Pregnancy and Child Development Quiz

Cognitive Development in Infants and Toddlers

• Piaget, considered the father of developmental psychology, studied his own children to understand how they learn.

• Children are active learners who interact with their environment to develop cognitive schemes.

• Sensorimotor scheme: children develop understanding through interactions with people and objects.

• Assimilation: Interpreting new experiences based on existing schemes.

• Accommodation: Modifying schemes to fit new experiences

• Cognitive equilibrium: maintaining balance between existing and new schemes through assimilation and accommodation.

Sensorimotor Development

• Stage 1: Reflexes (0-1 month): Infants use innate reflexes, such as sucking and grasping.

• Stage 2: Primary circular reactions (1–4 months): Infants repeat actions that focus on their own bodies, such as sucking their thumb.

• Stage 3: Secondary circular reactions (4-8 months): Infants repeat actions that cause a reaction in the environment, e.g., shaking a rattle.

• Stage 4: Coordination of secondary circular reactions (8-12 months): Infants combine schemas to achieve a goal, e.g., pushing a barrier to reach a toy.

• Stage 5: Tertiary circular reactions (12-18 months): Explore objects' properties through trial and error.

• Stage 6: Mental representation (18-24 months): Infants use mental symbols; understand object permanence.

Current Approaches to Piaget's Theory

• Current research suggests that cognitive abilities emerge earlier than Piaget proposed.

• Core knowledge systems: Infants have innate knowledge about the world, including numbers and objects.

• Information processing: Focuses on the processes of attention, memory, and problem-solving, showing gradual development, rather than stages.

Physical Health and Development

• Sleep: Newborns sleep about 16-18 hours per day, but their sleep cycles are different. Co-sleeping is used in some cultures

• Nutrition: Breastfeeding is recommended for the first 6 months of life.

• Growth: Follows cephalocaudal (head-to-toe) and proximodistal (center-outward) patterns; influenced by genes and environment.

• Brain Development: rapid in the first two years, with periods of high neural growth and pruning.

Language Development

• Early Language: Infants use various vocalizations (cooing, babbling).

• First Words (~12 months): typically nouns; vocabulary significantly increases past 18 months

• Language Acquisition Device (LAD): Chomsky's concept; humans are wired to acquire language. Environmental support through interaction = essential

• Sensitive Period for Language: Early exposure and experiences are crucial for language development.

Prenatal Development

• Periods: Germinal (1-2 weeks), Embryonic (3-8 weeks), Fetal (9+ weeks)

  • Germinal: Blastocyst implants in the uterine wall

  • Embryonic: Major organs & body structures develop

  • Fetal: Growth and development proceed rapidly.

• Prenatal Care: Essential for avoiding health risks to mother and child.

• Teratogens: Substances harmful to prenatal development (e.g., alcohol, drugs, chemicals).

• Twin Development: Monozygotic (identical) and dizygotic (fraternal) twins develop differently.

Infant Sensory and Perceptual Development

• Touch: Newborn reflexes like rooting and sucking show responsiveness.

• Taste & Smell: Infants show preferences for certain tastes and smells, often mirroring the mother's diet in utero.

• Hearing: Responsiveness to sound occurs very early in development and plays a critical role in social interaction and language development.

• Vision: Vision is the least developed sense at birth, but improves rapidly over the first few months with various patterns and contours highly stimulating.

Motor Development

• Reflexes: Infants demonstrate various reflexes at birth (rooting, sucking, stepping), that often disappear over time.

• Gross Motor Skills: Infants develop large muscle movements for crawling, sitting, and walking.

• Fine Motor Skills: Infants refine small muscle movements for reaching and grasping.

• Development: affected by maturation of neural circuits, body mechanics, interactions with environment.