child development Flashcards
o Feral, unsocialized o Mental retardation? Social isolation? o People asked if they could “civilize” him o Raised fundamental questions: Innate vs. environmental? Can early experience be reversed?
Victor
o Severe isolation and abuse
o Mostly mute
o After rescue: learned to speak and play but was never “normal”
o Critical periods of development?
Genie
• Periods of Development
o Prenatal (conception to birth) o Infancy (birth to two years) o Early childhood (2-6 years) o Middle childhood (6-12 years) o Adolescence (12-18)
• Domains of development
o Social, emotional, cognitive, physical
• Contexts of development
o What shapes development?
Family
Culture
Community, school, peers
four fundamental issues
nature and nurture, plasticity, continuity/discontinuity, individual differences
nature and nurture
what are the sources of development? Biology vs. environment
plasticity
is development open to change?
sensitive periods
experience has strong effect on development
critical periods
experience is necessary for development
gradual change
o Quantitative
continuity
quick, abrupt change
o Qualitative
discontinuous
How are people unique?
How are people the same?
How stable are individual differences?
individual differences
• A conceptual framework that guides our understanding of observations
theory
classical conditioning, operant conditioning, modelings
social learning/behaviorism
♣ Watson: can turn a child into anything you wanted. Everything was based on experience
classical conditioning
♣ Reinforcement will be repeated and punishment associated with things will not be repeated
o Operant conditioning
♣ Learn behavior from models
♣ Bobo doll experiment (bandura)
♣ Woman beats up Bobo, children watch and then beat up Bobo
modeling
o Children start with a Schema: way of understanding world
o Go into the world and gain Experience: biological or environmental change
o Then adapt their schema:
♣ Assimilation (large–> small blocks)
♣ Accommodation (blocks–> legos)
o With every experience they have, they should be updating their schemas
o Stages of cognitive development (know ages and first two)
♣ Sensorimotor
♣ Pre-operational
♣ Concrete operational
♣ Formal operational
constructivism
o Emphasizes role of culture
sociocultural theory
gap between what a child can do and then next step they need to get to. Parents need to help them get to that next step.
o Zone of proximal development
o Environment of evolutionary adaptiveness (EEA)
♣ Ex: fight or flight
o Survival of the fittest
o Skills that children have are evolutionary adaptive (crying, motor skills etc.)
evolution darwin
• Ecological systems theory
o Takes focus off of the individual
o Focuses on larger systems
o From direct (friends, family, school) to very indirect (culture that they’re in, government that their under)
o Family systems therapy
cultural tools
• Material:
o The way your bedroom looks–boys typically messier than girls
o Different kinds of toys you give to each gender
• Symbolic
o Beliefs, values, and expectations are all built from conversation etc.
how is culture inherited?
o Imitation
o Explicit instruction
o Symbolic communication
what genetic makeup is
genotype
observable traits
phenotype
prenatal period
germinal, embryonic, fetal
germinal
♣ Conception (8-10 days)
♣ Cell proliferation
exist in early stages that can become anything, go in any direction can become liver, brain, etc.
♣ Totipotent stem cells
o Embryonic
♣ Germinal period- week 8 ♣ When zygote gets implanted and become embryo ♣ Amnion and chorion are formed ♣ Placenta ♣ Umbilical cord ♣ ♣ Cell differentiation (gastrulation) ♣ Epigenesis
o Fetal
♣ Embryonic period-birth
♣ All systems are present
♣ Increase in complexity and mass
♣ Responsive to environment
o Labor and birth
♣ 38-42 weeks gestation
♣ 3 stages: contractions(uterus is squeezing in on baby), PUSH, after-birth (placenta comes out)
childbirth in US
most are hospital births, and have an effect on the childs development
brain development
born with 10 billion neurons
experience-dependent
child are developing and learning about whats in their environment
experience-expectant
ready for certain input (sensitive periods)
phoneme distinction
babies can distinguish between phonemes within the first few months of life. can hear all different sounds
babies hear sounds produced in their native language
6-8 months
face recognition
o Innate preference for faces o Face-like forms o Preferences—upper vs lower half o Configuration vs. feature differences o 3 to 4 month year olds were sensitive to configuration
taste
o sweet preference: its calming, pain relief (because breast milk is sweet)
o don’t like sour and bitter, they make a face
intermodal perception
ability to combine senses
reflexes
grasping, sucking, rooting etc.
