Developmental Psych Final Exam

Question 1

Childhood physical and cognitive development: General characteristics

Answer 1

1. Unevenness, magical thought
   From 2-6 years of age, children are starting to learn patterns of rational thinking, but they don’t do this rational thinking all of the time (thinking with reason). Rather, they overgeneralize the patterns of thinking that they do know.

Question 2

Childhood physical and cognitive development: General characteristics example (uneveness and magical thought)

Answer 2

For example: from watching their parents cook, children figure out that when you boil something for long periods of time, it gets smaller/there should appear to be less in the pot.
- Researchers then put rocks in boiling water and they asked kids what they thought would happen. The kids said they believed that the rock in the boiling water would shrink. After showing the kids, they insisted that the rock shrunk. This represents overgeneralization and underspecification. So, during the age 2-6 years developmental period, we witness a patchwork of competent and incompetent thoughts/ a mixture of sound logic and magical thinking

Question 3

Piaget 4 stages of cognitive development

Answer 3

1. Sensorimotor (birth-2 years)
2. preoperational (2-6 years)
3. concrete operational (6-12 years)
4. formal operational (12-19 years)

Question 4

Sensorimotor stage of cognitive development

Answer 4

Sensorimotor (birth-2 years): thinking based on physical activity

Question 5

Preoperational stage of cognitive development

Answer 5

Pre-operational (2-6 years): overcoming limitations to logical thinking by keeping all aspects of a problem in mind.
There is a focus on cross-domain problems, and children must figure out what variables in a problem/task matter. This overall thread of this stage is the challenge of keeping multiple perspectives in mind at once.

Question 6

Concrete operational stage of cognitive development

Answer 6

Concrete operational (6-12 years): logical operations to combine, separate transform importation
This involves mastering the use of logic in concrete ways. The word concrete refers to that which is tangible; that which can be seen, touched, or experienced directly.

Question 7

Formal operational stage of cognitive development

Answer 7

Formal operational (12-19 years): Systematic thinking about logical operations. Interest in abstract ideas and the act of thinking (metacognition = thinking about thinking). More interest in abstract ideas, and not bound to what is directly and explicitly right in front of them.

Question 8

Three Functioning characteristics of preoperational thought

Answer 8

1. Egocentrism
2. Confusion of appearance and Reality
3. Precausal reasoning

Question 9

Three Operational characteristics of preoperational thought: Egocentrism

Answer 9

Egocentrism: difficulty in seeing the world from another’s perspective. Don’t take a spatial perspective (can’t break out of their own spatial perspective). Egocentric speech: gives too little information to listen to who cannot see objects.

Question 10

Three Operational characteristics of preoperational thought: egocentrism and theory of mind/ false belief task

Answer 10

Egocentrism & Theory of mind/ false-belief taskTheory of mind and false-belief tasks: children are egocentric and lack theory of mind; they don’t understand that other people see the world differently than they do.
Theory of mind is that other people have minds; other people have their own mental states and intentions that are separate from and possibly different from one’s own.
Evidence comes from “The false belief” tasks: a young child is presented with a box of crayons and when it’s opened, he notices that the crayon box is filled with candy not crayons. The experimenter then asks the kid to describe what he thought would be in the box, the kid says that he thought the candy would be in the box. This shows that he doesn’t know that his own state of mind has changed. Then he is asked what other people would see in the box & he says candy.
A slightly older kid understands both that he initially thought crayons would be in the box and that another person would also think that crayons would be in the box.

Question 11

Three Operational characteristics of preoperational thought: confusion of appearance and reality

Answer 11

In the preoperational period, children tend to focus on only a single dimension/feature (either height of a container but not width, spatial distribution but not number, etc.)
Specifically, they have a tendency to focus on just the surface attributes (the most salient/ notable features) of an object, ultimately causing them to confuse appearance with reality. For instance, in the Maynard cat experiment, if you put a dog mask on a cat, a process that a 3 year old sees happening, they think the cat is a dog. But at age 6, they know it’s a cat simply wearing a dog mask.

