Developing Through the Life Span
● Nature and nurture
● Continuity and stages
● Stability and change
Prenatal Development
● Zygote: fertilized egg, enters a 2-week period of rapid cell division and develops
into an embryo
● Embryo: developing human organism from about 2 weeks after fertilization
through second month
● Fetus: Developing human organism from 9 week conception to birth
● Female by default biologically
● At each prenatal stage, genetic, and environmental factors affect development
● Placenta screens out most harmful substances, some slip by
○ Teratogens (viruses, drugs, chemicals, alcohol, nicotine)
○ Fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) leading cause of mental retardation,
physical abnormalities, lower birth rate
● Maternal stress increases risk for health problems
Infancy (birth to 18 months) and Childhood (18 months to puberty)
Innate Abilities in Infancy
● Automatic reflex responses:
○ Postural
○ Grasping
○ Rooting
○ Sucking
○ Stepping
○ Babinski (feet fan out and upwards)
○ Moro (changing positions quickly, legs and head extend, arms jerk out, hands
clench)
● Innate sensory abilities
○ Taste
○ Vision
● Brain Development
○ Explosive growth in developing prenatal brain
○ Rapid neural network branching and linking after birth
○ Neural pruning process shuts down unused links
○ Critical period for some skills
, ● Brain maturation and infant Memory
○ Rapid neuron growth disrupts old memory circuits, causing infantile amnesia
● Piaget’s Stage Theory
○ Children construct their understanding of the world while interacting with it
● Core concepts
○ Schema: framework that organizes and intercepts information
○ Assimilation: incorporates new information into existing schemas
○ Accommodation: modifies schemas in order to accommodate new information
Piaget’s Approach
● Asked children to solve problems and then questioned them about the
reasoning behind their solutions
● Discovered that children think in radically different ways than adults
● Proposed that development occurs as a series of ‘stages’ differing in how
the world is understood
Sensorimotor and Preoperational- Birth to about age 2
- Child relies heavily on innate motor responses to stimuli
Concrete Operational and Formal Operational- Sensorimotor intelligence
- Mental representations
- Object permanence: understanding that objects exist independent of one’s actions or
perceptions of them
- Before 8 months, infants act as if objects removed from sight to cease to exist
Sensorimotor and Preoperational- About 2 to age 6 or 7
- Marked by well-developed mental representation and the use of language
- Theory of mind
Concrete Operational and Formal Operational- Egocentrism, Animastic thinking,
centration, and irreversibility
Theory of Mind
- Knowledge and ideas about how other people’s minds work
- False-belief task
Sensorimotor, Concrete Operational, and Preoperational- about age7 to about age 11
- Child understands conservation but is incapable of abstract thought
● Nature and nurture
● Continuity and stages
● Stability and change
Prenatal Development
● Zygote: fertilized egg, enters a 2-week period of rapid cell division and develops
into an embryo
● Embryo: developing human organism from about 2 weeks after fertilization
through second month
● Fetus: Developing human organism from 9 week conception to birth
● Female by default biologically
● At each prenatal stage, genetic, and environmental factors affect development
● Placenta screens out most harmful substances, some slip by
○ Teratogens (viruses, drugs, chemicals, alcohol, nicotine)
○ Fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) leading cause of mental retardation,
physical abnormalities, lower birth rate
● Maternal stress increases risk for health problems
Infancy (birth to 18 months) and Childhood (18 months to puberty)
Innate Abilities in Infancy
● Automatic reflex responses:
○ Postural
○ Grasping
○ Rooting
○ Sucking
○ Stepping
○ Babinski (feet fan out and upwards)
○ Moro (changing positions quickly, legs and head extend, arms jerk out, hands
clench)
● Innate sensory abilities
○ Taste
○ Vision
● Brain Development
○ Explosive growth in developing prenatal brain
○ Rapid neural network branching and linking after birth
○ Neural pruning process shuts down unused links
○ Critical period for some skills
, ● Brain maturation and infant Memory
○ Rapid neuron growth disrupts old memory circuits, causing infantile amnesia
● Piaget’s Stage Theory
○ Children construct their understanding of the world while interacting with it
● Core concepts
○ Schema: framework that organizes and intercepts information
○ Assimilation: incorporates new information into existing schemas
○ Accommodation: modifies schemas in order to accommodate new information
Piaget’s Approach
● Asked children to solve problems and then questioned them about the
reasoning behind their solutions
● Discovered that children think in radically different ways than adults
● Proposed that development occurs as a series of ‘stages’ differing in how
the world is understood
Sensorimotor and Preoperational- Birth to about age 2
- Child relies heavily on innate motor responses to stimuli
Concrete Operational and Formal Operational- Sensorimotor intelligence
- Mental representations
- Object permanence: understanding that objects exist independent of one’s actions or
perceptions of them
- Before 8 months, infants act as if objects removed from sight to cease to exist
Sensorimotor and Preoperational- About 2 to age 6 or 7
- Marked by well-developed mental representation and the use of language
- Theory of mind
Concrete Operational and Formal Operational- Egocentrism, Animastic thinking,
centration, and irreversibility
Theory of Mind
- Knowledge and ideas about how other people’s minds work
- False-belief task
Sensorimotor, Concrete Operational, and Preoperational- about age7 to about age 11
- Child understands conservation but is incapable of abstract thought
