever more complicated skills emerge.
• Sitting, standing, and walking develop in a
  predictable sequence, although the actual timing
  is a function of individual maturation rate.
• Genes play a major role, too. Identical twins
  typically begin sitting up and walking on nearly
  the same day.
• Experience has a limited effect for other
  physical skills as well, including those that
  enable bowel and bladder control.

4
What is Piagets view of how the mind develops,
and what is his stage theory of cognitive
development? What is current thinking regarding
cognitive stages? 1. Cognition refers to all
the mental activities associated with thinking,
knowing, and remembering. 2. Jean Piaget
maintained that the mind of the child is not a
miniature model of the adults. 3. He
theorized that the mind develops by forming
schemas (a cognitive concept that helps organize
and interpret information) that help us
assimilate our experiences and that must
occasionally be altered to accommodate new
information.
5
Continued

1. In this way, the child progresses from the
   sensorimotor stage of the infant to the more
   complex stages of thinking.
2. By about 8 months, an infant exhibits object
   permanence, an awareness that things still exist
   even when they are out of sight.

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Piaget believed

• that preschool children are egocentric (the
  inability of the child to take anothers point of
  view) and unable to perform simple, logical
  operations (the preoperational stage).
• However, he thought that at about age 6 or 7,
  children become capable of performing concrete
  operations, for example, those required to
  comprehend the principle of conservation (see
  page 146).

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He also believed

• By age 12, reasoning expands from the purely
  concrete to encompass abstract thinking, called
  by Piaget formal operational thinking.
• Recent research shows that young children are
  more capable and their development more
  continuous than Piaget believed.
• The cognitive abilities that emerge at each stage
  have begun developing in a rudimentary form in
  the previous stage. Todays researchers also see
  formal logic as a smaller part of cognition than
  Piaget did.

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Researchers have found

• that although still egocentric, preschoolers
  begin forming a theory of mind and they realize
  that others may hold false beliefs.
• Autism, a disorder characterized by deficient
  communication and social interaction, is marked
  by an impaired theory of mind.

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The Russian psychologist, Lev Vygotsky

• also found that by age 7, children stop thinking
  aloud and instead rely on internal speech, which
  makes them more capable of verbal thinking and of
  using it to work out solutions to problems.