The Effects of Environmental Stimuli on Child Development: Overstimulation Hypothesis and Early Exposure to Media

Running Head: GROWTH OF CHILD 0
Health 320 Research Paper
11/22/2018

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Child development
The essay brings is on the development of the child and the effects of environmental
stimuli on the nervous system of an individual during the key developmental periods which
further impacts the learning process and memory. In s general sense, stimuli refers to things
or any events which induce a particular functional response in a tissue or organ (English
Oxford Living Dictionaries, 2018). In other words, stimulus (stimuli) refers to the identifiable
change in the external or internal environment. Receptors are specialized cells which detect
the changes in the environment, called as stimuli (Pavlov, 2010). Thus, the essay will discuss
the audio-visual stimuli, and the concept of overstimulation hypothesis, with a major
emphasis on the early exposure to media on the development of a child (Aita, & Goulet,
2003; Christakis, Ramirez, Ramirez, 2012). Several aspects of this study will also be
highlighted such as attentional capacity, cognition, learning, and memory, and their impact on
the overall society (Aita, & Goulet, 2003).
The nervous system of an individual is composed of the complex network of more
than 100 million nerve cells, called as neurons enabling the body to respond to different
internal and external environmental stimulus. It integrates and regulates the functions of
different organ systems of the human body (Beauchaine, 2001).
Auditory and visual stimuli influence an individual’s nervous system in many
different ways. For example; the type of stimuli to which infants and children are exposed
determines their behavior and development in their key stages of life. An auditory stimulus
refers to those things which an individual listens and the basic type of auditory stimulus in the
presentation is the sound stimulus (Boyd, Bee, & Johnson, 2017). Discussing auditory stimuli
it can be stated that these types of stimulus are created by the objects, such as it includes
about the person speaking, musical instrument played by someone, or the sound of trees

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falling in the forest. Hearing is the greatest developed sensory system at birth and primary
exposure to auditory stimuli that motivates growth of the neural pathways. Functional hearing
grows at twenty-fifth to twenty-seventh weeks’ gestation, with the low-frequency noises, like
the mother’s heartbeat and talking, causing physiological reactions in the uterus (Boyd, Bee,
& Johnson, 2017). The growing foetus answers to a broader range of noise frequencies from
the third trimester (Boyd, Bee, & Johnson, 2017).
In babies, sounds produce remembrance in the auditory and the language areas of
baby’s cerebral cortex and trigger the development of nervous connections to body’s limbic
system (Schore, 2000). In the clinical examinations of the effects of the auditory stimulus on
neurobehavioral and autonomic development in initial life, longitudinal and randomized case-
control readings have revealed that motherly sounds like singing or talking in a soft soothing
speech, lead to decreased heart rate in pre-term infants (Gesell, 2013). Maternal sounds were
also related to better feeding behaviors and improved mother-infant attachment, thereby
dropping parental stress related to pre-term baby care (Corbetta, Patel, & Shulman, 2008).
The Visual sensory system developed poorly at birth but develops quickly with
stimulation in the first 1 to 3 months of life (Gesell, 2013). Development of the visual system,
counting neurological and visual components, is affected by many aspects including postnatal
and prenatal nutrition and postnatal pictorial stimulation (Crain, 2015). The body’s visual
cortex is the area of the mind accountable for handling visual information. There is some
experimental evidence that, from birth, babies favor direct eye interaction as a practice of
communication and that improved neural processing happens throughout infant-parent
straight eye contact (Gesell, 2013). Certainly, the World Health Organization (WHO)
suggests that parents need to involve in the direct eye interaction with their baby starting at
birth (Boyd, Bee, & Johnson, 2017). This initial sensitivity to shared gaze is probably to
support the growth of social skills in life later (Hoover-Dempsey et al., 2005).

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At the start of a sensitive period, the neural representations are rather widely tuned to
associate with environmental stimuli. Extensive tuning is beneficial because it permits the
growing brain to recognize and respond to the characteristics of the sensory environment.
During the sensitive period, the neural representations develop progressively refined and
initiate to especially respond to regularly encountered, thus allowing for extra precise and
effective handling of noticeable and regularly encountered information (Boyd, Bee, &
Johnson, 2017). Through numerous sensory systems, learning and plasticity throughout
sensitive periods are called “bottom-up” process, categorized by the perceptual contracting in
which underlying perceptual discrimination developed increasingly discriminating in their
responsiveness to the environmental input (Boyd, Bee, & Johnson, 2017).
The Overstimulation Hypothesis is considered as the continued exposure to a quick
image alteration during an acute period of mind growth which would prerequisite the brain to
suppose great levels of stimuli and that would result in distraction in later life (Christakis,
Ramirez, Ramirez, 2012). Therefore if someone watches sufficient ‘Baby Einstein’
(example), their mind might become uninterested when they are remain at a place that was
speaking about activities happened on the show because in real life it is not as promising as it
was on the television. Some observational research has shown links between
overstimulation in early stages of life via excessive television viewing and consequent
deficits in understanding and attention (Christakis, Zimmerman, DiGiuseppe, McCarty,
2004). Environmental enhancement is extensively known to significantly improved
memory functions (Leggio et al., 2005). The environmental improvement results in many
neurobiological alterations counting increased and improved dendritic splitting in the
cortical neurons enlarged size and density of the greater colliculus and proliferated
neurogenesis in the part of the brain called hippocampus (Boyd, Bee, & Johnson, 2017).
The important characteristic of the enriched environment (environment that stimulate brain