Lecture 10 Developmental Psychology 355 Motor Development Reflexes Motor Milestones Learning from experience Motor Milestones reach these milestones Normally developing children vary considerably in the ages at which they Chin up chest up roll over sits without support stand up holding on pulls self to stand walks holding onto furniture stands alone walks well walks up steps CRUISING There s a wide range of variability in terms of these motor milestones all approximate Many infants skip crawling all together Locomotion Walking depends on the ability to integrate many systems o Integrate many systems Upright posture leg alteration weight shifting sense of balance all of these go into the development to walking READ IN TXT ABOUT DYNAMIC SYSTEMS and how behavior can emerge by interactions of many forces get all of these things together in order to walk o Dynamic systems approach has many factors you need neurological maturity including all these other skills motivation Maturation and experience both play a role in the development of walking o Previously believed to be an element of neurological maturity o Current theories take a dynamic systems approach Emphasize many factors Increases in strength posture control balance Neural mechanisms Perceptual skills Motivation Culture even secular changes delayed the onset of crawling for many infants and many infants in society are skipping crawling all together altering motor behavior o sudden infant death syndrome is thought to occur more often when new born babies are sleeping on their stomachs face up to wake up campaign decreased SIDS Locomotion experience does make a difference o Hopi indian spend most of their life bound to cradle boards and only unbound to change their clothes and on caregivers back given same freedom to move toward the end of their first year of life and babies in both groups still walked about the same age if babies are allowed to walk at the same time as other babies then there isn t really a delay in their walking o Paraguay ache people mothers cant keep their babies close for the first 2 years of life due to dangers in society and these children aren t given that first opportunity to walk until second year of life nature vs nurture shows delay in walking need to be given opportunity during that same point when behavior should be occurring o West African dangling exercises believe its important to exercise infants to promote development to strengthen their muscles and hastens the achievement of motor milestones not nature vs nurture there are still rate limiting variables Video Karen Adolf What you learn in one posture doesn t transfer to other postures so there is a great deal to learning with experience Interaction between action and perception Interaction as an organizer of perception Locomotion may affect other aspects of development o Children s thinking and action are NOT independent dynamic systems theory Main point of dynamic systems theory all these ingredients that go into motor development are interdependent of each other Thinking cognition is not interdependent of action Perception does not equal understanding o Just because they could see the difference between 2 grid images doesn t equal understanding The onset of walking affects the way babies understand their perceptual world o Problem solving Find relocated toys crawlers vs noncrawlers Understanding and compensating for changes in spatial orientations Hid items in 2 containers and moved babies and left them to find items Babies who were experienced crawlers were more likely to solve the problem Babies who crawled were better able to deal with o Understanding object scale spatial problems o Scale errors failure of integration of perception and action Argument scale errors occur because toddlers are failing to integrate perception and action Video baby tries to put his foot in toy car in Baby sits on toy chair scale errors o Through experience that action becomes an organizer of perception and leads to enhanced understand about objects and object scale o Cannot use naturalistic observation o Design used structure observation to increase likelihood of behaviors Visual Cliff Research Self locomotors develop a fear of heights only after they finish crawling o Shows links between perception locomotion as well as cognitive abilities emotion and the social context Social referencing if the parent wasn t on the other side dangling a telephone cord if the parent changed their facial expression to indicate fear then the child looks to their caregiver of how to respond o Study o One side of the sheet is painted and the other side is transparent creating a big drop o Testing to see if fear of heights is innate o Baby didn t show any facial expressions in fear o Fear of heights was found to NOT be innate o But after a child has been crawling for about a month a change occurs baby gets scared and develops a fear of heights o A biological switch is thrown after a month of crawling Shows how it interactions with emotion and fear of heights Children will have experiences and get hurt and that is how they learn Sociocultural perspective there are other ways infants can learn about this piagets way social referencing Infant Cognition Learning profit from experience and acquire knowledge of the world 1 Habituation recovery of response repeatedly presenting infant with a stimulus until the response decreases and then present novel stimulus and record infants response to see if it increases measuring a variety of different things Speed with which an infant habituates initial response drops off reflects general efficiency of the infants processing of information Children in longitudinal studies had their cognitive ability measured later in life and found that the infants who habituated quicker had higher scores 2 Perceptual learning use perceptual abilities to actively search for order and regularity in the world around them smile with happy face Differentiation extracting elements from environment that are invariant or stable Discovery of affordances Intermodal perception tasks moms face and voice go together taste and color Extract info that s stable Relations between bodies and things around them liquids can be spilled 3 Statistical learning forming associations among stimuli that occur in a statistically predictable pattern Stimuli that occur in a statistically predictable pattern our natural environment has many regularities and redundancies ex circle square