Developmental Psychology Prenatal and Newborn Developmental Psychology Examines how people develop cognitively physically and socially from birth until death Zygote A fertilized egg that spends two weeks dividing and developing that begin to specialize into brain cells and other Embryo It gets to about two weeks old and attaches to the uterine wall it is an embryo During this two month period we develop organs and our heart begins to beat Fetus In 9 weeks we take on human characteristics and become a fetus means young one in latin By 6 months the fetus has a chance at survival outside the womb and you are able to communicate and respond to your mother s voice Placenta The baby s health is tied to the mother s health The placenta is to protect you from all outside harm Teratogens Things that are harmful to the baby like alcohol and cigarettes drugs fish that have mercury Fetal Alcohol Syndrome Babies have a distinctive appearances like misshapen heads and cognitive disabilities Habituation Babies are experiencing the world for the very first time but you can t get that information out of a baby Habituation is the decreasing response to a stimuli the more you see it the less you pay attention to it Scientists show babies pictures of cats and there is not much response But a cat with a dog head makes the baby interested How quickly they stop caring about the cat pictures and how quickly they identify the dog head as different Kids focus on the face first they are very important to babies Other Babies are attracted to their mother s smell Our brain over produces brain cells in the room we have at most 28 million different brain cells But by the time we are born we are down to 23 million brain cells Our neural system is still developing when we are born Infancy and Childhood Maturation A biological growth process that allows us to experience orderly change that is uninfluenced by the environment We see a development in motor abilities at ages 3 6 We also see the most development in our frontal lobe The things like memory and language develop last Your brain evolves the same in every child You will not be able to get up and walk before you crawl The exact timeline may be influenced by upbringing but the order is always the same Sets the course for our development but experience adjusts it We might read earlier than someone else but we don t learn it before other things that need to be learned before reading Blind kids follow the same step by step process as sighted kids Even if you have never seen someone else walk they crawl before they walk The exact environment we find ourselves in changes the timelines of our development Twins tend to sit up and walk the same day so maturation is influence by genetics Infantile Amnesia We don t remember things before the age of 3 They affect our memory subconsciously Schema How we view the world and our mental images of things Concepts or frameworks that organize our thoughts So you say doggy as a 1 year old that doesn t mean it s a dog As we grow we need to assimilate or accommodate that information Assimilation We put it into our existing schema If you meet a dog and a horse you might group them the same Accommodation Change your existing schema saying that a dog and a horse are two different things Babies struggle to accommodate so as we age we tend to accommodate more Piaget The most influential person in the study of child cognitive development Back in the day people assumed kids were just little adults with the same cognitive abilities Piaget said that children s brains work in stages There are things that an eight year old understands that a three year old can t There are four separate stages that we go through Sensorimotor Stage Kids in this age birth to two years old take in the world through their senses not rationally They live entirely in the present so they have no anxiety of the past and don t anticipate the future Object Permanence Before the age of 6 months kids lack this If you see something like a sweatshirt and then the sweatshirt is put in a bag they think that it is not there that it disappeared Peek A Boo is fun for children because you reappeared in front of them By 8 months old children acquire them Stranger Anxiety Fear of strangers kids begin to acquire it by the time the hit 8 months old When they are not walking mom is always near them so they don t have to worry about strangers When they can walk strangers become a big deal because mom and dad may not be there Preoperational Stage Kids begin to represent things using words and images 2 years old to about 7 Kids use intuition instead of logic Things that make sense to them are the way things are not the way that adults work Kids often times make errors that we find ridiculous Conservation Properties like mass or volume remain even if we change the object a little bit When you pour water into a wide glass they see it as a different amount of water not the same A classical failing we see in the preoperational phase Egocentrism Kids struggle with this the difficulty of seeing things from another person s perspective A difficulty in seeing another person s viewpoint Theory of Mind People s ideas about their own and other people s mental states feelings and thoughts Kids have trouble with understanding other people s minds if they know something then everyone else does Concrete Operational Stage 7 to about 12 years old Kids gain the ability to use mental operations to think logically about complex events Concrete is based on your experience this is what you know no higher order thinking You can t think abstractly They aren t able to write a thesis statement something that is in your own mind When you come to high school you struggle with writing history and english essays Formal Operational Stage You are able to think abstractly you can solve hypothetical issues like if this happens then this will happen We enter this stage at 12 years old Vygotsky We all have a capacity to learn If you take a kid that doesn t understand conservation you can t pass physics Scaffolding You build up from the top place if we support things and build around them people can know more than they actually know We don t just drop people into this is how you solve this problem they show you ways to get to it Zone of Proximal Development If you are put into a class slightly over your ability to learn but I put kids slightly smarter than you around you they pull you up to a higher level if the support
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