Instructor Resource
Kuther, Lifespan Development: Lives in Context, 3e
SAGE Publishing, 2023
Lecture Notes
Chapter 4: Physical Development in Infancy and Toddlerhood
Learning Objectives
4-1 Discuss patterns of growth and influences on growth during infancy and toddlerhood.
4-2 Examine threats to infant and toddler health.
4-3 Summarize processes of brain development during infancy and toddlerhood.
4-4 Compare infants’ early learning capacities for habituation, classical conditioning, operant
conditioning, and imitation.
4-5 Describe infants’ developing sensory abilities.
4-6 Contrast maturation, contextual, and dynamic systems explanations for motor development
in infancy and toddlerhood.
Annotated Chapter Outline
I. Body Growth
A. Growth Trends
i. Growth norms: Expectations for typical gains and variations in height and weight
for children based on their chronological age and ethnic background.
ii. Newborns lose up to 10% of their body weight in the first few days after birth
and then gain weight quickly.
B. Patterns of Growth
i. Growth is uneven.
ii. Cephalocaudal development: The principle that growth proceeds from the head
downward.
iii. Proximodistal development: The principle that growth and development
proceed from the center of the body outward.
iv. Growth can be influenced by health and environmental factors.
C. Nutrition and Growth
i. Promoting optimal health is essential in the first two years of life.
ii. Breastfeeding
a. Breastfeeding length is linked with maternity leave in the United States.
b. Factors affecting breastfeeding include maternal age, education, and
socioeconomic status.
c. Breastfeeding also differs due to racial and ethnic differences.
d. Mothers with a lower socioeconomic status often have few resources to
support breastfeeding.
e. Both infants and mothers benefit from breastfeeding, as babies find it
easier to digest, and it lowers rates of depression in mothers.
Instructor Resource
Kuther, Lifespan Development: Lives in Context, 3e
SAGE Publishing, 2023
f. The differences between development of babies who are breastfed and
those being bottle-fed are small.
g. Instant formula is a safe alternative.
iii. Complementary Food
a. As babies age, the need for milk lowers.
b. Infants under 2 should not receive sugary beverages, according to the
USDA.
c. Excessive weight gain in infancy can lead to childhood obesity.
II. Threats to Infant Health
A. Infant Mortality
i. The leading causes of infant mortality include birth defects, low birthweight,
sudden infant death syndrome, respiratory distress, and unintentional injuries.
ii. Infant mortality rates are declining in the United States.
iii. Infant mortality rates are associated with educational disparities.
iv. Structural factors also influence racial and ethnic differences.
B. Malnutrition
i. Growth stunting: A reduced growth weight.
ii. Marasmus: A wasting disease in which the body’s fat and muscle are depleted.
iii. Kwashiorkor: A disease found in children who experience an insufficient intake
of protein.
iv. Malnourishment causes children to show several cognitive deficits.
v. Malnutrition is found in both developing and wealthy countries.
C. Growth Faltering
i. Growth faltering: A condition in which a child’s growth and weight is
substantially lower than other children their age.
ii. Having a weight below the fifth percentile for their age.
iii. Affects cognitive, verbal, and behavioral skills.
iv. Medical, socioemotional, and contextual factors can contribute to growth
faltering.
v. Can have long-term cognitive and psychosocial deficits.
D. Failure to Vaccinate
i. Vaccine: A small dose of inactive virus that is injected into the body to stimulate
the production of antibodies to guard against the disease.
ii. There are 10 vaccines included in the standard recommendations for children.
iii. Medical, religious, philosophical, and socioeconomic reasons may cause parents
to decline or delay vaccinating their children.
iv. There is a common misconception that vaccines cause autism, causing a fear of
vaccines.
v. Widespread success of immunization may cause parents to hesitate.
vi. The vaccination schedule is complicated, causing a challenge for many families.
vii. Children living in poverty are less likely to be fully vaccinated.
E. Sudden Infant Death Syndrome
Instructor Resource
Kuther, Lifespan Development: Lives in Context, 3e
SAGE Publishing, 2023
i. Sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS): The diagnostic term used to describe the
sudden unexpected death of an infant less than 1 year of age that occurs
seemingly during sleep and remains unexplained after a thorough investigation.
ii. Believed to occur due to biological vulnerability and exposure to a stressor.
iii. Native Americans and Blacks show the highest rates of SIDS, showcasing many
ethnic differences.
iv. SIDS declined dramatically when the American Academy of Pediatrics
recommended that infants sleep in a nonprone/supine position.
