H C   1   -   2 6   A P R I L   2 0 2 3

Introduction to the course

Topics of this course

• Prenatal development: how does a fertilized egg develop in a baby?
• Brain development
• Genetics: nature vs. nurture debate
• Perceptual development
• Motor development: how do babies learn to walk etc.
• Cognitive development: how/when do babies develop thinking/learning
• Learning
• Intelligence and academic achievement: what is intelligence and how can you achieve it
• Language development

How to give a good oral presentation

We want the attention of the audience so we focus on:

• What you say » what makes a good story? The Three Act structure: setup, confrontation and resolution
  • Act 1: exposition (introducing the topic and discussing the relevance of the topic » discuss the problem statement and define the research question)
  • Act 2: rising action (discuss your methods and analysis, discuss your results)
  • Act 3: falling action (discuss what the results mean)
• How do you say it » who is your audience?
  
  • Presenting is adapting to the audience and situation.
  • Presenting is attention management » how do you keep the attention of the audience on you?
    
    • Tempo
    • Intonation (variety in intonation)
    • Emphasis (intonation or gestures)
    • Pauses
    • Articulation
    • Words (adapting your words to your audience) » always use the easiest words)
    • Facial expression (show enthusiasm)
    • Posture
    • Gestures
    • Movement
    • Clothes (professional)
    • Eye contact (most important thing you can do with your body) » if you don’t make eye contact you lose attention of your audience
• Visual aids
  
  • Don’t use too much text on your slides » only one message per slide
  • Use attention snatchers:
    
    • Movement (one of the most important attention snatchers) » don’t use to much movement or it will  be distracting
    • Signal colors
    • High contrast

H C   3   -   M E I   2 0 2 3  

Brain development

The brain is one of the most complex systems in our body.

What the brain is made of

• 100 billion neurons
• Neurons consist of:
  
  • Cell body (soma): contains the nucleus (in which all genetic materials are stored) and most cell process take place in the cell body
  • Dendrites: the receiving end of the neuron
  • Axon: it’s much longer than the dendrites and is the sending part of the neuron (it sends signals from one neuron to another)
  • Myeline sheet: cover of the axons. Two important functions:
    
    • to keep the neuron healthy
    • to speed op signal transduction along the axon
  • axon terminals: where the signal ends up and is transmitted to other cells

How do neurons communicate

• Resting potential: when a neuron is not sending any signals, it has a negative potential of 70 millivolts (-70 mV). The negative charge is caused by the distribution of ions (particles with a certain charge, positive or negative) outside and inside the neuron.
  • During the resting state, there are a lot of positive charged sodium ions outside the neuron, while inside the neuron, there are relatively much proteins (that have a negative charge) and some positive charged sodium ions and some positive charged potassium ions.
  • Because there are more positive charged ions outside the neuron, the result is that the neuron has a negative charge of about 70 millivolts
• In the cell-membrane (walls of the neuron) are a lot of channels through which ions can go in- and outside the neuron » causes the polarity of the neuron to change
• When the neuron is at rest, the distribution of ions in- and outside is kept relatively stable by the sodium-potassium-pump (consists of special ion channels that always transport three positive sodium ions out of the neuron for every two positive potassium ions that are transported into the neuron)
• If the amount of positive ions increases so much that the polarity is decreased to threshold value of -55 mV, special voltage gated ion channels are opened through which a lot of positive ions can rush into the neuron. This causes the polarity of the neuron to switch to a positive polarity of 40 mV (called action potential). The spike in positive charge is the signal in the neuron.
• As the action potential is reached, immediately another channel of voltage gated ions are opened, causing a lot of

H C   5   -   M E I   2 0 2 3

Perceptual development

Difference sensation and perception

• Sensation: processing of basic information from the external world via receptors in the sense organs and brain  »  five different senses: sight, hearing, taste, touch and smell
• Perception: processing of organizing and interpreting sensory information about the objects, events and spatial layout of the world around us

Visual development

Multiple steps to perception:

• Processing basic information (sensation)
  • Refers to all the properties of a stimulus (e.g. color, orientation, contrast, spatial frequency)
  • The properties are processed in your brain in the visual cortex
  • The properties enter the eye, after which the information is send to the Lateral Geniculate Nucleus (LGN) and then processed to V1 (striate cortex) in the visual cortex
  • Preferential looking technique: the check the eyesight of an infant (newborn) » if an infant looks longer at one picture this means two things: The infant can discriminate between the two things and the infant prefers the picture it looks longer at
    
    • Measures visual acuity (how sharp someone can see) » used for testing spatial frequency and contrast
    • Relation spatial frequency and contrast: if the spatial frequency increases, it’s more difficult to see the contrast and if the contrast becomes very low, we also cannot see a pattern anymore
• Object segregation » the ability of seeing/identifying different objects.
  
