Developmental Flashcards
What is developmental psychology?
- Examining psych across the lifespan
- Understanding psych as a dynamic process
- Often focused on childhood and early life - but not exclusively
What is the point of studying developmental psychology? What does it investigate?
Nature vs nurture - social and biological interactions
Education
Toy companies
Look at predisposed vulnerability to things
Understanding processes as they develop - tracking trajectory
Aiming for more generalisable theories and claims - different ages
Understanding the role of environment
How is development studied?
Observations, longitudinal studies, animal studies, questionnaires/ interviews, twin and family studies, adoption studies
What is the nativist position?
Emphasis on innate endowments.
The idea that we are ‘pre-programmed’.
Which psychologists follow the nativist position?
Descartes, Chomsky, Spelke
What is the empiricist position?
Emphasis on environmental influence and the role of learning/ observing/ culture
Which psychologists follow the empiricist position?
Locke, Bandura, Gopnik
What is the neuro-constructivist approach?
Emphasis on relative contributions of nature and nurture, on the assumption that both are important and that they may have a reciprocal relationship.
Which psychologists follow the neuro-constructivist approach?
(Plomin, Karmiloff-Smith)
How much genetic info do MZ and DZ twins share?
- Monozygotic (MZ) twins share 100% genetic make-up as they are split from one egg.
- Dizygotic (DZ) twins share 50% of their genes, from 2 eggs. This is the same as non-twin siblings.
How do twin studies help us draw conclusions about the heritability of certain traits?
Twin studies use statistical models to examine the differences in correlations between the two twin types to draw conclusions about heritability of certain traits
What is the Twins early development study (TEDS)?
- Using birth records of all twins born in England and Wales between 1994 and 1996, the parents of potential participants were contacted and the families invited to take part in the TEDS study.
- Over 15,000 pairs of twins originally signed up for the study.
- Completing studies and questionnaires in person, over the telephone and on the web at roughly yearly intervals throughout their lives so far.
- DNA samples have also been gathered from more than 5,000 pairs of twins.
What is the ‘gold standard’ of twin studies?
The ‘gold standard’ of systematically studying the influence of genes is to look at MZ twins who have been raised apart (tricky!)
- Discounts the role of environment, as most twins have a very similar upbringing
What do adoption studies look at?
The role of environment
What is the critical period?
When you are more attuned to learning or growth than normal
- Critical periods for attachment and language learning
What research did Konrad Lorenz (1930s-40s) do on critical periods?
- Ducklings follow the mother duck around.
- Lorenz taught the ducklings to follow him around instead (“imprinting”).
- Their behaviour was experience-dependent
What does imprinting depend on? (Hess, 1958)
Age and distance
What should be considered when choosing a method of study?
- Does it answer the question you want to ask?
- Is it appropriate?
- Are there other factors that can influence your findings?
What are strengths, limitations and examples of observational studies?
Eg. play session observations, playground observations etc
- Gives us key naturalistic information, but hard to code objectively and reliably
What is habituation? (looking paradigms)
We expect infants to tire of seeing the same sort of thing, so we show it until total looking decreases, then change it
What is preferential looking? (looking paradigms)
We show 2 items and expect to see them look more to a target than a distractor
What are combined habituation trials? (looking paradigms)
Combined habituation trials with a preferential looking test at the end to see whether they react to novelty
How is neuroimaging used to study developmental psych?
- EEG can give us good time-based info about brain activity
- Structural MRI can tell us about brain growth and structure
- fMRI can tell us about activation in regions of the brain with great precision, but require stillness and safety checks (no metal)
- fNIRS allows neural activation without fMRI, but less precise
What were Piaget’s constructivist beliefs?
“Children are active thinkers, constantly trying to construct more advanced understandings of the world”
- Not passively experiencing things, instead trying to understand rules and governing forces
- They construct ways of understanding the world: schemata
- These can be patterns of behaviour, mental models, or mental operations
What are the two processes of learning and what does this aim to achieve? (Piaget)
Assimilation: (process of generalising) application of old schema to a new instance (calling a cat a dog)
Accommodation: development of a new schema (calling a cat a cat, or even a Persian cat).
