Theories of Human Functional Brain Development
The goal of the maturational perspective
What is to relate the anatomical maturation of specific regions of the brain to newly emerging sensory, motor, and cognitive functions?
What does the postnatal neuroanatomical development predict?
What is the more delayed the general time course of development, the larger the relative volume of the later developing structures
What are the two domains listed as being very important to the developing infant in their visual processing?
What is inanimate (non-social) objects & animate (social) objects?
Infants fail object retrieval tasks up to what age?
What is 9 months?
At what age do infants go through a “sticky fixation” during which they have difficulty in shifting their gaze from one stimulus to another?
What is at 1 month? (Some have attributed this to the onset of competition between cortical and subcortical visuomotor pathways.)
The benefit of the delayed time course of human brain development
What is it creates a prolonged time frame that permits the environment to make an impact on the tuning and shaping of the brain?
What kind of information do infants rely on more in comparison to adults?
What is spatial and temporal information (less on Object-specific feature information which adults rely on)?
What was visual habituation used to show in this study?
What is that infants can perceive a continuous rod moving behind an occluder, instead of perceiving it as two rods.
The interactive specialization approach
What is it is a viewpoint that assumes that postnatal functional brain development, at least within the cerebral cortex, involves a process of organization inter-regional interactions?
What percentage of the maximum density is reached between 4-12 months?
What is about 150% of the adult level?
By what age are infants most likely able to perceive and process objects in the way that adults do?
What is the second year of postnatal life?
At what age are infants successful at tasks used in visual habituation techniques?
What is 4 months?
The skill-learning hypothesis
What is the skill-learning hypothesis is that the regions active in infants during the onset of new perceptual or behavioral abilities are the same as those involved in skill acquisition in adults. This hypothesis predicts that some of the changes in the neural basis of behavior during infancy will mirror those observed during more complex skill acquisition in adults?
By what age do the brain structures have the overall appearance of those found in an adult brain?
What is 2 years old?
The “middle ground” explanation of why babies process social information
What is infants are born with biases to attend to and process certain stimuli in different ways (including the processing of non-social objects) and these processing biases are what shape subsequent learning and plasticity of the infant’s brain?
Infants as young as _______ appear surprised when viewing the impossible event.
What is 4 months?
Perceptual development
Which is the development of the five senses?
The most rapid changes in the brain occur during what time frame?
What is the first 2 years?
What abilities are associated with infants being able to share joint attention with adults and at what ages are they able to display these abilities?
What is at 3 months (maybe earlier) infants are able to orient more rapidly to visual targets in their periphery when cued by a change in the direction of eye gaze of a centrally presented face (or object that interacts with them similarly) & at 12 months and up, infants seem more capable of interpreting adults’ behavior in terms of their goals or intentions?
What does an infant’s surprise at the impossible event show?
What is they appreciate that objects are solid and (usually) non-compressible?