Infant Development: Motor Skills, Sensation, Perception, and Nutrition, Lecture notes of Psychology

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PHYSICAL DEVELOPMENT

IN INFANCY

• (^) Physical Growth and Development in Infancy
• (^) 1) Patterns of Growth
• (^) 2) Height and Weight
• (^) 3) The Brain
• (^) 4) Sleep
• (^) 5) Nutrition

• (^) Growth also follows the proximodistal pattern, the sequence in which growth starts at the center of the body and moves toward the extremities.
• (^) For example, infants control the muscles of their trunk and arms before they control their hands and fingers, and they use their whole hands before they can control several fingers.

• HEIGHT AND WEIGHT

• (^) The average North American newborn is 51 cm and 3.2 kg
• (^) Ninety-fi ve percent of full-term newborns are 45 -56 cm; 2 - 4,5 kg

• (^) Then they grow rapidly, gaining an average of 140-170 gr per week during the first month.
• (^) They have doubled their birth weight by the age of 4 months and have nearly tripled it by their first birthday
• (^) approximately doubling their birth length by their first birthday.

• (^) Growth slows considerably in the second year of life.
• (^) By 2 years of age, infants weigh approximately 12-14.5 kg, having gained a quarter to half a pound per month during the second year; now they have reached about one-fi fth of their adult weight.
• (^) At 2 years of age, the average infant is 81- cm, which is nearly half of their adult height.

• (^) Because the brain is still developing so rapidly in infancy, the infant’s head should be protected from falls or other injuries and the baby should never be shaken.
• (^) Shaken baby syndrome, which includes brain swelling and hemorrhaging, affects hundreds of babies in the United States each year (

• (^) The Brain’s Development
• (^) At birth, the newborn’s brain is about 25 percent of its adult weight. By the second birthday, the brain is about 75 percent of its adult weight. However, the brain’s areas do not mature uniformly.

THE BRAIN’S FOUR LOBES. Shown here are the locations of the brain’s four lobes: frontal, occipital, temporal, and parietal

• (^) • Frontal lobes are involved in voluntary movement, thinking, personality, and intentionality or purpose.
• (^) • Occipital lobes function in vision.
• (^) • Temporal lobes have an active role in hearing, language processing, and memory.
• (^) • Parietal lobes play important roles in registering spatial location, attention, and motor control.

• (^) Neurons have 3 functions
• (^) 1) Processing of messages coming from the brain with sensory organs / computerization
• (^) 2) transporting these translocations to other neurons
• (^) 3) storage of this information

• (^) It is the responsibility of the synapses located at the tip of the neurons that the stimuli coming to the nervous system are processed and transformed into wisdom.
• (^) Synapses decide whether signal transmission between neurons will occur

• (^) The incoming stimulus is converted into a chemical called neurotransmitter in the synaptic region when the neuron is in electrical current
• (^) The stimuli are transferred to other neurons by means of these carrier chemicals (neurotransmitter).