Chapter 1

●​ Three reasons to understand child development

○​ Raising children well/Improving children’s wellbeing
○​ Social policy and court testimony
○​ Understanding human nature at large
■​ Nativists: evolution has created many remarkable capabilities present even in
early infancy → understanding basic properties of physical objects, plants and
animals, and other people
■​ Empiricists: infants possess general learning mechanisms that allow them to
learn, but they don’t have those specialized capabilities like object identification
●​ The timing of experiences influence their effects: The longer/later a child is in something, the
harder it is to reverse those effects
○​ Physical health and intellectual competence of romanian orphans and especially social
development/mental health
■​ Opposite to intellectual development, the difference in mental health problems
increased between the ages of 15 and 23 years when compared to earlier ages
(low levels of action in the amygdala)

Historical foundations of the study of child development

●​ Beginning in the early 20th century, psychologists began to apply the scientific method to
analyzing human behavior
○​ Early non-researchers thinkers still have an influence

Early philosophers’ views of children’s development → these underlie many contemporary debates
●​ Plato and Aristotle, 4th century BC
○​ How are children influenced by the nature and nurture they receive?
○​ Both believed that longterm welfare of society depended on properly raising children
■​ Plato – self control and discipline, believed that children have ingrained
knowledge (rationalism)
●​ nature
■​ Aristotle – discipline, individual/customizable raising based on child’s needs,
all knowledge comes from experience → tabula rasa (empiricism)
●​ nurture
●​ 2000 years later, Locke and Rousseau
○​ Locke was also an empiricist/tabula rasa
■​ Nurture
 ■​ Growth of character was most important - honesty, stability, gentleness in
raising/setting of good examples and avoiding indulging the child to a point
(still allow some freedom)
○​ Rousseau
■​ Believed that parents and society should give children maximum freedom from
the beginning
●​ Contemporary takes
○​ Kagan 2000: children have an innate moral sense, encompassing five abilities that even
primate lights
■​ Inferring the thoughts and feelings of others
■​ Applying concepts of good and bad to one’s own behavior
■​ Reflecting on past actions
■​ Understanding that negative consequences could have been avoided
■​ Understanding one’s own/other motives and emotions

Social reform movements

●​ What are the roots of the contemporary field of psychology?
○​ Social reform movements devoted to improving children’s lives
■​ Industrial revolution
●​ Earl of Shaftesbury – forbidding employment of girls and boys
younger than ten and research

Darwin’s theory of evolution

●​ Darwin’s work on evolution → inspired scientists to use children’s development as a means of
understanding human nature
○​ “A biographical sketch of an infant”

Enduring themes in child development

●​ Seven clear basic questions
○​ 1. How do nature and nurture shape development?
○​ 2. How do children shape their own development?
○​ 3. In what ways is development continuous, and in what ways is it discontinuous?
○​ 4. How does change occur?
○​ 5. How does the sociocultural context influence development?
○​ 6. How do children become so different from one another?
○​ 7. How can research promote children’s well-being?
Nature and nurture:
●​ Nature: Genetics can affect something as specific as political attitudes and propensity for
thrill-seeking
●​ Nurture: wide range of environments, both physical and social, that influence our
development
○​ The womb
○​ The homes
○​ The schools
○​ The broader communities
○​ People we interact with
●​ Working together
○​ Schizophrenia
■​ Genetics play a strong role
■​ 50-60% who have an identical twins do not become schizophrenic themselves
●​ Children born in troubled homes v. children raised in a normal
household
■​ Interactions between nature and nurture are especially powerful
●​ Schizophrenic parent and who were adopted into a troubled family →
really bad
●​ Genome influences experiences/behaviors, experiences/behaviors influence genomes
○​ Even though DNA is constant throughout life, but proteins regulate gene expression by
turning gene activity on and off
■​ Proteins change in response to experience and, without structurally altering
DNA, can produce enduring changes in cognition/emotion/behavior →
epigenetics (the study of stable changes in gene expression that are
mediated by the environment – “how experience gets under the skin”)
○​ Epigenetics - example study
■​ Methylation - reduces expression of genes and regulates stress reactions
●​ The amount of stress that mothers experienced during child’s infancy
was related to the amount of methylation in the children’s genomes 15
year later
○​ Also depression and abuse → children at higher risk of mental
illness

The active child: how do children shape their own development?

●​ Selective attention
 ○​ Newborns attend more to objects that move and make sounds than to others
○​ Recognizing mother’s face – after two months, associated with expressions of
emotions like smiling and cooing
○​ Between 9 and 15 months of age, their contribution to their own development
becomes more evident
■​ Toddlers often talk when they are alone in a room (internally motivated to
learn a language)
■​ Young children’s play/Make believe
■​ Older children’s play
●​ Organized
●​ Rule bound
○​ Self-control for turn taking
○​ Adhering to rules
○​ Controlling one’s emotions in the face of setbacks

Continuity/discontinuity
●​ Continuous - pine tree growing taller and taller
●​ Discontinuous - transition from caterpillar to butterfly
○​ Children of different ages seem qualitatively different
■​ Not only do 4 year olds and 6 year olds differ in how much they know, but they
also differ in the way they think of the world
●​ Piaget’s conservation of liquid quantity problem - does not vary based
on culture
○​ Stage theories - development occurs in a progression of distinct age-related stages,
think: butterfly
■​ “Relatively sudden, qualitative changes”
○​ Piaget’s theory of cognitive development
■​ Children go through 4 stages of cognitive growth between birth and
adolescence
●​ 2-5 year olds: stage of development where they can only focus on only
one aspect of an event
○​ Liquid in a glass
●​ By age 7: multitasking
○​ Liquid in a glass (considering both relevant dimensions of the
problem simultaneously)
○​ Other stage theories – emphasize that age plays a huge role in these manifestations
 ■​ Freud, Psychosexual development
■​ Erikson, Theory of psychosocial development
■​ Kohlberg, theory of moral development
●​ In the past years, many researchers have concluded that most developmental changes are
gradual rather than sudden
○​ “Development occurs skill by skill” rather than in a broadly unified way
●​ Hard to know because the same facts can look different based on one’s perspective - how you
look at it and how often you look
○​ Does children’s height increase continuously or discontinuously?
■​ Depends on if you look at it from a year to year basis (discontinuous) or not
(continuous)

Mechanisms of change: how does change occur?

