Development Flashcards
Developmental Psychology Definitions
A field that examines biological, physical, psychological and behavioural changes that occur throughout life.
The scientific study of how and why human beings change over the course of their life.
Normative Events
Age-related events that most people will go through at some point e.g. first day of school.
Non-normative Events
Atypical or unexpected events e.g. 911 or losing a family member.
Scenario: Sam is a disruptive child in school who isn’t making progress however seems smart to teachers.
The reasons for disruptiveness could potentially be hearing difficulties, developmental/metal disabilities e.g. autism or ADHD, peer interactions and bullying.
Nativism
Biological predisposed/innate capacities e.g. language: infants are born with an innate ability to acquire any language.
Empiricism
Blank slate is an idea that all ideas and knowledge are gained through the senses and experiences.
What Can Infants Do
At 14 weeks infants develop binocular vision, at 6 months depth perception arrives (sometimes earlier at 2 months), taste after 2 hours, at 2 days old they can recognise their mothers smell, at birth they can turn their head in the direction of noise at birth and recognise their mothers voice.
What Infants Want
There was a study on the types of sounds that children enjoyed by measuring their physical responses and created an ideal song that is used to make them less upset.
Infant Skills
Infants are born with reflexes that aid survival e.g. rooting reflex that help them locate food and sucking reflex to get the food. These reflexes can be used to learn what the infants can do.
Hearing & Memory Learning
An experiment was done where mothers would read stories to the fetus (3.5 hours). The experimenter read the same story when the newborns were 55 hours old and saw that there was an increase in the sucking reflex when stories from the womb were heard.
Visual Acuity
Visual acuity was tested with stripes measuring 1/8, 1/16, 1/32 and 1/64 inches apart with a grey square placed next to them. The finest lines the child could differentiate from the grey square would show their visual acuity. This showed that children under a month old could see 1/8 inch strips whereas at 6 months they could see 1/64 inch strips.
Infant Motor Development
At 2-4 months they prone and use arms to sit, at 5-7 months they sit without support, 5-10 months they can stand with support, 6-10 months they can pull themselves to standing position, at 10-14 months they can stand alone easily and at 11-14 months they can easily walk alone.
Monozygotic Twins
These are known as identical who share 100% of their DNA and have the same genome.
Dizygotic Twins
These are known as fraternal twins who have the same gene similarity as normal siblings.
Genotype
The genetic make-up (blueprint) of an individual.
Phenotype
The expression of genes in an individuals physical appearance and/or behavioural tendencies.
Twins
These are a good experimental group for nature vs nurture studies. This is done with identical and fraternal twins, some who shared a common childhood environment and some who didn’t.
Hereditability
In terms of intelligence 70% of variation due to genes other majorly hereditary traits are height, weight and smoking.
Teratogens
These are external agents (environmental influences) that can cause abnormal development before birth e.g. fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD). This occurs due to exposure to alcohol in utero. This results in facial and brain abnormalities as well as psychological impairments such as low intellectual capacity, poor attention and perception, inhibition and social difficulties.
Perceptual Attunement
An example of this is language attunement where infants are sensitive to linguistic contrasts in all languages. Between 6 and 12 months infants ‘attune’ to their natural linguistic environment (only process sounds that are present in the linguistic environment). This perceptual attunement may not occur with children with reading difficulties e.g. dyslexia.
Habituation Paradigm
An example of this is when a native sound is played until and infant listening gets bored (a 50% decrement in average looking times) after which a non-native (new) sound is played and see if they notice (increased looking time). Infants between 9 and 12 months at risk of dyslexia are just as interested in sounds that aren’t important in their linguistic environment as sounds that are showing a lack of habituation.
Gene Effects
Genes aren’t the be all and end all of everything we do. This is because context is crucial and despite being born with a certain hardware (phone) you can still learn things and develop (download apps).
Zone of Proximal Development
A discovery by Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934). This showed that children might exhibit the same behaviour but with appropriate support (teaching or scaffolding) one of these children might progress while the other isn’t ready to do so yet.
Sensitive/Critical Period for Language
This is seen in the story of Genie. She was a child who was locked away from the world for 13 years and didn’t learn how to speak. She was then raised by a scientist and continued to develop her skill in movement and language. Even after years of work however her speech abilities were very diminished and she wasn’t able to use grammar properly. This shows some evidence for the need for exposure to language to learn it and this has to occur before a certain age.