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Environmental factors that influence child development
Environmental factors that influence child development
Environmental factors that influence child development
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The acquaintance with the surrounding environment is not an easy task for infants. The onset of locomotion not only expands the opportunities for exploration, but brings about a number of novel and ambiguous situations. In order to predict an outcome of a certain action, infants use emotional cues offered by people around them, which represents the process of social referencing. Previous research suggests that the primary cue for social referencing is visual information – facial expressions of excited/allowing or scared/disapproving emotions. Vaish and Striano (2004) in their study examined the effects of the auditory versus visual cues on 12-month-olds behavior in possible threatening situation - visual cliff crossing – inclined table with
The purpose of this assignment is to answer the three posed questions in regards to my Virtual Child, who I will refer to as Kieran throughout my assignment. I will be describing changes in his exploratory and problem solving behaviors as well as analyzing his temperament. I will also summarize his developmental assessment at nineteen months old that may differ from my perception of what was assessed through his developmental examiner. Kieran was at the age of eight months when I first used the object permanence test developed by Jean Piaget, in the aspect of sensorimotor development in both stage 3 and 4 of the Six Substages of Sensorimotor Development (Table 6-2, pg 154). At stage 3, infants begin to show greater interest in their world with objects becoming incorporated into what is called the secondary circular reaction where they start to learn about the actions associated with objects.
Vyt, A. (2001). Processes of visual self-recognition in infants: Experimental induction of 'mirror' experiences via video self-image presentation. Infant And Child Development, 10(4), 173-187. doi:10.1002/icd.277
... Rosnay, Marc, Joanna Pearson, Caroline Bergeron, Elizabeth Schofield, Melanie Royal-Lawson, and Peter J. Cooper. "Intergenerational Transmission of Social Anxiety: The Role of Social Referencing Processes in Infancy." Child Development. By Lynne Murray. Vol. 79. N.p.: Wiley, n.d. 1049-064. JSTOR. Web. 1 Mar. 2014.
The Behavioral Assessment System for Children, Second Edition was written by Cecil R. Reynolds and Randy W. Kamphaus. The BASC-2 was published in 2004 by Pearson. The manual is currently priced at $102 and can be purchased online. The BASC-2 is qualified under level B. This means that it may be purchased by an individual with a master’s degree in psychology, education, occupational therapy, social work, or any field closely related to assessment and formal training it the ethical administration, scoring, and interpretation. AN individual who has certification in a professional organization that requires training and experience in the area of assessment. An individual who has a degree or license to practice in the healthcare field. Lastly an individual with formal, supervised training specific to assessing children.
Research in this field found preferential differences in an adult when their eye gaze is directed towards an object, as opposed to faces with eye gaze averted from an object, in neonates (Farroni, Csibra, Simion, & Johnson, 2002). Reid and Striano (2005) examined 4-month-old infants looking at adult faces with their eye gaze directed towards an object and averted away from an object. It was found that infants looked substantially shorter at the object that was cued by the eye gaze. They concluded that the cued object was familiar compared with the uncued object which was seen as novel and therefore attracted more attention. Reid, Striano, Kaufman, and Johnson (2004) expanded upon previous research and investigated neural activity using event related potentials to measure an infants’ reaction to direct and averted eye gaze. A positive slow wave measure was adopted and it was found that the amplitude was larger for the averted eye gaze condition compared against the direct eye gaze condition. This increase indicated that the averted eye gaze was seen as novel compared to the direct eye gaze, substantiating what had been found in previous research.
This study was conducted by showing the infants videos that depicted discriminable individuals doing repetitive tasks, such as brushing their teeth (Bahrick & Newell, 2008). The faces of the individuals doing these tasks were oriented in three different ways: left, right, and center. The infants were exposed to the same video action to help them get familiar with the action. Once familiarization was complete, the infants were exposed to the familiar stimulus and a novel stimulus of the same action (Bahrick & Newell, 2008). The results for this experiment showed that the infants who had a longer period of time being familiarized with a video were able to discriminate between faces when shown with an action than those with a shorter familiarization time period (Bahrick & Newell, 2008). These findings can help conclude that infants have poor facial recognition when only presented with faces, but the recognition can be improved when the faces are associated with a certain, familiar action (Bahrick & Newell, 2008). Lastly, further research has been conducted that relates to the specificity of species with facial recognition in
Baillargeon, R. (1994). How do infants learn about the physical world? Current Directions in Psychological Science, 3, 133-140.
