Question

Experience-expectant development is the development of universal skills in which excess synapses form and are pruned according to experience. Experience-dependent development is the development of specific skills in which new synapses form to code the experience. Give at least one example of each. Given these definitions, what do you think about the influence of the environment in brain development?​

Answer 1

Note: This response is in UK English, please paste the response to MS Word and you should be able to spot discrepancies easily. You may elaborate the answer based on personal views or your classwork if necessary.

(Answer) Experience-expectant development – In this situation, an individual already might have an expert know-how of a subject. However, their knowledge is “calibrated” based on their experience and not their study.

For instance, there will be a difference in studying French from a book and learning it through experience. One may study the word “macaroon” and know the meaning and spelling and even the recipe of a macaroon. However, when one visits France, and beings to learn French through conversations, they will actually learn the true pronunciation of the word.

Experience-dependent development – In this instance, an individual would have to depend on experience to teach them something.

For instance, there is no course in school that teaches us how to do our taxes or balance a chequebook. That is something we may learn only through experience.

Influences – The brain stores information gained from experience, which has been absorbed through our senses and understood through our cognition. All of these neural pathways have therefore been fired up through some or the other occurrences in our environment. Therefore, our environment becomes our classroom, in terms of how much we are able to learn from it through experience.