Did you know that a giraffe can walk within 30 minutes of being born? In this same skill can take humans close to a year to master after birth, although in comparison to many members of the animal Kingdom, humans are relatively helpless. However, we do possess a surprising number of skills. So, for example, in humans, if immediately after birth and infinite placed on mom's belly, he will instinctively crawl towards the breast and initiate breast feeding on its own. This is also why is becoming increasingly popular for mother and child who plays skin to skin immediately after birth. The skin to skin contact helps both babies and moms to adjust. So here's a picture of me sitting skin skin with my son on his birthday. It's not anything special at mothers either my husband also sent skin the skin with our son to on his birthday. For babies, skin to skin helps with body temperature regulation, facilitates bonding and promotes breast feeding. Its also that the one of the reasons why a woman's nipples darken during pregnancy is to help the baby with their immature eyesight to find the nipple. The so called breast crawl is one of the many capacities held by newborns. There also many reflexes which are automatic responses to certain stimuli. Reflexes, including the rooting reflex, which helps a baby breast feed the Moro reflex, which is the startle reflex when it baby throws out their arms like this and also sucking as well. Sucking is an interesting reflex because it's associated with both feeding and emotional regulation. This is why young babies and children will often suck a thumb or a pacifier. So other than being interesting to see, at least if you're a science nerd like me, reflexes are also an important indicator of healthy development. Pediatricians, which are doctors who treat children contest reflexes to ascertain the health of a babies nervous system. Inappropriate reflexes can be indicative of brain damage, so testing them can help pediatricians determine if some kind of intervention is necessary. So parents who joke about newborns doing nothing but sleeping, eating and pooping aren't kidding. And cry. The crying. Crying is interesting because of the biological impact it has on caregivers. Someone else is crying, baby, that's annoying. You're crying baby is just stressing. An interesting one of the best ways to help babies adjust to life outside of the womb and to cry less is to recreate the experience of being in the womb. So as I mentioned before, human babies are relatively immature, particularly because if they stayed in mom any longer, they wouldn't be able to exit. Creating that wound like environment weather through swaddling or white noise helps babies to adjust and helps their tired parents sleep. Infancy and toddlerhood the period of birth two years is one of the greatest periods of physical growth over a person's life span. Most of the growth that occurs is body fat rather than muscle as well as brain growth. During this stage of development, the brain grows faster than anything else, making this a very critical, sensitive period. Without proper stimulation or loving relationships, the trajectory of brain development can be permanently altered. For example, stress of children from living in poverty can undermine the child's ability to learn. Even newborns are attracted to novel stimuli an can also imitate adults facial expressions. In the latter part of the first year, babies begin to develop motor skills, including things like the pincer graphs was it allows them to reach down and pick something up like a Cheerio and then eat it. So as an example of a pincer graph, we have my son here at about six months old eating noodles. Language development goes from crying in the first few months to cooing and babbling, and then eventually the saying first words, interestingly, babies understand language far longer before they are able to use it so yes, keep talking to babies. Baby talk or as developmental psychologist call it infant directed speech is really good for language development. Reading and in particular didactic reading which is a more interactive formal reading that stimulates discussion rather than apparent simply reading the book even during infancy, is extremely important for both language development and socio emotional development. Infancy and Toddlerhood are also in the foundations for attachment or set. Attachment and developmental psychology terms is the psychological and biological phenomenon of forming a bond with the caregiver. This is different from the attachment parenting trend, which is based on responsive parenting in physical contact. Infants are going to inherently engage in emotional relationships with their caregivers because over evolutionary time, this is more likely what was going to resolve in our survival. Both the initial attachment and continuing quality of the parent child relationship is thought to be critical groundwork for all future relationships. A child will have over the course of their life. Children who do not have the opportunity to form solid attachments, such as in the case of emotional abuse or neglect, death of a caregiver or lack of attention can develop attachment disorders. Attachment disorders, if left untreated, can significantly impact a child's future social and emotional relationships with others. Ultimately, this results in everything from impaired physical development to relationship problems, addiction, complex post, dramatic stress disorder, anxiety and depression. So once we faster 2nd birthday in eventer childhood, we start having clear memories and can remember various milestones. Remember when you lost your first tooth when you learn to read? When you learn to ride a bike? There's two parts to childhood. Early childhood is ages two to six, and middle childhood is approximately ages 6 to 11. In early childhood, physical growth begins to slow down and children begin to lose their baby fat. Children have more food, physical coordination that can run, jump and climb. So, for example, here's my son playing basketball when he was two years old. During middle childhood, children continued to grow taller. The brain isn't developing quite as rapidly. Developmental psychologists have devised many clever and occasionally humorous experiments to test for various milestones and cognitive development. For example, theory of mind begins to develop in early childhood. Theory of mind refers to an organisms understanding that they have thoughts and emotions and that their thoughts and emotions may be different from someone else's. It can also be acquainted with the ability to think about thinking or meta cognition. Okay, let's look at one classical theory of mind test, called the false