Dev Flashcards
Decasper
asked mothers to repeat one of two nursery rhymes from 33 weeks pregnancy to 37 weeks pregnancy. Then both rhymes were played through a speaker while measuring the heartrate of the foetus (i.e. one novel rhyme and one habituated rhyme).
Slater et al.
habituated 2D shapes to neonates and measured looking times at dishabituation when presenting a novel and a habituated shape. Babies looked longer at the novel shapes.
habituated babies to seeing a rod moving behind the block and then either presented them with a whole rod or two rods without the block. New-born babies looked for longer at the whole rod compared to the two rods suggesting greater surprise that the object was whole. 4 months olds are more surprised by the broken rod. This suggest that at birth we perceive objects as we see them but by 4 months we recognise that objects exist beyond our visual field.
Baillargeon et al.
habituated infants to a drawbridge going down. Then they introduced an object which should get in the way and prevent the drawbridge closing. They look longer at the impossible event, which may suggest surprise. However, it may just be more interesting to watch a drawbridge go down completely.
made a new study whereby the track of a car is exposed before the car passes through it. Sometimes, there is a block in the way, sometimes the block is not in the way. Children look longer when the block is in the way.
believed that we may have in innate disposition to understand the world, but we learn quickly how to interact with the world. However, this doesn’t explain why children make the blatant errors that they do.
Spelke
argued that children show abilities and understanding of the world very early on, too early for it to be learned through experience. Therefore, knowledge and abilities may be inbuilt.
Gergely et al
14-month-olds observe someone using their head to turn off a light with their hands either free or occupied. Children are more likely to copy and use their head to turn the light on/off if their hands are not occupied. This may suggest that they understand the motive of others; if their hands are free there must be another reason for using their head, if their hands are occupied, that is the reason for not using hands.
Wood and Middleton
used a scaffolding approach to teach a child to build a pyramid. Interventions were categorised from low control/general prompts/physically demonstrating. Learning was more successful when parents moderate their support against how the child is doing (only supporting when they need it).
Ramani and Siegler
children are better at counting and reading numbers after playing a game wherein they interact with numbers and see the linear relationship of numbers. This suggested that their practice of working with numbers improved their later performance because they generalise the information and apply new information across different problems.
Saffran et al.
habituated 8-month-olds to continuous speech of 4 made up words. One word was “bidaku”. ‘bi’ is always followed by ‘da’ which is always followed by ‘ku’. ‘ku’ is followed by the start of any of the words, so this difference in probability can segregate words. When playing a word that doesn’t follow this rule, children listened longer to new words. This suggest they have a mechanism for statistical learning
Eiman et al.
Differences in phonemes are categorised very early on; 1 month olds changed sucking rates when they heard words that crossed phoneme barriers (pa to ba) but not when the words were the same.
Werker and Tees
sensitivity to phoneme differences in other languages declines but sensitivity to phoneme differences in their own language increases. This shows that they focus on learning their own language through the mechanism of phoneme concentration
Berko
hildren accurately end multiples of words with an ‘s’ or the past participle of words with a ‘ed’ even with new words.
Golinkoff et al.
children accurately tell the active agent in a sentence from 24 months old even when using a made-up word.
Berman et al.
4-year-olds look at the broken doll if ‘look at the doll’ is said in a sad way compared to the complete doll if it is said in a happy tone. This differentiation was not successful amongst 3-year-olds.
