Lecture
1. Crisis of the newborn.
2. Physical and motor development.
3. Sensory and perceptual development.
4. Cognitive development and speech development.
For a child, coming into the world is a stressful event; however,
most newborns have everything they need to
cope with this process. The neonatal period is an adaptive period for
children, which lasts during the first month of their life. The main
task of this period is the child's adaptation to the new environment.
Children possess a whole complex of unconditioned reflexes.
The newborn's sensations are undifferentiated and inseparably fused
with emotions. Auditory concentration appears at 2–3 weeks. At 3–4
weeks, such a reaction arises in response to a human voice. Visual
concentration appears at 3–5 weeks. At about one month, the
«revival complex» appears. With this the transitional stage of
the neonatal period ends and infancy proper begins.
In infancy the child actively develops fine
motor skills. At about 5 months the grasping act arises – the first
organized, directed action. The grasping act is a behavioral
act, and behavior necessarily involves orientation. Grasping
is carried out under visual control: the child looks at its hands,
watches how the hand approaches the object.
The grasping act is of great importance for the child's mental
development. Object perception arises in connection with it.
Thanks to the grasping act the hand develops: an
opposition of the thumb arises.
On the basis of the grasping act the possibilities of manipulating an
object expand: at the age of 4 to 7 months productive actions arise:
simple displacement of an object, extraction of sounds from it. At the age of 7–10
months correlating actions are formed: the child can
manipulate two objects at the same time, moving them away from itself and
relating them to one another: the child moves an object away from itself, bringing it closer to
another object in order to put it down, stand it up or thread it onto it.
By the end of infancy (from 10–11 to 14 months) the stage of
functional actions arises: these are more advanced actions of threading,
opening, inserting, but whereas earlier the child performed an action in one
way it had been shown and with the same objects, now it
tries to reproduce the action on all possible objects.
Manipulation develops: from an orientation toward the object
to an orientation toward the result.
Gross motor skills also develop. Grasping, reaching toward an
object, stimulates the emergence of sitting. Then the child begins to
crawl. at first this is low crawling (on the stomach), and then – high crawling (on
all fours). Then the child stands up, stands while holding on, learns to keep
balance, and takes its first steps.
As the child masters new types of movement and refines them,
the child's orientation in the properties and relations of
objects is formed. During this period the child's orientation is
undifferentiated in character; it is hard to distinguish separate
aspects within it: perception, thinking, memory.
At the beginning of infancy the work of the visual and auditory
analyzers becomes more precise, and visual and auditory concentration arise. Then vision
and hearing begin to act in a coordinated way.
The child's orientation in the surrounding world, carried out by means of
external movements, arises earlier than orientation carried out by
means of mental processes, and serves as its basis.
From about the 7th month movements acquire an object-related character, and
after 10 months the image of the object begins actively to control the movements of the hands
and regulate them, i.e. sensorimotor coordination arises.
Throughout infancy cognitive development
takes place. This line of development depends to a great extent on communication with an adult.
The central new formation of infancy is the formation
of the need for communication with adults.
In the first half-year direct emotional communication is regarded as the
leading activity. On the basis of situational-personal communication between the adult and the child, the infant gradually
develops an image of itself as a subject of communicative activity.
In the second half-year object-related manipulations appear, and communication,
becoming aligned with them, takes on a situational-business form.
Perception and action – this is the basis that allows one to judge
the initial forms of visual-active thinking in infancy.
Over the course of the year the cognitive tasks that the child is able to solve become more complex, at
first only in terms of perception, and then
using motor activity.
Speech development also begins in infancy (cooing, babbling,
the appearance of first words).
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