1. Emotions in early childhood have been studied time by time again, to come to a conscience method on how emotions are developed from the start. The earliest emotions that are expressed in the first six months of an infant’s life are things like surprise, interest, joy, anger, sadness, fear, and disgust with a plethora of other emotions began to spawn. Emotions have proven to be important roles in communication with others and behavioral organization. Infants use these aspects to determine interactions weather emotions would be positive or negative.
According to Piaget children go through 4 stages of cognitive development. The stages are; Sensorimotor stage (0-2 years), Preoperational thought (2-7 years), Concrete operations (7-11 years), Formal operations (11years and above). During the sensorimotor stage infants learn by using their senses, there is no abstract thinking. Object permanence which is the understanding that objects continue to exist even when they cannot be observed and separation anxiety develop in this stage. Stranger anxiety develops at around 8 months which is an infant’s fear of strangers. Infants under two believe other people see the world like they do, this is called egocentrism, being unable to see that the environment looks different to someone else. Temperament
For humans, our ability to understand other people’s actions, and the intentions behind those actions, are enabled by our mirror neuron system (Cattaneo & Rizzolatti, 2009). Most crucial throughout infancy and toddler years, the mirror neuron system (MNS) allows for simple tasks such as imitation, which later becomes vital to the development of our social cognitive skills (Iacoboni & Dapretto, 2006). The MNS is located in the F5 sector of our ventral premotor cortex and is known to discharge upon sensation of movement, however not firing to simple body displacements. Cattaneo and Rizzolatti explain there are two sets of mirror neurons, parietofrontal mirror neurons and premotor mirror neurons (2009). The entire system works together, first with the parietofrontal mirror neurons learning of the action that is taking place, followed by the premotor neurons sending a signal when they understand the reason behind that particular action (Cattaneo & Rizzolatti, 2009). The MNS system is not only activated during observation, but also while listening to sounds and emotion (Iacoboni & Dapretto, 2006; Dapretto el al., 2005...
Because infants are not physically and cognitively able to linguistically communicate, studies conducted in attempt to better understand their perception and understanding of the world are most often conducted in way that measures visible external behavior that does not rely on linguistic communication. In these types of experimental studies, there is a certain amount of inferences that are made in interpreting the infants’ behaviors. Thus, there has been some disagreement and speculation among researchers as to the exact degree of infants’ perceptual abilities.
Imagine this, a mother lets her child pick a toy from the toy aisle. He or she gazes at the many types of toys that stand in front of him or her. So many choices, but only one can be bought. Many characteristics of the toys are taken under consideration in the decision process. The Sharp crisp edges of the box, the assortment of colors, the font of the toy’s name on the box, and even the position of the toy in the aisle helps the child decide on which toy is best. However, not all decisions are made by just looking at how good the toy looks. Children are good for observing their surroundings and things that are going on in the world. In the textbook “The Science of Psychology” by Laura A. King, one of the chapters described the stages of human
In the process of human infants’ development, infants start to learn how to communicate with the others at the surprising early age, for example: Newborns can follow objects to make saccades to peripheral targets (Farroni et al., 2004);Infants’ responding eye gaze behaviour increase constantly since two months old (Scaife & Bruner, 1975); Cooper and Aslin pointed out that this preference showed up as early as the infants were one month old in 1990. Infants not only can respond to eye contact, vocal cues also are used for gaining more reference information during a communication, particularly when the speech is conducted forward to the infants. It had been reported in many studies that infants show more preference to infant-directed communication
a child won’t share his or her toys because they are all me, me, me if
Thinking and reasoning are the species-specific feature which is unique to human being. Infants are equipped with a capacity to think, reason, and learn about the world and about themselves. Understanding the milestones of cognitive processing is important topic for developmental psychologists because it plays a critical role in human nature such as survival. From birth, infants are response to stimuli especially to face. Even though the baby’s eye sight is not that much developed, it is good enough for communicating with their parents. Natures have prepared the human from birth to pay attention to the face as if saying look carefully what you are seeing now will be crucial for your survival.