●​ All mechanisms = processes that produce an outcome of interest
○​ Behavioral
■​ Mathematical development → behavioral mechanism of improved strategies
○​ Neural
■​ Increased interconnection between the frontal cortex and the intraparietal
sulcus (cognitive functions)
○​ Genetic
■​ Presence or absence of specific alleles
●​ What are the roles of these above factors in effortful attention?
○​ Voluntary control of one’s emotions and thoughts
■​ Inhibiting impulses, controlling emotions, focusing attention
■​ Difficulty controlling these impulses is associated with behavioral problems,
weak math and reading skills, and mental illness
○​ Neural evidence/brain activity
■​ When controlling thoughts and emotions, brain activity is especially intense in
connections between the limbic area and the anterior cingulate/prefrontal
cortex
●​ Former deals with emotional reactions, latter deals with goal setting
●​ Connections between these two brain areas underlies effortful
attention
○​ Affected by environment and genetics
■​ Environment - Spending one's childhood in poverty
can make it harder to suppress negative emotions and
 ■​ Genetics - neurotransmitter genes, especially in
conversation with parenting, for example for attention
○​ Effects of learning on effortful attention
■​ Makes brain wiring for effortful attention and intelligence tests stronger
●​ Experience influences brain processes/gene expression and vice versa
●​ What are the roles in the three main factors in sleep?
○​ Infants before 18 months
■​ 14-15 hours of sleep per day
■​ Promoting learning, specifically the maturation of the hippocampus
(important for learning and remembering)
○​ Children after 24 months/2 years
■​ Learning focused on during sleep shifts to specific moments and not just
general patterns
○​ Active systems consolidation theory, Werchan and Gomez
■​ Explains the memory changes that underlie the change from infancy to the
preschool period
●​ Hippocampus and cortex (Frontal, parietal, occipital, temporal) are
both interconnected and responsible for learning, but the former can
learn details of new information from one or two experiences and the
latter deals with abstraction of general patterns
○​ During sleep, in older children and adults, the cortex extracts
general patterns from specific memories stored in the
hippocampus – learning general patterns improves retention of
details of new experiences of the same type
■​ Sleep for infants → general patterns, function of the cortex
●​ Hippocampus is too immature
■​ Sleep of preschoolers → specific experiences, hippocampus

The sociocultural context: how does sociocultural context influence development?

●​ sociocultural context
○​ Physical
○​ Social
○​ Cultural
○​ Economic
○​ Historical
○​ Most key: who they interact with and the physical environment they live in
 ■​ Less important – institutions, like educational systems, religious institutions,
sports leagues, social organizations, etc. ; general characteristics of the child’s
society
●​ Childcare centers in the US: historical (not likely 50 years ago),
economic (women are more likely to work now) , cultural values
(women should be allowed to work)
●​ Classic example: urie bronfenbrenner (1979)’s bioecological model
●​ Cross-cultural comparisons
○​ Young children sleep in the same bed as their mother for the first few years - italy, japan,
south korea - and same room for somewhat older children
■​ Prizing interdependence v. independence
●​ Within cultures as well ​
○​ Socioeconomic status → cumulative risk, greatest obstacle to poor children’s
successful development
■​ Health problems in infancy
■​ Brains have less surface area from ages 3-20
■​ Emotional problems
■​ Smaller vocab
■​ Lower IQs
■​ Lower math and reading scores
■​ Having a baby
■​ Dropping out of school
○​ What are the characteristics of resilience
■​ 1. Positive personal qualities (high intelligence, easygoing personality,
optimistic outlook on future)
■​ 2. Close relationship with at least one parent
■​ 3. Close relationship with at least one adult other than parents

Individual differences: how do children become so different from one another

●​ What can lead children to be different from each other, including if they’re from the same
family? Scarr (1992)
○​ 1. Genetic differences
■​ Even true for identical wins → mutations causes several hundred differences on
average even before birth
■​ Even more different for other children
○​ 2. Differences in treatment by parents and others
 ■​ Often caused by preexisting characteristics in the children
■​ More sensitive care to easygoing infants; parents are often angry with difficult
children even when they have done nothing wrong
○​ 3. Differences in reactions to similar experiences
■​ Subjective interpretations of their treatment – when each of a pair of siblings
feels that their parents favor the other
■​ Different reactions to general family issues like parent job loss and divorce
○​ 4. Difference choices of environments
■​ Active child theme
■​ choosing/accepting niches for themselves

Research and children’s welfare: how can research promote children’s wellbeing?
●​ Anger management programs, eyewitness testimony, educational innovations
○​ For example, children’s differing beliefs about intelligence and how those differing
beliefs influence their learning
■​ People who don’t view education as stagnant throughout life react to failure in
more effective ways → especially children who change from possessing the
former view to the latter view
○​ Showing “struggle stories”

Methods for studying child development

●​ All beliefs may be wrong
●​ The first second and fourth steps of the scientific method are not unique to science (choose a
question, formulate a hypothesis, draw a conclusion regarding the hypothesis) and have been
used by great thinkers in the past
○​ What distinguishes the scientific method is the METHOD
■​ The importance of appropriate measurement – relevance to the hypothesis,
reliability, and validity
●​ An unreliable measure - one in which the ratings of different people are
not strongly related - cannot be valid because there is no way to tell
which rater is accurately assessing the behavior being rated
●​ Reliability
○​ Consistency between independent measurements
■​ Interrater reliability errors
■​ Test-retest reliability
 ●​ Validity
○​ Internal validity – can the effects observed within experiments be attributed with
confidence to the factor that the researcher is testing?
○​ External validity – ability to generalize research findings beyond the particulars of the
research in question

Contexts for gathering data about children

●​ Interviews
○​ Oral/printed interviews
○​ Clinical interviews – pre-prepared questions
○​ Pros: quick data, in-depth information
○​ Cons: bias
●​ Naturalistic observation
○​ Gerald Patterson (1982) comparative study of family dynamics in “troubled” and
“typical” families
■​ Parents in troubled families were more self-absorbed and less responsive to
their children than were parents in the typical households
■​ More aggressive v. less aggressive response to behavior – cycle of aggression in
the former
■​ But how did the current situation arise/
■​ Many behaviors of interest also occur only occasionally
●​ Structured observation
○​ Kochanska, Coy, and Murray (2001) – 2 and 3 year olds compliance with mothers’
requests to forgo appealing activities v. participate in unappealing ones
■​ Children that complied with the request to not play with the nice toys on the
shelf when their mother was present also did so for a longer time when she
wasn’t present + more likely to put away toys if she asked
■​ When retested for fourth birthday, showed same compliance
○​ Pros: ensures that children are showed identical situations
○​ Cons: does not provide extensive information about subject experience, unlike
interviews, not open-ended or everyday data

Correlation and causation

●​ Correlational designs – association between two variables, knowing one variable allows for
accurate prediction of the other variable
○​ Do children who differ in one variable also differ in predictable ways in other variables?
 ■​ Is a toddler’s aggressiveness related to the number of hours they spend in
daycare?
●​ Why does correlation not equal causation?
○​ Direction of causation problem
○​ Third variable problem
○​ When is correlation good?
■​ For variables you can’t manipulate, like age and sex
■​ Relations among variables rather than cause-effect

Experimental designs
●​ Random assignment – prevents impact of preexisting variables​
○​ Ideally 30+ per group
●​ Experimental control
●​ Example experiment, Schmidt (2008), hypothesis that having TV shows in the background
lowers quality of play
●​ When can lab experiments be externally valid/applied to everyday life?

