HDFS Exam 2

best for infant

kcal deficiency

• wasting
• severe malnutrition during the first year of life leading to death
• caloric deficiency
• growth rate declines progressively
• most common : 6mos. - 18mos.
• Causes
• Maternal death
• Cessation of maternal milk (maternal malnutrition)
• Inadequate milk substitute
• Social upheaval cutting off food supply

protein deficiency

• during toddlerhood (1-4) leading to an increased risk of death (despite adequate caloric intake)
• Abdomen and feet swell with water, skin disturbances and hair discolorations
• Diet high in starch and low in protein

• genetically carrird automatic response to a particular form of stimulation
• Illustrate the most obivious organized patterns of behaviors found in the newborn
• generally fade away after first few months as they are replaced with more porposeful and voluntary movements

• occurs when newborns automatically suck on an object placed in their mouth
• enable newborns to get nourishment before they have associated a nipple with food
• Present at birth , later disappear at 3-4 months

• occurs when the infant's cheek is stroked or the side of the mouth is touched
• infant turns its head toward the side that was touched in an apparent effort to find sth. to suck
• disappear when the infant is 3-4 months old,
• replaced by the infant's voluntary eating

• a neonatal startle response that occurs in response to a sudden, intense noise or movement
• when startled, a newborn arches its back, throw back it head, flings out its arms and legs
• close its arms and legs to the center of the body
• steady pressure on any part of the infant's body calms the infant after it has been startled
• disappear around 3-4 months of age

• occurs when sth. touches the infant's palms
• infant responds by grasping tightly
• replaced around the end of the third month by voluntary grasps

• Large muscle activities
• ex. moving one's arms and walking

Sequence of accomplishments is quite uniform

• fined-tuned movements
• ex. finger dexterity

• infants have hardly any control over fine motor skills at birth
• infants have many components of what later become finely coordinated arm, hand, and finger movements

• Prereaching - stems from reflexive movements
• Reaching - with 2 hands, then with 1
• Ulnar grasp
• Pincer grasp

Cephalocaudal Trend (Gross motor skills)

Proximodistal Trend (Fine motor skills)

Gross motor skills

Motor control of head occurs prior to control over arms and trunk, which occurs prior to control over legs

Fine motor skills

Motor control of head, trunk, and arms occurs prior to control of hands, then fingers

the least developed sense at birth

taste, smell, touch, and hearing are well developed at birth

• 1963, Robert Fantz discovered that infants look at different things for different lengths of time
• also found that 2-day-old infants look longer patterned stimuli than at single-colored discs

• Newborns prefer to look at human faces
• Face perception present from birth

• Visual Cliff Experiment (Gibson & Walk,1960)
• Most crawling babies avoided the cliff and readily crawled over the non cliff side
• concluded that by crawling age, we perceive depth

• Hearing begins prenatally
• after birth, infants responded in a certain way when mothers read them a story that they had read to them during the 6 weeks prior to birth
• this finding suggests that the infants recognized that story's pattern and tone - something they had only been exposed to prenatally

At birth, newborns will react to sounds heard during prenatal development (cat in the hat study)

Taste preferences probably begin in utero

• Taste buds emerge about 6-7 weeks gestation
• Prefer sweet for the first 4 months of life (breast milk)
• by 4 mos. prefer salty over plain water (prepares us for solid foods)
• 2-hr-old newborns made different facial expressions when they tasted sweet, sour, and bitter solutions
• Sensitivity to taste may be present prior to birth due to increased swallowing of a near-term fetus when saccharin was added to the amniotic fluid

Prenatal experiences influence newborn taste and smell preferences

• within hours of birth, newborns will latch onto mothers breast and begin sucking 
• (if one breast is washed, newborn latches onto unwashed breast, indicating that newborns are guided by smell)

• Babies prefer the scent of their mother and a lactating breast
• at 4 days, breast-fed babies prefer the smell of their own mother's breast to that of another lactaing mother
• bottle-fed babies prefer scent of lactating women over the smell of the formula

Children actively construct their knowledge of the world through their direct interactions with the physical world

• Incorporation of new knowledge into existing schemes
• Modify experience to fit current schemas

• Adjusting existing schemes to fit within new information
• Modify schema to fit new experiences

Children progress through a set of stages that makes qualitatively distinct thinking patterns at each stage

• Sensorimotor Stage (0-2)
• Preoperational Stage (2-7)
• Concrete Operational Stage (7-11)
• Formal Operational Stage (11-15)

Key Development - Object Permanence

schemes involve gathering sensory information and operating physically (motor) on the environment (sucking, grasping, pushing...)