Aims to achieve equilibration
What are the Piagetian stages?
Birth-2yrs = Sensorimotor Stage
2-7yrs = Preoperational Stage
7-11yrs = Concrete Operational Stage
11 yrs up = Formal Operational Stage
What develops during the Sensorimotor stage? (0-2)
This stage is the initial building block of everything else
During this stage, the child has a very limited number of skills at her disposal, which develop:
- Sensory abilities (vision, touch, hearing, etc)
- Motor & Sensorimotor abilities
- Gradually, these allow for the development of cognition – understanding & representing the surrounding world.
What skill develops by the end of the sensorimotor stage?
Object permanence - we have to know an object still exists when we aren’t looking
- 4 – 8 months. Initially, “Laurent’s reaction to falling objects still seems to be non-existent: he does not follow with his eyes any of the objects which I drop in front of him.” ‘out of sight, out of mind’
- 8-12 months. The child knows that occluded objects still exist (basic “object permanence”): “Laurent searches in front of him for a paper ball which I drop above the coverlet.”.
- However… the child is still subject to the A not B error
What is the A-not-B error?
We have to know that an object is where it was last acted upon, not elsewhere
- This is where the 8-12 month olds fall down!
- Babies stick with the location they think the object belongs in, and not the location they saw someone put it - fail to understand that objects cannot move on their own
What develops during the pre-operational stage? (2-7)
- In the early part of the Preoperational Stage (the pre-conceptual period 2-4 years) there is a rapid increase in language
- Piaget put this down to the development of symbolic thought
- Make-believe play and imitation arise here
- They are thinking symbolically but not use cognitive operations
What is egocentrism and when does this develop?
Only viewing things from one’s own perspective
Developed by end of pre-operational stage
What is conservation and when does this develop?
Being able to judge the amount there is of something, even if one is more spread out/ a different shape
e.g. same number of beads but one set is more spread out - able to recognise it is still the same number
Developed by end of pre-operational stage
What is class inclusion and when does this develop?
Being able to consider a subset and a full set at once
e.g. brown and green beads - ask a child if there are more brown beads or more beads, they should say more beads
Developed by end of pre-operational stage
What develops during the concrete operational stage (7-11)
- This is characterized by the development of organized and rational thinking
- The ability to pass egocentrism, conservation and class inclusion tasks in an intuitive way develops by the end of the preoperational period (5-7 years), but logical justification is only given in the concrete operational stage
What tests do concrete operational children pass?
- By this stage they pass the egocentrism test: decentration has occurred according to Piaget (the ability to consider different perspectives)
- They also pass the conservation test, meaning they understand:
- Reversibility: the ability to imagine the opposite of a perceived transformation.
- Invariance: that things stay the same unless something has been added or subtracted.
- They also pass the class inclusion test
What is seriation and transitive inference and when does this develop?
Concrete operational stage (7-11)
- Seriation - able to sort things in order of length
- Transitive inference - compare two values by using their relation to an intermediate value
What is developed during the formal operational stage? (11+)
- In this stage, children can reason logically about objects that are not currently present.
- They can also conduct verbal reasoning, which deals with logical thought about totally hypothetical scenarios. ‘Edith is taller than Susan. Edith is shorter than Lily. Who is the tallest?’
What are criticisms of conservation?
Many different kinds - length, liquid, mass, area, volume
Number conservation usually develops by 5-6 years and volume conservation not until 10-11 years (e.g. water level rising when something put in)
How did Piaget respond to criticisms of conservation?
He adapted it to include the idea that concepts (e.g. conservation), once acquired, might not be immediately applied to all cases.
What are criticisms of experimenter effects in Piagetian studies of childrens’ abilities?
- ‘The experimenter is up to something funny, I’ll play along’
- Children have seen the experimenter make the change, so the experimenter is repeating the question because she wants a different answer this time.
