Advanced developmental Flashcards
Where does the UK rank in a measure of pressure on families?
The UK ranks 24th out of 27 European countries in a composite measure of pressure on families
What is the lifecourse approach in developmental psychology/medicine?
How early events affect later disease patterns
Evidence for the lifecourse approach presented by Barker et al in the 1980s?
Identified that under-nutrition caused changes in the foetus in later life that were linked to coronary heart disease.
The development of working memory, attention and inhibitory control problems can be biologically explained how?
Emotional insults that affect the development of the pre-frontal cortex that begins in infancy and continues into adulthood.
What is normative stress and toxic stress, how do they both contribute to child development?
Normative stress is part of normal development and helps the child develop coping mechanisms.
Toxic stress however is an insult that occurs with protective factors (such as positive attachment with an adult)
How has the scientific thought process been formalised?
Used to be:
Observations
Suppositions
Questions
Now:
Facts
Hypothesis
Theories
Definition of a fact?
A repeatable careful observation, or measurement
Different methods for answering different types of questions in cross-sectional research?
- Questions about population stats e.g. stats for age
Within group summary - How does age relate to performance
Between group comparison - how do boys compare to girls at certain ages
USE Multi-level modelling
- Questions about what factors influence measures e.g. attention and exercise
Within group - how does exercise influence a childs attention
Between group - is attention a function of BMI
USE correlational
Definition of a theory?
A well substantiated useful explanation based on knowledge that has repeatedly been conformed and not yet falsified
When would you want to use an individual growth model/multilevel model for change?
Longitudinal - Questions about systematic change over time
When would you want to use discrete or continuous time analyses?
Longitudinal - Questions about whether and when events occur.
What is a conjectural account?
Not a full scientific theory - has stood up to repeated attempts of falsification
Basically; what does the second law of thermodynamics say?
Entropy is always increasing, function of number of microstates that give way to macrostates
Pack of cards has a ridiculous number of orders
If you keep shuffling a pack of cards it keeps getting more and more disordered
What happens to entropy in life?
Things become MORE ordered, entropy DECREASES.
What is information theory?
There is free energy - surprise (entropy?)
The job of the human nervous system is to minimise free energy - to make better predictions.
May link and explain lots of brain theories, like baysian theory and neural darwinism
What is dynamical systems theory? How does this relate to development
Relates to information theory
Idea that systems change over time.
Development is:
Step-by-step - don’t know where it will end up. Baby steps.
Non-linear - messy, things happen at different times, not nice gradual progression.
Continuous in time - may develop things then stop and come back to.
Soft assembled
Multi-determined
Should track observable behaviours over time and describe how elements interact in short and long term - have to take a step back and look at things in context.
What is emmotropia, myopia and hypermetropia?
Emmotropia - normal
Myopia - eye is too large (keeps growing) - short sightedness
Hypermetropia - Eye is too small (doesn’t start growing when it should) - long sightedness
`this process appears to be under neural control.
What is Amblyopia, what causes it - how does this process happen? What is the critical period?
When the cortical cells don’t receive adequate stimulation. The critical period is when the system has plasticity and will develop normal vision.
What are the use for motor milestones for development in children?
The key acquisition of motor skills in a fairly ordered pattern. some skills require others to be acquired first.
Development of basic manipulative skill over the first 12 months?
7-15 days - visually elicited reaching
3-4months - visually controlled reaching
5-6 months - closed loop visual control
12 months - maturish grasping behaviour
This however is refined until 6-8years
Progression of writing and drawing? how fast does this progress
Holding palmar 8 months
Pincer - 18 months
Simple lines - 2 years
draw/paint - 4 years
painting and writing 6-8 years
Moderately fast progression
What types of skills progress slowly?
Dressing grooming - 2-4 years
Construction skills - 3-5
Bimanual skills:
- Transfer 6-7 years
- Functional assymetry - 5-12
What is an example of developmental abnormality that backs up embodied cognition?
Embodied cognition holds that the nature of the human body is largely determined by form of the human body.
Children with cerebral palsy for example will typically have lesser mathematical ability than children without.
Why are the figures of developmental disorder increasing?
We are good at keeping kids alive
Large migration
Increasingly unhealthy environments - obesity epidemic
Austerity cuts - Jeremy cunt.
Massive increases in inequality - inequality is bad for everyone, including those who are well-off
Issues with birth? Conditions?
large object going through small hole - cerebral insults - cerebral palsy, Developmental coordination disorder.
Why does trisomy in the 21st chromosome not result in abortion?
small enough not to make that much of a difference.
Van Bergen et al’s model’s approach to assortive mating?