Question 12

Three Operational characteristics of preoperational thought: precausal reasoning

Answer 12

In the preoperational period, children tend to confuse cause and effect. They don’t use induction (specific to general) or deduction (general to specific). Rather, they tend to use transductive reasoning, which involves them creating (inaccurate/erroneous) connections between particular instances. For example, many 3 year olds are afraid of graveyards. They know that they contain dead people, and so they believe that graveyards cause death, causing them to be scared of them. This represents transductive reasoning (confusing 2 facts).
Transductive reasoning: confusing 2 facts

Question 13

Transductive reasoning

Answer 13

Rather, they tend to use transductive reasoning, which involves them creating (inaccurate/erroneous) connections between particular instances.
Transductive reasoning: confusing 2 facts (graveyard and death)

Question 14

Problems with Piaget’s view on cognitive development

Answer 14

Piaget emphasized domain-general mechanisms of cognitive development. The issues with this are the experience and language-dependence of tasks.
Overestimating the ability of adolescence and underestimating infant’s capacity.

Question 15

Task-dependent performance: (experience-dependent nature of tasks)

Answer 15

Task-dependent performance: With regard to the experience-dependent nature of the tasks, an experimenter can make the task easier for children by using familiar objects, scenarios, etc. Additionally, the amount of exposure the kid has in setting up the surprising task matters, as well as whether or not it is presented to them as a trick. Moreover, a child’s performance on these tasks improves when the task is part of an ongoing activity that they already understand.

Question 16

Linguistic nature of tasks:

Answer 16

Linguistic nature of the tasks: With regard to the language-dependent nature of the tasks, a child’s ability to distinguish between appearance and reality depends on how the question is asked and the context of the language (familiar vs. unfamiliar).

Question 17

Domain general mechanisms in cognitive development: working memory, executive function, statistical learning:

Answer 17

The idea of domain-general approaches to cognitive development is that specific types of knowledge (physical laws, social behaviors, animacy) are all grounded in the same underlying mechanisms. Some examples include working memory, executive function, and pattern recognition/statistical learning. With domain general approaches, there is an emphasis on the similarity in performance (and errors) across domains.

Question 18

Statistical Learning

Answer 18

Statistical learning in children is like how they pick up patterns from things they see and hear around them, without anyone needing to teach them directly. This helps them learn their language, like figuring out where words start and end when people talk, and understanding rules of how words fit together. They also notice patterns in other areas, like recognizing shapes, sounds, and even how people behave. It’s a natural way for kids to learn a lot just by being curious and paying attention to the world.

The biological mechanism that uses environmental input/information to actually drive language learning is a domain-general cognitive mechanism: statistical learning.

Question 19

Domain-specific mechanisms to cognitive development: dedicated subsystems/modules

Answer 19

The idea of domain-specific approaches to cognitive development is that specific types of knowledge (physical laws, social behavior, animacy) require specific, specialized mechanisms.

Examples include special social niches/experiences and dedicated, experience-expectant biological subsystems (mental modules). With domain-specific approaches, there is an emphasis on the unevenness of performance and errors across domains.

Question 20

Aspects of Domain-specific approaches: modularity/ core knowledge of physics (Spelk)

Answer 20

Core knowledge of physics, as discussed by Spelke, refers to the idea that even very young children, like three-year-olds, naturally understand some basic concepts of physics. For example, they know that if you change the shape of a substance (like clay or water), the substance itself is still there. Also, kids between the ages of two and six start to grasp ideas about inertia (objects keep moving unless something stops them) and gravity (things fall down, not up), and they get better at understanding these concepts as they grow and learn more from their surroundings.

This suggests that knowledge about basic physical principles is not just randomly acquired; it has a special importance, possibly because understanding these principles has been crucial for human survival and development through history.

Question 21

Aspects of Domain-specific approaches: modularity/ TOM and autism

Answer 21

In simpler terms, research by Baron-Cohen has found that children with autism are really good at understanding and predicting patterns in things like puzzles or machines—often even better than kids without autism. However, they have a harder time understanding patterns that involve people’s thoughts and feelings. This suggests that autism affects a specific area of thinking skills that deals with social interactions, rather than all types of thinking skills. Essentially, kids with autism can handle mechanical tasks really well, but struggle more with tasks that require understanding social cues or other people’s emotions.

