● How Children are influenced in nature and nurture:

○ Plato: Innate Knowledge

○ Locke: Child as a tabula rasa - discipline before freedom
○ Aristotle: Knowledge comes from experience
○ Rousseau: Children learn from their own spontaneous interaction
● Developmental Psychology:
○ Tries to describe, explain and predict the changes over time of the mind of the
individual by the means of scientific methods.

● Brain Development:
○ Structural Imaging:
○ Functional Imaging:
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● Plasticity
○ Experience-expectant plasticity:
■ The process through which the brain is shaped in part as a result of
experiences that every human who inhabits any reasonable normal
environment will have
○ Experience-dependent plasticity:
■ The process through which the brain is shaped by an individual’s specific,
idiosyncratic experience.
● The brain and its development are strongly influenced by genes but can also be affected
by experiences.

Perceptual and motor development:

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Intelligence:
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● Language Aquisition - in the uterus

○ Babies in the uterus when read a speech over and over were able to remember it
after birth - or at least recognize the melody/tonage
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○ Babies like infant directed speech over adult directed speech

■ Aka speech with high tonal volatility
● Cognitive Development
○ Jean Piaget (1896-1980)
■ Knowledge is a result of a new construction based on an interaction with
the world. A child needs to construct everything, even those things that
appear trivial to adults. Knowledge is not pre-formed.
■ Children are mentall active from birth.
■ “The child as a scientist”
● Information Processing theories:
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○ Executive Functions:
■ Control of the cognitive activities
■ Subserved by prefrontal cortex.
■ Inhibiting tempting action that can cause difficulties
● Picking up food and can’t stop eating
■ Enhancing working memory through use of strategies such as repeating a
phone number
■ Being cognitively flexible
● People who speak multiple languages are good at this
● Taking another person’s perspective in an argument
● Development of Problem Solving
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Dynamic-Systems Theories

Social Expression
Theory of Mind

● False belief can signify if a child has theory of mind or not

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● Pro Social Behavior

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Peer Relations:
Sociometry and Sociometric Status:
● Impact on the age of emergence:
○ Historical, Cultural, SAS, and Individual difference