PSY2071 Lecture 3: PSY2071 – Lecture – Week 3 – Childhood Development
5 Jun 2018
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PSY2071 – Lecture – Week 3 – Childhood Development
• learning objectives
•
o To outline some of the major processes in neurological
development during childhood
o To describe important childhood milestones across developmental
domains: motor, cognition, language, self-awareness, identity
o To outline some of the theoretical approaches and methods used
to explain individual differences in childhood across
developmental domains: cognitive, language, self-awareness and
identity development in childhood
• development of the frontal lobes
•
o developing across childhood - also adolescence and adult hood
o have an important role in many functions
o
▪ executive functions
▪ thinking
▪ planning
▪ organising and problem solving
▪ emotions and behavioural control
▪ personality
• corpus callosum
•
o becomes thicker
o involved in the transfer and integration of information across the
hemispheres
o helps coordinate brain functioning between two hemispheres
o white matter tract that connects the two hemispheres
• lateralisation
•
o specific functions become more localised to one hemisphere
o sex differences?
o
▪ boys
▪
▪ greater lateralisation of language in left hemisphere
▪ higher autism incidence - baron cohen’s theory or
predisposition to functioning differences
▪ girls
▪
▪ language is more evenly divided between two
hemispheres or verbal abilities emerge earlier in
girls because girls receive greater encouragement
for verbal skills than boys
• growth and height - physical development
•
o preschool years - pattern of steady increases in height and weight
o individual difference in the preschool years
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find more resources at oneclass.com
o
▪ sex differences
▪
▪ boys start becoming taller and heavier, on average
than girls
▪ national and global economic differences - developed vs
developing countries
▪ middle childhood - girls are taller than boys on average
• gross motor development
•
o age 5 - greater control over muscles -
o increases with age - muscle development etc
• fine motor development
•
o handedness - how do preschoolers decide which hand to use?
o
▪ early preference in some young infants
o necessary for school related tasks
o influenced by growth spurts in myelination - helps speeding up
communication between neurons
• factors influencing physical development
•
o sufficient or insufficient nutrition
o disease
o genetic inheritance
o family stress
• childhood nutrition
•
o children who received higher levels of nutrients had more energy
and felt more self confident than those whose nutritional intake
was lower
• childhood obesity
•
o monitoring
o
▪ BMI body mass index is the ratio of weight to heigh
o factors influencing childhood obesity
o
▪ social factors - reduced time to prepare nutritious meals,
increased portion sizes, easy access to low cost calorie
dense foods
▪ technology - reduced excessive
▪ bidirectional effects
▪ epigenetics
▪
▪ our experience is influencing our genes
• cognitive development
•
o piaget’s approach
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find more resources at oneclass.com
o
▪ children pass through four universal stages in a fixed order
from birth through adolescence
▪ knowledge is a product of motor behaviour
▪ key terms
▪
▪ centration
▪ conservation
▪ transformation
▪ egocentrism
▪ intuitive thought
▪ pre operational period
▪
▪ characterised by symbolic thinking - mental
reasoning and use of concepts increase
▪
▪ symbolic thinking is the ability to use
symbols, words, or objects to represent
something that is not physically present
▪ important for increasingly sophisticated use of
language - allows preschoolers to
▪
▪ represent actions symbolically
▪ think beyond present to future
▪ consider several possibilities at a time
▪ still not capable of operations - organised, formal,
logical, mental processes that characterise school
age
▪ centration
▪
▪ what you see is what you think
▪ concentrate on one aspect of an
object/situation - obvious elements in sight -
while ignoring others
▪ conservation
▪
▪ appearances are deceiving
▪ the knowledge that quantity is unrelated to
the arrangement and physical appearance of
objects
▪ transformation
▪
▪ understanding is complete
▪ one state is changed to another
▪ egocentrism
▪
▪ inability to take others’ perspectives
▪ thinking that doesn’t take into account the
view point of others
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