Question 22

TOM and autism: domain general (Tager-flusberg):

Answer 22

Tager-Flusberg found that strong individual differnces exist in the ability of children with autism to pass TOM tasks, as well as that children with autism show deficits in non-social domains as well. Namely in executive functioning, inhibition and language. Tager-Flusberg’s research suggests that autism affects more than just social skills. While it’s true that many children with autism struggle with tasks that involve understanding others’ thoughts and feelings (known as “theory of mind” or ToM tasks), they also have difficulties in areas that don’t involve social interaction, like planning, controlling impulses, and language. These findings show that the challenges faced by children with autism are not limited to social situations but are more general.

This broader view of autism suggests that the core challenge is in anticipating what will happen next in any context, not just in social situations.

Question 23

Connecting domain-general to domain-specific approaches: Theory Theory

Answer 23

The “theory theory” (Gopnik): serves to connect domain-general and domain-specific approaches.

The “theory theory” idea, suggested by Gopnik, is about how babies learn about the world. Gopnik believes that babies naturally pay more attention to moving things. This helps them notice and focus on important details around them. From these observations, babies start forming their own ideas or “theories” about how things work—like understanding that objects fall if you drop them. They then test these theories, just like scientists, to see if they are right.

This idea combines two things: the natural focus on certain things (like moving objects) and the ability to make guesses and check them. So, babies are both drawn to the right things to learn from and are actively trying to figure out the world through their own experiments.

Question 24

Connecting domain-general to domain-specific approaches: Skeletal principles

Answer 24

Smith’s idea is that our brains start out with the potential to develop special areas that are really good at understanding different types of information, like language or music. These areas don’t start off fully formed but grow and get better over time. As we experience more of the world, our brains sort this information and help these special areas develop. This means that while we might be born with a natural focus on certain types of information, the detailed understanding and brain structures to handle them get built up as we learn and grow.

Question 25

Connecting domain-general to domain-specific approaches: the “scientist in the crib”

Answer 25

The “scientist in the crib” : development consists of a rational process of hypothesis generation and testing: consists of a rational process of hypothesis generation and testing.

Question 26

Connecting domain-specific attentional biases-Cognition

Answer 26

Domain-specific attentional biases-Cognition is inherently rational: development consists of hypothesis generation and testing the importance of play, exploration.

Question 27

How domain-specificity might develop- experience on neural specialization (karmiloff-smith)

Answer 27

Effects of experience on neural specialization (Karmiloff-Smith): Smith posited that the brain contains modules of domain-specific computational circuity that produce a domain-specific understanding of the world. But this modularity, she maintained, develops over time, and structure in the input helps drive the development of specialized brain structures that are domain-specific. Thus, modularity doesn’t simply start out specific but rather develops.

Question 28

How domain-specificity might develop: effects of stable cultural practices?

Answer 28

Effects of stable cultural practices:
Cultural events can create domain-specific understanding and, therefore, developmental unevenness by influencing the occurrence and frequency of events; the relationships among events; and the role of the child in events. For instance, there is a domain-specific understanding of objects across cultures based on cultural differences in parents allowing their infants to explore their world.

Question 29

Vygotsky: zone of proximal development

Answer 29

Vygotsky: zone of proximal development:
Focused on how the world around the infant creates structured input that drives cognitive development, a concept he referred to as the zone of proximal development. Specifically, he focused on activities between infants and parents whereby infants are being guided in an age-appropriate way, largely through scaffolding (picture book reading). He recognized that cultural differences in opportunities for scaffolding can create unevenness in the development of domain-specific knowledge.

Question 30

Differences between Piaget’s and Vygotsky’s assumptions about the infant/child

Answer 30

Piaget emphasized an independent learning acting on the world through trial and error and hypothesis. On the other hand, Vygotsky emphasized a socially dependent learner learning as a result of the way people structure cognitive challenges/ learning.
Neither is right or wrong; it just depends on the task to determine which approach is most appropriate (learning solidity vs. learning how to cross the street).

Question 31

Childhood social and emotional development (moral development, sources of developmental change)

Answer 31

Development of right vs. wrong: moral development
In the process of moral development/ the right vs. wrong, there are multiple forces at work, both internal and external. On the one hand, kids have a lot of external role models around them on which they can model their own behavior (heteronomous morality). On the other hand, kids have a gradual emergence of an internal sense of rules of behavior (autonomous morality). Moreover, the forces that exist to drive moral development are both externally-imposed and internally-driven, and they both have different developmental trajectories. We tend to see heteronomous morality increase at around 3 years of age, and we tend to see an emergence of autonomous morality at around 6-7 years of age.

