Throughout the course of an Infant’s early stages of development there are several factors that can affect the child such as environmental factors which can damage the fetus and interfere with a healthy development of a baby. Infancy development is the early stage in which a baby undergoes its first physical and mental development stages. In this paper you will find how Cognitive and social aspects of development are shaped and molded at an early age, as well as physical changes, language, speech, perception, and motor skills.
The reader will understand how the motor, sensory and perceptual skills of Infants are developed as they are exposed to a wide range of experiences, with large amounts of opportunity to explore and understand the surroundings all around them. What is Cognitive development? Cognitive development is the construction of thought processes, including remembering, problem solving, and decision-making. A very well know psychologist known as Jean Pigged, states that children progress through a series of four key stages of cognitive development.
Each stage Is marked by shifts In how kids understand the world. Pigged believed that children are like “little scientists” and that they actively try to explore and make sense of the world around them. How do physical developments advance on an infant? Well during the early stages of physical development newborns have very limited physical skills even though their senses work, but they advance over time and prepare themselves for various situations. The brain and nervous system of an Infant develops rapidly during the first 2 years an example of this Is throughout the synaptic development.
Synaptic development results from growth of both dendrites and axons. During Psychogenesis which is the formation of synapses between neurons in the nervous system it normally occurs rapidly in the cortex during the first few years after birth, quadrupling the overall weight of the brain by age 4 (Johnson,2011) this helps show how these growth spurts have many connections between neurons and primarily the development of the brain. What Is Motor skill development? There are two different forms of Motor skill development which are Fine and gross skills.
Fine Motor skills can generally refer to movements involving smaller muscles, like those in hands, wrists and fingers and Gross motor kills generally refer to movements involving larger muscles, like those in the arms, legs, feet or the entire body. Today motor development provides an opportunity for infants to navigate their environments, which advances cognitive, social, and perceptual development. According to the text girls are ahead of boys In some aspects of physical maturity. For example, the separate bones of the wrist appear earlier in girls than in boys (Tanner, 1990).
This helps shows that girls have an advantage in the development of fine motor skills while boys advance faster in Gross motor skills. Another good example example of motor skill practice is in certain study were very young babies were given more practice sitting were able to sit upright longer than those without such practice (Azalea, Azalea, Cohen, & Azalea, 1993). This sit upright while others will still be taking a longer time to get used to learning this ability. What can be taught about language development? Language development is process starting early in human life.
Infants start without language while babies can discriminate speech sounds and engage in babbling. During language development child’s understanding and production are guided by an innate language processor called LAD, it contains basic grammatical structure of all human language. An influential natives, Dan Slob’s (AAA, Bibb), proposes that babies are preprogrammed to pay attention to the beginnings and endings of strings of sounds and to stressed sounds a hypothesis supported by research (e. G. , Morgan, 1994) these principles can help the reader understand some features of a child’s early grammar. What is perception?
Perception is the ability to see, hear, or become aware of something through the senses. According to our text one of the most studied perceptual skills is depth perception. Depth perception is when in infant needs to be able to Judge depth in order to perform all kinds of simple task such crawling off the edge of a couch. A perfect study to help explain this is an experiment that was used by Eleanor Gibson and Railcar Walk (1960) they used a “visual cliff’ apparatus. It consisted of a large glass table with a sort of runway in the middle and one side is a checkerboard pattern following the glass and the side the “cliff’.
The babies could judge depth through this experiment. The aforementioned shows some of the early stages of development and factors that play a role in a child’s development. Cognitive and social aspects of development of infants were discussed and how physical changes, language, speech, perception, and motor skills develop as an infant grows up. The level of exposure to these various factors will determine how successful they develop in years to come. In the end all infants develop at their own rate depending in their surroundings which are based solely on child’s caregiver to provide these essential skills within their environment.
