PSYCO105 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Frontal Lobe, Visual Acuity, Osteoporosis
1 May 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
B) Childhood (The Brain, Motor Development, Sensation and Perception)
The Brain
❏At birth the brain is 25% of adult weight → At 6 months the weight is 50%, and at 5 years it is 90% of adult
size.
❏What Happens? → Cells become larger, neural networks form and they become more complex over early
years.
Continued Development of Synapses
❏Compared with infancy and early childhood, overall brain growth slows from childhood to adolescence.
❏Infancy to early childhood = more neurons while childhood to adolescence = less neurons.
Order of brain Development
1. Starts with areas related to body function → Brain Stem.
a. Basic Necessities of life
2. Later more complex cognition → Association Cortex (Cerebrum and Ventricles)
a. Things you can control, such as emotions.
Early Childhood - Motor Development
❏Begins with reflexes → Innate behaviours → shows progress across movements.
Early Childhood - Sensation and Perception
❏Poor vision at bird → Develops continually.
❏Extremely blurry at one month → Less blurry at three months, and complete vision at one year.
Testing Vision
❏Preferential Looking Procedure → Measures how long infant looks at a stimulus
❏Newborns look longer at stimuli that they find interesting.
Vision Preferences
❏Prefer Patterned Stimuli and the mothers face.
Hearing
❏1st Year Audition → Phoneme discrimination exceeds that of an adult which disappears by 1 year of age.
❏Pre-wired for any language?
C) Adolescence
❏Begins at Puberty.
❏Brain’s hypothalamus signals the pituitary gland to increase its hormonal secretion.
❏Primary Characteristics (Sex Organs) → Mature to allow reproduction
❏Secondary Characteristics (Non-reproductive physical features)? → Body changes also occurs (height,
weight, hair etc.)
❏Adolescent brain development through Adulthood
❏3. Last, higher order cognition (Frontal cortex) → Read, adolescent decision making.
D) Adulthood
❏Young adults are considered at the peak of physical functioning. → Maximum muscle strength at age 25-30.
Middle Adulthood
❏Visual acuity declines
❏Physical status declines at id-life → Especially among sedentary people
❏Basal Metabolic rate slows after 40.
❏Women experience menopause, the stopping of menstruation around 45 to 55.
❏Bones may become brittle → slow to heal (Osteoporosis)
Adult Brains
❏Lose brain tissue (5-10% of tissues every 10 years) → Begins at 40 years old.
❏Frontal and Parietal lobes show the greatest tissue loss.
Memory
❏Decline in late 30s.
❏Stronger declines in recognition versus recall.
❏Recognition → Familiar so that you can recognize despite not knowing what it is.
Document Summary
Childhood (the brain, motor development, sensation and perception) At birth the brain is 25% of adult weight at 6 months the weight is 50%, and at 5 years it is 90% of adult size. Cells become larger, neural networks form and they become more complex over early years. Compared with infancy and early childhood, overall brain growth slows from childhood to adolescence. Infancy to early childhood = more neurons while childhood to adolescence = less neurons. Order of brain development: starts with areas related to body function brain stem, basic necessities of life. Later more complex cognition association cortex (cerebrum and ventricles: things you can control, such as emotions. Begins with reflexes innate behaviours shows progress across movements. Poor vision at bird develops continually. Extremely blurry at one month less blurry at three months, and complete vision at one year. Preferential looking procedure measures how long infant looks at a stimulus. Newborns look longer at stimuli that they find interesting.