belief task. Course belief. Task, in the false belief task children are tested to see if they understand whether or not a false belief presented by another can guide their behavior. So in this Pascoe child is given 2 boxes. One of these boxes is a plain box. And the second box is a marked box, so let's say it has a little first aid symbol on it. And then maybe will also draw a picture of a band aid. Will Band-Aid there. Okay, so then the child is asked to pick which box the plane box or the mark box has been incident and so usually the child would pick the marked box 'cause it's got a picture of a band aid on it, it's got a little first aid symbol within the researcher would open this box and show the child that this box is actually the one that's empty. In this one over here is the one that has the band dates in it. So after we've established with the child but the plane box is actually the one with the band aids in it. The researcher is then going to bring in a puppet so. This is my little sock puppet here. So then the researchers going to ask the child where the puppet thinks the band aids ours. The puppet going to think the band aids are in the marks box. Or the plane box, and so a child with theory of mind, meaning that they understand that their thoughts are different from the puppet slots. I was going to say that the puppet is going to think that the band aids are in the marked box because without that extra knowledge that we know from the researcher, it stands to reason that the puppet would initially believe that the band aids are in the marked box, just like the child did. A child without theory of mine would say that the puppet thinks that the band aids are found in the plane box because the assumption there is the puppets thoughts are equal to my thoughts. That means that there is no theory of mind that's developed yet. Now, the really interesting thing about theory of mind is that it is not a uniquely human trait and the men twenty 10s research came out that corvettes, a group of birds that includes crows and Ravens such as this Raven who lives at the Tower of London also have theory of mind. So for example, Corvettes Cash or store their food to eat later in researchers design an experiment where captive Ravens could look through the peephole and see where another Raven was storing its food. They observe that if Ravens new the people to their enclosure was open, they behaved differently. This demonstrated they both had some rudimentary understanding of what the people was four and then they knew in meant if another burdens watching. If you're curious to read the research for yourself. I'm included the citation at the end of this lecture. Research also indicates that primates, like chimpanzees in macaques as well as grey parrots, scrub Jays, dogs, pigs and goats also have theory of mind. Another interesting developmental task is what's called the Marshmallow task. The Marshmallow task is a test of executive function. Think of an executive's, the one who's in charge. Your executive function refers to brain functionality that controls what we're doing, so this includes planning, paying attention, being able to follow instructions and being able to multi task. There's very specific Brain functions that go along with this, such as working memory, which is how we manipulate information in a short period of time. So for example, being able to remember what you need to buy at the grocery store. It also includes mental flexibility, which is the ability to shift your attention, and self control, so being able to resist the urge to pull up social media when you're supposed to be studying. Okay, so the marshmallow task itself, a young child is brought to a room with an investigator. In that room, there is a table with a marshmallow or some kind of other yummy treats sitting on him. The investigator leaves the room and tells the child that they can eat the treat, but if they wait 15 minutes until the investigator returns, they can have twice as many treats. Very young children don't have a lot of executive function and it's very hard for them to wait. As executive function ability increases as children develop, the task becomes easier. What's interesting about the marshmallow task is that it's been around for a long time. It was first done in 1960s. So the original four-year olds tested in the 1960s who were able to wait also went on to lead successful careers as well. So the more executive function that you have, the better you're able to do later in life. Incidentally, videos of children asked to complete the marshmallow test can also be quite funny to watch. I've included an optional video after this lecture if you'd like to see for yourself. Well, we can talk about tasks to test cognitive development without Jean Piaget. Piaget was a psychologist with a background in biology, and he is most well known for his work in cognitive development. One of Piaget's biggest contributions to education was the idea that the learner is an active participant in their own learning environment. And this is one of the theoretical principles that underlines the active learning movement in education today, something we'll return to at the end of this course. Piaget thought that there was four stages of cognitive development. Sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational. Later research indicates that these stages aren't as clear cut as Piaget had originally thought. So for example, some skills develop later than others, others can be improved with training, and the influence of culture was initially overlooked. Piaget developed some interesting tasks to test development and where children are. For example, one of the tasks he developed is called the conservation tasks. The purpose of a conservation task is determine if children can perform operations or logical tasks. There's a few versions of this task, but for now, let's just look at one example. So here a child is presented with two similar sized glasses. The child is asked if there is the same or different amounts of water in each glass, and the child would say that there is the same amount of water in each class. So then the experimenter takes one of the glasses and pours it into a different shaped container. The investigator then asks again if there is the same or different amounts of water in each glass. A child who is preoperational will say that there's a different amount of water, whereas the concrete operational child will recognize that the amount is the same, because we started with the same. Okay, so what happens after childhood but before adulthood? Adolescence. Adolescence is the greatest period of physical change that occurs during postnatal life and what we'll be discussing next.