Question 32

Heteronomous morality

Answer 32

kids have a lot of external role models around them that they can remodel their own behavior.

Question 33

Autonomous morality

Answer 33

kids have a gradual emergence of an internal sense of rules of behavior.

Question 34

Domains of inhibition (development of regulation and self-control)

Answer 34

Movement, emotions, choice, conclusions

Question 35

Domains of inhibition characteristics

Answer 35

The mechanisms guiding the development of morality are all about regulation and self-control/inhibition. Regulation is the ability to inhibit impulses (self-control), balancing what you want to do with your own internalized set of standards for your behavior.

Question 36

Domains of inhibition: Movement

Answer 36

Movement inhibition is about effortful control (like in Simon Says), as well as the delay of gratification.

Question 37

Domains of inhibition: Emotions

Answer 37

Emotions: there are primary emotions primary: pain, anger, and joy, and secondary: shame, pride, and embarrassment.
Emotion inhibition is slow developing. 3 year olds getting dropped off at preschool for the first time aren’t good at inhibiting their emotions and will cry to mom, hold on to her, and resist leaving her side.
However as kids get older and are being dropped off at school on the first day, more often than not they run towards toys and away from mom. This represents a kids active regulatory inhibition strategy to distract themselves and inhibit their emotions to not cry. They adaptively have figured out that they need to get somewhere else away from their mom so as not to react in a big emotional way, and therefore distract themselves by going to the toys.

Question 38

Domains of inhibition: Choice

Answer 38

Choice inhibition also involves the delay of gratification.

Question 39

Domains of inhibition: conclusion

Answer 39

Conclusion inhibition involves how much data you think you need to collect before deciding on an answer for something (i.e. how systematic are you?). For instance, in a picture-matching task, the amount of caution involved in coming to a conclusion increases between 5-10 years of age. A 5 year old will take 8 seconds, while a 10 year old will take 17 seconds. Thus 10 year olds are more systematic in their conclusions of differences/ more cautious. This task also just gets easier over time. Note that males are significantly worse than females in these tasks studying inhibition of conclusions.

Question 40

Delay of gratification task

Answer 40

In the video watched in class on the delay of the gratification task, a child puts their hands on the table and is shown an M&M in a little bowl by the experimenter being covered by a cup. The child is told by the experimenter that when a bell is rung, they can reach out for and eat the M&M. The kicker is that the period in which the child is shown the candy and the experimenter rings the bell gets longer and longer after each trial. Younger kids don’t wait for the bell to ring; rather, they instantly grab the candy without caring about the bell or rules they were just told. But the experimenter still carries out the experimental actions/rings the bell to show the kid that he would’ve been able to eat it eventually.
But as the kids grow, they are able to handle longer delays and show better inhibition. Also, girls tend to do better at the tasks than boys. There are strong differences in the ability to inhibit one’s emotions and delay gratification by both age and gender.

Question 41

Development of emotion regulation strategies:

Answer 41

Emotion regulation strategies slowly develop over time. From birth to 2 years, the main emotion regulation strategies include thumb-sucking and rocking (self-stimulation).
From 2-6 years, the main emotion regulation strategies include avoiding/reducing emotional arousal by closing your eyes or turning away and using language.

Question 42

Development of Aggression: 2 types

Answer 42

Instrumental and Hostile Aggression

Question 43

Instrumental Aggression

Answer 43

Instrumental aggression: The goal is to obtain something (like a toy), not to hurt someone. But ultimately end up hurting someone in order to obtain what you want (toy), though this hurting is just instrumental to you getting something.

Question 44

Hostile Aggression

Answer 44

Hostile aggression: The goal is to hurt someone (bullying, establishing dominance, social shunning, and exclusion).

Question 45

Developmental changes in aggression

Answer 45

From 12-24 months, we see a rapid increase in instrumental aggression as kids develop more motor competence, as well as due to their developing sense of self.
From 24-36 months, we see an emergence of teasing as a function of enhanced language skills and enhanced TOM (knowledge that teasing will affect someone else).
From 3-6 years, we see a decrease in physical instrumental aggression due to developing language skills, but more of an emergence of hostile aggression as a function of emerging social networks.We also continue to see language aggression/ the use of language as a weapon.

