Unit 5: Development in Early Childhood (2-6 years) Flashcards
How much height and weight do children between the ages of 2 - 6 gain in total?
30 cm
8kg
Muscle maturation occurs, as fat is turned into muscles. This leads to the average body mass index (BMI) being at its ______ between 5-6 years.
lowest
How tall and heavy is the average 6 year old?
> 110 cm
12-23 kg
How does the center of gravity shift, why and which effect does that have?
shifts from chest to abdomen
faster growing legs (and arms) -> 60% height increase by puberty
provides more stability and development of more complex movements
Which factors can influence growth and maturation?
genetic inheritance
exercise and daily physical activity
Social class
Physical deficiencies/ illnesses
Trauma and physical/ psychological abuse
Nutrition
What does a very high level of training cause?
less growth
When do most eating disorders begin?
during physical development
What does obesity in early puberty mainly cause?
delays in cognitive development
Where do the hemispheres mainly get their information from/ exert their influence on?
contralateral parts
Which structure allows for a transfer of information between the hemispheres and why is the exchange of information crucial?
corpus callosum
crucial for everyday functioning (e.g. coordinated movements)
When does the process of myelinisation occur at a particularly high rate and which effect does this have?
3-6
increased efficiency of corpus callosum
lateralization
each hemisphere is specialized for certain functions
Is lateralization true for all processes?
no
e.g. speech comprehension
Does lateralization depend on handedness?
yes
handedness
preference of using one hand or side of the body over the other
How many adults are righthanded, and what does this mean when talking about lateralization?
90%
dominant left half of brain
Even though there are signs of lateralization from birth, when is handedness well established?
2-3 years
Should you “lateralize” your child by the age of 5 if it does not happen spontaneously?
yes
double lateralization hypothesis
innate laterality (genetic inheritance, spontaneous)
learned laterality (use of objects)
How can preoperational children think compared to sensorimotor beings?
in symbols (not just via senses)
What is symbolic function?
ability to make one thing represent another
Which are examples of manifestations of mental representations appearing during the preoperational stage?
drawing
symbolic play
language (describing objects)
cataloguing/ categorization and class logic
children have an enormous capacity for learning new words and logical connections between them
animism
belief that inanimate objects are alive
non-human objects have human characteristics
Why are children in the preoperational stage egocentric?
children understand the world from own perspective and have difficulties to understand the POV of others
How did Piaget and Inhelder study egocentrism in children?
Three mountains study
Do children in the preoperational stage still act intuitively, despite their ability to describe things not immediately present?
yes
How do children interpret the environment? (e.g. DeVries & “Maynard” experiment)
based on its appearance
conservation
recognition that properties of an object are not altered if appearance is altered in a superficial way
Do children in the preoperational stage understand conservation?
no
Flavell: experiment with water containers
-> children below 6-7 think taller container contains more liquid
Which concepts do children in the preoperational stage lack, to understand conservation (according to Piaget)?
Decentration: ability to concentrate on more than one aspect of a problem at a time
Reversibility: ability to mentally reverse actions
Which other properties of objects prove that children younger than 6-7 don’t understand conservation (Flavell)?
Mass (longer = more perceived mass)
Number (same amount of objects wider spaced is perceived as more objects being there)
Which are the 5 behaviors Piaget identified as vehicles of representation?
delayed imitation
mental imagery
language
drawing
play
Signifier
designates graphic or phonetic representation
Signified
meaning of a word
semantic aspect
What’s the difference between Signals, Symbols and Signs?
Signal: signifier directly linked to signified (e.g. smoke and ifre)
Symbol: greater distance between signifier and signified (e.g. symbol of a house and house)
Sign: arbitrary, no relation (e.g. mathematical signs)
When does the ability to use differentiated signifiers begin to develop?
1.5 years
Delayed imitation
imitation in absence of model
reveals existence of internal models
Symbolic play
situations produced in symbolic way
-> giving meaning to elements
Mental imagery
internalized imitation
-> representation of situations
Language
use of arbitrary signs
What are some advantages of play?
physical development
improved planning and self-control (e.g. setting rules)
emotional regulation and social skills
Rough-and-tumble play
one of the most common forms of active play
mimcs aggression (e.g. wrestling, chasing or hitting) without intention to harm
more common in boys
peers
children of similar age but not from the same family
What’s a difference between child-parent and child-child interactions?
vertical relationship (child parent)
horizontal relationship (child chil)
-> more difficult to manage (require compromise)
How does play develop from infancy to childhood?
6 months old: little attention to peers
2 years old: parallel play
2-5: play with increasing cooperation
How did Mildred Parten categorize play?
Unoccupied play (no activity)
Onlooker play (watches others)
Solitary play
Parallel play
Associative play (interact in same activity)
Cooperative play (interact in coordinated way, e.g. taking turns)
Can we take the progression through Parten’s play behaviors as an index of social and cognitive abilities (ages 2-5)?
no, younger and older children engage in various forms of play
Functional play
first 2 years
simple, physical activities
“sensorimotor play” (piaget)
Symbolic play
2-6 years
child symbolically represents something, which is absent in immediate setting
Make-believe (sociodramatic) play
2-6 years
acting out various roles and plots
emerges after simpler forms of symbolic play
Why is sociodramatic play important?
allows exploration of social roles
learning how to explain and negotiate
practice emotional regulation
Constructive play
3-6 years
creating or building objects (or representations of objects)
Games with rules
6+ years
structured games with publicly accepted rules
What is drawing?
form of imitation of reality
-> shapes mental representations
Are children’s drawings simple copies of reality?
no, they also involve internal images and information
Which other activities/ skills is drawing connected with?