- If instead of the experimenter, naughty teddy makes the transformation, preoperational children pass.
- Perceived trust of experimenter, no trust of naughty teddy - characteristics of experimenter have an impact
- Children don’t trust beards - effect of dad having beard?
What are criticisms of language effects in Piagetian studies of childrens’ abilities?
- Preoperational children fail the class inclusion task (‘are there more brown beads or beads?’)
- But if rephrased to emphasise the class, they pass!
Showed four toy cows, three black, one white, all asleep:
‘Are there more black cows or more cows?’ > ‘black cows’
‘Are there more black cows or more sleeping cows?’ > ‘sleeping cows’
What are criticisms of memory effects in Piagetian studies of childrens’ abilities?
This is big in transitive inference
- Bryant and Trabasso (1971) argued that the main problem for children in inferring the difference between A and C was in remembering the premises (A>B and B>C)
- Assessing children’s working memory - not whether they can perform the operation
- Children who were trained to remember these premises passed.
What are criticisms of methods in Piagetian studies of childrens’ object permanence?
When looking time rather than reaching is used, children in the sensorimotor stage seem to have a concept of object permanence (Kellman & Spelke, 1983).
How do Vygotsky’s beliefs differ from Piaget’s?
- One of the fundamental ideas behind Piaget is that learning occurs through interaction with the environment
- But what if learning is something that occurs in a social context
- From this angle the individual constructs knowledge - not through solitary interaction with the world or the environment, but in a social context.
What did Vygotsky believe about children’s development?
“What a child can do in co-operation today he can do alone tomorrow”.
- The child uses tools provided by culture: real tools (pens, paper) & symbolic tools (maths, language).
- And they are taught by others – it doesn’t come from the child
What is the zone of proximal development and scaffolding?
- The learner has a Zone of Proximal Development.
- “Distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance, or in collaboration with more capable peers.”
- The teacher provides ‘scaffolding’ for learning (Wood et al 1976 ; Bruner, 1986).
What did Kellman and Spelke’s object permanence experiment show?
- Kellman and Spelke (1983) habituated 4-month-old infants to a rod with an occluder in the middle
- Infants then habituated - show infant same thing over and over, eventually the amount of time they pay attention decreases each time - habituation occurs when attention reaches less than 50% of attention on first trial
- They present objects without occluder - infants dishabituate to a broken rod, but not to the one that’s intact
- See broken rod as a new object
- We see the same with other shapes and patterns
- This suggests that they were perceiving the object as being whole, without ever seeing it being whole
- This means they must have some representation of the object?
What is Spelke’s theory of core knowledge?
Young infants have many core cognitive capacities available to them
Object representation
Number
Space
Agents and actions
- Innate, domain-specific systems of knowledge.
- Each system has its own set of core principles
- Learning is an enrichment of the core principles
Why do infants fail object permanence tasks and search paradigms according to Spelke?
- Infants aren’t good at motor movements, but can do looking tasks, this is why they fail object permanence tasks
- Many of these core capacities cannot be seen in search paradigms, but can be observed with looking measurements
What is core knowledge of agents and actions? (Spelke)
- If infants see a hand moving to grab something, and then change goals they look for longer
- If they know a hand is going to grab the same object, they don’t look for as long - they may know that the same object is there
What are weaknesses of looking time experiments?
Looking times are a fragile measurement – effects are small and some inferences have been oversold, also only one trial per infant
What is core knowledge of objects? (Spelke and Baillargeon)
- Infants can represent the spatial location of objects, the fact that they exist continuously - don’t just disappear (even if hidden), and the fact that solid objects cannot pass through one another
- They perceive the unity of a partly hidden object by analysing the movements and configuration of its visible surfaces.
- Baillargeon (1985) - violation-of-expectation paradigm with 3½ month-olds - they looked longer (dishabituation) at an impossible event when a moving object (drawbridge) passed through a solid object than the possible event
What are criticisms of Spelke’s core knowledge of objects?