Research designs for examining children’s development

●​ Cross-sectional
○​ Comparing children of different ages on a given behavior, ability, or characteristic by
studying them roughly at the same time
○​ Evans, Xu, and Lee (2011): development of dishonesty in chinese 3/4/5 year olds
■​ 5 year olds lie more often, lies were more ingenious
●​ Longitudinal
○​ Following the same children over a substantial period, usually at least a year, and
observing changes and continuities in these children’s development at regular intervals
during
○​ Children in kauai followed until age 40
○​ Brendgen and colleagues’ (2001)
■​ Examination of children’s popularity with classmates, from 7-12 years old
○​ Less common than cross-sectional
○​ Cons: more drop out - which threatens validity, repeated testing, costly
●​ Microgenetic
○​ Both longitudinal and cross-sectional studies only provide a broad outline of the
process of change
○​ Specifically about the processes that produce change
 ○​ Recruiting children on the verge of an important developmental change, heighten their
exposure to the type of experience that is believed to produce that change, and then
intensively study the change as it is occurring
○​ Like longitudinal, repeatedly studying the same children over time, but greater number
of sessions presented over a shorter time
○​ Ex: siegler and jenkins (1989), studying how young children discover the counting-on
strategy for adding two small numbers – counting from a number to add v. counting
from 1, which takes more time
■​ Children often discovered the counting on strategy while solving easy
problems they previously solved correctly by counting from one + realization
was often paired with excitement
■​ Only gradually increased their use of this strategy, which tends to be a trend

Ethical issues in child-development research

●​ Doesn’t harm children physically or psychologically
●​ Obtain informed consent for participating in the research from parents and children if they are
old enough to have the research to be explained to them
●​ Preserve anonymity
●​ Discuss any information yielded by the investigation that is important for the child’s welfare
●​ Try to counteract any unforeseen negative consequences that arise during the research
●​ Correct any inaccurate impressions child may develop during research

Chapter 2: prenatal development and the newborn period

●​ Most notable theme will be nature and nurture, but also active child, sociocultural context,
individual differences, continuity/discontinuity, research and children’s welfare

Prenatal development
●​ Beng = baby is reincarnation of ancestor
○​ Making the baby happy
○​ Encouraging dropping off of umbilical stump
●​ Aristotle believed in epigenesis – the emergence of new structures and functions during
development
Conception
●​ Gametes/germ cells
○​ Ovum
○​ Sperm
■​ Any sperm that makes it to the egg is likely to be healthy and structurally sound
■​ Chemical reaction seals it so that other sperm cannot enter once a sperm head
penetrates
■​ The tail of the sperm falls off, the contents of its head gush into the egg, and
the nuclei of the two cells merge within hours
■​ Fertilized egg = zygote, 23 chromosomes from each parent
○​ Contain only half the genetic material found in other cells
■​ Produced through meiosis
●​ Conception is equally likely to result in male and female embryos, but female fetuses are less
likely to survive early gestation, but females are more likely to survive birth because males are
sensitive to teratogens (harmful external agents) and are more likely to die from sudden infant
death syndrome and develop developmental disabilities
○​ Killing girls at birth or selectively aborting theme → sociocultural model
○​ New research: impact of climate change on sex ratios - temp and stress-related
teratogens

Developmental process

●​ Zygote → embryo → fetus

○​ Four main processes
■​ 1. Cell division/mitosis
■​ 2. Cell migration - movement of newly formed cells away from point of origin
ex: neurons that travel to outer reaches of the developing brian
■​ 3. Cell differentiation
●​ Embryonic stem cells can be any of 200 types
●​ Specialization
●​ What determines specialization?
○​ Location via cell-to-cell/chemical contact
○​ Gene expression - which genes are switched on
■​ 4. Apoptosis
●​ Programmed into the cells themselves
○​ Hormones
 ■​ Sexual differentiation
●​ Androgens for male genitalia – from the male fetus itself
■​ Steroids like glucocorticoids - limit fetal growth/help fetal tissues mature
●​ Increases production toward end of gestation to facilitate maturation
of key organs - like lungs, which are needed for life outside the womb

Prenatal development

Early development - takes place at a more rapid pace than later development
●​ By fourth day - hollow sphere with a bulge of cells, called the inner cell mass, on one side
○​ Identical/monozygotic twins: inner cell mass splits in half
○​ fraternal/dizygotic twins: when two eggs happen to be released from the ovary into the
fallopian tube and both are fertilized
■​ No more genetically alike than non-twin siblings
●​ By end of first week - zygote starts relying on mother in uterus
○​ Differentiation begins
■​ Amniotic sac, placenta
●​ During the second week - single-layer inner cell mass folds into three layers, each with a
different developmental destiny
○​ Top layer - nervous system, nails, teeth, inner ear, lens of eyes, outer surface of skin
○​ Middle - muscles, bones, circulatory system, inner layers of skin, other internal organs
○​ Bottom layer - digestive system, lungs, urinary tract, glands
●​ A few days after the embryo has differentiated into these three layers, a u-shaped groove forms
down the center of the top layer → creation of the neural tube (one end will be brain, other
end will be spinal cord)
●​ What develops along with the embryo?
○​ Amniotic sac
○​ Placenta - rich network of blood vessels that extends into the mother’s uterus - 90% of
the cells in the placenta come from the fetus itself
○​ Connected to each other by umbilical cord
●​ About the placenta
○​ Semipermeable – exchanges materials carried in the bloodstreams of the fetus and its
mother, but prevents blood from mixing
■​ Oxygen
■​ Waste products from the fetus go to the mother and are removed by her
normal excretory processes
 ■​ Inhibits disease to the fetus

