Chapter Three

Tools for Exploring the World: Physical,

Perceptual, and Motor Development

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 3.1 The Newborn: Learning
Objectives

• 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?
Do they change as children grow?

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 The Newborn’s Reflexes

• Reflexes: the newborn is born with unlearned

responses triggered by specific stimuli.
– 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

• Five Apgar scores

1. Breathing
2. Heartbeat
3. Muscle tone
4. Reflexes
5. Skin tone
• Each scored from 0 to 2, 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
• Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale (NBAS)
– 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 to 12 hours at night
• REM sleep
– 50% of newborn sleep
– 25% by 12 months

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 Co-sleeping (1 of 2)

• 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.

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 Co-sleeping (2 of 2)

• By the toddler and preschool years, sleep

routines are well established.
• Some preschoolers will have difficulty sleeping.
– Usually the result of an inconsistent bedtime routine.
– Establish a nighttime routine that helps children “wind
down” from busy activities.
– Research does not support the idea that this makes
children less self-reliant.

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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 2 to 9)
• 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)

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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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 Stability of Temperament

• 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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 3.2 Physical Development:
Learning Objectives
• How do height and weight change from birth to
two years of age?
• What nutrients do young children need? How
are they 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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 Malnutrition

• Worldwide, about one in four children under age

5 are malnourished (UNICEF, 2006).
• Malnourished children tend to be small for their
age.
• 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.

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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 surface of the brain
• 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 may
have 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

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 Growth of a Specialized Brain:
Brain-Mapping Methods
• 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 (1 of 2)
• 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.

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 Five General Principles of Brain
Specialization (2 of 2)
• Environmental stimulation is important in 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 not linked to
specific points in development.
– variation across individuals and cultures

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 3.3 Early Motor Skills: Learning
Objectives
• 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.
• 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 (1 of 2)

• Walking skills must be learned separately and

then integrated with others skill.
• 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.

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 Coordinating Skills (2 of 2)

• 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 South American
countries, can delay motor development.

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 Fine Motor Skills

• Fine motor skills are associated with 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.

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 Handedness

• The preference for one hand over the other

becomes stronger and more consistent during
the toddler and preschool years.
• Handedness is influenced by both heredity and
environment (where right-handedness is
favored).
• Many cultures have viewed left-handedness
negatively.

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 3.4 Perception: Learning
Objectives
• 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
 Pain cry – a sudden, high-pitched wail – and they are not
easily soothed

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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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 Coming to Know the World:
Perceiving Objects
• 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 and textures
– Aligned edges

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 Perceiving Faces

• Newborns prefer to look at moving faces,

suggesting an innate attraction to them.
• By 4 weeks, infants track all moving stimuli,
including faces and nonfaces.
• Between 6 to 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:
Learning Objectives
• 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 (1 of 2)

• Self-awareness
– Mirror test
 Child’s nose is painted red and 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

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 Origins of Self-Concept (2 of 2)

– 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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 Theory of Mind (1 of 2)

• 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.

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 Theory of Mind (2 of 2)

– Different states of knowledge: A child is aware that

he may possess knowledge another child does not.
– 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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