DEVELOPMENT 1/2 Flashcards
Development
2
- Change and continuties that occurs within the individual between conception and death
- Developmental psychologists are looking at how individuals change over time, or how they stay the same.
Process that leads to developmental change:
Maturation
1.1
- The biologically timed unfolding of canges within the individual according to that individual’s genetic plan.
EX. a particular genetic plan might lead to a maturation timeline where they will grow their first baby tooth at 5 months old, start walking at 12 months, enter puberty at 12 years, and die at 8 years.
Process that leads to developmental change:
Learning
2.1
- Relatively permanent changes in our thoughts, behaviours, and feelings as a result of our experiences.
- The acquisition of neuronal representions of new information.
EX. Avoid touching a stove, looking both ways before crossing the street, that become automatic with continued practice.
Process that leads to developmental change:
Interactionist Perspective
3.2
- The veiw that holds that maturation and learning interact during develoment
- Some essential system (maturation) must develop before learning proceeds and vice versa.
- Without a minimal input of learning from the outside, maturation will be delayed.
EX. Development of muscles in the torso and limbs before child learns how to walk.
EX. A child fed with proper nutrition, but isolated in the dark will mature physically, however they will lack in developing normal vision, speech, motor, and social skills.
Studying Development
Habitutation Procedure
2
- Infants show interest in novel objects that can be measured throguh physiological/sensory response (i.e heart rate, breath or behavioural orienting responses)
- Novel objects show a burst of activity until the infant habituates to the stimuli, becoming a baseline.
Studying development
Habituation
1
- A decrease in the responseiveness to a stimulus following its repreated presentation
Studying Development
Dishabituation
1
- An increase in the responsiveness to a stimulus that is somehow different from the habituated stimulus
Studying Development
Event-Related Potentials (ERP)
2.1
- A special cap with electrodes is placed on the infants’s head to detect changes in electrical activities across a population of neurons.
- Particular behaviours will evoke change in various brain regions.
EX. Visual stimui will activate occipital lobe
Studying Development
High-Amplitude Sucking Method
3
- Measuring the baseline sucking rate in the absense of relevant stimuli.
- During the shaping procedure, the infant is presented is a control (i.e musical notes)
- If the infant likes the musical notes, they will suck for longer with a higher sucking rate. If they dislike the note, they continue sucking at the baseline rate or slower.
Studying Development
Preference Method
2
- When infants are presentd with two different stimuli, their attention is directed to one stimuli over the other.
- Generally not used until the researchers have determined if the infant can tell the difference between the two stimuli.
Studying Development
Competence-Performance
2
- An individual may fail a task not because they lack those cognitive abilities, but because they are unable to demonstrate those abilities.
- A researcher may strongly assume that failure to respond to your question means no preference.
Developmental Research Methods
Longitudinal Design
1.1
- A development reseaarch design in which the same indivudals are studied repeatedly over some subset of their lifespan.
EX. Testing the same people from age 5 until they are 75 y/o, tracking their development and the links between early to late life.
Developmental Research Methods
Drawbacks to Longitudinal Design
3
- Cost and time: expensive and time consuming
- Selective attrition: when people are more likely to drop out of a study than others, making sample non-representatie of the original poopulation.
- Practice effects: changes in partipant responses due to repreated testing.
Developmental Research Methods
Cross-Sectional Design
2.1
- A development research design in which individuals from different age groups are studied at the same point in time.
EX 30 Y/O do better than 50 Y/O, but not as good as 20 Y/O - As a result, researchers can formulate developmental trends according to age groups.
Developmental Research Methods
Drawbacks to Cross-Sectional Design
2
- Cannot distinguish age effect from generational effect
- Cannot directly assess indvidual develoment changes, where you are not really observing what happens as a person ages, but rather inferning trends in group data.
Hereditary Transmission
Conception
3
- Sperm meets ovum to form zygote
- Single cell contains 46 chromosomes, with 23 chrosmomes contributed by each parent.
- The chromosomes are made made of DNA whcih comprises the genes and chemical code for development (proteins)
Zygote
Monozygotic Twin
2
- AKA identical twin
- Genetically indentical because they come from the same sperm and ovum, which form one zygote and then split into two separate zygotes.
Zygote
Dizygotic Twins
2
- AKA fraternal twins
- Share 50% of genes because they come from two different sperm and ova, and start off as two different zygote.
Zygote
Full Genetic Siblings
1
- Occurs when monozygotic twins have a child with another monozygotic twins. Although their children are cousins they are 50% genetically identical.
Chromosomes
Sex Chromosomes
4
- Although all other chromosomes are identical between male and female, it is the 23rd chromosome that distinguishes the sex of the child.
- Females have two X (xx) chromsomes
- Males have one X and one Y (xy) chromsome.
- The mother passes only x chromosomes while the father can either pass down x or y.
Chromosomes
Genotype
1
- An individual’s inherited genes
Chromosomes
Phenotype
1
- The expression of an individual’s genotype in terms of obersbable characterisitcs (Phenotypic trait is often governed by multiple pairs of genes)
Patterns of Genetic Expression
Simple Dominant-Resseive inheritance
1
- A pattern of inheritane in whihc the expression of a trait is determined by a single pair of alleles
Simple dominant-recessive inheritance
Allele
2
- A specific form of a gene, where 1 allele is inherited by each parent.
