Chapter 3:

Tools for Exploring the World: Physical,

Perceptual, and Motor Development

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 Icebreaker: Think, Pair, and Share

Find a partner in the class to discuss the following:

• This chapter begins by discussing the newborn. Do you have any experience of your own with
newborns (through your own family, babysitting, or in your community)?
• What do newborns do most? What are they unable to do?
• What do you think is the most challenging part of taking care of a newborn? Even if you don’t
have your own experience, what would you guess based on things you’ve heard or seen in
your environment?

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 Chapter Objectives

3.1 Describe newborn assessment, reflexes, states, and temperament

3.2 Describe physical changes in infancy and toddlerhood as well as growth of the nervous
system
3.3 Describe the growth of locomotion and fine-motor skills during infancy
3.4 Describe the development of senses and perception during infancy
3.5 Describe the development of self-understanding and theory of mind

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 3.1 The Newborn

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 Key Questions 1.1

• How do reflexes help newborns interact with

the world?
• How do we determine whether a baby is
healthy and adjusting to life outside the
uterus?
• What behavioral states are common among
newborns?
• What are the different features of
temperament?

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 The Newborn’s Reflexes

• The newborn is born with unlearned responses triggered by specific stimuli, which are called
reflexes
• Certain reflexes have survival value
• Rooting, sucking, eye blinks
• Other reflexes are developmental precursors to later voluntary motor behaviors
• Stepping is a precursor to walking
• Reflexes reflect the health of the child’s nervous system

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 Assessing the Newborn

• The Apgar score provides a quick assessment of the newborn's status

• The five Apgar scores are based on breathing, heartbeat, muscle tone, reflexes, and skin tone
• Each is scored from 0 to 2 (where 2 is optimal), then summed
• Total of 7+: good physical condition
• Total of 4–6: needs special attention
• Total of 3 or less: life-threatening

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 Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale

• Brazelton’s Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale (NBAS) is another way to assess the
newborn's status.
• Includes 28 behavioral and 18 reflex items
• Assesses four systems
• Autonomic: body regulation (e.g., breathing)
• Motor: activity level and control of body
• State: maintaining states (e.g., alertness)
• Social: interacting with people

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 The Newborn’s States

• Alert inactivity: calm; eyes open and attentive; deliberately inspecting environment
• Waking activity: open but unfocused eyes; uncoordinated motions
• Crying: cries vigorously; motion is agitated and uncoordinated
• Sleeping: eyes closed; degree of activity and quality of breathing alternate

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 Crying

• Basic cry
• Starts softly and builds in volume and intensity
• Often seen when the child is hungry
• Mad cry
• More intense and louder
• Pain cry
• Starts with a loud wail, followed by a long pause, then gasping

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 Sleeping

• Newborns sleep an average of 16–18 hours

per day
• Sleep cycles
• Newborns: 4-hour cycle; 3 hours sleep
and 1 hour awake
• By 6 months: sleep 10–12 hours at night
• REM sleep
• 50% of newborn sleep
• 33% by 12 months

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 Co-sleeping

• Outside of North America, many parents engage in “co-sleeping,” which is important for
bonding in cultures that value interdependence
• Research does not support the idea that it makes children less self-reliant
• Research suggests that co-sleeping is dangerous only when parents smoke, drink, or sleep
with babies in sofas or chairs
• Co-sleeping facilitates breastfeeding
• There is little evidence about the long-term effects of co-sleeping
• Future research should consider if it’s a well-established cultural practice, how it occurs,
and why parents choose to do it (to address sleep-related problems or due to a belief in
benefits, for example)

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 Sudden Infant Death Syndrome

• Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS): sudden, inexplicable death of a healthy baby
• Risk factors
• Premature birth and low birth weight
• Parental smoking
• Child overheating and sleeping on stomach
• African American and Native American infants (often sleep on stomach)
• To reduce risk, babies should sleep on back or sides