III. Brain Development During Infancy and Toddlerhood
A. The Neuron
i. The brain is made up of billions of neurons.
ii. Neurons: Specialized cells that communicate with one another to make it
possible for people to sense the world, think, move their body, and carry out
their lives.
iii. Synapses: The gaps between neurons.
iv. Myelin: The fatty substance that coats axons which speeds the transmission of
electrical impulses and neurological function.
B. Process of Neural Development
i. Neurogenesis: The process in which, through the embryo’s neural tube, the first
neurons form in prenatal development.
ii. Glial cells: A second type of brain cell that outnumbers neurons while nourishing
neurons and moving throughout the brain to provide its physical structure.
iii. Synaptogenesis: The process in which the dendrites grow and branch out,
increasing synapses with other neurons.
iv. Toddlers have more synapses than at any other point in life.
v. Synaptic pruning: The process in which unused neural connects are lost, which
can improve the efficiency of neural communication by removing excess unused
connection.
vi. Myelination: The process of brain development in which glial cells produce and
coat the axons of neurons with a fatty substance called myelin.
vii. Myelination advances neural communication.
C. The Cerebral Cortex
i. Cortex: The wrinkled and folded outermost layer of the brain.
ii. The cortex comprises 85% of the brain’s mass.
iii. Each lobe of the brain has a different function.
iv. Prefrontal cortex: The frontal lobe that is responsible for higher thought, such as
planning, goal setting, controlling impulses, and using cognitive skills and
memory to solve problems.
v. Corpus collosum: The thick band of neural fibers that join the two hemispheres
of the cortex.
vi. Lateralization: The process in which the right and left hemispheres become
specialized to carry out different functions.
Instructor Resource
Kuther, Lifespan Development: Lives in Context, 3e
SAGE Publishing, 2023
vii. Each hemisphere has different functions.
viii. Most adults experience hemispheric dominance, usually with the left
hemisphere.
D. Experience and Brain Development
i. Stimulation and experience maximize brain development, particularly in infancy.
ii. Sensitive period: A period (infancy) in which experience has a particularly
powerful role.
iii. Experience-expectant brain development: Development in which the brain
depends on experiencing certain basic events and stimuli at key points in time to
develop normally.
iv. All infants depend on basic experiences to contribute to brain organization.
v. Experience-dependent brain development: The growth that occurs in response
to learning experiences.
E. Sleep and Brain Development
i. The typical neonate sleeps 16 to 18 hours a day.
ii. Sleep is associated with memory consolidation for adults.
iii. REM sleep is essential for cognitive development.
iv. While newborns typically wake every 2 hours, sleep serves as a developmental
function.
v. Intrinsic and environmental factors interact to support brain structures and
functions.
IV. Early Learning Capacities
A. Habituation
i. Habituation: A type of learning that occurs when repeated exposure to a
stimulus results in the gradual decline in the intensity, frequency, or duration of a
response.
ii. As infants develop, habituation improves.
iii. Age-related gains in habituation skills is affected by neural development.
iv. Some gain habituation skills more quickly than others, showcasing individual
differences.
v. Dishabituation: The recovery of attention that indicates that an infant detects a
second stimulus is different from a first.
B. Classical Conditioning
i. Classical conditioning: Entails making an association between a neutral stimulus
and an unconditioned stimulus that triggers an innate reaction.
ii. As seen in studies conducted by Blass, Ganchrow, and Steiner (1984) and Lipsitt
and Kaye (1964), newborns demonstrate classical conditioning.
iii. Since newborns process information slowly, they require repeated exposure.
C. Operant Conditioning
i. Operant conditioning occurs when babies learn to engage in behaviors based on
their consequences.
ii. Infants are able to process information more quickly as they develop.
Instructor Resource
Kuther, Lifespan Development: Lives in Context, 3e
SAGE Publishing, 2023
D. Imitation
i. Children and adults learn through imitation.
ii. The mirror neuron system contributes to newborns mimicking facial expressions.
V. Sensation and Perception During Infancy and Toddlerhood
A. Sensation: Occurs when our senses detect a stimulus.
B. Perception: The sense our brain makes of the stimulus and our awareness of it.
C. Methods for Studying Infant Perception
i. Preferential looking tasks are experiments that test to see whether infants look
at one stimulus or another.
ii. Visual acuity: Sharpness of vision or the ability to see.
iii. The habituation method can also be used to study infant perception and
cognition.
iv. Researchers also use operant conditioning to study perception in infants.