- Individual variation: in the drawbridge study, only fast habituators show the effects.
- Need for careful control: when habituated to the impossible event, babies looked longer at the possible event: just interested in novelty (Cashon & Cohen 2000)? Just training infants to believe a certain thing?
What is core knowledge of numbers? (Spelke)
Xu & Spelke (2000) tested if 6 month olds had an ‘approximate number’ system for distinguishing between large sets:
Two sets of squares each containing different numbers of dots, but each varying the size and layout of the dots
Tested whether infants could tell the difference between the numbers despite the varying sizes and layouts
Habituated to one set with one number, tested on a square with that number and a square with a different number
Result: 6 month-olds looked longer at the new number than at the old number. Therefore they can discriminate between a set of 8 and a set of 16.
They cannot discriminate between 8 and 12 in this way, so it is only approximate!
What are criticisms of core knowledge of numbers?
- Mix, Huttenlocher & Devine (2002) points out that infants may have been responding not to number but to ‘contour length’
- So imagine putting a piece of string around each dot, and then putting those strings end to end.
- If during habituation, infants were paying attention to contour length, then in test they could have looked longer at the novel number purely because it had a very different contour length – not because they perceived number!
- Plus, these contour length differences weren’t so large in the 8 vs 12 condition, which might explain the null result there.
What did Fiegenson (2005) find out about infant perceptions of number?
Showed that infants computed number when objects differed in colour, pattern and texture
However, when objects were identical they instead computed continuous extent (area filled by objects), and if there was a different number but same continuous extent they viewed this as the same
What is core knowledge of space? (Spelke) (The Blue Wall study)
Blue Wall study (Hermer & Spelke, 1994)
18-24 month olds
Hide teddy in one corner, disorient child by spinning them round, observed where child will look for teddy
One out of four walls were blue - geometric cues
Rats can use geometric info to figure out sense of direction, children search at geometrically correct corners but do not take colour into account as a cue
Spelke concludes they have a geometric module for reoreintation, which is impervious to colour information
What are criticisms of core knowledge of space?
- Cheng & Newcombe (2005) point out that the room used by Hermer & Spelke was very small (1.2 x 1.8m).
- Toddlers do use colour for reorientation in a large room (Learmonth et al 2002).
What is Gopnik’s theory of the scientist in the crib?
Alison Gopnik argues that very young infants think like scientists
- They are observing the statistics of their environments; forming and testing hypotheses, and revising their theories on the basis of new data
- Contrast with Piaget who thought young children were irrational and illogical, she thinks they are rational but do not know much
What evidence is there that babies can make inductive inferences? (Deducing something about the population from a sample) (Gopnik)
Habituated to a box with mostly white balls or mostly red balls, experimenter pulls a sample of balls out of the box which are the majority colour, then shows the box to the infant which is mostly the opposite colour or the expected colour.
8 -month-olds look longer at the unexpected display
They can make inferences about the population from a sample
What evidence is there that infants can infer causality?
Can 3-4 year olds give objects with the same causal powers the same name? (Gopnik & Sobel, 2000)
- Children are given experience of objects (‘blickets’) which had a new causal power: the ability to make a machine (‘blicket detector’) light up.
- Child is shown that two of these make it light up & play music; two don’t.
- Then shown one that does, and told “this one is a blicket. Can you show me another blicket?”
- Results: they chose the one with the same causal powers on 74% of trials.
- Objects with the same function are grouped together, not objects with the same shape
What are Spelke’s key ‘core knowledge’ beliefs?
Knowledge is innate
Knowledge is domain specific
Learning as consolidation and enrichment of the starting position
Learning through language and symbol systems
What are Gopnik’s ‘Infant scientist’ beliefs?
