Child Development II1

Child Development
II Postnatal Development
Historical Context
• Until the advent of agriculture approximately 10K
ybp, humans almost certainly lived in small,
territorial kin bands
• Economy was hunting (men)/gathering (women)
• Women carried and nursed young under 3 years
of age while they gathered
• There is no evidence that men ever took a
significant role in child care
• The inter-birth interval was about 4 years
Historical Context
• When the infant reaches age 2-3, the mother
stops carrying it, and leaves it in a child group
• The child group contains close and more distant
kin, ranging in age from 3 to 15
• From 3 to 15, the child’s social universe is the
child group
• Survival and future success in social competition
depend on success in the child group
Adaptations of Childhood
• The child needs behavioral strategies to:
– 1. Elicit maternal care (milk, proximity)
– 2. Avoid sources of danger
– 3. Acquire knowledge about the physical world
– 4. Acquire language
– 5. Develop motor skills
– 6. Compete for dominance and develop social skills
– 7. Learn to recognize group members
– 8. Learn to recognize close kin
Elicit Maternal Care
• Instinctive suckling
• Smile reflex
• Crying
– Hunger
– Discomfort
– Abandonment
Avoid Danger
• Instinctive fear of cliffs
• Face recognition (permits recognition of
strangers)
• Instinctive fear of strange adult males
• Attachment to mother
Childhood Physics
• From early ages, children show an
understanding of folk physics
– Impenetrability of matter
– Gravity
– Momentum
– Looming
– Biological vs. object movement
Acquire Language
• Language does not have to be taught –
children acquire it by an interplay of
instinct and experience
• In many aboriginal societies, parents do
not talk to infants – speech develops when
the child joins the peer group
• The developmental window for speech
acquisition is open until about age 11
Develop Motor Skills
• What do children do in play?
– Run
– Climb, hang, swing
– Wrestle
Seconds Social Play per Hour
300
250
200 Olive Baboon
150
100
50
0
0 20 40 60 80
Months of Age
4
Play Motor Patterns/Hour
3
Collared Peccary
2
0
1-2 3-4 5-7 8-11 12-15 16-23 24-31 32-44
W eek of Age
40
35 Pronghorn
30
Rates of Play (Acts/h)
Social
25
Locomotor - Rotational
20 Total
15
10
0
1-2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
W eek of Age
7
Pronghorn
6
% Energy and Kilometers Run
Kilometers
5 Energy
0
2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
W eek of Age
Cerebellum
Purkinje Cells
120 70
CEREBELLAR SYNAPSES (% ADULT NUM BER)

House m ouse
60
100
50
Rate of PLay (Sec./Hr)

80
40
60
30
40 20
10
20
0
0
5 10 15 20 25 30
POST-NATAL AGE (DAYS)

SYNAPTO PHYSIN EXPRESSIO N (% ADULT VALUE)
120 NORW AY RAT
100
100
PLAY RATE (Acts/h)

80
60
50
40
20
0 0
0 20 40 60 80 100
POST-NATAL AGE (DAYS)
8 2200
7 Dom estic cat 2000

C-FOS EXPRESSIO N
6 1800
PLAY RATE (s/h)

5 1600
4
1400
3
1200
2
1000
1
800
0
0 10 20 30 40 50 60
POST-NATAL AGE (W EEKS)
Play and Brain Development
• In three species (house mouse, Norway
rat, domestic cat) the ages during which
there is experience-dependent pruning of
Purkinje cell synapses are precisely the
ages at which rate of play reaches a peak
Social Skills
• A common feature of child peer groups is
dominance striving
• A uniquely human trait, that appears at
about age 3-4, is the theory of mind, the
understanding that mental states exist in
others
• A non-functioning theory of mind may be
the deficit in autism
Individual and Kin Recognition
• Based upon face recognition
• Face recognition is instinctive and is
supported by specific brain areas
• An inability to remember faces,
prosopagnosia, results in severe social
deficits
• Supports group vs. non-group
discrimination
• Supports inbreeding avoidance
The Westermark Effect
• Edward Westemark – 19th century anthropologist
• Proposed a sensitive period, in which children
categorize other children with whom they share frequent
close contact as siblings, and adult with whom they
share frequent close contact as parents
• Proposed that such unconscious categorization would
result in lack of sexual interest in siblings and parents
• Verified by results of kibbutim and of Chinese early bride
adoption
• Folk knowledge of the Westermark effect is shown in the
myth of Oedipus
Sensitive Periods
• Common feature of development in birds
and mammals
• Experience interacts with innate programs
to guide brain development
Sensitive Periods in Human
Development
• Kin recognition and incest avoidance
• Visual system
• Architecture of the cerebellum
• Language acquisition
• Personality Development
Personality
• Social behavioral phenotype
• The set of behavioral predispositions that
affect how each person interacts with
others
Dimensions of Personality as
Defined by Psychologists
• Introversion – extroversion (retiring or social)
• Neuroticism – stability (worry constantly or calm
and self-satisfied)
• Agreeableness – antagonism (courteous and
trusting or rude)
• Conscientiousness – undirectedness (careful or
careless)
• Openness – nonopenness (daring or
conforming)
• Intelligence
Dimensions of Personality as
Defined by Biologists)
• Dominant – subordinate (calm, trusting,
careless, rude, daring vs. neurotic,
suspicious, careful, conforming)
• Shy-bold
• Male - female
Sources of Variation in Personality
• Personality, like any aspect of phenotype,
is built by an interaction of genes with
environment during development
• Within a population, we can ask how much
of the variation in the trait among
individuals is attributable to variation in
genotype, and how much is attributable to
variation in environment
Turkheimer, E. 2000. Three laws of behavioral
genetics and what they mean. Current Directions
in Psychological Science 5: 160-164.
1. All human behavioral traits are heritable
2. The effect of being raised in the same family is
smaller than the effect of the genes
3. A large portion of the variation in human
behavioral traits is not accounted for by the
effects of genes or families
Heritability
• Defined as the ratio of additive genetic
variance to total (or phenotypic) variance
• Can be measured in a number of ways
• In humans, is measured by comparing the
strengths of correlations between pairs of
individuals that differ in degree of
relatedness
Human Behavior – Heritability
Results
• For most traits, heritability is about 0.5
• Means that 50% of the population variation
in the behavioral trait is attributable to
variation in genotype
Family Effects
1. Adult siblings are equally similar whether
or not they grew up together or apart
2. 2 adoptive siblings are no more similar
than 2 people chosen a random from the
population
3. Identical twins reared apart are as similar
as identical twins that grew up together
• These results mean that the family effect
is zero, or very close to zero
If genes account for 50% of the variation, and
family effects account for zero, what accounts for
the other half?
• Harris, J. R. 1998. The Nurture Assumption. Why
Children Turn Out the Way They Do. New York: The
Free Press
• Reviews evidence for family effects, including birth-order

effects, and concludes that there are none
• Concludes that the other half of the variation is created
by peer group effects
• Threatens to invalidate decades of child development
research that purports to show an influence of parental
behavior on child outcomes

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Child Development

200 Olive Baboon

CEREBELLAR SYNAPSES (% ADULT NUM BER)

Rate of PLay (Sec./Hr)

POST-NATAL AGE (DAYS)

PLAY RATE (Acts/h)

7 Dom estic cat 2000

PLAY RATE (s/h)

• Reviews evidence for family effects, including birth-order

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