D. Vision
i. We do not know if a fetus has a sense of vision.
ii. Face Perception
a. Newborns prefer patterns over plain stimuli.
b. Infants have the ability to discriminate between same-race faces and
other-race faces.
c. Perceptual narrowing: The decline in sensitivity to discriminate faces
with unfamiliar groups.
iii. Object Exploration
a. Changes in age affect how infants explore visual stimuli.
b. Externality effect: Infants scan along the outer contours of complex
visual stimuli.
iv. Color Vision
a. Color vision improves with age.
b. Seven-month-old infants can determine the same amount of color
differences as adults do.
v. Depth Perception
a. Depth Perception: The ability to perceive the distance of objects from
each other and from ourselves.
b. Infants can perceive depth at birth.
c. The visual cliff demonstrates that infants perceive differences in depth.
d. Young infants do not associate fear with deep drops.
e. Perceptions of depth change as infants crawl more.
E. Hearing
i. Hearing is the most well-developed sense at birth.
ii. Through listening, language learning begins at birth.
F. Touch
i. Touch is a critical way in which newborns learn about the world.
Instructor Resource
Kuther, Lifespan Development: Lives in Context, 3e
SAGE Publishing, 2023
ii. Touch can reduce stress responses and is associated with weight gain in
newborns.
iii. Neonates feeling pain has influenced debates surrounding circumcision.
iv. Circumcision in infants is very debated, as it has medical benefits, but from rare
conditions.
v. The American Academy of Pediatrics encourages circumcision due to a cultural
bias to support common social practices in the United States.
vi. Cultural, religious, and social factors contribute to circumcision decisions.
G. Smell and Taste
i. Preferences for smell and taste are well developed at birth.
ii. Newborns prefer human milk to formula and prefer sugar to other substances.
H. Intermodal Perception
i. Intermodal perception: The process of combining information from more than
one sensory system.
ii. Neonates can coordinate auditory and visual stimuli to recognize their mother.
iii. Vision and touch are integrated very early in life.
iv. fMRI research shows that infants show activity in similar sensory regions of the
brain as adults.
v. Social touch can aid learning and facilitate sensory integration.
vi. Development is triggered by experiences, as senses are not completely
integrated at birth.
I. Infant-Context Interactions and Perceptual Development
i. Perception arises through interaction with the environment.
ii. Perception develops through action.
iii. Affordances: The nature, opportunities, and limits of objects.
iv. Infants explore their environments systematically to discover the properties of
things around them.
VI. Motor Development During Infancy and Toddlerhood
A. Reflexes: Involuntary and automatic responses to stimuli such as tough, light, and
sound.
B. Gross Motor Development
i. Gross motor development: The ability to control the large movements of the
body, actions that help us move around in our environment.
ii. Motor achievements show a cephalocaudal progression of motor control.
iii. Milestone charts do not always predict behavior of individuals.
iv. Crawling is significant for both infants and parent.
v. Visual fields change when infants begin to walk.
C. Fine Motor Development
i. Fine motor development: The ability to control small movements of the fingers
such as reaching and grasping.
ii. Voluntary reaching improves in accuracy begging at 3 months of age.
iii. Infants develop cognitively the more they reach and acquire objects.
Instructor Resource
Kuther, Lifespan Development: Lives in Context, 3e
SAGE Publishing, 2023
D. Biological and Contextual Determinants of Motor Development
i. Biological Influences on Motor Development
a. Genetics influence motor development, as well as maturation.
b. Infants display the same sequence of motor milestones around the
world.
ii. Contextual Influences on Motor Development
a. Opportunities to practice motor skills are also essential to motor
development.
b. Motor development is enhanced through practice.
c. The motor and cognitive development domains interact with one
another.
d. Different cultures provide infants with different opportunities for
practice.
e. Western cultures place emphasis on individualism and Eastern cultures
focus on collectivism.
f. Survival and success sometimes require a dependence on caregivers and
delaying motor milestones.
g. Simple aspects of the childbearing context can influence motor
development, such as choice of clothing.
iii. Motor Development as a Dynamic System
a. Motor milestones develop systematically and build on one another.
b. Dynamic systems theory: Motor development reflects on interaction
among developmental domains, maturation, and environment.
c. Separate abilities blend together to explore and control environments
more effectively.
d. Motor development is initiated by the child to accomplish something,
showcasing goal-oriented behavior.
e. Motor skills do not develop in isolation but are influenced by social and
cultural contexts.
f. Motor development is the result of central nervous system maturation,
the infant’s physical capacities, environmental supports, and the infant’s
desire to explore the world.