Many researchers have tried to identify environmental factors that can cause intellectual deficits. These include malnutrition, deprivation of parental care, abuse, prenatal drug exposure or exposure to stress hormones, parental style and so on. It is important to identify such potential factors in order to consider the risk of intellectual deficits. Further one has to investigate how these early developmental influences are connected with the outcome in maturity. It has been suggested by some researchers that certain kinds of early experiences produce irreversible effects. I am going to explore some of the environmental factors that can cause intellectual deficits. Further I am going to investigate whether children can recover from such deficits.
In what ways can environmental factors cause intellectual deficits? Can children recover from such deficits?
Many researchers have tried to identify environmental factors that can cause intellectual deficits. These include malnutrition, deprivation of parental care, abuse, prenatal drug exposure or exposure to stress hormones, parental style and so on. It is important to identify such potential factors in order to consider the risk of intellectual deficits. Further one has to investigate how these early developmental influences are connected with the outcome in maturity. It has been suggested by some researchers that certain kinds of early experiences produce irreversible effects. I am going to explore some of the environmental factors that can cause intellectual deficits. Further I am going to investigate whether children can recover from such deficits.
First of all I am going to consider nutrition as an environmental factor which can cause intellectual deficits. There are many problems when considering the impacts of nutrition on intellectual development. This is because measuring the adequacy of nutrition is difficult e.g. if body size is used one has to consider that it is affected by many other factors and it cannot tell anything about the quality of the diet. One also has to note that in human populations nutritional adequacy varies with all the other determinants of intelligence. Often children who are less well fed are also less well supervised, stimulated and educated than children who are more adequately nourished. They may have been conceived by more poorly endowed and nourished parents, had more stressful foetal and birth experiences, and suffered more illnesses because of poor nutrition and associated environmental conditions. This means that nutrition is often linked to many other factors which can confound the impact of nutrition itself. Results of studies on the effects of severe malnutrition in children have shown that schoolchildren who were previously malnourished had lower IQs, poorer cognitive abilities and school achievement, and greater behavioural problems than controls matched on family background. It has been noted that the links between severe malnutrition and cognitive deficits may not be direct: most children who suffer from short periods of severe malnutrition are also chronically undernourished, which makes the effects of the severe episodes of malnutrition difficult to isolate. The effects of severe malnutrition appear to be reversible in some cases in that some children who suffer from short periods of malnutrition owing to medical conditions or traumatic events recover completely and malnourished children who are adopted into more affluent families have only moderate after-effects of their early malnutrition. Some studies have shown that children who suffered from malnutrition also behave differently in a variety of ways. They are often reported to have limited motor abilities, they are less attentive, more distractable and less emotionally controlled than their peers and have poor relationships with others. It has been argued that their limited cognitive skills may result from deficits in attention or motivation that compromise learning and the ability to perform on intelligence tests.
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- Citation du texte
- BA (Oxon), Dip Psych (Open) Christine Langhoff (Auteur), 2004, In what ways can environmental factors cause intellectual deficits? Can children recover from such deficits?, Munich, GRIN Verlag, https://www.grin.com/document/80248