Question 46

Gender differences in aggressive behavior:

Answer 46

Hostile aggression is more prominent in boys than girls. Girls tend to do more teasing than boys and employ relationship aggression. These gender differences are largely related to the fact that girls have more cognitive sophistication and better TOM than boys.

Question 47

Causes of aggression

Answer 47

Awards: if you’re a kid in a situation where your aggression is rewarded, your aggression rates are going to increase. It is important to recognize that aggression can be inadvertently and unintentionally rewarded by parents (parents giving negative attention to the aggressor is attention nonetheless).
Imitation: imitation of a role models behavior. Observing a lot of physical punishment, especially when combined with aprental anger, can teach kids very early on to be aggressive, as aggression is highly salient to kids. This fact was demonstrated in Bandeur’s experiment on social modelng of aggression.
In his experiment, children who were watching an adult model aggressive behavior toward a doll (hitting it, pushing it down, etc.) carried out aggressive behavior toward the doll when they were subsequently presented with it. Further these kids generalized the aggressive behavior that was modeled to them, devising new ways of hitting the doll.
Children in the control group, however, with no exposure to aggressive modeling did not exhibit novel forms of aggression towards the doll.
Aggression is easily picked by children when it is modeled to them.

Question 48

Sources of individual differences in aggressive behavior:

Answer 48

individual differences in aggressiveness can be traced back to individual differences in emotion regulation/inhibition. Specifically, sources of individual differences in aggression can come from psychobiology, family environment, or cognitive style.

Question 49

Sources of individual differences in aggressive behavior: Psychobiology

Answer 49

Psychobiology: Aggression is associated with increased levels of testosterone and decreased levels of serotonin. But it is important to note that hormones serve not only to regulate aggression, but they themselves are also regulated by aggression (bidirectional, two-way street where hormones both regulate aggression and are regulated by aggression).
The experiment shown in class there were two rooms. A lizard could enter one room in which it would be able to win a fight. A lizard could also enter another room in which it would either lose in a fight or in which nothing would happen (lizard would neither win nor lose).
Researchers found that the lizards developed a preference for the location/room in which they won the fight. But they also found that if they simply injected testosterone into the lizards, they developed the same preference, demonstrating that the lizards don’t need to win the fight, they just need to have testosterone to develop that sense of pride and satisfaction. (i.e. testosterone surge causes the rewarding feeling). At the same time, they found that winning the fight also causes a testosterone surge, which is inherently rewarding to the lizards (rewarding feeling causes the testosterone surge). This shows that testosterone can also be a consequence of aggression, not just a cause.
Another aspect of psychology and individual differences is that aggressive behavior exhibited by children as early as age 3 is highly significantly predictive of later aggressive behavior in adulthood, which speaks to the stability of aggressive behavior, as well as the persistence of aggressive behavior over developmental time.

Question 50

Sources of individual differences in aggressive behavior: Family environment

Answer 50

Aggression is associated with low SES but correlated with higher parental stress. In other words, even though aggression is associated with low SES, if you control for parental stress levels, the aggression becomes much weaker and in some cases disappears. Therefore, a lot of aggressive behavior in children is correlated with the level of parental stress in the home/ family.

Question 51

Sources of individual differences in aggressive behavior: cognitive style

Answer 51

Aggressive children are more likely to interpret others’ actions in negative ways, which ultimately leads to more aggressive responses. This demonstrates that there are real connections between emotional regulation capabilities, inhibition capabilities, and aggression.

Question 52

Strategies for controlling aggression in children: Developing a hiearchy

Answer 52

Developing a hierarchy for a child reduces their overall levels/displays of aggression because hierarchy makes it so that there are fewer other kids around that the child needs to worry about in terms of who might be aggressive toward you, or who you can be aggressive toward. In this way, developing hierarchy allows aggressive behaviors to stabilize and reduce overall.

Question 53

Strategies for controlling aggression in children: Venting feelings (catharsis)

Answer 53

Venting feelings (Catharsis) has often been associated with controlling aggression, though there is little evidence to support this.