Assortive mating suggests that parents with similar traits are more likely to mate.
This affects the children through environmental and genetic factors.
For example a parent with bad reading may mate with a individual also with bad reading, and they may not read to their child.
Description of Pennington’s cascade model?
from bottom up,
Genes Neural systems Sensorimotor processes Higher order cognition Behaviours Diagnostic constructs e.g. dyslexia
Each level has a number of components that interact with each other, i.e. one gene may influence one component and then that will affect others - it is such a complex system that we cant predict how one change at one level will affect other levels and the eventual diagnostic construct.
What is a construct, how does this affect diagnosis?
A construct is an explanatory variable that is not directly observable.
Diagnoses are constructs with ‘fuzzy’ lines - they are categories of convenience, but the diagnoses are complex and not all the same.
WHO definition of disibility?
Bodily structures and impairments may not cause disability
Participation in activities is what defines disability
It is subjective and personal
What does a 22q11.2 deletion tell us about genetic/environment interplay?
Significantly increases risk of developing developmental abnormality - but not guaranteed and many different disorders, tells us there are a lot of environmental affects.
Dietary exposures that affect development?
Iodine - we know none is bad, not sure about suboptimal, being investigated at the moment
Acrylamides - processed food, have a negative impact on developing food - equivalent to smoking
Alcohol - binge drinking is bad
Ethnic differences of smoking and drinking (in bradford)?
15% avg. smoke
- 33% white British
- 3% south asian
20% drinking avg. during pregnancy
- 43% white British
- 0.2 South asian
WHO framework for considering social determinants on health?
Structural determinants:
- Socioeconomical and political context
- SES
Intermediary determinants:
- behaviour and biological factors
- maternal circumstances
- psychosocial factors
WHO framework for tacking social determinants on health outcomes?
MICRO - individual
MESA - community
MACRO - public policy
ENVIRONMENT
How do coordination difficulties in early life affect later life outcomes? How can these causes be tackled?
Coordination difficulties can be caused by periventricular leukomalacia - health issues
People with coordination issues can also have trouble with tasks such as handwriting - eduction effects
People with coordination difficulties have higher chance of developing mental health problems - health effects
Children with coordination difficulties can develop behavioural issues - eduction
What did Hill et al, (2010) show about exercise and kids?
Exercise in the middle of the day improves the children’s abilities to stay on task throughout the rest of the day
Assessment systems for DCD?
Movement ABC
- Manual dexterity
- Ball skills
- static balance (posture)
This is however subjective and time consuming
The CKAT (ipad tracing) - objective and time efficient
Interventions for DCD?
Robot guided therapy can improve fine-motor control
Piaget’s task, conclusions and criticisms?
Showed baby a toy - the toy was covered and the baby did not reach for it - concluded the baby could not remember the existence if the toy.
HOWEVER - reaching may have been hard - had to reach behind the screen, may not have been in a good position to reach.
What were Violation of expectation tasks?
had a screen and a short and tall carrot.
In the expected event the screen had no window, in teh unexpected there is a window
In the large carrot experiment you would expect to see the carrot in the window.
If the babies were surprised then they could had a mental representation and probably form memories
Found babies were surprised
Two types of ways to measure remembering in children?
mobile-conjugate reinforcement - putting together two different things and remembering they are together
Operant conditioning
Evidence for operant conditioning in children?
DeCasper & Fifer:
Set up a condition that if they increase or decrease their sucking in response to mothers voice vs strangers they are rewarded (i guess). So babies increase or decrease to mothers voice
Also works with familiar story
Evidence for mobile-conjugate reinforcement
Put babies in cot. See how much they kick.
Then hook babies leg up to mobile - when they kick the leg the mobile moves
babies learn that if they kick their leg the mobile will move
Then did manipulations, e.g. retention interval,
Will remember 2 weeks later
Found that it was very context specific, i.e. mobile type, cot décor, room.
Reminder increased retention interval
Constraints with developmental trajectories when measuring in different age groups?
Can’t keep using the same test - very variable between what some babies can/can’t do
main developments when moving from infancy to toddlerhood?
Independent movement
Language
Results from magic-shrinking machine experiments?
From 2 can remember.
at 2 years old some photo recognition (30%), re-enactment is at 40% and verbal recall is not good.
Photo recognition is really good at 3, and re-enactment lags slightly, verbal is still pretty bad
At 4 photo and enactment is basically at ceiling but verbal recall is still only 35%
When tested a year later they used the vocab they had 12 months before (frozen in time)
Findings of Peterson and colleagues about stressful events?
