Developmental Psychology

Achieve Test Prep: Developmental Psychology

reaction times. The less a connection is used, the weaker it becomes. Weak neural connections can lead to a lack of coordination and slower reflex times. Increased coordination leads to an increase in control of gross motor skills. Gross motor skills are engaged during certain activities, such as running, jumping, and other large body movements. Fine motor skills take longer to improve as young children (generally speaking) have not developed the muscular control, the patience, or the judgment necessary to utilize these skills. Children in the years after infancy are active and spend much of their time exploring their surrounding environment. The number one cause of mortality of young children is accidental death related to drowning, choking, and poisoning. There are different risk factors that increase the risk for accidental death, suxh as gender, socioeconomic status (SES), and parental involvement. Children in lower SES were found to be three times more likely to die from an accidental death than their counterparts in other SES categories. Cognitive Development: Children of preschool age tend to be egocentric , meaning that their view of the world is from their own perspective and no one else’s. Despite being egocentric, preschoolers are not necessarily selfish or self-centered. By the end of early childhood, children begin to understand how others feel and may begin to exhibit empathy. Children may begin to exhibit empathy before this stage, which is dependent on the parental involvement and surrounding environments. A child’s intellectual and language skills develop in conjunction with increased memory capabilities. A child’s memory during this stage is not mature enough to handle complex memories or the retrieval of such memories. Children rely on scripts , or visual outlines, of common occurrences in their lives. Scripts help children to remember the verbal and speech memories which coincide with familiar visual events. Generally speaking, children do not remember events well before the age of three or four years. Before this age, children have difficulty encoding and retrieving information, which may contribute to the inability to recall memories. Based on the stages outlined by Jean Piaget, a child in this age range is in the preoperational stage. The preoperational stage lasts until approximately age six. During this stage, a child may not be able to perform complex mental operations, but their language usage improves. Preoperational implies that a child is moving towards performing more complex ‘operations.’ The significant linguistic milestone of the preoperational stage is the ability to use symbols to communicate, referred to as semiotic function . A child may assume that if two objects share a quality, the two objects are identical. This is referred to as transductive reasoning . For example, a child may call all four-

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