An illustrated summary of prenatal development

●​ Earlier development takes place at a more rapid pace than later development
●​ Cephalocaudal development
○​ Later on, last five months, external genitalia are substantially developed
●​ At 28 weeks, brain and lungs are developed enough to allow survival outside the womb
●​ Last three months, fetus grows dramatically in size, essentially tripling its weight; develops a
wide repertoire of behaviors and learns from its experiences

Fetal experience and behavior

●​ Themes
○​ Nature and nurture: prenatal experiences shape the developing fetus
○​ Active child: formation of organs and muscles depend on fetal activity; fetus rehearses
the behavioral repertoire it will need at birth
○​ Continuity and discontinuity: continuity → 32 week old fetus whose heart rates were
generally slower and who moved less were more behaviorally inhibited at 10 years of
age
■​ Discontinuity of environment
■​ Continuity of similarities between fetus and children

Movement of the fetus

●​ From 5 or 6 weeks after conception, fetus moves spontaneously
○​ 7 weeks - hiccup (preparing fetus for eventual nursing)
●​ Swallowing - amniotic fluid, normal development of tongue palate, helps digestive system
mature properly
●​ Breathing - 10 weeks, fetal breathing of amniotic fluid not air , moving chest wall in and out

Touch
●​ Active child - experiences tactile stimulation because of its own activity
○​ Contact between hand and mouth during second half of pregnancy
●​ By full term, fetal heart rate responds to maternal movements, suggesting that their vestibular
systems (inner ear) are also functioning before birth

Sight
●​ Visual experience of womb is minimal
 ●​ By third trimester, fetuses can process visual information by the third trimester of pregnancy
●​ Fetus visual preference: topheavy light (correctly oriented faces)

Taste
●​ Fetus has a sweet tooth
○​ DeSnoo (1937) injected saccharin into amniotic fluid

Smell
●​ Amniotic fluid takes on odors from what mother has eaten, fetal breathing
●​ Phylogenetic continuity – humans share many characteristics and developmental processes with
nonhuman animals due to our shared evolutionary history

Hearing
●​ Fetus’s heart rate changes when mother starts speaking
●​ Last trimester, movement reactions as well, can differentiate between movement and speech

Fetal Learning
●​ Studies of habituation – growing bored of a stimulus if it is repeated over and over again
○​ Only possible if memory exists
○​ Dishabituation
●​ Heart rate increasing more for a mother’s voice than another woman’s voice
●​ Newborns definitely remember fetal experience
○​ Still prefer to listen to mother’s voice
○​ Still prefer languages their heard in the womb
○​ Remember sounds of specific stories heard in the womb
○​ Tastes and smells - prefer scents that mother ate
■​ Might explain cultural food preferences
●​ Prenatal education programs still aren’t helpful
○​ Cannot process specific sounds

Hazards to prenatal development

●​ Spontaneous abortion/miscariage
●​ What environmental factors contribute to miscarriages?
○​ Teratogens = environmental agents
■​ Harmful if present during a sensitive period - when basic structures are being
formed - in prenatal development
 ■​ Amount or duration of exposure also matters → dose response relation also
matters
●​ Ex: thalidomide, either before the limbs started to develop or after they
were basically formed
■​ Frequently occur in combination
●​ Families living in poverty → poor maternal nutrition, exposure to
pollution, inadequate prenatal care, psychological stress
●​ Fetal programming: belated emergence of effects of prenatal experience
○​ Inadequate prenatal nutrition can lead to obesity postnatally (ex: Dutch Hunger
Winter)
●​ Individual differences in genetic susceptibility + sleeper effects (only affects adolescence and
adulthood)

Examples of teratogens

●​ Drugs
○​ Accutane
○​ Antidepressants
■​ Treatment for depression during pregnancy can help reduce risk of postpartum
depression
●​ Solution: CBT and mindfulness-based cognitive therapy
○​ Opioids
■​ Mimic effect of neurotransmitters
■​ Neonatal abstinence syndrome (NAS) - low birth weight, problems with
breathing and feeding, and seizures
○​ Marijuana
■​ Esp when in combo with tobacco
■​ Attention, impulsivity, learning, and memory
○​ Cigarettes
■​ Less oxygen for her and fetus
■​ Slowed fetal growth
■​ Low birth weight
■​ Sudden infant death syndrome, lower IQ, hearing deficits, ADHD
■​ E-cigs - use of nicotine can also affect cardiac, respiratory, and nervous systems
○​ Alcohol
■​ In bloodstream directly and amniotnic fluid
 ■​ Remains in fetus’s system for longer
■​ Fetal alcohol spectrum disorder
●​ Environmental pollutants
○​ Lake Michigan fish, newborns with smaller heads
○​ Air pollution from the burning of fossil fuels, low birth weight/neurotoxicity
○​ Lead in Flint, Michigan
○​ Dose-response relationship

Maternal factors that affect fetus

●​ Age
○​ 15 years or younger are 3 to 4 times more likely to die before 1st birthday than between
23 and 29
○​ Waiting until 30s and 40s to have children
■​ Dose-response relationship, with a risk of negative outcomes for both mother
and fetus increasing with maternal age
■​ Heightened risk for autism
●​ Nutrition
○​ Little folic acid - higher risk for having an infant with a neural tube defect such as spina
bifida
○​ Dutch Hunger Winter – evidence that malnutrition prenatally effects into adulthood
with attentional tasks and prematurely aged brains
●​ Disease
○​ rubella/3-day measles
○​ STIs like cytomegalovirus and genital herpes
○​ Zika, microcephaly
●​ Maternal emotional state
○​ Alterations in hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis and the hormone cortisol
■​ Disrupted HPA axis functioning
○​ Prenatal environment not genetics are strongest predictor of later outcomes
■​ Postnatal maternal stress is the strongest predictor

The Birth Experience

●​ What does squeezing during birth do?
○​ Reduces overall size of head
○​ Stimulates production of hormones to help withstand mild oxygen deprivation during
birth
Diversity of childbirth practices
●​ 1. Safeguarding the survival and health of both mother and baby 2. Social integration
●​ US ←> Bali
●​ Ju’hoansi women or rural Botswana and Namibia
○​ Give birth outside despite presence of predators – sociocultural context