Question 54

Strategies for controlling aggression in children: Punishment

Answer 54

Punishing aggressive behavior (such as spanking) is effective only if the child identifies strongly with the punisher, if punishment is used consistently yet not frequently, and if the punishment is explained by the punisher (i.e. why it is being done/for what purposes and what the ultimate message to be received/lesson to be learned from the punishment is). Overall, though, parents who do a lot of punishment have kids who are more anxious, stressed, and aggressive, especially if the aforementioned parameters are not met.

Question 55

Strategies for controlling aggression in children: Reward nonagressive behavior (selective attention)

Answer 55

Rewarding and reinforcing non-aggressive behavior is important in controlling attention. This can also involve selective attention, which can mean paying attention to the victim only so as not to accidentally reward the aggressive child and/or putting the aggressive kid in time out.

Question 56

Strategies for controlling aggression in children: Cognitive training

Answer 56

Kids who are aggressive have a significantly weaker understanding of emotional expression/of others’ emotional states, feelings, perspective, etc., as well as more essentialist views of aggression, so cognitive training can help these kids get this important emotional understanding and perspective-taking. One example of this is practice with matching a face to a description of emotion, something that aggressive kids are simply just less accurate at but can be improved through practice.

Question 57

Prosocial behavior and development of empathy

Answer 57

Prosocial behavior is the voluntary behavior intended to help others. Having and exhibiting prosocial behavior requires that you are able to understand others’ emotional expression and that you are able to emphasize with others’ stages, situations, experiences, struggles, etc.

Question 58

Prosocial behavior and development of empathy: cognitive/emotional prerequisites

Answer 58

Understanding the emotional expressions of others:
At 6-7 months, infants can associate faces (smiling vs. frowning) with pitch contours.
By age 2, children can correctly predict/interpret others’ emotions when the context in which the emotion is being shown corresponds to their own experience (e.g. birthday party = happy).
By age 5, children can interpret/predict negative and positive emotions even when in new unfamiliar, novel contexts (understanding of emotional expression by age 5 is not as context-dependent/independent of their own lived experiences).
Ultimately understanding emotional expressions of others/that others have their own rich emotional lives leads to empathy and involuntary actions intended to help other people (prosocial behavior). An example of this development of emotional expression can be seen from the disappointing gift task.

Question 59

Hoffman’s 4 stages in the development of empathy:

Answer 59

1. neonates
2. egocentric empathy (2 years)
3. Generalizable empathy (3-5)
4. Abstract empathy (6-9)

Question 60

Hoffman’s 4 stages in the development of empathy: Neonate

Answer 60

Neonates: (global empathy) neonates become stressed and cry when they are exposed to others’ cries/displays of sadness and upsetness. But is this really a true form of empathy, or is it just emotional contagion?

Question 61

Hoffman’s 4 stages in the development of empathy: egocentric empathy

Answer 61

Egocentric empathy (2 years): 2 year olds will seek to comfort others but will do so specifically using techniques based on their own preferences, experiences and when in a familiar context. Additionally, the emotion of another must be very salient/ right in front of the child for them to know they should try to comfort them.

Question 62

Hoffman’s 4 stages in the development of empathy: generalizable empathy

Answer 62

Generalizable empathy (3-5 years): 3-5 year olds can show empathy when presented with a linguistic expression of emotion, such as when presented with stories and scenarios of fictional characters.

Question 63

Hoffman’s 4 stages in the development of empathy: Abstract empathy

Answer 63

6-9 year olds show greater interest in and empathy for social and political issues, such as poverty, oppression, and illness.

Question 64

Relationship between emotion regulation and empathy (Eisenberg)

Answer 64

there is a great connection between the level of emotional regulation kids are able to do and their expressions of empathy.
In Eisenbergs research she found that based on a child’s capacity to do emotional regulation, the distress of another can create an emotional response/ reaction in the child of either sympathy (expression of concern, empathy toward the other person) or personal distress (overwhelmed, focus on the self, increase in personal anxiety and arousal).
Specifically, in 6-8 year olds, she found that children who are rated high on emotion regulation in non-social tasks are more likely to show sympathy in response to another’s distress. On the other hand, she found that children who are rated low on emotional regulation in non-social tasks are more likely to show distress, such as heightened cortisol levels(stress hormone) in response to another’s distress.
Thus, the way these capacities of emotional regulation and emotional response/empathy to others link is that if you can regulate your emotional state, you will be better able to focus your attention on others (show empathy) without your own emotions and feelings in the way/taking over.