sensorimotor stage
coordinate sense with movement
sub stage 1
exercising reflex schemas: practicing their reflexes
subs tage 2
primary circular reactions: expand reflexes to new situations (can suck more than just nipples and repeat these)
difference between sub stage 1 and sub stage 2
go from noticing reflexes to actually using them for better more satisfying purposes
fine motor skills
what they can do with their hands (reaching, grasping)
gross motor skills
whole body (Crawl, walk)
fear of heights
developed around 9 months. Learned by experience
conceptual development
starting to move from sensorimotor to representational. starting to represent things in the world in their mind
object permanence
objects exist when out of sight
A not B error
hide toy then move it to a new location to hide right in front of them, and see if they can find the toy in the new location
criticism of Piaget
the tasks he had the kids doing were too difficult
alternative research methods
violation of expectations: show a kid something that couldn’t happen, and see their reaction
counting
o Sense of numerical properties, looking tasks, surprised at wrong numbers, intermodal
• Cause-effect relationships
o Squares bumping into squares o Causal or non-causal condition o Stared longer at non-causal o More complex objects o Learning process...
categorization
kids will group birds and airplanes together because they look the same
two ideas regarding infant’s emotions
differentiation and ontogenetic adaptation
differentiation
children seem to have fewer emotions, but have all emotions as adults but express them in a different way (crying)
ontogenetic adaptation
emotions serve a different purpose than adult’s emotions (ex: smiling…random)
intersubjectivity
shared emotional connection between a child and their caregiveer
primary intersubjectivity
interaction between infant and caregiver
secondary intersubjectivity
interaction with other things in the world
intersubjectivity gone wrong
still-face study
attachment
parent-child bond. • Sense of security
• Established by 7-9 months
attachment theories
drive reduction theory: freud’s theory, the reason children become attached is because they need food from parents.
ethological theory: bowlby’s theory, the parent serves as secure base of exploration for child
strange situation: separation and reunions
secure attachment strange situation
Strange situation task Child’s behavior
With parent. Freely explores
With stranger or alone. Exploration limited. Often upset.
Reunion Easily conforted. Returns to exploring.
ambivalent/resistant strange situation
Strange situation task Child’s behavior
With parent. Cautious. Low self exploration
With stranger/alone Very upset and negative
Reunion Not easily comforted. Seeks and resists affection
avoidant
Strange situation task Child’s behavior
With parent Freely explores. Ignores parent
With stranger or alone Not upset
Reunion Ignores or avoids parent
disorganized/traumatic
Strange situation task Child’s Behavior
With parent Disorganized, confused, often fearful
With stranger or alone Disorganized and confused, often fearful
Reunion Disorganized, confused, often fearful
Attachment: Socioemotional trajectories
- Secure: feel in control, low psychopathology
- Ambivalent/resistant: lack of control, anxiety and depression
- Avoidant: worse social relationships, behavior problems
- Disorganized/traumatic: world in incohesive, low sense of self, behavior problems, aggression, emotional dysregulation
developing sense of self
• 18-24 months
o differentiate self from others
o rouge test: put them in front of mirror and see if they can realize they are looking at themselves
o is the “self” just for humans
Social referencing
• Using others’ faces/emotions to understand ambiguous situations
visual cliff
language development
- requires biological and environmental inputs
- Universal progression
- Requires linguistic inputs
- Social-cultural variations
Pre-speech patterns
o Cooing (2-2.5 months) o Babbling (7-9 months) o Jargoning (9-12 months) o First word (12 months)
o Speech production
broca’s area
o Language comprehension
wernicke’s area
left hemisphere
language is more strongly located on the left side
noam chomsky
idea of universal grammar, language is innate and hard wired in people.
can primates learn language?
o Kanzi (Bonobo and the rumbaughs): did the tasks that the lady asked him to do
o Lexical keyboard and reinforcement learning
o 2-word uterances
o vocabulary (100’s of words)
o comprehend novel sentences?
how environment affects language development
o Genie
o Deaf children in non-signing homes
♣ Rudiments of language
♣ Low complexity
when two kids come together from different languages, kids can take grammatical structures of both and develop mixed language and it becomes a new language
pidgin languages
multi-lingualism
does it help or hurt language development
brain development in early childhood
- Myelination of frontal cortex
- Length and branching of neurons
- Synaptic pruning
- Uneven change— > variable development
Preoperational stage (Piaget)
- 2-6 years
- transition out of sensorimotor
- mental operations begin
centration
o fixate on one feature
o that thing is usually an immediate experience (no objectivity) start over generalizing, for example you see a CD player in a car and would expect them to be in all cars. Centered on one feature.
