Developmental

Question 1

Development

Answer 1

series of long lasting change, many changes throughout life.
Who you are as an adult is affected by childhood, majority of change is during childhood to change cognition.

Question 2

What changes in human behaviour?

Answer 2

biology, cognition, social

Question 3

Key concepts in science

Answer 3

• theory is an established explanation of why phenomenon occur
• hypothesis predicts how result will look prior to experiment
• facts are established not discussed, can be easily gained from environment or need specific environment to produce

Question 4

What do theories need to be able to do?

Answer 4

explain all evidence gathered about something

Question 5

Stimulus response Psychology

Answer 5

comes from behavioursism, response to stimuli where only the most basic reflexes are inherited genetically, strongly based on environment, most simple to complex come from environment, trial and error- reinforcement

Question 6

Thorndike’s stimulus response

Answer 6

• Law of effect- states if the response is positive then is more likely to continue behaviour- stim and response
• Law of exercise – more often stimulus is consistent, then more likely to continue behaviour strengthening stim and response, but if not prepared or ready to learn then will not continue behaviour

Question 7

Pavlov’s dog

Answer 7

classical conditioning, stimulus causes response, dogs linked sound to food, so would salivate when hear bell

Question 8

BF Skinner

Answer 8

instrumental conditioning, reward and punishment, the environment causes changes to behaviour

Question 9

Watson

Answer 9

you can’t inherit talent, inheritance, temperament etc, the environment causes change and who a person becomes, so will a perfect environment crate a perfect person?

Question 10

Edward Tolman and latent learning ‘cognitive maps in rat and men’

Answer 10

Placed rats in a maze and give them a learning period where they wander until they find food, this is repeated and the rats become faster, shows learning behaviour, if rats are very hungry they will hurry more and vice versus

if given rewards everyday they slowly learn the maze and become faster, if rats received no food, it took them ger to learn the maze

they created a cognitive map so when food became involved they were able to use the map

Question 11

The cognitive revolution

Answer 11

in the 50s behaviour was linked to internal cognitive processes, Chomsky hypothesised that the are unborn structures within the brain, without this we couldn’t learn to speak, therefore we have innate learning/ genetics, additionally nativism in 60s became harder to explain more complex things like language through reinforcement

Question 12

Violation of expectation

Answer 12

Spelke claims humans are born with core knowledge of the physical world, innate to know the basic knowledge of the world, to know this they must test young infants

VoE where spelke tested 3 months to 1 year- 2 scenarios- follow law of physics or break law, infants tend to look longer at impossible events, they understand it doesn’t make sense, innate knowledge of the world

Question 13

Innate concepts theory

Answer 13

they argue humans have cognitive modules specialised in processing of events, difficult theory to prove or falsify, rules more sophisticated with development so there’s some learning

Question 14

Constructivism

Answer 14

rejects stimulus-response and nativist claims

Piaget had 2 mechanisms of change, assimilation and accomodation

Question 15

Assimlation

Answer 15

used preexisting frameworkds of information to understand stimilus, fitting it into current framework

Question 16

Accommodation

Answer 16

adjusting own cognitive framework to understand reality, adjusting to new experiences

Question 17

what if Piagets 2 mechanisms are balanced?

Answer 17

the child has equilibrium

Question 18

schemas

Answer 18

are frameworks of the world around us to help us understand it

Question 19

Sensory motor stage

Answer 19

birth to 2yrs lack object permanence

Question 20

Preoperational stage

Answer 20

2 to 7, ego centrism, imagination stage, don’t understand conservation early in this stage, centration (focus on objects stage and shapes, cant understand things that look different sizes might be the same size

Question 21

Operational stage

Answer 21

starts 6 to 7 and ends at 12 years, during this stage develop ToM

Question 22

formal operational stage

Answer 22

12 years through to adulthood, however non of these stages are fixed

Question 23

Social Constructivism

Answer 23

Vygotsky emphasised language and the way children develop changes with culture and children and adults think very differently
Piaget thought cognitive representation must come first, while Vygotsky thought there’s a basis of language and culture, and thought

Question 24

Zone of proximal development

Answer 24

what you can do alone and then what you can do with guidance and help – large emphasis of social development of child (community) a collaboration. Called scaffolding, building of knowledge with ‘professional’

Question 25

Nature v Nurture

Answer 25

Cannot be a perfect dichotomy due to more understanding scientifically of DNA, cannot assume all theories are either/or
Development is more nuanced.