Question 65

2 Strategies for facilitating prosocial behavior

Answer 65

1. Explicit modeling
2. Induction

Question 66

Strategies for facilitating prosocial behavior: Explicit modeling

Answer 66

In contrast with aggression facilitation, rewarding prosocial behavior is not too successful in facilitating it. However, explicit modeling (demonstrating helping and sharing behaviors) is successful in facilitating prosocial behavior, but only if the kid takes an active part in it.
In preschool ages kids, this modeling of sharing and helping behaviors marked an increase in prosocial behavior that had a lasting effect of about 2 weeks.

Question 67

Strategies for facilitating prosocial behavior: Induction

Answer 67

Induction is also helpful in facilitating prosocial behavior. Induction involves parents giving their kids explanations of why specifically prosocial behaviors are good. But this only works really well for 12 years old, as it requires sufficient language comprehension and capabilities, a lack of egocentrism, generalization abilities, and symbolic reasoning abilities.

Question 68

Identity formation: personal-identity development:

Answer 68

Personal-identity-development, role of autobiographical memory
In early childhood, kids focus primarily on specific concrete characteristics. In other words, if you ask a 3 year old to describe themselves/their personality identity, they will give you examples of all their individual characters that have to do with their physical attributes, what they can do, possessions, social relations, preferences. Young children also tend to be unrealistically positive, especially about their own knowledge and characteristics.
By 6 years old, kids move beyond the specifics and toward more generalizable traits (smart, athletic, etc.). The mechanisms underlying this shift are the development of autobiographical memory and the role of adults. Autobiographical memory is the ability to construct a personal narrative that helps children acquire an enduring sense of self. The role of adults is to assist in recall and interpretation of past and current events and to help kids figure out how to categorize their own likes, dislikes, and self attributes. So part of personal identity formation is what the kid itself is doing and part of it is what adults are doing.

Question 69

Identity formation: Sex role identity (Bandura)

Answer 69

Theoretical perspectives: social learning (bandura).
Bandura was interested in the role of social modeling in shaping and affecting the development of gender identity. She maintained that gender identification is bred out of observation and imitation of gender-typical behaviors presented by adults, siblings and the media. She also argued for the role of differential reinforcement in shaping and affecting gender identity, in that adults (as well as media, social groups, etc.) tend to reward sex-appropriate behavior and tend to not reward (sometimes punish) cross-sex behavior. Ultimately, kids are very attuned to this social modeling. The problem with this approach is that it assumes passive acceptance and imitation on the part of the kid.

Question 70

Identity formation: Sex role identity (Kohlberg) 3 stages

Answer 70

Kohlberg argued that sex-role identity formation is a cognitive process, emphasizing the active role of the child in their own development. Specifically, Kohlberg posited three stages of sex identity:
The first is basic sex-role identity in which by 3 years of age, children can label themselves as either a boy or girl, which is largely a function of autobiographical memory, categorization abilities, and influences of the media, family, and social groups.
2. Sex role stability in which by 4-6 years of age, children understand that sex roles are stable over the lifetime, which is largely a function of autobiographical memory and experiences within social groups.
3. Sex-role constantly in which older kids gain an understanding that outward appearance doesn’t alter their underlying gender identity.

Question 71

Role of the social group as a driving force of gender differentiation (Maccoby)

Answer 71

Not assuming the passivity (acceptance of what happens, without active response or speaking up/resistance) of the kid, he looked at preschool kids actively playing in groups.
He noticed that from about age 3, boys and girls tend to sort into the same sex groups, as well as that many dyadic friendships are of the same sex. These groups tend to act differently, and these differing dynamics ultimately create subcultures that canalize socialization by gender: Boys tend to have larger groups that are more physically active and competitive. Girls tend to engage in more collaborative discourse (reciprocal talk and action, pretend play, etc.). These differences in how gendered groups interact create influences on gender (what girls think being girl-like is and what boys think being boy-like is).
Specifically, when you have a group with more collaborative discourse, the people in that group learn how to talk to each other and maintain group harmony. However, when you have a group with more physical activity and competition, the people in that group are more likely to lay down rules harshly than collaborate with one another.

