Increasing age, by itself, contributes nothing to development. The maturation and changes resulting from experience that intervene between different ages and stages of childhood are important. Maturation aspects are aspects of development that are largely under genetic control and hence largely uninfluenced by environmental factors.

Folk theories of development are ideas held about development that is

In precocial species, the young are physically mobile and able from the moment of birth and in altricial species the young are helpless. Nativism is the view that many skills or abilities are native or hard-wired into the brain at birth. Empiricism is the view that humans are a blank slate at birth. Cognition is mental activity.

Visual acuity is the ability to make fine discriminations between the elements in the visual array. Infants’ vision is poorer than that of an adult. Visual accommodation is the ability to focus on objects irrespective of their distance from the eye. Infants are not good at this either. There are several ways to test infants their vision:

Piaget proposed that the basic unit of understanding was a scheme, which is a mental representation of actions and knowledge. Infants start out with three basic schemes, sucking, looking and grasping. Operations are internal mental representations. Mental representations not based on physical activity.

Children modify their schemes using two processes: organisation and adaptation. Organisation is organising several

Intuitive psychology refers to the awareness some people have regarding others’ motives and beliefs. The unexpected transfer test is the classic false-belief test. The false belief test helps us differentiate between those who do and those who do not understand that minds hold beliefs.

Children below the age of 7 are egocentric, according to Piaget. A

Moral dilemmas are situations in which people must choose and justify a course of action or reasoning with respect to a moral issue. Piaget concluded that younger children’s moral judgement was governed by unilateral respect for adults and adults’ rules, with little understanding of reciprocity or the intentions of others. Kohlberg defined five stages of moral development:

Pedagogy refers to any aspect of theory or practice related to teaching. In the 1960s, there was a shift toward a child-centred education. Piaget emphasised the role of the teacher for providing the best physical environment for children to overcome their egocentrism and start to understand conservation. Discovery learning is encouraging children to learn by discovering information for

Bullying is the term used to define an individual’s repeated exposure to negative actions by one or more other people. There is a lot of social pressure in the classroom. A key factor is the process of social comparison, where the child compares his performance with his classmates. This comparison is mostly upward and can raise the child’s

The most notable cognitive declines as a result of aging are: difficulty paying attention to relevant information and ignoring irrelevant information, word-finding difficulties, problems remembering the context in which information was learned.

Aging affects a range of cognitive functions, but there is one core deficit, according to domain-general theories of aging. There are three possible core deficits:

Until recently, it was thought that drug-abusers keep using drugs because they like the benefits more than the disadvantages, but most drug-abusers are well aware of the disadvantages of abusing drugs. The problem is that most drug-abusers cannot resist the automatically triggered impulses. If there is little room for conscious control in a situation, the action tendency (using