Child is learning connections between sensations and motor actions

No information is held in the head

occurs when an infant chances upon a new action and tries to repeat it

• action and responses both involve infant's own body
• ex. suck own thumb
• ex. thumb sucking, grabbing and holding feet
• the organization of two separate body schemes (movements)

• baby discovers and reproduces an interesting event outside of his owb body
• ex. toy, object, different person, mobile

• perform a single action to get a result
• ex. kicking a mobile

action gets a response from another person or objrct, leading to baby's repeating original action

Objects continue to exist even when they are not visible

Seneorimotor stage ends with mental representations and object permanence

• Egocentrism
• Animism
• Centration

• Inability to distinguish the the perspective of others from ones own
• How is it measured? - By three moutain task

Belief that inanimate abjects have life-like qualities and are capable of action

• founded during preoperational stage
• inability to attend to more than one aspect of a situation
• lack of conservation

the principle that the amount of a substance is unaffected by changes in its appearance

Concrete thinkers can solve

Preoperational thinkers can't solve

• Conservation - horizontal decalage, decentration
• Classification - seriation, transitivity

different aspects of the same skill emerge at different times

focusing on serveral aspects of a situation and relating them, rather than centering on just one

• ability to order items along a dimension
• ex. place rocks in a line according to size

ability to mentally seriate

• Abstract
• Idealistic
• Logical

• Children actively construct knowledge and understanding through social interactions
• Learning is a socially-mediated activity
• Cognitive development depends on societal tools and cultural context

The distance b/w actual development level determined by individual problem solving and the level of potential development determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers

what the child can do independently and under-guided

the support a learner might receive from a more capable peer, teacher, or parent that allows the learner to achieve a higher level of skill or understanding than would be possible for the learner to achieve alone

• Support level must be continuously changed to match the child's perfermance level
• Adjusting the support to keep the task within the child's ZPD

suggested that imitative abilities are biologically based because infants can imitate facial expresstions within 72 hours of birth

the process of focusing mental resources

• Sustained Attention
• Selective Attention
• Divided Attention

ability to detect and respond to small changes in the environment

ability to focus on relevant stimuli while ignoring irrelevant stimuli

ability to allocate attention to more than one stimulus

• Decreased responsiveness to a stimulus after repeated exposure
• ex. heart rate, sucking rate, breathing rate...

Recovery of respnsiveness after a change of stimulus

• After habituating to a stimulus, infants respond to a change in stimuli (dishabituate) 7 hours after birth
• demonstrate that infants can sustain attention to novel stimuli
• sustained attention is the earliest to develop

• Sustained - during infancy, toddlerhood, early childhood
• Selective - preschool, childhood, early adolescence
• Divided - adolescence

• detect and respond to small changes
• earliest to develop
• during infancy, toddlerhood, early childhood

• focus on relevant stimuli, ignore irrelevant stimuli
• preschool, childhood, early adolescence

• allocate attention to more than one stimulus
• adolescence

• Short term Memory
• Working Memory
• Long term Memory
• Explicit Memory
• Implicit Memory

Limited capacity (7+ or -2) and limited duration

Active "workspace" where info is accessible for current use

Huge capacity, potentially very long duration (decades)

conscious memory of facts and experiences

• Episodic memory - personally experienced events
• Semantic Memory - general information

non-concious recollection of a prior experience that is revealed indirectly (memory without awareness)

personally experienced events

general information

• 3 months - infants can remember perceptual-motor information (Rovee-Collier)
• Some researchers argue this is implicit memory rather than explicit memory
• Primitive implicit memory system

• Short term memory increases over the childhood years
• Digit-span test
• Strategy use emerges during late childhood years
• Rehearsal and repetition emerge before imagery
• Imagery emerges before elaboration

Declined - Working memory & Episodic memory

Less Declined - Implicit memory

Processing speed began to decline in early aduldhood

• Information processing capabilities, reasoning, processing speed
• Declines into middle adulthood

• our accumulated knowledge and verbal skills
• increased into middle adulthood