Lecture 5

Motor Development
1. The Dynamic Systems View (Esther Thelen):
- Infants assemble motor skills for perceiving & acting
- Motivation leads to new motor behaviours, which are tuned with repetition.
- Factors influencing motor behaviors:
o Nervous system development, physical properties of the body, the child’s goal,
and environmental support (e.g., walking).
2. Reflexes:
- Built-in reactions to stimuli.
- Allow infants to respond adaptively to environment before learning
- Examples:
o Rooting reflex: Turning head when cheek is stroked.
o Sucking reflex: Sucking on objects placed in the mouth.
 Enables the infant to get nourishment before it associates a nipple with
food; also serves as a self-soothing mechanism
o Moro reflex: Startle response to sudden noise or movement.
 Newborns arch their backs, throw back their head & fling out their arms
and legs, then quickly close them.
- Some reflexes persist such as coughing, sneezing, blinking, shivering & yawning.
- Some reflexes are incorporated into more complex voluntary actions.
o Grasping reflex: infants tightly grasp any object placed in their palm.
3. Gross Motor Skills
- Large-muscle activities (e.g., arm movement, walking)
o Requires postural control.
- Posture is a dynamic process linked with:
o Sensory information in skin, joints & muscles, which tell us where we are in space
o Vestibular organs in the inner ears that regulate balance and equilibrium
o Vision and hearing
- Locomotion and postural control are closely linked, especially in walking upright.
o Infants discover places & surfaces that are safe for locomotion.
o Experience, rather than age, predicts adaptive responding on varying slopes
o Specificity of learning
- Motor accomplishments in first year leads to increasing independence in second year.
o Infants can explore environment more extensively & initiate interaction with
others.
o Few restrictions, except for safety, should be placed on a toddler’s motor activity.
o 13 to 18 months: can pull a toy by a string and climb steps.
 o 18 to 24 months: can walk quickly or run stiffly, balance on their feet, walk
backward, stand and kick or throw a ball, and jump in place.
- Gross Motor Skills in Childhood:
o Young children enjoy simple movements for joy of performing them
 Take pride in these accomplishments.
o With age, motor skills become smoother and more coordinated
 Boys usually outperform girls on average
 Engaging in active activities benefits motor development, cognition, mental &
physical health
4. Fine Motor Skills
- Involve precise movements (as any task requiring finger dexterity)
- Infants refine fine motor control through two types of grasps:
o Palmer grasp: whole hand.
o Pincer grip: thumb and forefinger.
- Perceptual-motor coupling is necessary, and experience plays a role.
o The perceptual system that is used varies with age.
- Examples:
o “Sticky mittens” enhance infants’ object exploration skills
o “Tower-Building Toddlers”: Toddlers who built higher towers at 18-21 months
remained more advanced in tower building at 3 years old
- Fine Motor Skills in Childhood
- As children get older, their fine motor skills improve.
o Increased myelination of CNS supports improvement of fine motor skills.
o Children use their hands more skillfully as tools.
- Ages 10 to 12, children begin to show manipulative skills similar to abilities of adults.
o Complex, intricate, and rapid movements can be mastered.
o Examples: fine-quality crafts or playing a difficult piece on a musical instrument.
o Girls usually outperform boys in fine motor skills on average.

Sensory and Perceptual Development

- Sensation: reaction when information interacts with sensory receptors.
o Sensory receptors: eyes, ears, tongue, nostrils, and skin.
- Perception: interpretation of what is sensed.
o Examples:
 Interpreting air waves that contact ears as noise or musical sounds
 Interpreting light transmitted to retina as specific colour/pattern/shape.
Studying Newborns’ Perception:
- Robert Fantz: used a “looking chamber” to study infants’ perception of stimuli.
o Visual preference method (children look longer when interested).
- Habituation-dishabituation paradigm
- Habituation = gradual reduction in response strength with repeated stimulus
- Dishabituation= recovery of a habituated response after a change in stimulus
- High-amplitude sucking: Method of assessing infant’s attention to sound
- Eye tracking equipment: Precision in determining infants’ “looking time”

- Visual Perception in Infants:

- At birth, the nerves, muscles, and lens of the eye are still developing.
o Newborns can’t see things that are far away (20/240).
o 6 months of age = 20/40
- Infants show Interest in human faces soon after birth and can perceive certain patterns.
o Prefer looking at mother’s face vs. stranger’s face as early as 12 hours post birth.
- Infants’ colour vision gradually improves during the first months of life.
o By 8 weeks & maybe by 4 weeks, infants can discriminate between some colours.
o By 4 months of age, they have colour preferences that mirror those of adults.
- Development of perceptual constancy allows infants to perceive their world as stable
o Sensory stimulation is changing but perception remains constant.
o Size constancy: recognition that an object remains the same even though the
retinal image changes as you move toward or away from the object.
o Shape constancy: recognition that an object remains the same shape even
though its orientation to us changes.
o Babies as young as 3 months show some size constancy and have shape
constancy for regularly shaped objects.
- By about 2 months of age, infants develop the ability to perceive partly occluded
(hidden) objects as whole.
- Might infants even perceive depth?
o The visual cliff experiment was used to investigate this in 6 to 12 month olds.

- Visual Perception in Childhood:

o Children become increasingly efficient in detecting boundaries between colours
at 3 to 4 years of age.
o Many preschool children are farsighted, unable to see close as well as they can
see far away.
o By kindergarten, most children can focus their eyes and sustain attention
effectively on close-up objects.

- Hearing
- During last two months of pregnancy, the fetus can hear sounds outside of the womb.
o Fetus can hear and learn before birth
o Example: “The Cat in the Hat” story reading experiment
 - Many changes take place in infancy.
o Newborns cannot hear soft sounds quite as well as adults can.
o Infants are more likely to hear high-pitched than low-pitched sounds.
o By 6 months, infants more proficient at localization—detecting origin of a sound.
- Touch and Pain
- Newborns respond to touch and can feel pain.
- In the past, doctors performed operations on newborns without anesthesia because of
the dangers of anesthesia and it was thought that newborns did not feel pain.
- Recent advances have made it possible to use anesthesia and pain relievers effectively.

- Smell and taste

- Newborns can differentiate odors.
o Importance of early experience with odors in development of olfactory
perception.
- Sensitivity to taste is present before birth.
o Newborns learn tastes prenatally through amniotic fluid & in breast milk after
birth.
o During first several months infants begin to prefer salty tastes

Intermodal perception: the ability to integrate information about two or more sensory
modalities, such as vision and hearing.
- Early, exploratory forms of intermodal perception exist even in newborns.
o These early forms become sharpened by experience in the first year of life.

Nature, Nurture, and Perceptual Development

- Much of very early perception develops from innate (nature) foundations, but
environmental experiences (nurture) fine-tune some abilities and may drive others.
o Importance of critical/sensitive periods
o Case study of infant born with cataracts (red line)

The Information-Processing Approach

- Information-processing approach: how individuals encode information, manipulate it,
monitor it, and create strategies for handling it.
- A computer metaphor
o The hardware limits amount of data computer can process (capacity & speed)
o The software limits the kind of data that can be used as input and manipulated.

Cognitive Resources: Capacity and Speed of Processing Information

- Developmental changes are influenced by increases in capacity & speed of information
processing.
 o These are referred to as cognitive resources because they have an important
influence on memory and problem solving.
o Both biology and experience contribute to growth in cognitive resources.
- An increase in capacity improves processing of information (example: memory capacity).
- How quickly we process information (speed) influences what we can do with that
information.
- One method of assessment is using a reaction-time task:
o Speed at which tasks are completed improves across the childhood years.
o Processing speed predicts working memory capacity & complex reasoning skills.

Mechanisms of Change (Robert Siegler)

- Certain mechanisms of change are important in advances in cognitive development:
o Encoding: process by which information gets into memory.
o Automaticity: ability to process information with little or no effort.
o Strategy construction: creation of new procedures for processing information.
 Example: reading strategy
Attention
- Attention is the focus of mental resources.
- Children allocate attention in different ways:
1. Selective: focusing on relevant aspects while ignoring irrelevant one
2. Divided: focus on more than one activity.
3. Sustained: maintaining attention to selected stimulus for long time.
4. Executive: planning actions, goal-directed attention, detecting and compensating
for errors, monitoring progress, and dealing with new or difficult circumstances.

- Attention in Infancy:
- Dominated by orienting/investigation process in the first year of life.
o Involves directing attention to potentially important locations in the environment
(where) and recognizing objects and features (what).
o By 4 months, infants can selectively attend to an object.
o Sustained attention helps infants learn and remember.
o Infant attention is strongly affected by novelty.
- Joint attention: two or more individuals focus on the same object or event.
o Typically observed by the end of the first year.
o Infants begin to direct adults’ attention to objects.
o Enhances infants’ ability to learn from other people.
o Associated with development of language, memory and self-regulation

- Attention in childhood:
 - Ability to pay attention improves during the preschool years.
- Children make advances in executive attention and sustained attention.
- Control over attention continues to show important changes during middle and late
childhood.
- Preschoolers notice things that stand out, but after age 6-7, they pay attention to what's
important for the task at hand.
- Ability to control & sustain attention is related to school readiness & academic success.