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 Temperament

• Temperament: consistent styles or patterns of infant behavior (temperamental dimensions

may range from two to nine)
• Rothbart’s (2007) three dimensions:
• Generally happy, active, vocal, and seeks stimulation (surgency/extroversion)
• Angry, fearful, frustrated, shy, and not easily soothed (negative affect)
• Focuses attention, is not easily distracted, and can inhibit impulses (effortful control)
• Studies suggest that temperament tends to be somewhat stable from infancy through
adulthood
• Temperament predisposes but does not always guarantee later personality characteristics
• Parents can nurture children to behave in ways somewhat different from their temperaments

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 Hereditary and Environmental Contributions to
Temperament

• Environment
• Cultural and ethnic factors
• Toddlers in Asia often have greater effortful control but lower levels of positive emotion
than European children
• Parental characteristics
• Responsiveness reduces infant emotionality
• Depressed mothers may encourage more fearfulness in infants

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 Discussion Activity: Environment and
Temperament

As a class, discuss the interaction between environment and temperament in your country

• Do you think your country encourages certain types of behaviors in children and discourages
others?
• Is it the same for all children, or does it differ based on gender? What about race or ethnicity—
do they have an effect?
• Do you think it’s the same throughout the country, or does it differ depending on where you
live?

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 3.2: Physical Development

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 Key Questions 1.2

• How do height and weight change from birth to 2 years of age?

• What nutrients do young children need? How are nutrients best provided?
• What are the consequences of malnutrition? How can it be treated?
• What are nerve cells, and how are they organized in the brain?
• How does the brain develop? When does it begin to function?

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 Growth of the Body

• Growth is more rapid in infancy than during any other period after birth
• Infants double their weight by 3 months
• Infants triple their weight by 1 year
• Average is not the same as normal
• Children of the same age can vary greatly in their heights and weights
• Height depends largely on heredity

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 “You Are What You Eat”: Nutrition and Growth

• Rapid growth requires young babies to consume large amounts of calories relative to body
weight
• Breastfeeding is the best way to ensure proper nourishment
• Bottle-feeding has advantages and disadvantages
• In developing nations, bottle-feeding is potentially disastrous because of contaminated
water and higher dilution of formula

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 Think, Pair, and Share Activity: Breastfeeding

Students should find a partner for this activity

• Both breastfeeding and bottle feeding have their advantages and disadvantages. Discuss with
your partner what kinds of information you think pregnant women and caregivers for infants
should receive about their feeding options
• Some questions to get you started:
• Formula can be expensive. How would that affect your recommendations for what
information is shared?
• What are the benefits of bottle-feeding, and what are the downsides?
• What are the benefits of breastfeeding, and what are the downsides?
• How would your recommendations change depending on who was receiving the
information?

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 Malnutrition

• Worldwide, about one in four children under age 5 are malnourished (UNICEF, 2016)
• Malnourished children tend to be small for their age due to inadequate nutrition
• Malnutrition can cause substantial and potentially irreversible brain damage
• Malnourished children are listless, quiet, and inactive
• These characteristics call less urgent attention to the children’s needs
• About 11% of U.S. households are food insecure

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 The Emerging Nervous System

• The brain and the rest of the nervous system consist of cells known as neurons
• Consist of cell body, dendrites, the axon, and terminal buttons
• Terminal buttons release chemicals called neurotransmitters
• Cerebral cortex: the wrinkled surface of the brain that regulates many functions
• Hemispheres: the two halves of the brain
• Corpus callosum: the thick band of fibers connecting the two hemispheres

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 Emerging Brain Structures

• At three weeks after conception, the neural plate forms

• By 28 weeks after conception, the brain will have about all the neurons it will ever have
• Neurons migrate and become positioned into the six layers of the mature brain
• In the fourth month of prenatal development, axons begin to form the fatty sheath, myelin
• The number of synapses peaks at 12 months
• Synaptic pruning occurs when the number of unnecessary synapses slowly decreases
• Methods to study origins and time course of brain specialization
• Studying children with brain damage
• Electroencephalography: Measuring the brain’s electrical activity through electrodes
placed on scalp
• Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI): Using magnetic fields to track brain
blood flow

