Developmental Psychology Lecture Notes - Prenatal & Infancy

**Developmental Psychology Lecture Two - Prenatal Development and Infancy \ 3 weeks early or \ - What are the perceptual skills of the newborn child? \- How do perceptual skills develop? - Can infants remember? **Motor development** - This development enables \- Exploration of ob...

**Developmental Psychology Lecture Two - Prenatal Development and Infancy \ 3 weeks early or \ - What are the perceptual skills of the newborn child? \- How do perceptual skills develop? - Can infants remember? **Motor development** - This development enables \- Exploration of objects \- Exploration of surroundings \- Social interaction (e.g. pointing) - These abilities support the development of \- Social skills \- Cognition \- Language **Reflexes** - Reflexes are an innate automatic response to stimuli - Reflex function reveals health of nervous system - Some have survival value (e.g. rooting reflex) - Others form basis of alter motor skills (e.g. stepping reflex) - Most innate reflexes have disappeared after 6 months - Some are permanent (e.g. eye blink) **Motor skills** **Fine motor skills** - Smaller movements - Reaching, grasping, etc **Gross motor skills** - Also known as locomotor skills - E.g. crawling, standing, walking - Grasps cube (Ulnar grasp) - 3-4 months - Sits alone - 7 months - Pincer grasp - 9 months - Walks alone - 12 months - Jumps - 2 years **Some important concepts** **Maturational theory (Gessell, 1940)** - Cephalocaudal trend- head, arms/trunk, legs - Proximodistal trend- head/trunk/arms then hands and fingers **Cultural variations** - Some communities promote behaviour where infants reach milestones earlier than US-centric models, or vice versa - WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialied, Rich, Democratic) **Perceptual development** **Five senses** - Touch - Taste - Smell - Hearing - Vision **Perceptual skills of newborns** **Touch** - Well developed, e.g. rooting reflex **Taste** - Can distinguish sweet, sour, bitter **Smell preferences** - Like chocolate; don't like rotten eggs - Survival function (identification of mother) **Hearing** - Prefer complex sounds - Sensitive to speech sounds **Vision** - Least developed sense **Depth perception** - Ability to judge distance between objects and from self - Necessary for reaching - Survival function - Visual cliff (Gibson and Walk, 1960) - Kinetic (blink reflex at 3-4 weeks) - Binocular (2-3 months) - Pictorial (6-7 months) **Pattern perception** - At birth, prefer patterned stimuli to plain - With age, prefer more complex patterns- contrast sensitivity **Memory development** **How do we measure memory in pre-natal infants?** - Operant conditioning - E.g. Rovee-Collier, 1999 \- 3 months- remember for 1 week \- 6 months- remember for 2 weeks - Memory is highly context specific