Interviewed about emergency medical treatment they’d had
The key determinant for memory was whether they possessed adequate language facilities at the time
Language has a big role on certain types of memories
What is infantile amnesia?
The fact that people often don’t remember anything pre 5 yrs and almost nothing pre 3 years.
Two factors that may explain infantile amnesia?
Lack of language
Lack of sense of self
Mirror/red-dot test of sense of self? How is this developed in terms of episodic memories?
Put red dot on mirror where nose is, see if child touches mirror or nose
Then hide Larry the lion, ask later to see if child remembers where Larry is
Children better on red dot test are better at finding Larry.
Trend in terms of use of memory strategies in development to remember?
Flavell et al (1966)
Children engage in sub vocal rehearsal increasingly as they develop - big spike between 7 and 10 years old
Kobasigawa
Gave kids a test, also gave them pictures they could use as a strategy, again big spike at 7-10
Evidence regarding knowledge and memory in development?
Did two tests on adults and children, one digit span and one on chess pieces
Children are chess experts
Children remember much better than adults on chess task, but much worse on digit.
Shows children do use their knowledge as a help to remember more things.
What is metamemory?
A type of metacognition, is both the introspective knowledge of one’s own memory capabilities (and strategies that can aid memory) and the processes involved in memory self-monitoring. Self-rating of memory.
Relationship between metamemory and memory performance?
Metamemory is positively related to memory performance
Some research suggests that this may be because overconfidence makes children try harder
What did Gathercole (2004) show about working memory development?
Very clear developmental improvement of WM across age up to 14/15
Why is WM so important for development?
Kids with poor WM find it hard to concentrate and follow instructions or maths problems
Looks like they are not paying attention/trying
Main points from Allen & waterman (2015) and effects on children?
For adults, enactment at encoding is better - specifically for verbal recall
However not for children
Waterman found that for children, enactment is worse.
HOWEVER This is because the (enacted) task is difficult for children.
When changed to make task easier then enactment was also better.
One of the strongest predictors of academic success? (language)
Vocabulary level
When do education deficits for children begin, what happens during the school career?
Even before school, by the age of 3 there is a gap between SES children and their cognitive test scores. This gap widens through the school career
Five different aspects of language?
Phonology: sounds of the language
Lexicon: Words of the language
Semantics: Meanings of words
Pragmatics: Rules for using language in a social context
Syntax: Organisation and grammatical rules for language
Five different stages of language development?
Prelinguistic: Crying, cooing, gooing (still has some system - french different to english)
Holophrastic: One word means many things, 50 words by 18 months, 300 by 2 years
Telegraphic: Two or three word phrases i.e. where go? 18 to 24 months
Stage II grammar: between 2 and 3, includes for example ‘s’ as plurals, but may do generalisations - mouses
Adult-like speech: about 5-6 years old
However of course language development continues to be refined into later life
Carey 1978 suggest 6 year olds know how many words?
How many for adults?
14,000
Adults know around 70,000
Two arguments about language development, who are the proponents for each?
Rationalist/Nature
- Chomsky/pinker - we are born with it all
Nurture/Emprircist
- Skinner - we only learn language through entirely learnt structures
What is learning theory? Criticism?
Theory supporting Nurture/Empiricist argument.
Learned through classical condition.
We can give feedback for incorrect answers, but model the right answer - if it were purely conditioning you couldn’t give feedback for wrong answers at all
So there is a lack of negative feedback and feedback is not always consistent.
Also children make generalisation: ‘balereening’, hasn’t learned that directly
Children of deaf parents still babble in similar ways to children of hearing parents
What is Chomsky’s universal grammar theory?
Originally the language acquisition device
Language is not learned, it grows
idea is that you are born with a set of principles and parameters that constrain you to certain languages - these are different in different languages so the environment shapes how you output them.
Evidence for universal grammar regarding pidgin and creoles (bickerton 1981, 84)?
Pidgins develop to communicate and are highly simplified, but the children who grow up with it as a first language make it creole and this is syntactically rich
Like you have a biological drive to create syntax
Language bio program hypothesis
Evidence for universal grammar due to genetic language disorders?
Criticisms?
Specific language impairment - SLI - Van der lely & Stollawreck:
Highly heritable condition
Genetic component suggests that we have a natural ability for language
However some evidence it may also be to do with temporal and other aspects of cognition
Evidence for chomsky’s view of a critical period in the child Genie lennenberg.
Genie could learn vocab but never learned grammar - there may be a critical period.
The interactionist view of language development?
Likely biologically prepared in some way for language development, however the child is an active learner and language develops in the context of behavioural, social and cognitive development