Play
Language
Which components are involved in drawing?
motor
cognitive (understanding of reality)
affective (represents interests, worries and desires)
What are children able to do at 2 years of age (context: language)?
use basic grammar
place words into categories
naming insight
18-24 months
children realize that names apply to everything
fast-mapping
process of quickly acquiring a word after hearing it
-> immediately place it into a category
often occurs when child and speaker are jointly attending to object mentioned
overextension
when children use one word for a wide variety of objects
underextension
tendency to use general term to smaller range of objects
overlap error
mixture of overextension and underextension
How much does the child’s vocabulary expand by 3 years?
1000 - 5000 words
-> language progresses with conjunctions
sentences up to 8 words
-> many why questions
How do vocabulary and sentence length change by 4 years?
10.000 words
20 word sentences
How does grammar progress by the 4th year?
includes dependent clauses and tags at sentence end (e.g. won’t you)
How do vocabulary and sentence length change by 6 years?
30.000 words
unlimited sentences
How does grammar change by the 6th year?
passive voice
subjunctive
more complex questions
What are the component processes of the memory system?
encoding
storage
retrieval
How does the preferential looking method work and what does familiarity imply?
infants spend less time looking at familiar stimuli compared to unfamiliar stimuli
shows degree of memory
What is a common task employing the preferential looking method and how does it work?
Visual paired comparison task (VPC)
children shown stimulus
after delay they are shown 2 stimuli (1 unfamiliar, 1 familiar from before)
time spent looking at familiar compared to unfamiliar stimulus used as index of recognition memory
What has the VPC found out so far?
children between 3-6 recognize visual stimuli
Morgan and Hayne used the VPC to study encoding. What did they find out about the coding abilities of 1 year old’s compared to 4 year old’s?
1: took 10 sec to remember stimulus; forget about stimulus after 1 week
4: took 5 to remember stimulus; need 10 sec to encode stimulus to recognize it after 1 week
-> 1 year old’s need more time to encode stimuli
What did Morgan and Hayne discover when looking at our abilities of retrieval and encoding? (VPC of children between 1-4)
retrieval depends on the time we spend encoding the information
encoding develops significantly between 1 and 4 years
Are memory processes only possible from 1 year onward?
no
6 months: recognition after 20 sec delay
9 months: recognition after 2-3 minute delay
Bowlby: infants can recognize caregiver at 2 months of age
infantile amnesia
not having memories younger than 3.5 years of age
What could explain infantile amnesia?
role of language
still very rudimentary until 3
-> may affect how memories are encoded
Why is a mature understanding of emotions in others important for us?
key role in understanding own internal states
-> allows us to behave competently in social interactions
When do basic emotions become visible?
birth: interest, distress, disgust, contentment
2 months: social smiles
2-7 months: anger, sadness, joy, surprise and fear
When do complex emotions like shame or guilt develop?
18-24 months
When can children recognize the emotions of others?
7-10 months
social referencing
ability to use other’s emotional expressions as guide for how to behave
Why is the ability to display and understand emotions important for social development?
allows child to understand how they should feel
What is understanding how external expressions are related with inner feelings important for?
developing a theory of mind
First definition of theory of mind (ToM)
ability to predict what another person believes in a situation, and based on that, predict how they might behave
What is a ToM important for?
managing social interaction
understanding intentions
empathise
Which cognitive abilities does the theory of mind depend on?
ability to understand what another person wants (desire)
ability to understand what another person believes (belief)
Baron-Cohen suggested, that the ToM develops in two phases. Which ones?
8 months: gaze following (awareness that sb else is looking at something of interest)
12 months: proto-declarative pointing (to confirm that they know what another person is looking at)
At 2 years children develop a private and public self. What are they?
private self: how we feel
public self: how we show how we feel to others
empathy
reading feelings by physical expressions
When do children understand that internal emotions correspond with desires (which then again motivate the behavior of others)?
2 years
belief-desire reasoning
ability to empathize and predict how others might act based on beliefs and desires
-> may not act if desires go against beliefs
developed at 3 years of age
principle of seeing leads to knowing
understanding that what a person knows about a situation depends on what that person sees
developed at 3-4 years
meta-representation
used in pretended play
learning to separate what is true from what someone is pretending to do
developed at 3-4 years
What’s the most used task to assess a child’s understanding of first-order false beliefs?
Sally-Anne task
Belief question
designed to test ability to understand another person’s belief
reality question
tests understanding of reality
memory question
tests ability to recall events
Until which age can subjects not answer the belief question? (but are capable of answering the others)
until 4 years they can’t answer belief questions
When do children develop an understanding of second-order states and what does that mean?
6
understand that others say and do thing to evoke a response in others