The Newborn Infant

●​ State = continuum of arousal; 6 states → substantial individual and cultural differences in how
much time is spent in these states
○​ Active sleep
○​ Quiet sleep
○​ Drowsing
○​ Alert awake
○​ Active awake
○​ Crying
●​ Sleep
○​ Average newborn sleeps twice as much as young adults two
■​ REM and non-REM changes dramatically with age
■​ 50% REM for newborns but only 20% by 3 or 4 years of age
●​ Why? Developing visual system + natural jerking movements
(myoclonic twitching) to build sensorimotor maps
○​ Not as disconnected with external stimulation as older individuals are
○​ Nighttime awakenings diminish over the course of the first postnatal year
○​ Graduated extinction more helpful than sleep-education –greater improvement in
sleep behaviors; no negative effects on cortisol
○​ + bedtime fading – bedtime shifted later to ensure sleepiness, and then gradually
moved earlier
○​ Cultural difference
■​ Kipsigis parents in rural Kenya are relatively unconcerned about their infants’
sleep patterns
●​ Crying
○​ Initially increases, peaking at around 6-8 weeks, decreases at around 3-4 months of age
○​ Soothing
■​ Swaddling
 ■​ Mothers in the rural island communities of Fiji are more likely to rapidly
respond to their infant’s negative facial displays than US mothers
○​ Colic = inconsolable crying
■​ Causes are unknown: allergic responses to mother’s diet? Formula intolerance,
immature gut development, excessive gassiness

Negative outcomes at birth

●​ Apgar score quickly assesses the health of newborn infants immediately following birth
○​ Skin tone, pulse rate, facial responses, arm and leg activity, and breathing strength
●​ Infant mortality
○​ Far higher infant mortality rate in US than other industrialized nations - relatively
○​ Why?
■​ Low-income mothers don’t have health insurance
●​ Low birth weight
○​ Premature often
○​ Small for gestational age, either premature or full term
○​ Neurosensory deficits, more frequent illness, lower IQ scores, lower educational
achievement
○​ Causes
■​ Teratogens - smoking, alcohol, and environmental pollutants like lead and
mercury, airborne pollution
■​ Skyrocketing rate of multiple births because of successful treatments for
infertility like IVF
○​ Long-term outcomes
■​ Persistent difficulties - sensory impairment, academic achievement, behavior;
inattention, anxiety, and social difficulties
●​ Because of white matter reduction, ventricular enlargement, and other
abnormal brain development outcomes
■​ Often confound socioeconomic status with low birth weight
○​ Good news
■​ Majority of lbw children effects gradually diminish
■​ Intervention programs
●​ Going from being scared of parents infecting children to now
promoting skin to skin contact
●​ Breast milk
 ●​ Touch → increased neural responses to touch later on in life based on
NICU treatment
■​ Consequences of preterm children
●​ More likely o be victims of child abuse → training in child
development and helping parents be more responsive improve
behavioral outcomes, greater weight gain, IQ, etc. + support systems

Multiple-Risk Models
●​ A negative developmental outcome is more likely when multiple risk factors are involved
○​ Structural racism → lbw and prematurity
●​ Developmental resilience
○​ Kauai study
■​ 1. Personal characteristics like intelligence, responsiveness to others, and a sense
of being capable of achieving their goals
■​ 2. Responsive care from someone

Chapter 3: Biology and Behavior

●​ 1990: the minnesota study of twins reared apart

○​ + epigenetics
●​ Genetic contributions for most behavioral traits
○​ But genes only code for proteins, not anything as complex as occupation
●​ Key biological factors that are in play from the moment of conception through adolescence
○​ Inheritance/influence of genes
○​ Development and early functioning of the brain
○​ Physical development and maturation

Nature and nurture

●​ Genome – complete set of an organism’s genes
●​ Gene synthesis – method for producing DNA
○​ Ethics behind this
●​ The number of genes that humans have about 20 to 21000 if far were than previous estimates,
which ranged from 35000 to more than 100000 genes
●​ Most genes are possessed by all living things
○​ Genes in decreasing order: animals to vertebrates to mammals to humans
●​ Much of the genome is non-coding DNA that regulates the activity of protein coding genes
Genetic and environmental forces
●​ Genotype, phenotype (body characteristics and behavior), environment
○​ Environment affects phenotype and phenotype affects environment
○​ Environment also affects genotype

1.​ Parents’ genotype–child’s genotype

a.​ Chromosomes – made up of two twisted strands of DNA
b.​ Human heredity - each chromosome pair carries at corresponding locations genes of
the same type
c.​ What promotes genetic diversity
i.​ Random assortment of chromosomes during gamete division/meiosis +
crossing over
ii.​ Mutation - random or environmental
d.​ Sex determination
i.​ Depends on x-bearing or y-bearing sperm

2.​ Child’s genotype-child’s phenotype

a.​ Endophenotypes - behavior ​
b.​ Switching on and off determined by regulator genes
c.​ Ex of environmental effects
i.​ Maya-vetencourt and origlia, cataracts that are not removed early in life
d.​ Recessive x allele affects sex-linked inherited disorders because y allele is naturally more
recessive
e.​ Polygenic inheritance

3.​ Child’s environment-child’s phenotype

a.​ Includes prenatal experience
b.​ PKU phenylketonuria
i.​ Red meat → impaired brain development and intellectual disabilities
c.​ Inactive MAOA + severe maltreatment = more antisocial v. active maoa + severe
matlreatment
d.​ Parental contributions
i.​ Genetic nurture; Parents own genes affect the environment children grow up in
ii.​ Kong (2018); children’s educational outcomes predicted by alleles the child did
not inherent
Types of testing
●​ Genetic
●​ Prenatal - maternal blood
○​ Tests for aneuploidy
●​ Newborn screening

4.​ Child’s phenotype-child’s environment

a.​ Active child theme
b.​ Selecting experiences that match interests and personalities

5.​ Child’s environment-child’s genotype

a.​ Epigenetics
i.​ Methylation
1.​ Regulates amount of protein produced by a given gene
2.​ Neglect → less activation of glucocorticoid receptor gene (fear/stress),
pattern of methylation
b.​ Cross-generational transmission of stress

Behavior genetics
●​ All behavioral traits are heritable to some extent
●​ 1. Individuals who are genetically similar should be behaviorally/phenotypically similar
●​ 2. Individuals who were reared together should be more similar than people who were reared
apart

Quantitative genetics research design

●​ Family study - are phenotypic traits correlated with the degree to which people are related
●​ Twin study - identical v fraternal twins
●​ Adoption study - biological parents/siblings or adoptive parents/siblings
●​ Adoptive twin - identical twins who grew up together v. not
○​ But children’s phenotypes affect environment
○​ Separated twins are paired with families with backgrounds similar to them
 ●​ Heritability - how much are variances in a phenotypic trait attributable to genetic
differences among individuals?
○​ Heritability applies only to populations, particular populations living in
particular environments
○​ Heritability decreases if environmental influence increases
■​ heritability may appear larger within populations with more
homogeneous environments
■​ Heritability estimates can change as a function of developmental
factors
○​ High heritability does not imply immutability
○​ WEIRD mainly

Molecular genetics research design

●​ Large samples of unrelated individuals
●​ Polygenic → genome-wide association studies
●​ Genome wide complex trait analysis
○​ Is family SES on school achievement genetically mediated?
○​ Genetic factors accounted for fully half of the correlation between school achievement
scores and family SES
○​ Are the same genes for a trait activated over time or different ones?