Question 26

Communication

Answer 26

both linguistic and non-linguistically, there is generativity in language, where there is a finite set of words that can be combined to express infinite ideas.
It isnt s automatic as thought, very difficult to master grammar
need both comprehension and production, children produce words before they actually understand them

Question 27

Segmenting words

Answer 27

must do this from a continuous speech stream to be able to understand language

Question 28

Stress Patterns in 7.5 month olds

Answer 28

can already segment words of their native language like simpler words,
Lusczyk found chldren find it easier to learn words that are easier to segment, and words they have already learnt the children enjot reading passages with these words in it more
stress on first syllable (kingdom) easier to understand than stress in second syllable (guitar)

Question 29

Stress patterns in 9 month olds

Answer 29

can learn ti use different and new stress patterns in word segmentation, stressng different parts of words and seeing if the could distinguish them

Question 30

Transitional Probability

Answer 30

probability of one sound following another sound, Saffran tested 8 month olds, familiarised first then tested with different words in word stream, children surprised if different word used, able to distinguish what is new word and what is the same word, therefore infants can distinguish words

Question 31

Vocab development

Answer 31

first word develops around 1, simple language.
then around 18 months 2 words stage, multi-word utterances, learned by listening to people around them, inflexible statements, telegraphic

Question 32

Linking words to concept

Answer 32

Vocabulary growth, early words are concrete nouns, basic category names, fast mapping which is quickly mapping novel words to its meaning and putting into a category

Question 33

Quine’s referential ambiguity problem

Answer 33

many potential meaning for words, mapping words to concepts can be a problem eg dog may mean pet but assumption that is a specific name for animal

Question 34

Perceptual Heuristics

Answer 34

shape bias (perceptual bias), automatically assume shape is what they mean, not innate, by 2 years of age most children will pick the correct shape.
when children have more nouns in vocabulary they begin to show shape bias, if over 50 nouns in vocabulary.

Question 35

Conceptual heuristics

Answer 35

whole-object bias, if point at object then assume that talking of whole object/ thing.
Taxonomic assumptions- objects of the same kind will be labelled as the same thing, even if they look slightly different, children around 18 months begin to show this bias

Question 36

Pragmatic social cues

Answer 36

before 12 months already point at things, and around 15 months can already use gaze direction as cues -Houston, price et al

Question 37

Lexical Heuristics

Answer 37

also known as mutual exclusivity, if told a word that they don’t know and there’s a novel item on the table (the other object on the table they are familiar with), they will assume the new word will be for the novel object

Question 38

Cross situational learning

Answer 38

a new solution to word learning, by learning word overtime and in ambiguous ways, infants should use what they already know and can infer what novel words mean and are - able to do this by 12 months

Scott and Fisher tested 2.5 year olds - evidence to support this learning by asking children what dance moves are which and children in process of elimination figured it out - fast mapping

Question 39

Infant directed speech

Answer 39

when speaking to children we use louder slower speech, accentuate boundaries, repeat more, paraphrase what they say, simpler words - baby talk etc

Question 40

External factors influencing vocab development

Answer 40

-socio economic status (Hart & Risley) - children in professional families a 4 years old 45 million words compared to welfare families only 13 million
-CDS (Rowe) - the amount and quality of speech predicts children’s vocab development, education of caregiver is positively correlated to quality and quantity of child’s vocab, but CDS isnt universal, not in rural zones
-Maternal responsiveness predicts timing of childs language milestones (Tamis lemonda, bornstein, baumwell)