- Some innate knowledge
- Knowledge is not domain specific
- Learning can fundamentally alter the existing understanding
- Learning through exploration and seeking out evidence
Gopnik or Spelke: “What’s it like being a baby? It’s like being in love in Paris for the first time after you’ve had three double espressos”
Gopnik
Gopnik or Spelke: “young infants appear to make inferences about the hidden motions of inanimate, material objects in accord with.. principles”
Spelke
Gopnik or Spelke: “Infants are world-class learners and can be trusted to select, more or less on their own, experiences that will enhance their learning”
Spelke
Gopnik or Spelke: “babies only gradually learn about hidden objects”
Gopnik
Gopnik or Spelke: “[babies] are born knowing a great deal, they learn more, and we are designed to teach them”
Gopnik
Gopnik or Spelke: “development leads to the enrichment of conceptions around an unchanging core”
Spelke
Gopnik or Spelke: “clever mothers from time immemorial have discovered that the best way to get a chance to actually get to cook dinner is to give the baby free rein in the pots-and-pans cupboard”
Gopnik
Why should we care about neural development?
It allows us to examine physical brain growth, or development of functional networks
It allows us to relate behaviour in development to to the structures and networks which underpin it
What does more white matter in language areas of the brain in childhood mean?
Means better language abilities
How is neural development measured?
EEG, fMRI, MEG, NIRS
What is EEG?
Tests electrical activity in the brain
Very high temporal resolution
Low spatial resolution
Can be used in early infancy
What is fMRI?
Measures changes associated with blood flow
Very high spatial resolution
Requires stillness which can be tricky
Not appropriate if there is metal in the body - Problem for children with cochlear implants (metal) where you might want to use fMRI to look at language related regions in the brain
What is MEG (magnetoencephalography)
Measures magnetic fields produced by the electrical currents in the brain
Very high temporal resolution
Requires some tolerance from the participant
What is NIRS?
Uses Near Infra-Red (NIR) light to measure light scattering and absorption, allowing us to measure change in blood flow
Trade off between spatial and temporal resolution
Can be used early
What is executive function? What abilities does it encompass?
An umbrella term for the processes underlying conscious, goal-directed thought, most often in novel circumstances.
Inhibitory control
Monitoring/ updating working memory
Planning
Problem-solving
Attention-switching
Forward planning
What is the Cloth-pulling task for EF? (Means-end behaviour)
A test of means-end behaviour Willats (1999)
6- to 8-month-old infants are presented with an object which they can only retrieve by an intermediary action (pulling it towards them on a supporting cloth)
7-month-olds would sometimes retrieve the object by chance (without watching it during their response)
8-month-olds demonstrated intentional means-end behaviour: they looked at their ‘goal’ when pulling the ‘means’
This required them to execute a sequence of actions in the correct order – an executive function task.
If this, then that = means to end
What is the Towers of Hanoi task? (Shallice, 1982) (Klahr and Robinson, 1981)
Can only move one disk at a time
Can only put small on large, not other way round
Measures Problem-Solving and Planning
Improvement with age
Older children could pursue long-term goals
Can also manage subgoals
What brain area is EF strongly associated with? Phineas Gage?
Prefrontal cortex
Phineas Gage lost a lot of executive function due to PFC injury
How is the brain a bit like a computer processing information?
Cognition can be thought of as the flow of information through a series of stores (Atkinson & Shiffrin 1968).
Baddeley & Hitch (1974) propose that there is a central executive controlling what to attend to, how to encode it, and what to prioritise.
How does the PFC change throughout development?
The PFC changes throughout childhood and into adolescence – including synaptic pruning; increased myelination & connectivity; increase & subsequent decrease in gray matter (Giedd et al, 1999)
How does PFC development compare to other brain areas?
Myelin improves connection speed in different areas of the brain - PFC becomes myelinated much later than other areas
Explains why children’s inhibition of responses develops a lot later than other functions like language
How does EF relate to the A not B error?
At 8-12 months, the child makes a perseverative error, continuing to search at A after the object moves to B. With age, errors decrease, as does the delay period over which the child will search correctly.
This demonstrates difficulties in set-shifting, inhibition and working memory
What did Diamond (1990) find out about the A not B task in monkeys and the PFC?
