Читать книгу Infants and Children in Context - Tara L. Kuther - Страница 254

 4.1 Discuss growth and influences and threats to growth during infancy and toddlerhood.Growth proceeds from the head downward (cephalocaudal) and from the center of the body outward (proximodistal). Breastfeeding is associated with many benefits for mothers and infants. Malnourishment is associated with growth stunting and impaired learning, concentration, and language skills throughout childhood and adolescence. Severely malnourished children may suffer from diseases such as marasmus and kwashiorkor or, more common in the United States, growth faltering. Other threats to infants’ health include SIDS and underimmunization.

 4.2 Summarize brain development during infancy and toddlerhood.The brain develops through several processes: neurogenesis (the creation of neurons), synaptogenesis (the creation of synapses), pruning (reducing unused neural connections), and myelination (coating the axons with myelin to increase the speed of transmission). Experience shapes the brain structure through pruning. Sleep also plays a role in brain development. Although infancy is a particularly important time for the formation and strengthening of synapses, experience shapes the brain structure at all ages of life.

 4.3 Compare infants’ early learning capacities for habituation, classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and imitation.Innate learning capacities permit young infants to quickly adapt to the world. Habituation is a type of innate learning in which repeated exposure to a stimulus results in the gradual decline in the intensity, frequency, or duration of a response. In classical conditioning, an association is formed between a neutral stimulus and one that triggers an innate reaction. Infants also learn based on the consequences of their behaviors, whether they are followed by reinforcement or punishment, known as operant conditioning. Neonates mimic simple facial and finger expressions but do so without control. The regulatory mechanisms to inhibit imitative responding develop during infancy.

 4.4 Describe infants’ developing sensory abilities.Visual acuity, pattern perception, visual tracking, and color vision improve over the first few months of life. Neonates are sensitive to depth cues and young infants can distinguish depth, but crawling stimulates the perception of depth and the association of fear with sharp drops. Newborns can perceive and discriminate nearly all sounds in human languages, but from birth, they prefer to hear their native language. Intermodal perception is evident at birth as infants can combine information from more than one sensory system.

 4.5 Analyze the roles of maturation and contextual factors in infant and toddler motor development.Infants are born with reflexes, each with its own developmental course. Gross and fine motor skills develop systematically and build on each other, with each new skill preparing the infant to tackle the next. Much of motor development is influenced by maturation, but infants benefit from opportunities to practice motor skills. Different cultures provide infants with different experiences and opportunities for practice, contributing to cross-cultural differences in motor development. Viewing motor development as dynamic systems of action produced by an infant’s abilities, goal-directed behavior, and environmental supports and opportunities accounts for the individual differences that we see in motor development.