• Egocentrism
o Unable to take others’ perspective: can’t see things from another person’s perspective
o 3 mountains study
• confusing appearance and reality
o maynard the cat: cat wearing dog mask. Younger kids would say dog etc. older would say cat wearing a dog mask.
o Adults in costume
Precausal Reasoning
• Correlation = causation? • Reverse causality • Complexity? • Snoopy! o Ball causing snoopy to pop up, which ball? One or two
How do kids do this? (develop different forms of reasoning)
• Privileged domains
o Specialized, hard-wired forms of reasoning
o Born with naïve/rudimentary understanding of cause
o Directs attention to key features of environment
o Builds knowledge and skills
• Naïve Physics
o We are born to understand basic physical laws such as:
♣ Gravity
• Violation-of-expectations
• 5 vs. 7 month olds
• only 7 months looked longer at wrong acceleration
♣ gravity and inertia
• Naïve Psychology
o Theory of mind: theories of how other people think
o False belief tasks: seeing if you can trick a kid
o Influence of language and culture
Modularity Theory
• Distinct, innate mental modules • Triggered by environment • Autism and theory of mind o Naïve psychology: impaired o Naïve physics: often intact o Fail false-belief tasks
Theory Theory
• General theory-making ability
• Applied to specific domains
• Modified with experience
• Evidence—appropriate theories in given situations
o Ex: boys hangs on branch– > falls
o Ex: boy steps off stool wanting to float– > falls, disappointed
♣ Psychodynamic
- Vast majority of our behavior is a way to resolve internal conflicts
- Oedipus complex states that boys have a desire to kill dad, have sex with mom. Guilt reaction: identify with dad, distance from mom.
- Electra complex: Girls have desire to have a penis, kill mom, have sex with dad. Guilt reaction: identify with mom, distance from dad
- Evidence? No. untestable!
♣ Social learning
- We model what we see
- Differential reinforcement: girls are rewarded for “girl behaviors” and boys are rewarded for “boy behaviors” or get punished
- Role models? Parents, teachers, older siblings
♣ Cognitive development
• Taking a constructivist point of view
o New cognitive skills— > identity formation
• 3 stages (Kohlberg)
o 3 years: sex identity: can label yourself as boy or girl
o 3-5 years: sex stability: understanding that what sex you are in that moment is what you’ll be when you’re older
o 5-6 years: sex role constancy—can’t change your sex. No confusion of appearance vs. reality. Where is the start of sex-type behavior?
♣ Gender schema
• Starts very early
• Little kids get mental model of sex roles, attention is going to be guided towards these things. (encourage or discourage gender roles)
• Scripts for familiar events
• Information processing: boys/girls are being guided to attend certain activities
o Toy choice— > kids ask themselves: is it relevant to me?
o Yes? Gender category
o No? forgotten
♣ Cultural
• Gender roles
o Relative emphasis
o Rigidity of boundaries
• Girls can act like boys but its not as normal is boys act like girls
o Why? Possibly because male stereotype is stronger.
♣ Ethnic Identity
• In-group and out-group attitudes
• Clark & clark: “white bias” children chose white doll to play with
o Why? Identify with majority group? Devalue minority group? Desire for equality. Ex: power, wealth
o Less white bias when:
♣ Less power differential
♣ Greater parental activism
♣ Ethnic Socialization
• Ethnic relevant messages
• 4 types:
o Cultural socialization: pride in ethnicity
o Preparation for bias: ethnic discrimination
o Promotion of racial mistrust
o Egalitarianism: all equal
• African American parents
o 88%- had messages of cultural socialization
o 65%- had messages of racial mistrust
o higher cultural socialization— >higher cognitive skills
♣ Personal Identity
- I-self: subjective, sense of stable sense over time. Solidified in teenage/early adult years.
- Me-self: objective, in the moment, current physical characteristics.
• Young kids: more at me-self. Preoperational (low representational ability.) Unrealistically positive self-evaluations. Real self vs. ideal self. • Autobiographical memory o Personal narrative o Creates continuity in self o Parents ♣ Help kids recall events ♣ Probe and make connections ♣ Embellish or diminish details o Growing independence
personal identity
