Biological and Cognitive Development Essay

Developmental psychology studies the qualifys and how much(prenominal) changes occur oer a course of an some bodys life events. It seeks to understand the changes that argon universal, the changes that occur regardless of the individuals culture or experiences. Moreover, it in addition seeks to understand why and how individual differences occur why some sight respond one way in a particular spotlight while others respond quite distinguishablely. Further, take aimmental psychology is particularly refer with the process by which carriage changes during an individuals lifetime.By goatvas biologic and cognitive emergence, psychologists and valet de chambreity hope to better understand, predict, and modify an individuals behavior. BIOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT Biological development refers to the changes in the body and witticism from the moment of conception to old get along. This development greatly influences wads behavior. Three of these biological-related events argon p renatal, from childhood to adolescent, and adult to aging. In prenatal development, the individual grows from a single fertilized egg cell, known as the fertilized ovum to an sister with billions of specialized cells.This period is divided into 3 stages namely, the germinal, embryonic, and fetal changes. In the germinal stage, the zygote has give out a small mass of cells in the germinal stage, the fetus brain and heart begin to develop, arms and legs appear, limbs and diminutive internal organs are speed upily developing and in the fetal stage, the fetus respiratory system has developed. So at the end of prenatal period, an individual call for grown from a single cell into an amazingly complex individual who, on average, is almost 20 inches long and weighs intimately 7.5 pounds. The brain during the prenatal development begins to develop between the flash and third week after fertilization, and by 3. 5 weeks a raw(a) nervous system is present. By the time of take in, r ealisticly all of the just about 100 billion neurons in the human brain are already present (Cowan, 1979). In the child development, an individual is the like a virtual maturement machine. By the age of 2, the average child is about 70 % taller than at birth and nigh 400 % heavier (Eichorn, 1989).As a reign of thumb, girls grow tall to about half their adult height by 18 months of age while the boys by the age of 2. Between the ages of 2 and 5 old age, physical growth slows dawn and then levels off at a relatively steady station until adolescence. The beginning of adolescence is in like manner the flack of knowledgeable maturation or puberty. The usual sequence of changes that occur during sexual maturation for girls are the following breasts and pubic hair begin to develop and the onset of menstruation. For the boys, the first signs of puberty are the growth of penis and testes and the coming into court of pubic hair.These early signs of sexual maturation take place durin g a rapid increase in height, muscle size and strength curiously for the boys with growth peak at about the age of 14 eld old. The girls on the other hand have their growth peak at 12 years old. However, boys grow taller than girls on average. But the growth of divergent parts o f the body is non uniform during the growing years. Physical growth ceases, on average, at about 18 years of age in girls and 20 years of age in boys. However, biological development does not stop until the end of life.The brain in like manner grows apace during this period. At birth, the brain is about 25 % of its adult weight and size. By the age of 2, it has grown to about 75 % of its adult weight. Although all of a somebodys neurons are present at birth, the number and complexness of the connections among neurons increase substantially after birth (Parmelee and Sigman, 1983), and this increase is partly liable for the growth in brain size. Further, the increased neural connections and the developm ent of medulla oblongata make possible more and more complex behavior and cerebration as an individual grows.In some areas of the brain, these developmental changes continue until due date (Parmelee and Sigman, 1983). The adult and aging life events are flockonicalally a declining stage. A variety of biological developments takes place as people age, including redistri andion of body fat, strike in bone mass, and decrease in muscle size and speed of contraction. Biological changes progress into old age. Many elderly people in reality become shorter, partly because they slump and partly because of a decrease in bone mass. Muscle size and speed of contraction excessively decrease. maturation also takes its toll on internal body organs. The heart muscles become weaker, blood flow decreases, and breathing capacity continues to decline. Physical instruction execution also declines. According to Stones and Kozma (1985), these bodily changes are paralleled by declines in physical p erformance with age. Beginning at about age 30, a persons physical speed, strength, and endurance decline at an average rate at about 1. 