Environmental effects
●​ Harder for researchers to measure than genes

Brain development
●​ Axon -> away
●​ Communicate at synapses
●​ Glial = myelin sheath + neural stem/progenitor cells during prenatal brain development
and sometimes adulthood
●​ Lobes you don’t know
○​ Temporal: speech/language, think text
○​ Parietal: spatial processing, different sensory modalities
○​ Frontal lobe: executive/cognitive control
○​ Lots of interactivity between regions
○​ Electrophysiological recording
 ■​ EEG - time course of neural events
■​ Event-related potentials - changes in brain’s electrical activity
○​ Magnetoencephalography
■​ Localize the origin + time course
○​ Fmri
■​ Blood flow practice sessions
■​ Infants need tobe asleep
●​ Diffusion tensor imaging- white matter development/myelination in
early postnatal
●​ Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging
○​ Brain activity in absence of stimuli
○​ Near infrared spectroscopy
■​ Optical imaging –different absorption of infrared light in brain tissue
■​ Infant adult pairs, simultaneous recording
●​ Cerebral hemispheres
○​ Corpus callosum
○​ Cerebral lateralization
■​ Right brain to process faces
■​ Left to process speech

Developmental process
●​ Neurogenesis - proliferation of neurons through cell division
○​ Begins 42 days after conception and is virtually complete by the midway point of
gestation
○​ Hippocampus has neurogenesis throughout life - memory
○​ Some passively pushed, others propel themselves → glial cells = vehicles
●​ After neurons reach their destination - arborization
●​ Adult neurogenesis affected by environmental factors -increases under rewarding conditions
and decreases in threatening environments
●​ Myelinated portions → white matter on axon
○​ Sensory areas myelination takes longer than executive
●​ Synaptogensis
○​ Thousands at a time
○​ Begins prenatally and after birth for some time after
○​ Varies for different cortical areas - sensorimotor much quicker v. frontal area
■​ Contributes to varied developmental timing
 ●​ Synaptic pruning
○​ First months and years of life, but also adolescence
■​ Outer layers of cortex shrink at a faster rate here
■​ Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex – adult dimensions until after age of twenty,
synaptic pruning until thirties
○​ Asd and schizophrenia
■​ Greater synaptic density for asd
■​ Increased cortical thickness for asd
■​ Too much pruning with schizophrenia

The importance of experience

●​ Use it or lose it
○​ Stronger connections between neurons the more a synapse is activated
○​ Plasticity
■​ Children who suffer brain damage are more able to recover than adults - other
areas of immature brain can take over functions
■​ Experience-expectant v. expereince-dependent
●​ Experience-expectant
○​ Fewer genes need to be dedicated to normal development because brain can rely on
experience
○​ Hard because experiential deficiencies can be bad
■​ Hubel and Wiesel - kittens deprived of light went blind → children with
cataracts
●​ Recruitment of visual cortex into auditory cortex – opposite for deaf
people
○​ Sensitive periods
■​ Adult kittens deprived of light aren’t affected
■​ Romanian orphans
■​ Adolescence is a sensitive period
●​ Experience-dependent
○​ More complex environments – extra brain hardware
○​ Musicians

The body: physical growth and development

Growth and maturation

 Variability
●​ Secular trends - like increasing height over generations; girls begin menstruating earlier
than ancestors

Nutritional behavior
●​ Fatty acids in breast milk have a positive effect on cognitive development – increased
myelination
●​ Food preferences
○​ Sweet - evolutionary + prenatal environment/postnatal breast milk
○​ Food neophobia - adaptive response
■​ Repeatedly introduce new foods
■​ Pressuring or bribing doesn’t usually work
●​ Broccoli connected with punishment
●​ Increasing value of food by restricting it → overindulgence
●​ Predictor of large BMI and obesity
○​ Social aspect
○​ Associative learning - branding foods with familiar characters

​ Obesity
●​ Increasing in developing countries because of adoption of western diet
●​ Why do some people but not others become overweight?
○​ 1. The weight of adopted children more strongly correlate with that of
biological parents than adoptive parents
○​ 2. Identical twins, including those reared apart, are more similar in weight than
fraternal twins are
○​ POMC gene
●​ Polygenic
○​ Influences on temperament/self-regulation/impulse control - childhood
impulsivity is linked to overweight and obesity

​ Undernutrition
●​ Brain development, cognition, social development, educational attainment, economic
productivity, quality of life
○​ Infants’ brains do not start out differently sized as a function of parental ses –
unlike prenatal nutrition, preterm birth, or genetic differences
■​ Changes in 12 months - gray matter mass
​ Vaccines
●​ Herd immunity

Chapter 4: theories of cognitive development

●​ Why is it important to know about these theories?

○​ Framework for understanding important phenomena
○​ Developmental theories raise crucial questions about human nature
○​ Developmental theories lead to a better understanding of children/motivate new
research​
■​ Munakata (1997): transparent cover - not about lack of ability or desire
■​ Diamond (1985): depends on time at which they’re allowed to retrieve –
memory is crucial
Five cognitive theories:
●​ Piaget
○​ Nature/nurture, continuity/discontinuity, the active child
●​ Sociocultural
○​ nature/nurture, sociocultural, how change occurs
●​ Information-processing
○​ Nature/nurture, how change occurs
●​ Core-knowledge
○​ nature/nurture, how change occurs
●​ Dynamic systems
○​ nature/nurture, active child, how change occurs

Piaget: view of children’s nature

●​ Constructivist, children are mentally active from birth and that mental/physical activity both
contribute greatly to their development
○​ Hypotheses, experiment, conclusion
○​ Children learn many important lessons on their own
○​ Children are intrinsically motivated to learn and do not need rewards from other
people to do so

Piaget nature and nurture:

 ●​ Work together - vital part of children’s nature is how they respond to nurture

