PSYC 1000 Chapter Notes -Parenting, Culture Shock, Gender Role

• School: University of Guelph
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 1000
• Professor: Benjamin Giguere

Document Summary

Formative nurture that conspires with nature begins at conception, with the prenatal environment in the womb, as the embryos receive differing nutrition and varying levels of exposure to toxic agents. Nurture continues outside the womb, where our early experiences foster brain development. Genes dictate brain structure but experience develops neural connections and prepares our brain for thought and language and other later experiences. Both nature and nurture shape our synapses. After brain maturation provides us with an abundance of neural connections, our experiences trigger a pruning process. Sights, smells, touches, and tugs activate and strengthen connections, while unused neural pathways weaken. At juncture of nature and nurture is biological reality of early childhood learning. During early childhood-while excess connections are still on call-master such skills as language and grammar. Lacking an exposure to language before adolescent, a person may never be able to master a language.