Human Development Key Concepts

Unit 2: Cognitive development

• Development encompasses specific changes in humans or animals from conception to death.

• These changes occur in an orderly manner and persist over a considerable period.

• Human development can be divided into physical, personal, social, and cognitive aspects

• Physical development concerns changes in the body

• Personal development concerns changes in identity and personality

• Social development concerns changes in interactions with others

• Cognitive Development concerns changes in thinking, reasoning and decision making

• Maturation refers to changes that occur naturally because they are genetically programmed.

• Growth concerns physical and biological changes

Principles of Development

• Theorists generally agree on a few key principles of development.
• Individuals develop at varying rates.
• Development occurs relatively in a logical order.
• Development happens gradually over time.

Debates About Development

• There are ongoing debates about research and theory in development.
• Nature vs Nurture is a key debate.
• Continuity vs discontinuity is another key debate.
• Defining Critical vs sensitive periods are subjects of debate.

Nature vs Nurture

• Nature refers to an individual's heredity, genetics, biological processes, and maturation.
• Nurture refers to the process of nurturing someone or something, this includes education, parenting, culture, and social policies.
• Darwin's theory of evolution explains how genes and the environment interact.

Continuity vs Discontinuity

• Continuity is the existence or operation of something unbroken over time.
• Discontinuity is a break in or lack of continuity.
• A debate related to continuity and discontinuity questions how development differs between humans and animals.

Critical vs Sensitive Periods

• A critical period is a time when the brain is more plastic, and more receptive to specific life experiences.
• A lack of experiences during critical periods can impact development.
• During critical periods skills can be formed given proper life experiences.
• If experiences are not available during this time, it can become difficult or impossible to acquire a skill after the window of opportunity closes.

Brain and Cognitive Development

• The Central Nervous System (CNS) contains the brain and spinal cord.
• The CNS is vital for existence and controls all functions.
• Damage to it can result in the loss of important functions.
• The brain has neural plasticity, so it has the ability to repair itself.
• Neural plasticity allows unaffected regions to take over functions of damaged areas.
• Nutrition and stimulation are key for brain development.
• Dehydration can reduce muscular strength, and increase fatigue and impair brain functions

Peripheral Nervous System

• Additional to the CNS there is also the Peripheral Nervous System (PNS).
• The PNS consists of cranial and spinal nerves, as well as the peripheral ganglia.
• PNS sends neural messages to the CNS and generated by the CNS.

Somatic vs Autonomic Nervous System

• The PNS divides into the somatic nervous system and the autonomic nervous system (ANS).
• Somatic nervous system controls the body and receives input from sensory organs to move the body.
• The Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) acts is involuntary and automatic.
• ANS is responsible for involuntary actions like regulating cardiac muscle, smooth muscle and hormone release.

Sympathetic vs Parasympathetic Branches

• The ANS divides again into the sympathetic and parasympathetic branches.
• The sympathetic nervous system prepares the body for "flight or fight" and increases energy.
• The body releases the correct hormones to deal with situations.
• The parasympathetic nervous system regulates all feels balanced, conserves energy and stores it.
• The parasympathetic nervous system ensures a state of homeostasis.

Hemispheric Lateralization

• The hemispheres of the brain are situated to the left and right of the mid-line.
• Hemispheric lateralization refers to the left and right sides of the brain.
• The corpus collosum contains the nerve fibers that connect the left hemisphere to the right hemisphere.

Brain Lobes

• Each hemisphere is further compartmentalized responsible for specific functions.
• The four lobes of the brain have functions and locations in the brain.
• The frontal lobe is responsible for higher executive functions, planning, problem solving and emotional regulation.
• The parietal lobe is responsible for integrating sensory information (touch, temperature, pain and pressure)
• The temporal lobe process sensory information for hearing and recognizing language and forming memories.
• The occipital lobe is responsible for visual processing and receiving information from the eyes.

Cognitive development

• Cognitive development is the process of humans acquiring and learning to use knowledge.
• This includes thinking, language acquisition, memory, decision making, problem solving, and exploration.
• Piaget and Vygotsky are two major psychologists who contributed to cognitive development.

Piaget's Theory of Cognitive Development

• Piaget was an influential 20th-century psychologist, who believed children developed through mental stages.
• Human cognitive functioning interacts with the environment and ensures survival.
• Thinking changes radically from birth to maturity for us to make sense of the world.
• Piaget identified four interactive factors for cognitive development: biological maturation, activity, social experiences, and equilibration.