- Different alleles are responsible for the possible variations in gene expression.
simple dominant-recessive inheritance
Homozygous
1
- When someone has two identical alleles of a particular gene.
simple dominant-recessive inheritance
Heterozygous
1.2
- When someone has two different alleles of a particular gene, one dominant, and one recessive
EX. Dominant allele is expression in the phenotype
EX. Recessive allele is not expressed but still heritable
Patterns of Genetic Expression
Polygenic Inheritance
3
- When the expression of a trait is determined by the interaction of multiple
- Many traits like height and weight are determined by the interactions of multiple genes which adds complexity.
- No single gene can account for most complex behaviour
Patterns of Genetic Expression
Codominance
1.1
- When the expression of a trait is determined equally by two dominant alleles.
EX. Blood type AB
Patterns of Genetic Expression
Sex-linked inheritance
1
- When the expression of a trait is determined by genes on the x or y chromosome.
Patterns of Genetic Expression
Pattern of X-linked inheritance
2
- A recessie trait located on the x chromsome.
- More likely to express itself in males than females.
EX. Comparitive chart
Patterns of Genetic Expression
Pattern of Y-linked inheritance
3
- y-liked traits have dominat effect because ther is only one Y chromosome.
- Only males can inherit and express y-linked gene.
- These y-linked genes cannont be masked, so if the gene is disease causing, it will show.
Interactionist Perspective
Nurturists
2
- Believes that external factors alone ultimately influence development
- Behaviorist Watson who suggests that with proper environmental control and training, any individual can be made to become a doctor, criminal, athlete etc.
Interactionist Perspective
Naturists
2
- Believes genes predetermine the path of development.
- If one has intelligent, good looking parents, who are very successful, you’ll be born with those traits
Interactionist Perspective
Canalization Principle
- Within a species, genotypes restricts the phenotype to a small number of possivle development problems, meaning that all members of a given species will share many phenotypic traits even though they had different interactions with their environment.
Normative Question
- Questions that ask how behaviours or processes change as a function of age.
EX. What behavioural or physiologcal changes should we expect to observe over the course of an individual’s normal development.
Analytic Question
- Ask about the underlying mechanisms that drive such changes in behaviours or processes as a function of age.
Androgen insensitivity Syndrome
- Individuals who are biologically male, but are resistant to the male hormone (androgens) that drive for male sex characterisitcs.
EX. Outwards physical characterisitics of female but with male reproductive organs.
Prenatal
Neural Plate
- Key developmental component of the nervous system. It is composed of primarily neural tissus that eveutally become the neural tube.
- Leads to the development of brain and spinal cord
Infancy and Childhood
Synaptic Pruning
- Rapid increase in synapse in the first year of postnatal life from perceieving and learning patterns about the world.
- Synaptic pruning is when the brain decreases number of sysnapses, by stripping away the unnecessary sysnapses.
Infancy and Childhood
Ocular Dominance Columns
- columns of neurons in the visual cortex that respond preferentially to information from one eye to the other.
- Both eyes are equally represented in a typical sighted individual; roughly half of the dominance columns receive input from the left eye, and half from the right eye.
Experience-dependent
- Our brains develop according to our own personal experiences
- Specific to each individual and subtle changes in brain structure across individuals
- Unique stimulation for beyond normal development
Experience-expectant
- Our brains have evolved to expect a certain amount of environmental input and with this input our
brains develop normally - Ordinary levels of visual and auditory and social input ensure that the brain develop properly
- Sufficient stimulation for normal development- A neural system whose development is critically dependent on inputs that are stable across sources.
- only proceeding normally if the animal receives the appropriate sensory input.
Sensitive Periods/ Critical periods
-Time windows early in development when an orgnaims must recieve certain input from their nervous system to develop normally.
EX. Even though these kittens were given regular sensory input after being deprived earlier in life, their ocular dominance columns never readjusted, and their vision was never as good as it was for control cats who received no visual deprivation.
- nervous system loses much of its plasticity after infancy, so if an organism is not raised in an enviornment that is typcal of its species, it may never acheive normal functioning.
Cataract example
- Even if the cataract is removed later in life and the eye receives visual input from that point forward, the person may forever have poor visual acuity, aka amblyopia (lazy eye)
- Likely due to the nondeprived eye early in life having more ocular dominance columns than the eye that was deprieved.
- TREATEMENT: patching stronger eye so that the competition for cortical space is lesson, and become equal with its lesser eye.
Plasticity
- The nervous system retains some flexibility even in the absesne of sensory input early in life.
- individuals born blind, the brain may maintain extra connections between different sensory areas, particularly those related to touch (somatosensory) and vision (visual).
- connections between somatosensory and visual areas that might be pruned in a sighted person are retained.
PIAGET: A MODERN VIEW OF COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT
- 4 stages of development
- Suggested specific stages of development, each with unique characterisitcs.
- The reality is more fluid and children actually have a greater grasp of logic than Piaget originally proposed.
Intelligence
Intelligence is broken down into two catergories:
1. Fluid intelligence: the speed/efficiency of our intellectural processing which declines with age.
2. Crystallized intelligence: Our accumulated knowledge which increases with age.