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 Five General Principles of Brain Specialization

• Specialization evident early in development

• Specialization takes two specific forms: focused and trigger specific
• Different brain systems specialize at different rates
• Environmental stimulation is necessary for successful specialization and normal brain
development
• Experience-expectant growth: a process by which the wiring of the brain is organized by
experiences that are common to most humans
• Experience-dependent growth denotes changes in the brain that are linked to unique
experiences, not to specific points in development
• Variation across individuals and cultures

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 3.3 Moving and Grasping:
Early Motor Skills

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 Key Questions 1.3

• What are the component skills involved in learning to walk? At what age do infants master
them?
• How do infants learn to coordinate the use of their hands?

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 Locomotion

• By 7 months, infants can sit alone

• Toddling: at around 14 months, toddlers may stand alone briefly and walk without
assistance, but they are unsteady
• Dynamic systems theory:
• Instead of simple maturation, motor development involves many distinct skills that are
organized and reorganized over time to meet specific task demands

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 Coordinating Skills

• Walking skills must be learned separately and then integrated with other skills
• Differentiation: mastery of component skills
• Integration: combining components into the sequence needed to accomplish the task
• Unsupported, independent walking occurs at about 12 to 15 months, once children have
mastered and coordinated its component skills
• Cultural practices can accelerate or delay the early stages of motor development
• In some traditional African cultures, children receive training to sit and walk at younger
ages than in Europe and North America
• Swaddling, practiced in some Central Asian countries, can discourage motor development

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 Fine Motor Skills

• Fine motor skills are associated with reaching, grasping, holding, and manipulating objects
• At 4 months, infants clumsily reach for objects
• By 5 months, they coordinate movement of the two hands
• By 2–3 years, children can use zippers but not buttons
• Tying shoes is a skill that develops around age 6
• Handedness:
• Preference for one hand over the other becomes stronger and more consistent during the
toddler and preschool years
• Influenced by both heredity and environment (where right-handedness is favored)
• Many cultures have viewed left-handedness negatively

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 Discussion Activity: Handedness

As a class, discuss your own experiences of handedness in your culture

• Are you personally right-handed, left-handed, or ambidextrous?

• Do you remember learning this about yourself? How old were you roughly, and what were you
learning to do?
• Did anyone try to change which hand you preferred? If so, what happened?

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3.4: Coming to Know the World:
Perception

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 Key Questions 1.4

• Are infants able to smell, taste, and experience pain?

• How well do infants hear?
• How well can infants see? Can they see color and depth?
• How do infants coordinate information between different sensory modalities, such as between
vision and hearing?

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 Smell, Taste, and Touch

• Newborns have keen senses of smell, taste, and touch

• Odors: pleasant from unpleasant, or familiar from unfamiliar
• Taste: salty, sour, bitter, sweet, and changes in mother’s breast milk—and a “sweet tooth”
• Touch: reflexes and other movements
• Infants’ pain cry – a sudden, high-pitched wail – in response to apparent pain-provoking
stimuli suggests they experience pain

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 Hearing

• Startle reactions suggest that infants are sensitive to sound

• Infants hear less well than adults
• Hear pitches best in the range of human speech (neither high nor low pitches) and
differentiate consonants from vowels
• Prefer pleasant more than unpleasant melodies and can remember songs
• By 4 months, infants recognize their own names

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 Seeing

• Newborns respond to light and track objects

• Infants at 1 month see at 20 feet what adults see at 200–400 feet
• By 1 year, infants’ visual acuity is the same as that of adults
• Colors
• Newborns perceive few colors until their cones start to function
• 3- to 4-month-olds can perceive colors similarly to adults

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 Seeing: Depth Perception

• Visual cliff research:

• 6-week-olds react with interest to differences in depth (heart rate deceleration)
• By 7 months, they show more fear than interest at the cliff’s deep end (heart rate
acceleration and refusal to cross the deep side)
• Fear of depth seems to develop around the time babies can crawl

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 Discussion Activity: The Visual Cliff

Discuss the visual cliff experiment as a class

You just learned that fear of depth develops around the age when babies begin to crawl
• Why is that the case?
• Would the visual cliff experiment work if the baby was paired with a stranger? Why or why
not?
• Do you think the visual cliff experiment would work in other cultures?
• What if a baby has trouble seeing?

