Child Development L3 Flashcards
What do most critics of Piaget’s theories on child development assert?
He underestimated children’s abilities at various ages
What’s the first critic of piaget’s theories?
Babies don’t seem to start with nothing
What are the three broad categories that indicate that babies don’t seem to start with nothing?
- Space and object
- Number and mathematical reasoning
- Social cognition
What are the things under the category of space and objects that indicate babies don’t start with nothing?
- The Visual Cliff
- The Effect of Occlusion
- Understanding of Support
- Object Permanence
What is the visual cliff, how does it indicate that babies don’t start with nothing?
- Experimental procedure where have a solid cliff and then glass
- Children appear to be able to perceive depth around the time they can crawl (6-9 months roughly)
- Even pre-crawling infants may be able to discriminate between the two sides of the “cliff”
What is the effect of occlusion, how does it indicate that babies don’t start with nothing?
- Understand that even if something is behind something else (occluded) that it still exists)
- Proven by the habituation procedure: infants prefer to pay attention to novel things
- Over time they become accustomed to stimuli and pay less attention to them
- The moment something “new” happens they pay attention again
- We can use this behaviour pattern to find out which of two stimuli infants perceive as more novel
- The picture that doesn’t obey the occlusion principle will be looked at longer therefore indication infants as young as 4 months grasp the concept
What is an understanding of support, how does it indicate that babies don’t start with nothing?
- Tested by a experiment where a hand holds blocks in different positions. Only one has the block supported by something and thus when the hand lets go the block won’t move the rest would see the block fall
- Infants have the ability to recognize this as it develops gradually over 6 months
What specific aspect of object permanence indicates that babies don’t start with nothing?
- The A not B error i.e infants search in the last place they found the object rather than when last saw it
- However, if look closely the infants gaze is actually directed to the right place
- It seems that they don’t really think that the object is in the place they search for it
- The error simply appears to represent difficulty overriding a motor habit
How does number and mathematical reasoning indicate that infants don’t start with nothing?
- Piaget said that infants had no concept of number and couldn’t conserve number until they were around 6 years old
- But even 6-months old show some understanding of number
What experiments were used to show that infants have an understanding of number?
- Form of the habituation task, if infants have been habituated to see of set of three things they will look longer at a set of 2 things (as novel) indicating they understand the difference
- Show set of 3 objects and a set of 2 objects. Speaker booms twice will look at set of 2 (opposite if speaker booms three times)
What is social cognition?
Having an understanding of people
Would babies rather look at normal faces or scrambled faces, what does this indicate?
Normal, indicates they are born with some social understanding.
What is second way that babies show some social cognition?
At 3 weeks old, infants will attempt to imitate facial expressions, piaget said this would not occur until age 2
What is a habit that indicates babies are not as egocentric as piaget thought?
9-month-olds will look in the direction of their mother’s gaze
What experiment shows that infants have an understanding of intentions?
- Habituate babies to the reach for the objects you want (iPhone). Then swap position of objects.
- 6 month old’s understood that the object being reached for is separate to the reach itself as they find it weirder if you keep the reach rather than the intention of getting the iPhone
- Infants of this age appear to understand actions in terms of intended goals
