PSYC 3800 Chapter Notes - Chapter 2: Heritage Language, Catastrophe Theory, The Sequence

• School: University of Guelph
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 3800
• Professor: Jen Lasenby- Lessard

Document Summary

Physical development: how your body structures changes over time. Social and emotional development: changes over time about how you relate to others, as well as to an individual"s personality and emotional understanding. Cognitive development: changes in thinking, whereby mental processes become more complex and sophisticated. Coactions: joint actions of nature and nurture: continuity vs. discontinuity. Do we learn continuously or in leaps: critical periods/earlier vs. later experiences. Sensitive periods: times when a person is ready for or responsive to certain experiences (set periods are known as critical periods). General principles of development: people develop at different rates, development is relatively orderly certain abilities develop before others, development takes place gradually. Thalamus- ability to learn new information (particularly verbal) The reticular formation- attention and arousal (includes blocking out things and sending others to high brain centers for processing. Corpus callosum- moves info to one side of the brain to another. At birth: 100-200 billion neurons / 2500 synapses per neuron.