Piaget cont/discont:
●​ Continuity
○​ Assimilation
○​ Accommodation - improving current understanding via new experiences
○​ Equilibration – balance assimilation and accommodation
■​ Satisfaction, new information, sophisticated understanding
●​ Discontinuity
○​ Most famous part of his theory
○​ Characteristics of stages of cognitive development
■​ Qualitative change – morality as consequences v. intent
■​ Broad applicability
■​ Brief transitions – proximal learning
■​ Invariant sequence - no exceptions!
○​ Four stages
■​ Sensorimotor: 0-2 rudimentary forms of time space causality; immediate here
and now
●​ Enhancing sucking to depend on object with time – accommodation
●​ Combining reflexes like sucking and grasping with time
●​ 6 months - repeating actions they like
●​ Object permanence → late into first year but no A-not-B error
●​ 1 year, curiosity
●​ 18-24 months, enduring mental representations – deferred imitation
■​ Preoperational: 2-7 language and mental imagery; No multiple dimensions;
Glass thing
●​ Symbolic representations → increasingly shift toward conventional
symbols than self generated ones + drawings
●​ Egocentrism (PIAGET/INHELDER cannot imagine mountains from
other perspectives, centration (focusing on only one aspect of an object
or the liquid shit)
■​ Concrete operational stage: 7-12; Dimensions things; No purely abstract
terms, no scientific experiments
●​ Logical reasoning about the world but only concrete situations
●​ Biased experiments
 ■​ Formal operational stage: 12+, abstractions and purely hypothetical, changing
beliefs
●​ Pendulum problem is key
●​ NOT UNIVERSAL
●​ Piaget’s weaknesses
○​ Mechanisms?
○​ infants/young children are more cognitively competent than piaget realized – object
permanence after a delay
○​ Social context?
○​ Children’s thinking is not consistent across measures - conservation of solid v. numbers

Information-processing theories
●​ 1. Task analysis → specifying children’s processes, obstacles that prevent immediate realization
of the goals
○​ Computer simulation
■​ Simon and Klahr – conversation problems, also object permanence, word
learning, working memory, reading, and problem solving
●​ 2. Thinking as a process that occurs over time
○​ Fast, unconscious mental operations
●​ What those mental processes are, the order in which they are executed, and increasing speed /
accuracy with development

View of children’s nature in information processing:

●​ Cognitive development occurs continuously – not qualitatively distinct
●​ Limited capacity processing system
○​ Gradually surmounting processing limitations
●​ Problem solving
○​ active problem solvers
■​ Goal-obstacle-strategy
●​ Precise descriptions of change mechanisms
○​ Development of memory
■​ Working memory, long-term memory, executive functioning
●​ Working memory = subset of knowledge attended to at a given time;
long-term is the totality
○​ Unlimited amount of information for unlimited time
 ●​ Executive functioning – behavior/thought processes
○​ Prefrontal cortex: inhibition, enhancement of working
memory via strategies, cognitive flexibility
○​ Increases greatly during preschool/early elementary years –
switching goals
○​ Predicts later outcomes
■​ How does memory develop?
●​ Basic processes - associating events with one another, recognizing
familiarity, recalling, generalizing + encoding, strategies, content
knowledge
●​ Selective encoding
○​ Ex: with balance scales, not accounting distance from fulcrum
if you’re five
●​ Processing speed increases most rapidly at young ages
○​ Myelination - insulation
○​ Increased connectivity
■​ Memory strategies
●​ 5-8 years, rehearsal/selective attention - not remembering categories at
the age of four
■​ Content knowledge - prior knowledge improves memory + knowledge
associations
○​ Development of problem solving
■​ Active problem solvers → overlapping waves theory
●​ Strategies that produce more successful performances are underscored
○​ Counting on
○​ Faster usage of strategies
○​ Choosing among strategies increasingly effectively - counting
on for larger addends than memory
●​ Planning
○​ Hard for children because you have to inhibit the desire to
solve the problem immediately
○​ Over optimism
○​ Improves with maturation of the prefrontal cortex and
humbling experiences

Core-knowledge theories:
 ●​ Key to evolution
●​ Children think in ways that are more advanced than Piaget thought possible
○​ Deception goes against egocentrism

●​ Children’s nature in core knowledge

○​ Active learners - just like Piaget and information processing
○​ V. piaget/information processing theory - equipped with only general learning abilities,
but core knowledge believes we enter with specialized learning mechanisms/mental
structures
■​ Child as scientist, child as problem solver, child as product of evolution
○​ DOMAIN SPECIFIC
■​ Different mechanisms in different domains
■​ Theory of mind module – other people’s minds/anti-egocentrism

Nativism v. constructivism within core knowledge

●​ Nativism SPELKE, four core knowledge systems

○​ Inanimate objects
○​ Minds
○​ Numbers
○​ Spatial
○​ Also language - universality not the same with math
●​ Constructivism
○​ Blends elements of nativism, piagetian theory, and information processing
■​ Infants initial knowledge in these domains is rudimentary – requires specific
learning within the domain
○​ Theories exist but get more complex with age and insight
○​ Learning about causation helps children - for example, when trying to understand the
process of natural selection

Sociocultural theories:
●​ Interpersonal context
○​ Not just children driving their own actions, but children driving interactions with
others
●​ Guided participation → social scaffolding (temporary framework)
●​ Cultural tools
Vygotsky’s view of children’s nature:
●​ Gradual continuous change - QUANTITATIVE/CONTINUOUS
●​ Thought = internalization of speech
●​ Children as teachers/learners
○​ TOMASELLO
■​ Teaching others and learning from teaching others - especially someone
older/more skilled
●​ Children as products of their culture
○​ Processes are the same - like guided participation, but content differs
○​ Fairytale example

Central development issues:

●​ How change occurs - Intersubjectivity
○​ Evident at 6 months, imitating behaviors
○​ Joint attention - drawing attention and directing attention
■​ Increases ability to learn from other people
■​ Evaluate competence of other people

Dynamic systems theories:

●​ Development of actions in complex systems over varying time periods
●​ THELEN – reaching// constant change
○​ Dynamic: Thought and action change from moment to moment in response to the
current situation, child’s immediate past history, and long-term history in similar
situations
○​ Systems: many subsystems like perception and attention work together to determine
behavior
■​ Object permanence determined by perception, attention, motor skills, and a
host of other factors