Diamond (1990) showed that in monkeys, A-not-B task performance was governed by the PFC
Infant monkeys with lesions of dorsolateral prefrontal cortex showed no evidence of passing at delays of 2,5, or 10 sec even by the end of their testing
Lesions of dorsolateral prefrontal cortex produced a profound deficit on the A-not-B task as long as any demand whatsoever was placed on memory
What did Bell and Fox (1992) find out about EEG differences and the A not B task?
EEG differences in 7-12 month old infants who can vs those who cannot solve the A not B task after a long delay:
Power of EEG signal at frontal electrodes (lots of change in strong group)
Coherence of EEG signal between front and back electrodes
Individual differences in brain activity (related to maturation of PFC) explain some of the individual differences in A not B performance
What is the dimension card change sort experiment?
A test of attentional shifting (Zelazo, Frye & Rupus, 1996)
3- and 4-year-olds asked to sort a stack of cards either by colour or shape
Half way through the game, the rule changes
Despite answering correctly to questions concerning the game ‘rules’, at 3 years children typically continue sorting cards with respect to the first dimension.
By 4-5 years they switch successfully.
They lack the ability to switch attention between aspects of the scene (colour and shape) – a central executive task.
At 3-4 years, executive function is still developing.
What is the Wisconsin Card Sorting Task?
Another measure of attentional shifting, but relates to flexibility as well – you don’t know the rules!
What direct evidence is there that developmental changes in PFC function accompany changes in executive function? (Moriguchi et al, 2009)
Children do card sorting task while brain activity is recorded via NIRS (near infra-red spectroscopy – measuring blood oxygenation related to brain function)
Nearly all aged 5 but only 75% aged 3 successfully switch rules
Change in blood oxygenation in prefrontal areas between control phase (sort blank cards) and study. Compare 3s who pass vs fail (persevere) - different strengths of EEG activity
What is an issue with using the stroop task on children?
It requires literacy
What alternatives to the Stroop task are used on children?
Day/Night task is commonly used (Gerstadt et al 1994)
Stop-signal task (Pliszka, Lotti & Woldorff, 2000):
Press left for A, right for B.
If S appears, stop your response and don’t press anything
Go/NoGo task (Jonkman, Sniedt , Kemner 2007):
6-7yrs, 9-10 yrs, adult
Press a button when the letter X appeared, but only when it was preceded by the A (Go condition). When an A is followed by another letter, inhibit your prepared response (A-not-X, NoGo condition).
What are neural activation differences in different ages during the Go/No-go task?
All ages: medial frontal cortex more active during NoGo task.
Children only: additional posterior source, different for 6-7yrs and 9-10 yrs.
Johnstone, Barry, and Clarke (2007)
At 7 – 12 years, little or no developmental change in behavioral measures on Go/No-Go and Stop tasks
But important changes in the neural mechanisms that accompanied performance. For instance, the central and parietal ‘‘No- Go’’ N2 component decreased in amplitude with age, whereas the parietal ‘‘Stop’’ N2 component increased in amplitude with age across this developmental period.
What does tracing neurodevelopmental trajectories provide? (Astle & Scerif, 2009)
“Tracing neurodevelopmental trajectories provides an additional layer at which executive control mechanisms can be distinguished.”
How much of our brains does visual processing take?
Over half
What are VEPs? (visual evoked potentials)
The scalp activity recorded as a result of visual stimuli
How is VEP measured?
- Only a few electrodes if studying one specific part of brain
- Identifying brain activity not muscle activity
- Put many brain responses on top of each other to create an average over time to hunt within general noise to find a reliable reaction to what you’re seeing
Can infants tell the difference between random change and orientation change?
Braddick (1993) found cortical orientation develops as early as 3 weeks
By 5 weeks we show very strong evidence of orientation perception
They are sensitive to relatively small changes in degree of orientation by 3 months (e.g. Franklin et al 2010)
- Could happen earlier - could be limitations of tools