- Attention in Adolescence:
- Sustained & executive attention are important for adolescent cognitive development.
- Increased executive attention supports ability to engage in complex tasks.
- One trend involving divided attention is multitasking.
- Multitasking expands information that we attend to & forces brain to share processing
resources.
- Controlling attention is a key aspect of learning and thinking.
Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)
- Neurodevelopmental disorder that affecting attention and related executive functions
(working memory, cognitive flexibility, behaviour regulation).
- Three presentations:
1. Predominately inattentive
2. Predominately hyperactive-impulsive
3. Combined (both inattentive and hyperactive/impulsive)
- Difficulties with sustained attention, especially on less stimulating tasks
- Increased difficulty with learning and emotion regulation.
- Affects 7-10% of North American children (majority boys)
- Treated with behavioural management and/or medication.
Memory
- Memory is the retention of information over time.
- Basic processes: encoding, storage, and retrieval
- Failures can occur in any of these processes.
o Encoding: getting information into memory
o Storage: retaining information over time
o Retrieval: taking information out of storage
- Short-term memory: retention of information for up to 30 seconds without rehearsal
o Individuals can retain information longer using rehearsal.
- Long-term memory: relatively permanent and long-lasting.
- Working memory: manipulating information for decision-making, problem-solving, and
language comprehension
 o Linked to many aspects of children’s development.

- Memory in infancy:
o Infants as young as 2-3 months of age show early stages of memory
development.
 Infants can remember perceptual-motor information.
 Carolyn Rovee-Collier’s technique
o Implicit memory: memory without conscious recollection (e.g., riding a bicycle)
o Explicit memory: conscious memory of facts and experiences (e.g., geographical
facts, memory of your birthday party).
 Infants do not show explicit memory until after 6 months
o Most adults can remember little from the first three years of their life—a
phenomenon known as infantile, or childhood, amnesia.
 Immaturity of hippocampus & prefrontal cortex of the brain plays a role.
o Key Brain Structures Involved in Explicit Memory Development:
 Cerebral cortex (tan coloured area with wrinkles and folds)
 Frontal lobe
 Hippocampus
o Age Group vs. Length of time you can remember things:
 6 months: 24hrs
 9 months: 1 month
 10-11 months: 3 months
 13-14 months: 4-6 months
 20 months: 12 months
o
- Memory in childhood:
o Recall improves with cues and prompts.
o Growing knowledge enhances memory.
o Increased use of gist, strategies, and changes in memory span contribute to
improvement.
o Memory span increases with age.
 Information processing speed and rehearsal of information are important
o Strategies that benefit children’s long-term retention:
 Organizing information during encoding boosts memory
 Elaboration benefits memory via extensive processing of information
 Mental imagery benefits older children more than younger children.

- Memory in adolescence:
o Memory span and working memory increases
 o Neural shifts in specific brain regions drive improvements in adolescence and
young adulthood.

Constructing memories:
- Schema theory: people mold memories to fit info. that already exists in their minds.
- Schemas: mental frameworks that organize concepts and information.
o Influences encoding, inference-making, and information retrieval
o Often gaps are filled in when memories are retrieved.
- Our ability to remember new information depends on what we already know about it.
o Examples: experts vs. novices
- Fuzzy trace theory: memory is best understood with two types of representations:
1. Verbatim memory trace: precise details of the information.
2. Gist: the central idea of the information.
- Young children prioritize verbatim traces; gist becomes prominent in elementary school.
o Gist contributes more to improved memory and reasoning because fuzzy traces
are more enduring and less likely to be forgotten than verbatim traces.
Reconstructive Memory and Children as Eyewitnesses
- Memories are constructive and reconstructive
o Children have schemas for all sorts of information & these affect how they
encode, store, and retrieve information
o Special concern with children: susceptibility to suggestion can alter memory and
create false memories
o Example: Bugs bunny study (Elizabeth Loftus)
- Several factors influence the accuracy of children’s memory:
o There are age differences in children’s susceptibility to suggestion.
 Preschoolers are the most susceptible group.
o There are individual differences in susceptibility.
o Interviewing techniques can produce substantial distortions in children’s reports
about highly salient events.