View of children’s nature

●​ Innate motivation to explore the environment; precise analyses of problem-solving activity;
early competence; formative influence of other people
●​ Emphasize internal motivation - try walking even though crawling would get them down
quicker
 ●​ Centrality of action - to development throughout life – thinking doesn’t just shape action,
action shapes thinking
○​ Reaching and grasping
○​ Categorization
○​ Vocabulary acquisition/generalization
○​ Memory
●​ Central development issues
○​ Self-development – soft assembly; changes from moment to moment and situation to
situation
■​ A-not-B - stronger, habitual memory wins out + memory demands + current
focus of attention
○​ Mechanism of change
■​ Selection - using better choice more
●​ Relative success of each approach
●​ Efficiency
●​ Novelty

Chapter Five: perception, action, and learning in infancy

●​ Extremely rapid changes during the first two years of life
●​ Development in perception, action, and learning is intertwined

●​ Preferential looking technique

○​ Visual acuity
○​ Prefer hues over blends
○​ Four months, smooth pursuit eye movements ​ - able to keep a moving object in view –
more about maturation than experience
○​ Can increasingly can more broadly
○​ Face perception - perceptual narrowing
■​ Sixth month olds can differentiate between two monkey faces, but not nine
month olds, who have become specialists to what’s in their environment
■​ Autistic babies usually prefer geometric shapes over faces
■​ Depends on culture - mouth v. eyes
○​ Object constancy
○​ Object segregation – only possible for four months olds if there’s motion/common
movement - assume wholeness / gestalt – must be learned
●​ Disproving out of sight, out of mind
 ○​ Reaching for objects in the dark
○​ Violation of expectancy
■​ Understanding that matter passing through matter is impossible (Ballairgeon)
– expected the screen to stop even when it occluded the box
●​ Depth perception
○​ Optical expansion – blinking defensively at one month when an object approaches
them
○​ Binocular disparity – the closer the object, the greater the disparity between the two
images – stereopsis (emerges around 4 months, processes depth)
■​ Natural outcome of brain maturation - does not occur if they are deprived of
normal visual input
○​ At about six or seven months of age, infants become sensitive to a variety of monocular
depth cues/pictorial cues
■​ Yonas, cleaves, and patterson - possible to reach toward the trapezoid with
longer side (which seemed nearer) at seven months but not five months
■​ Infants recognize two dimensional pictures as versions of three dimensional
objects, but misinterpret them as three dimensional objects – attempting to
pick up pictured objects
●​ Nine month olds do not dishabituate to a picture of a 3d object
●​ Some experience / cultural stuff required
●​ Habituation

●​ Auditory perception
○​ Auditory localization - being able to locate a sound
■​ Also requires multimodal experience
○​ Music
■​ Prefer consonant intervals – length of time they look at speakers
■​ Difficult to hear changes within a key as an adult who is used to hearing
Western music
■​ Changes in rhythm
■​ Bottom two things reflect perceptual narrowing

●​ Taste and smell

○​ Preferences can be stronger if prenatal eating as opposed to breastmilk
 ●​ Touch
○​ 4 months - manual exploration takes precedence over oral exploration
■​ Mental maps of touch

Intermodal perception
●​ Visually recognizing a pacifier that they only knew by their mouths – bumpy v. smooth
●​ SPELKE 1976 peekaboo v. beating sound
●​ Ball rising and falling at same rate as whistle noise
●​ Look more at own-race faces with happy music and more at other-race faces with sad music
●​ Mcgurk effect
○​ Four month olds hear da and ga
●​ Perceptual narrowing
○​ Older infants can’t match speech sounds of other languages with facial movements

Motor development
●​ After birth, movements are jerky and relatively uncoordinated – physical/neurological
immaturity + experiencing the full effects of gravity
●​ Start off with reflexes
○​ Grasping
○​ Rooting
■​ More likely to occur when an infant is hungry
○​ Sucking → swallowing
●​ Discovery of affordances
●​ Desire to learn/explore – infants who are better able to interact with environment may have
advantage in perceptual/cognitive development
●​ Modern views of motor development
○​ Arnold Gesell and Myrtle McGraw
■​ Thought it was brain maturation but current things it’s also body proportions
and motivations
○​ Esther thelen
■​ Dynamic systems
■​ Disappearing step reflex at 2 months of age
●​ Unless given extra practice exercising this reflex – thus not because of
cortical maturation
●​ Might have to do more with brawn than brains – explains why
stepping reflex comes back in water, which increases buoyancy
Motor milestones
●​ Heavily dependent on culture
○​ Tend to be placed in locations that offer less postural support
○​ Caregivers discourage early locomotion in china v. not in sub-saharan africa

The expanding world of the infant

●​ Reaching
○​ Sticky mittens given to pre-reaching infants helped later on
○​ More likely to reach for a distant object when an adult is present
●​ Great deal of interaction between visual and motor development
○​ Depth/dimension
○​ Vocabularies
●​ Self-locomotion
○​ Practice is vital

ELEANOR GIBSON/RICHARD WALK

●​ Visual cliff
○​ 6-14 month year olds would not cross deep side
●​ Judging steepness improves with crawling practice, had to restart the learning curve for walking
○​ Element of social referencing

●​ Scale errors
●​ 2d grasp error
●​ Media errors - reaching through a screen

●​ Learning and memory

○​ Habituation – speed of habituation reflects processing efficiency
○​ Statistical learning
■​ Sensitive to sequences/orders of shapes
■​ Prefer some degree of variability
○​ Classical conditioning
■​ Nipple = unconditioned stimulus
■​ Sucking reflex = unconditioned response
 ■​ Bottle = conditioned stimulus
■​ Sucking reflex at sight of bottle = conditioned response
○​ Instrumental conditioning
■​ Positive reinforcement
■​ Caroyln rovee-collier
●​ 3 month olds remember for one week; 6 month olds for two
●​ -6 months must be identical mobile
○​ Active child - positive emotions during peaks in performance
■​ Infants of depressed mothers smile less than infants of non-depressed- don’t
have control over parents
○​ Observational learning/imitation
■​ Second half of first year
■​ Importance of attention - will touch with hand if it only appears that model is
touching with forehead because she’s cold
■​ Limited to mimicking humans not inanimate objects
■​ Mirror neurons – mu rhythm, viewing faces but not inanimate objects
■​ Also for grit
○​ Rational learning x
■​ Xu and garcia - balls
■​ Schulz – toy thing blaming the toy v. the person
○​ Active learning
■​ Infants learn more about the objects they choose
■​ Surprise is a driving factor

Memory
●​ Habituation shit - 6 v. 12 month olds
●​ Crackers
●​

Numerical equality in onnlingustic sense

Ratio