A branch of psychology devoted to the study of age-related change in psychological functions in both humans and animals, using a variety of both experimental and observational methods. It has theoretical implications for other branches of psychology and practical applications (e.g., in providing more effective techniques for teaching children who are developmentally delayed). More recently, …
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Developmental plasticity
In the context of the nervous system, this refers to the role of neuronal activity and sensory experience in the normal development and maintenance of neuronal anatomy and function. It can also apply to compensatory changes in the nervous system following perturbations at any stage in the life span. For the developmental geneticist, developmental plasticity …
Developmental psychobiology
A field of study that endeavors to integrate developmental psychology and developmental biology, largely by means of experimental methods. Mainly this is done by combining topics in psychology (e.g., attachment, emotion) with techniques from biology (e.g., heart rate), neurophysiology (e.g., single cell recordings) and genetics (e.g., gene mapping). A large part of the research is …
Developmental outcomes
The developmental status of the child in intellectual, social or other terms as a consequence of the developmental processes as affected by maturation and experience. See Experience, Maturation, Process
Developmental neuropsychology
The study of the appearance and development of language, perception, memory and other cognitive processes as they relate to brain functions and structures across the life span. See Cognitive neuroscience, Developmental cognitive neuroscience
Developmental integration
.An account of multisensory development which posits that thesenses are initially separate, and that development is a process of gradualintegration of those separate sensations into multi sensory percepts. See Cross-modal coordination, Cross-modal matching, Developmental differentiation, Intersensory perceptual narrowing, Intersensory redundancy hypothesis, Molyneux’s question
Developmental gradients
See Maturational gradients
Developmental hypothesis
Put forward by Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) in 1852 as all-encompassing idea for change that could be applied to any organic phenomenon (across both developmental and evolutionary time), and praised by Thomas H. Huxley (1825-1895), Darwin’s ‘bulldog’ as something of a breakthrough in evolutionary theory. It was part of Spencer’s own attempt at formulating an evolutionary …
Developmental genetics
An important and burgeoning part of developmental biology that can be broadly defined as the study of how the genotype is transformed into the phenotype during development. Thus, it concerns identifying the mechanisms of differential gene expression from the same nuclear material during development. It arose from a division between embryologists and geneticists as to …
Developmental evolutionary biology
See Evolutionary developmental biology