Cognitive Development
Biological, Cognitive, and Socioemotional Processes
Biological Processes
produce changes in the child’s body and underlie brain development, height
weight gains, motor skills, and puberty’s hormonal changes. Genetic inheritance play a large part
cognitive process
changes in the child’s thinking, intelligence, and language. Cognitive developmental processes enable a growing child to memorize a Poem.
figure out how to solve a math problem, come up with a creative strategy
speak meaningfully connected sentences.
Periods of Development
Socioemotional Processes
relationships with other
people, changes in emotion, and changes in personality.
In the most widely used system of classification, the developmental periods are:
are infancy, early childhood,middle and late childhood
adolescence, early adulthood, middle adulthood
Late adulthood.
Developmental issues
Nature and Nurture
Continuity and Discontinuity
Nature refers to an organism’s biological inheritance, nurture to its environmental experiences.
The range of environments can be vast, but
a genetic blueprint produces commonalities in growth and development
The importance of nurture, or environmental experiences, to development. Experiences run the gamut from the individual’s biological environment
drugs, and physical accidents) to the social environment (family, peers, schools, community, media, and culture). For example, a child’s diet can affect how tall the child grows and even how effectively the child can think and solve problems.
the extent to which development involves gradual, cumulative change (continuity) or distinct stages (discontinuity).
Continuity
Discontinuity
each person is described as passing through a
sequence of stages in which change is qualitatively rather than quantitatively different.
Early and Later Experience
Early
The early-later experience issue focuses on the degree to which early experiences (especially in infancy) or later experiences are the key determinants of the child’s development.
Later experience advocates argue that children are malleable throughout development, and
that later sensitive caregiving is just as important as earlier sensitive caregiving.
Evaluating the Developmental Issues
Most developmentalism recognize that
it is unwise to take an extreme position on the issues of nature and nurture, continuity and discontinuity, and early and later experiences
The Brain