Human Tendencies

• Humans display basic tendencies in thinking that include organization and adaptation.
• Organization refers to the tendency that people are born with, to organise thinking into psychological structures.
• Simple structures are continually combined and become more effective, Piaget called these schemes.
• Adaptation refers to humans adapting to their environment and involves two processes: accommodation and assimilation.

Assimilation and Accommodation

• Assimilation describes how existing schemes make sense of new information.
• Accommodation means the change of existing schemes to respond to a new situation.
• If information does not fit into existing schemes, structures must be developed so that thinking adapts to information.
• Organizing, assimilation, and accommodation needs complex balancing in order to happen.
• Actual changes in thinking occur because of equilibration.
• People test adequacy of thinking process to achieve balance.
• Disequilibrium can occur if the scheme does not produce satisfactory results.

Piaget's Stages of Development

• Piaget proposed that cognition developed through stages from birth to adolescence.
• "Stages" refers to sequential thinking patterns that contain 4 key features.
• Cognitive development happens across all 4 stages: sensorimotor, pre-operational, concrete operational and formal operational.
• The stages always occur in the same order.
• No stage is skipped.
• Each stage results in a significant transformation of the previous one.

Stages Description

Sensorimotor (Birth-2 years)

• Differentiates self from objects
• Recognizes self as agent of action and and acts intentionally
• Achieves object permanence, that things continue to exist even when no longer present

Pre-operational (2-7 years)

• Learns to use language and represent objects with images and words
• Still egocentric and has difficulty taking the viewpoint of others
• Classifies objects by a single feature

Concrete Operational (7-11 years)

• Can think logically about objects and events
• Achieves conversation of number, mass, and weight
• Classifies objects according to several features by ordering them in dimensions

Formal Operational (11 years and up)

• Can think logically about abstract propositions and test hypotheses systematically
• Becomes concerted with hypothetical, future and ideological problems.

Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Perspective

• Vygotsky believed social interaction plays a critical role in children's learning.
• Culture profoundly influences the process of learning.
• Social interactions allow children to go through a process of continuous learning.
• Guided learning, imitation, and collaborative learning are critical.
• Cultural tools, such as iPads, mobile phones and calculators play an important role in children's development.
• Psychological tools, such as signs, symbols, maps, and work of art play an important role in children's development too.
• Language provides a way to express ideas and frees us from immediate situations to think about what is.
• Private speech guides cognitive development.

Vygotsky's Important Ideas

• He formulated three important ideas about cognitive development
• Internalization (to internalize)
• The zone of proximal development
• Scaffolding

Cognitive Views of Learning

• The cognitive approach revolutionized psychology beginning in the late 1950s.
• Computers showed how psychologists can try to understand human cognition, this is called the “computer analogy.”
• The information processing theory is used by cognitive psychologists to show how human thought works.

Information processing theory

• Humans process information to stimuli, and then receive information with the environment.
• As a child takes in information that it gets briefly stored in sensory storage, it then moves it to the short term or working memory.
• From short term memory the information can either be forgotten or transferred to the long-term memory.
• Sensory memory briefly holds information in a system that doesn't stay long.
• Perception processes detecting stimuli and assigning it meaning.
• Attention is a process that's a critical aspect of information in processing which allows us to focus on specific stimuli.
• Working Memory is the same as short term memory, it entails new held information held only temporarily.
• Working memory combines new information and combines it with long term memory, to solve current issues .
• Long-term memory (LTM) is transferred to LTM, and stored indefinitely.
• LTM has unlimited capacity and serve as long-term storage for information for our lifetime.
• Cognitive load refers to how much mental energy or resources are used, especially in working memory, the mental effort necessary to be a task
• There are three cognitive loads: intrinsic, extraneous, and germane.

Cognitive Loads Described

Intrinsic cognitive load

• Amount of cognitive processing required to figure a material amount.
• It cannot be avoided, but intrinsic is intrinsic to the task.

Extraneous cognitive load

• The resources required to processes something irrelevant to the task
• Deals with the problems related to the task, like having a noisy roommate.

Germane Cognitive Load

• Deals with deep processing of information which relates task, including the application of prior knowledge in a new task.
• This is supported by instruction like, for example, asking learners to explain to each other.

Test your knowledge of human development principles. Questions cover maturation, growth, individual rates, and orderly progression. Explore nature vs nurture and continuity.