5. Developmental Psychology Flashcards
Studies the way humans develop and change over time.
Developmental psychology
The extent to which changes and individuals overtime reflect the influence of genetically programmed maturation or of learning and experience.
Nature and nurture
Refers to biologically based changes that followed an orderly sequence, each step setting the stage for the next step according to an age-related timetable.
Maturation
Psychologists continue to debate whether human development is characterised by these two following…
Critical periods or Sensitive periods
Periods of special sensitivity to specific types of learning and sensory stimulation that shape of the capacity for future development.
Critical periods
Times that particularly important but not definitive for subsequent development.
Sensitive periods
Does development could occur in ______ – relatively discreet steps through which everyone progresses in the same sequence – or is it continuous – involving steady and gradual change.
Stages
Compares groups of participants of different ages at a single time to see whether differences exist among them.
Cross sectional studies
Assess the same individuals over time, providing the opportunity to assess age changes rather than age differences.
Longitudinal studies
Minimises cohorts effects by studying multiple cohorts longitudinally.
Sequential studies
Differences among age groups associated with differences in the culture.
Cohort effects
A means by which psychologists can learn about infant perception and cognition – it is the tendency of humans, even from birth, to pay more attention to novel stimuli than to stimuli to which they become habituated, or accustomed.
Orienting reflex
Decreases as the infant habituates to a stimulus and increases with the presentation of a new one.
Sucking rate
They are able to perceive subtle differences, such as the sound of the mothers and another woman’s voice, from birth. Vision is not well developed at birth.
Infant senses
The ability to associate sensations of an object from different senses or to match their own actions to behaviours they have observed visually.
Intermodal processing
People completely lack explicit memory for events before age 3 or 4.
Infantile amnesia
Who argued that children develop knowledge by constructing reality at of their own experience, mixing what they observe with their own ideas about how the world works.
Piaget’s theory of cognitive development.
Involves interpreting actions or events in terms of one’s present schemas.
Assimilation
An organised, repeatedly exercised pattern of thought or behaviour.
Schema
The modification of schemas to fit reality.
Accommodation
The driving force behind cognitive development – balancing assimilation and accommodation to adapt to the world.
Equilibration
People assimilate and accommodate when confronted with new information throughout their lives. At each stage of development however children use a distinct underlying logic, or structure of thought, to guide their thinking.
Piaget’s stages of development
0 to 2 years – thought and action virtually identical, as the infant explores the world with its senses and behaviours; object permanence develops; the child is completely egocentric.
Sensorimotor stage
2 to 7 years – symbolic thought develops, allowing children to imagine solutions to problems mentally rather than through action; children have difficulty imagining reality from other viewpoints, and have a tendency to centre on one perceptually striking feature of an object.
Pre-operational stage