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 Perceiving Objects and Faces

• Perceiving objects involves interpreting patterns of lines, textures, and colors

• Object perception is limited in newborns but develops rapidly in the first few months
• By 4 months, infants use several cues to discern that a stimulus is an object
• Elements that move together; similar colors/textures; aligned edges
• Newborns prefer to look at moving faces, suggesting an innate attraction to them
• By 4 weeks, infants track all moving stimuli, including faces and non-faces
• Between 6 and 12 months, a prototype of a face is fine-tuned to reflect familiar faces,
which they prefer viewing
• By 7 to 8 months, infants process faces similarly to adults, as a unique arrangement of
features

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 Integrating Sensory Information

• Infants visually recognize objects they previously only touched

• Infants soon begin to perceive the link between visual images and sounds
• Intersensory redundancy: simultaneously available multimodal sensory information
• Infants perceive best when sensory information is redundant
• Why? Brain regions specialized for a specific sense are not yet developed

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 3.5: Becoming Self-Aware

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 Key Questions 1.5

• When do children begin to realize that they exist?

• What are toddlers’ and preschoolers’ self-concepts like?
• When do preschool children begin to acquire a theory of mind?

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 Origins of Self-Concept

• Self-awareness
• Mirror test
• Child’s nose is painted red and the child is placed in front
of a mirror
• If the child reaches toward the mirror to touch the red
spot: no sense of self
• If the child reaches toward their own nose to touch the
red spot: sense of self
• Toddlers look more at photographs of themselves than at
photos of other children
• Toddlers refer to themselves by name and use personal
pronouns (“I” or “me”)
• Preschoolers describe the self in terms of possessions,
physical characteristics, preferences, and competencies

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 Think, Pair, and Share Activity: Self-Concept

Students should find a partner for this activity

You just learned that preschoolers describe the self in terms of possessions,
physical characteristics, preferences, and competencies
Now, think about how you would describe yourself now, and share your response with your
partner
• Do you describe yourself in terms of physical characteristics, preferences, and
competencies?
• What other sorts of information do you share about yourself with others?
• Why do you think that changes over time?

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 Theory of Mind

• Theory of mind: naïve understanding of the relationship between mind and behavior
• Develops in five phases (Wellman)
• Desire: By age 2, children understand that people have desires and that these desires can
cause behavior
• Different beliefs: A child begins to hold beliefs that differ from another child’s
• Different states of knowledge: A child is aware that he may possess knowledge another
child does nothing
• Belief: By age 4, children understand that behavior is often based on a person’s beliefs
about events and situations
• Emotion: Children understand that people may feel one emotion but show another

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 Peer Assessment

Find a partner and make sure that you each have something you can use to write down your
answers
• Think about the following concepts from this chapter. For each, please write down a brief
explanation of your understanding of the topic
• Apgar scores
• Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS)
• Theory of mind
• Self-concept
• The visual cliff
• After you’ve written down what you remember, compare with your partner! If you don’t agree,
you can look back through the material or ask for clarification

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 Summary

Now that the lesson has ended, you should have learned how to:
• Describe newborn assessment, reflexes, states, and temperament
• Describe physical changes in infancy and toddlerhood as well as growth of the
nervous system
• Describe the growth of locomotion and fine-motor skills during infancy
• Describe the development of senses and perception during infancy
• Describe the development of self-understanding and theory of mind

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