5 % a year. The brain also continues to change biologically with age (Creasey & Rapoport, 1985).It decreases in size and weight, and some areas of the brain stand 50 percent or more of their neurons, specifically at the age of 50, with an average decrease of 2 % of brain rule book every 10 years thereafter (Miller, Altson, and Corsellis, 1980). These age-related changes in the brain undoubtedly contribute to deteriorations of sensory, motor, and cognitive function. But just like biological changes in the body, these age-related changes in the brain are averages the actual amount of change varies considerably from person to person. cognitive DEVELOPMENTCognitive development refers to the changes in knowledge about the valet de chambre or specifically, it refers to the development of sensation and perception, of the ability to come across, to re ason, and to solve problems. Just like biological development, cognitive development continues from birth through old age. The threesome cognitive-related events that I would like to discuss are newbornborn babys, childhood and aging. In infants, cognitive development begins from the moment of birth as they begin interacting with and accumulation instruction about the world.They have all the rudimentary sensory abilities such as they can see objects, can tell the different shapes and patterns but cant change their focus very well. Their vision promptly improves over the first six months to a year, although it may be several(prenominal) years until it is fully mature. Moreover, infants can also hear at birth but their threshold of hearing is higher and cant dissever well between sounds than adults. As with vision, an infants hearing improves rapidly over the first year, although it will be several years ahead it is fully mature.Further, infants have a well-developed sense of t aste (Cawart, 1981) as they can discriminate among different tastes they can also smell and react to different odors and their sense of touch is particularly well-developed. Infants motor behavior consists primarily of reflexes such as rooting, sucking, and grasping. These reflexes gradually give way to organize voluntary actions, such as sitting and walking. On the other hand, infants can learn from the moment of birth. They show habituation, a simplex form of learning where they stop responding to a repeated stimulus.They also learn through operant conditioning, which is making a particular response that brings about either reward or punishments. Although newborn infants can learn, they do not learn as readily as senior(a) children as their retrospect is not as good as that of adults. Childrens cognitive development theory is most influenced by Jean Piaget. He believed that people raise knowledge by interacting with the world and that they construct knowledge through assimila tion, which is incorporating new information and accommodation or modifying old information.He further proposed a series of four stages of cognitive development, where he described childrens basic intellectual abilities sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational and formal operational. According to Piaget, these stages represent qualitatively different ways of thinking that occur relatively and abruptly and in the same sequence for all children. Though many psychologists challenged and modified Piagets theory, arguing that cognitive development is not really stagelike, its basic tenets uphold widely accepted.During Aging, changes in cognitive abilities seem to decline. This decline may be due to factors such as slow processing of information. Moreover, aging also show declines in memory performance, partly because they use fewer encode strategies for remembering information and partly because they use fewer cues to retrieve information from memory. But long term storage i tself appears to be relatively unmoved(p) by aging and, under favorable conditions, the elderly are nearly as good as young adults at remembering information.Further, research lab studies indicate that performance on a variety of problem-solving tasks declines with age. But these studies also show that training and practice can markedly improve older adults problem-solving performance. What is more, when tasks are familiar and the subjects have experience with them, they show little or no decline in performance with age. Older people have accumulated a lifetime of experience, knowledge, and wisdom that they bring to everyday tasks, and this can offset cognitive deficits that may occur (Canestrari, 1986).The picture of inevitable implike intellectual impairment that many people have of the elderly is therefore, a misconception. So, when we consider each(prenominal) of these life events though discussed separately, we will see that each of these two major threads in the developmen t (biological and cognitive) of the individual are interwoven. Hence, we cannot separate one from the other and thus must be considered when analyse about an individuals development or life-span changes. References Canestrari, R. E. , junior (1986). season changes in acquisition. In G. A. Talland (Ed.) Human Aging and Behavior (pp. 169-188). new-made York academic Press. Cowan, W. M. (1997). The development of the brain. Scientific American, 241, 113-133. Cowart, B. J. (1981). Development of taste perception in public Sensitivity and preference throughout the life span. Psychological Bulletin, 90, 43-73. Creasy, H. & Rappport, S. I. (1985). The aging human brain. Annals of Neurology, 17,2-10. Eichorn, D. H. (1997). Biological Development Current foci of research. In J. D. Osofsky (Ed. ), Handbook of infant development (pp. 253-282). New York John Wiley & Sons.Miller, A. K. H. , Altson, R. L. , & Corsellis, J. H. N. (1980). Variation with age in the volume of grey and white matt er in the cerebral hemispheres of man. Neuropathology and Applied Neurobiology, 6, 119-132. Parmelee, A. H. , Jr. , & Sigman , M. D. (1983). Prenatal brain development and behavior. Handbook of child psychology, Vol II (95-1550. New York John Wiley & Sons. Piaget, J. (1983). Piagets theory. In W. Kessen (Ed. ), Handbook of child psychology (4th ed. ). account statement , theory, and methods 9pp. 103-128). New York John Wiley & Sons