  • Three relevant processes:
    
    • Border detection: we need to see where an object ends and another object/the background begins
    • Integration/grouping: we need to know which elements belong to one object
    • Figure-ground segregation: we need to segregate the object from its background
  • Gestalt theory: the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Our mind organizes and interpret visual input according to certain grouping principles
    
    • Proximity: objects close to each other are grouped together
    • Similarity: elements that are similar are grouped together regardless of their proximity
    • Figure ground: distinguish between the background and the foreground
    • Continuity: we tend to follow the smoothest path when following a line
    • Closure: we tend to fill in the gaps
    • Connectedness: objects that are connected are seen as a whole, are grouped together
  • The grouping principles determine whether we detect an object or not
  • Saccadic eye movement: ‘jumpy’ eye movements, no straight line
  • Smooth tracking: smooth eye movement, can only when following an object (emerge around 7/8 weeks)

H C   7   -   J U N I   2 0 2 3

Cognitive development

Major themes regarding to cognitive development

• Nature vs. nurture
• The role of the child
• Continuity vs. discontinuity
• Mechanisms of change
• The sociocultural context
• Individual differences

Major theories of cognitive development

• Piaget
• Information processing
• Core-knowledge
• Socio-cultural
• Dynamic systems

Jean Piaget

• Developed his theory by observing his own children
• His view of children’s nature:
  
  • Children are mentally active from birth (not before)
  • Their mental and physical activity both contribute to their development
• Constructivist approach to cognitive development » because the child is very active, these experiences kind of construct the knowledge and cognitive development (children construct knowledge for themselves in response to their experiences)
• The constructive processes are:
  
  • Generating hypotheses (because children are curious)
  • Performing experiments (‘see what happens’)
  • Drawing conclusions from their observations (they learn about their environment)
• Central developmental issues
  
  • Nature and nurture interact together to produce cognitive development
  • There are stages each child ‘walks through’ (discontinuous), but within each stage takes a continuous development place
  • Main sources of continuity are:
    
    • Assimilation: the process by which a child incorporates incoming information into concepts they already know (bijv. dat een kind ergens een persoon met donkere huidskleur ziet en denkt dat dat zwarte piet is)
    • Accommodation: the process by which children improve their current understanding based on new experiences
    • Equilibration: the process by which children balance assimilation and accommodation to create a stable understanding
  • Four distinct stages of discontinuous cognitive development (each of these stages is characterized by certain capabilities and limitations):
    
    • Sensorimotor stage: birth – age 2
      • Sensory and motor abilities are used to explore the world
      • Child learns about objects and people
      • Child learns about rudimentary forms of concepts like time, space and causality
      • Experience is largely in here and now
      • Birth to 1 month: reflexes (e.g. sucking, grasping)
      • Beyond first months: integrating reflexes (e.g. grasping objects, then bringing it to mouth to suck on them)
      • Around 8 months: object permanence (if the object is no longer in the immediate sight of the child, the child knows that the object was there) » mental representation beyond here and now » A-not-B-error (when object is hided in another place, the child can’t find it anymore)
      • Beyond first

H C   9   -   J U N I   2 0 2 3

Intelligence & academic achievement

What is intelligence?

• Does it even exist or is it something that we invented?
• Related to three abilities:
  
  • Acquire knowledge
  • Think and reason effectively
  • Deal adaptively with the environment
• Different types of intelligence

What was the first attempt?

To conceptualize intelligence

• Francis Galton
  • First to use a questionnaire and survey to collect data on human behavior
  • Intelligence as a heritable trait
  • Conceptualization: energy and sensitivity to stimuli
  • Intelligence has something to do with the size of the skull » he measured skulls but couldn’t find any differences » we now know that not the size of the skull is related to intelligence, but the size of the brain
• Alfred Binet
  
  • Asked to develop an easy-to-administer objective test of intelligence for children (Binet-Simon test)
  • For the test he assumed that mental abilities develop with age » with this he could make a distinction between the chronological age and the mental age

How do we measure intelligence –

• Binet-Simon intelligent scales
  • Tasks of reasoning and problem solving
    • Verbal reasoning (e.g. defining certain objects)
    • Quantitative reasoning (e.g. counting backwards)
    • Abstract reasoning » involves defining abstract terms and problem questions
    • Short-term memory
  • Main limitations: relies heavily on verbal skills (that’s why it isn’t used often nowadays)
• Wechsler
  
  • It relies less on verbal skills. It measures both verbal IQ and performance IQ
  • Based on Carroll’s three striatum theory
  • Version for adults (called WAIS)
  • Version for children 6-18 (called WISC)
  • version for children 2 years and up (called WIPPSI)

Intelligence quotient

• IQ = ratio of mental age to chronological age, multiplied by 100
• The problem: it doesn’t work anymore at a certain age (it’s likely that for example a 25 year old can’t do a lot more tasks than a 23 y/o)
• Now based on standardization (with the median)
• The Flynn effect: gain in mean IQ for world regions (possible through increasing accessibility for schools, longer learning, more experience with testing and (maybe) improving in nutrition)

What is intelligence?

• Factor analysis: statistical method to identify clusters of variables that correlate highly with each other » if you score high on one task you will also score high on