PSY 100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 20: Frontal Lobe, Corpus Callosum, Prefrontal Cortex

• School: Tunxis Community College
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSY 100
• Professor: Bourne

Document Summary

At birth, the hemispheres have already started to specialize: newborns show greater activity in the left hemisphere than the right when they are making or listening to speech sounds. Some areas of the brain, such as the primary motor areas, develop earlier than others such as the primary sensory areas (movement before sensation) The frontal lobes are immature in newborns: as neurons in the frontal lobes become myelinated and interconnected during the first year of life, infants develop the ability to regulate their physiological states. Cognitive skills that require deliberate thinking do not emerge until later in the first year. The brain and other parts of the nervous system continue developing through childhood and adolescence; The brain and head grow more rapidly than any other part of the body (cephalocaudal growth pattern) Some of the brain"s increase in size is due to myelination and some is due to an increase in the number and size of dendrites (dendritic spreading)