Life Span Development

• 1960; the most important technological change that allows for the period
• of emerging adulthood

• 18-25; nothing is demographically normative anymore, individuals make own unique life course decisions
• Culturally constructed developmental period

• Explored many alternatives; now committed to clearly
• formulated set of self-chosen values and goals.

• A delay or holding pattern. In process of exploring gathering information.
• Facilitated by college

Committed to values and goals without exploring alternatives.

Clear lack of direction

nuerons migrate to specific brain regions as regions form

• once situated, synaptic connections form and multiply- begins at end of fetal period
• timing is genetically prediterminded
• extent is set by environment

decay of synapses due to lack of stimulation

coatingof neural fibers with insulating fatty sheath, carried out by glial cells

the specialization of parts of the brain

if a part of the brain is damaged a different part can take on its function

building schemes through direct interaction with the environment

use our current schemes to interpret the external world

create new schemas or adjust old ones after noticing that our current way of thinking so not capture the environment completely

the understanding that objects continue to exist when out of sight

• internation depictions of info that the mind can manipulate
• images and concepts

failure to distinguish the symbolic viewpoint of others from one's own

child starts to communicate w/ themselves in much the same way they converse with others

adjusting the suppoer offered during a teaching session to fit the child's current level of performance

• vocabulary consists mainly of words that refer to objects
• most toddlers us this

the transition b/w childhood and adulthood

a flood of biological events leading to an adult-sized body and sexual maturity

involves the reproductive organs

are visible on the outside of the body and serve as additional signs of sexual maturity

early experience and the psychological and biological functioning they induces lead individuals to engage in either a quantity or a qualityt patter of mating and rearing

mental actions that obey logical rules

• the major personality achievement of adolescence and as a crucial step toward a productive, content adult
• to construct must: define who you are, what you valule, and the directions you choose to pursue in life

• our reflections on how we arrived at facts,beliefs, and ideas
• dualistic thinking, relativist thinking, commitment within relativist thinking

structural advance in which logic becomes a tool for solving real- world problems

awareness of positive and negative feelings and coordination of them into a complex organized structure

just listing words

us elaboration or sentences to remind us of things

try to remember chunks of information

ability to think through a problem and walk backwards in head through the problem

see different facets to a problem

• children tested for iq at 22, 44, 60 and 120 month
• kids in high ses familes tended to get smarter and smarter relative to their peers and vice verse

• there is differential heritability by social class
• if in a maladaptive environment, may not get experiences that allow genes to be relavant

menarche will always be stressful; it is just a stressful transition

girls who reach menarche at a early or late time will have higher behavioral problems because they are not going through it at the same time as their peers

reaching menarche early is stressful for girls

high child antisocial/ high adolescent deliquincy

low/ average child antisocial/ high adolescent delinquency

Idea that individual people by virtue of their genes are differentially responsive/ susceptible to environmental influences than other

environments can alter the heritability of a characteristic by stimulating/not stimulating genetic expression

the ability to remember and copy the behavior of models who are not present

ability to generate (in abstract) and test (in reality) a hypothesis

ability to evaluate logic of a proposition without regard to "reality"

Gap between cognitive capacity and socioemotional development