Biological and Cognitive Development Essay

developingal psychology studies the adjustments and how such changes take place over a course of an case-by-cases flavor events. It masterks to belowstand the changes that ar universal, the changes that occur regardless of the individual(a)s culture or experiences. Moreover, it also seeks to understand why and how individual differences occur why some(prenominal) people respond one way in a particular situation while new(prenominal)s respond quite differently. Further, educational psychology is in particular concerned with the process by which behavior changes during an individuals life while.By studying biological and cognitive training, psychologists and humansity foretaste to better understand, predict, and modify an individuals behavior. BIOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT biologic assumeing refers to the changes in the dust and brain from the mo of conception to older age. This teaching greatly influences peoples behavior. Three of these biological-related events ar prenatal, from puerility to adolescent, and adult to aging. In prenatal development, the individual grows from a single fertilized en cell, known as the zygote to an infant with billions of specialized cells.This period is dissever into 3 stages namely, the germinal, embryonic, and fetal changes. In the germinal stage, the zygote has become a sm whole mass of cells in the germinal stage, the fetus brain and nerve centre begin to develop, arms and legs appear, limbs and critical inside organs are quick developing and in the fetal stage, the fetus respiratory system has developed. So at the barricade of prenatal period, an individual expect grown from a single cell into an amazingly complex individual who, on sightly, is intimately 20 inches long and weighs astir(predicate) 7.5 pounds. The brain during the prenatal development begins to develop between the second and third week after fertilization, and by 3. 5 weeks a primitive nervous system is largess. By the time of fo rk over, virtually all of the approximately 100 billion neurons in the human brain are already present (Cowan, 1979). In the infant development, an individual is the likes of a virtual growing machine. By the age of 2, the average child is nigh 70 % taller than at birth and nearly four hundred % heavier (Eichorn, 1989).As a rule 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 age, physical growth slows penet range and then levels off at a relatively steady rate until adolescence. The beginning of adolescence is also the onset of sexual suppuration or puberty. The vernacular 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 appearance of pubic hair.These early signs of sexual maturation take place durin g a rapid increase in height, go across size and strength especially for the boys with growth peak at about the age of 14 years old. The girls on the other hand engender their growth peak at 12 years old. However, boys grow taller than girls on average. But the growth of different parts o f the body is not 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 retrovert until the end of life.The brain also grows rapidly 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 persons neurons are present at birth, the number and complexity of the connections among neurons increase substantially after birth (Parmelee and Sigman, 1983), and this increase is part responsible for the growth in brain size. Further, the change magnitude neural connections and the development of myelin make possible to a greater extent and more complex behavior and thought as an individual grows.In some areas of the brain, these developmental changes continue until adulthood (Parmelee and Sigman, 1983). The adult and aging life events are basically a declining stage. A variety of biological developments takes place as people age, including redistribution of body fat, decrease in bone mass, and decrease in muscle size and recreate of contraction. biological changes progress into old age. some elderly people actually become shorter, partly because they slump and partly because of a decrease in bone mass. Muscle size and speed of contraction also decrease.Aging also takes its toll on internal body organs. The heart muscles become weaker, blood flow decreases, and breathing skill continues to bloodline. Physical performance also declines. According to Stones and Kozma (1985), these bodily changes are paralleled by declines in physical performance with ag e. 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 lose 50 percent or more of their neurons, specifically at the age of 50, with an average decrease of 2 % of brain strength 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 heart of change varies considerably from person to person. COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENTCognitive development refers to the changes in knowledge about the manhood or specifically, it refers to the development of one and perception, of the ability to learn, to reason, and to solve problems. Just like biological development, cognitive development continues from birth through old age. The three cognitive-related events that I would like to cover are newborn infants, childhood and aging. In infants, cognitive development begins from the moment of birth as they begin interacting with and gathering information about the world.They commence all the rudimentary sensory abilities such as they hobo see objects, go off tell the different shapes and patterns but cant change their focus very well. Their vision rapidly improves over the first sextette months to a year, although it may be several years until it is fully mature. Moreover, infants can also hear at birth but their threshold of audience is higher and cant discriminate well between sounds than adults. As with vision, an infants hearing improves rapidly over the first year, although it go away be several years before it is fully mature.Further, infants have a well-developed sense of taste (Cawart, 1981) as they can discrimi nate 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 coordinated voluntary actions, such as sitting and walking. On the other hand, infants can learn from the moment of birth. They show habituation, a simple form of learning where they stop responding to a repeated stimulus.They also learn through operant conditioning, which is reservation a particular response that brings about either reward or punishments. Although newborn infants can learn, they do not learn as quickly as older children as their store is not as impregnable as that of adults. Childrens cognitive development theory is most influenced by Jean Piaget. He believed that people acquire knowledge by interacting with the world and that they construct knowledge through assimilation, which is incorporating new i nformation 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, pre operational, concrete operational and formal operational. According to Piaget, these stages represent qualitatively different ways of persuasion that occur relatively and abruptly and in the same sequence for all children. Though some psychologists challenged and modified Piagets theory, arguing that cognitive development is not really stagelike, its basic tenets remain 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 encoding strategies for remembering information and partly because they use fewer cues to retrieve information from memory. But long bourne storage itself appears to be relativ ely unaffected by aging and, under favorable conditions, the elderly are nearly as good as young adults at remembering information.Further, laboratory studies indicate that performance on a variety of problem-solving tasks declines with age. But these studies also show that training and manage 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 life story 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 severe intellectual impairment that many people have of the elderly is therefore, a misconception. So, when we consider each of these life events though discussed separately, we will see that each of these two major thread in the development (biological and cognitive) of the individu al are interwoven. Hence, we cannot separate one from the other and thus must be considered when studying about an individuals development or life-span changes. References Canestrari, R. E. , younger (1986). Age changes in acquisition. In G. A. Talland (Ed.) merciful Aging and Behavior (pp. 169-188). radical 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 humans 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 matter 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. ). History , theory, and methods 9pp. 103-128). New York John Wiley & Sons