#developmental science

[candlemouse]

So you’ve heard about mom brain, but in documentary, “Babies,” on Netflix, the scientist explains that when fathers are the primary caregiver, their brains’ amygdala is activated to the same extent through committed caregiving that mothers are through pregnancy and breast-feeding. And there was no difference between biological parents and parents through surrogacy. It’s a very sweet documentary.

[music-dreamer110622]

"An 18 year old is a grown adult because the law says so" what the fuck lol.

[shit-people-say-in-grad-school]

If you think you are an intellectual imposter, call me and we can have a beer because--believe me--we all think that.

55-year-old professor on first day of class, Research Methods for Causal Inference

[i-read-somewhere-that]

As developmental psychologists have demonstrated, children reliably develop highly specific fears along a predictable developmental trajectory. And as evolutionary psychologists have demonstrated, these predictable fears emerge when children are most vulnerable to the dangers targeted by the fears—or more precisely when children would have been most vulnerable to such dangers in ancestral environments, the kinds of environments in which our species evolved. These environments in significant respects diverged from modern environments, but the fears persist. For infants, incapable of self-propelled motion and self-defense, the most dangerous situations—in ancestral environments and now—are the absence of caregivers and the presence of potentially hostile strangers. Hence infants reliably develop separation anxiety and stranger anxiety, which persist until the toddler years.3 As children begin to move about on their own, they reliably develop fear of heights. At around age 4–6, as children begin exploring their environments more extensively and thus become more vulnerable to predation, they typically become obsessed with death, afraid of monsters lurking in the dark, and preoccupied with dangerous animals such as lions and tigers. In middle to late childhood, fears of injury, accidents, and contagion emerge, and in late childhood and particularly early adolescence, social threats become “salient” to children—children tend to become highly anxious of losing status, losing friends, being ostracized, and so on...

[amazingreveal]

Dogs Too Smart to Follow Useless Advice

Dogs Too Smart to Follow Useless Advice

Dogs Too Smart to Follow Useless Advice FRIDAY, Oct. 14, 2016 (HealthDay News) — Dogs are less likely than children to follow useless instructions, researchers say. In experiments with 40 pet dogs, the Yale University team found that dogs only copy a person’s actions if doing so is essential to getting what they want. This is not true of children. “Humans often fall prey to the bad advice of…

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[maskedbrute]

Some have argued that male brains were hardwired for these abilities by throwing spears back in the Stone Age. But women hunted too, killing small game and birds with arrows or slings.

We need look no further than boys’ tendency to play more games in childhood such as football, baseball, and blocks than do girls. One study found that boys threw better than girls did with their dominant arm — but when the kids were asked to throw with their other arm, there were no gender differences. If biology alone determined throwing ability, then boys would throw better than girls with either arm. Practice, not hardwired ability, turned boys into better throwers. Playing videogames that involve stalking or tracking also create superior mental rotation skills.

One Canadian research team, instead of just noting that the males did better than the females, and chalking the difference up to female brains, or male hunting in prehistory, took another step. The low scorers were divided into two groups; one group spent 10 hours playing tracking videogames, while the others did not get such training.

What happened? The training almost completely eradicated the gender gap in mental rotation skills. And when the researchers checked back six months later, the group that had received the training had retained the gains they made.

[aaudisix]

Change

I just read in my developmental science text book that development is a continual and cumulative process. It continued to add that the one constant is change.

I understand it but I find it ironic.

"The one constant is change"

That just blew my mind for some reason.

[livemessy]

Children being messy in a highchair leads to increased learning.

This study shows the cascading influence that the context of everyday activities such as mealtimes has on children’s exploration, attention, and word learning.  When young children messily eat and explore food at each meal, they are learning both about individual foods and also about nonsolid substances more generally.  Children may be doing more than just making a mess in the moment: they are forever changing their attentional biases and the way they will learn over development.

Source: 

Perry, Lynn K, Samuelson, Larissa K. and Burdinie, Johanna B.  Highchair philosophers: the impact of seating context-dependent exploration on children's naming biases.  Developmental Science (John Wiley & Sons, Ltd). 2013.