Question 41

Morphogenesis

Answer 41

creation of the form and the form of the body

Question 42

Genetic guidance

Answer 42

determined sequence of events that can be modulate by environments

Question 43

Plasticity

Answer 43

brain is adaptive and evolves after birth

Question 44

prenatal development

Answer 44

begins at fertalisation, split into 3 stages, 266 days, 40 weeks

0-2 weeks Germinal > 3-8 weeks Embryonic > 9 weeks-birth Fetal

Question 45

Important characteristics of development

Answer 45

early brain is called a neural tube (3-4 weeks) - rapidly evolves by furthering connections in front part of brain
micro developments in the brain in embryo, larger cellular changes, genetically programmed changes

Question 46

Neural network creation

Answer 46

Cell proliferation > cell migration > cell differentiation > programmed cell death > synaptic resurrection

Question 47

Neural cell proliferation

Answer 47

massive production of cells occur from 2 to 4 months of gestation but continues until birth and after, humans are more or less born with all the neurons they will possess during their life, unlikely to be able to develop more neurons

Question 48

Cell migration

Answer 48

all neurons come from neural precursor cells, undifferentiate cells can become neurons or glia cells, then the immature neurons migrate to colonise all partsof embryonic brain
Immature neurons migrate to reach target layer > first cells to arrive will be in the deepest level (6 layers) > the cortex is said to be assembled from the inside out

Question 49

Cell differentiation

Answer 49

different types of neurons, all these come from the same ki d of cells, precursor cells, when cells migrate they start to differentiate and become neural cell they will be in life

Question 50

Genesis of connection

Answer 50

Neuron is formed of a cell body, a dendrite (receiver) and output (axon). So neurons interconnect throughout their axons to form a network, connected neurons process the same information in chain, as differentiation occurs they extend axons that must faind their appropriate targets
Growing tip of developing axon is able to travel in the developing brain to connect their target, tip of axon is guided by special proteins and repulsed by others until it finds a proper target neuron to connect with

Question 51

Cell death (apoptosis)

Answer 51

loss of entire populations of neurons, programmed cell death, process disregards neurons that didn’t connect to any other neurons without a proper receiving neuron with disappear, basically cell without a role will be removed from the neural network

Question 52

Elimination of synapses

Answer 52

Synaptic pruning - early in development, 50% more synapses in early brain development than in then adult brain, not efficient. Synaptic rearrangement, elimination of synapses that don’t receive signal, only survival of most efficient. The arrangement is activity dependent.

Question 53

Genes/ environments interaction & brain development

Answer 53

Rearrangement synaptic – visual system
Plasticity and critical period – visual system
Learning

Question 54

Example of environmental influence on the brain structure

Answer 54

the nerves linking the eyes and brain have very strict organisation, the right and left eye send info to different locations in visual cortex, before birth there is no visual stimuli, but once seen, there will be connections made
we have multimodal experience of the world, we can locate things in the world using the 2 senses

Question 55

Plastic brain

Answer 55

Maguires taxi drivers, longitudinal studies hippocampus changes, plasticity is brains ability to change, brain isn’t fixed structure

Question 56

Limitation of brain plasticity

Answer 56

1 modification of ODC, but a totally different pattern can be observed if we occlude one eye, ocular dominance stripes with one eye occluded, occluded eye didn’t capture as much cortical space as the non-occluded one. If an eye is occluded during a whole period, the ODC will never change
Critical period (period during the development of the brain where mechanism/organism can be influenced) – no ocular dominance > normal distribution of ODC both eyes has brain resource, no ocular dominance after one eyes covered at first > abnormal distribution of the ODC one eye took all the brain resource
The critical period puts a timer on the brain plasticity, during infancy the brains plasticity is much higher than during adulthood, recovery of early brain lesions in infancy

Question 57

Post natal brain development

Question 58

critical period and lasticity of the brain CC1