Question 72

Constructing relationships: Gleason paper on the nature and function of imaginary companions and personalized objects

Answer 72

IC and PO provide kids with their own accessible, constant, stable, predictable, and reliable forms of social simulation. Gleason figured out that PO typically are defined by a vertical relationship (child as a caregiver) whereas IC typically are defined by a horizontal relationship (egalitarian relationship). Children with an IC are more likely to be a first-born or only child. But when these kids start school, their IC tends to go away.

Question 73

Mechanisms

Answer 73

Mechanisms: provide information about how certain milestones of development are achieved in terms of what processes and systems (i.e. the nuts and bolts) are driving the developmental process.
Mechanisms provide the “how” instead of simply the “what” of milestones.

Question 74

Milestones

Answer 74

Milestone: a description of an average trend that doesn’t provide any explanation of how to achieve the milestone. It just expresses that on average, something occurs x% of the time. Provide the “what” in development.
Also don’t explain variation or anything about development itself.
Mechanisms: are needed to explain such variations. Milestones change as underlying science advances, meaning that as the mechanisms explaining milestones are more well understood, milestones are more accurately predicted. Examples of milestones in development include crawling, walking, and speech.

Question 75

What is development

Answer 75

Definitions of development: A series of adaptive changes to a series of environmental challenges. An organism and its environment change each other.

Question 76

Developmental habitat

Answer 76

Habitat: An organism’s habitat is its address (where the organism is), and it can change over development. Eventually developing organisms choose their own habitats to further enforce development.

Question 77

Developmental Niche

Answer 77

Niche: The job of an organism has at a particular point in development, also known as an organism’s “occupation.” Niche encompasses the functional relations between an organism’s capacities and its environment. Like habitat, niche is not static, and an organism can construct different niches over developmental time.
Developmental Niche: the fit between an organisms’ capacities and stimulation available in the environment, which impact their “occupation” at a given point in development.

Question 78

Niche construction

Answer 78

Niche construction: through mutual modifications between an organism and its environment, new relationships can emerge over developmental time.

Question 79

3 principles for the development of intelligent systems (Smith & Breazeal)

Answer 79

1. Coordination of sensory-motor activity
2. Coupling to intelligent others
3. Overlapping coordinations

Question 80

Coordination of sensory-motor activity (Smith & Breazeal)

Answer 80

Smith & Breazeal said that coordinating input from multiple sensory and motor channels helps to facilitate the development and drive adaptive change. This breaks down cartesian dulaism, because it says that sensory-motor integration helps drive development.

An example of this coupling of sensory-motor activity is the sticky-mittens experiment. This study took 2-5 month olds with poor motor control (cant coordinate their grasping and reaching when they get close to an object). They put mittens on them with velcro/ velcro on toys in front of them so they could easily grasp it. This experience was found to facilitate all kinds of developmental advancements.
Infants in this study got better at coordinating vision and reaching, and they also got better at knowing earlier on that objects have multiple sides and dimension earlier on the cognitive advance of 3D mental rotation.
The sticky-mittens experiment facilitated a baby’s ability to act on objects and watch them rotate, skills that they could extend to novel objects. This shows that sensory (visual) and motor activity can lead to adaptive, developmental, cognitive change. It also implies that immature behavior (early lack of motor control) has later implications for cognitive development/for a greater understanding of objects in their environment.

Question 81

Coupling to intelligent others (Smith & Breazeal)

Answer 81

Smith & Breazeal emphasized that another important principle for the development of intelligence is structured social interaction.
Babies don’t exist in a social vacuum. Rather, critical information lives outside of the baby, driving it to develop adaptive skills. The idea of coupled to intelligent others is that there is an additional sensory-motor coupling occurring between individuals/partners. These partners provide a lot of spatial and temporal structure and feedback for infant actions.
For example, babies have very short arms, and this has traditionally been thought to be a problematic feature of immaturity. But in reality, having short arms helps toddlers fulfill their developmental niches of having to learn words for things.
Because babies have such short arms, the objects that they hold take a lot of space in their visual field. So odds are that when babies hear a word for something, it’s in reference to the object that is taking up almost their entire visual field. Further, parents tend to label things their baby is holding, and because what babies hold take up the majority of their visual space, this solves the problem of their need to learn words for things/associate words with objects. So when a baby is around others socially, these people don’t make the world more complicated for the baby. Rather, others’ behavior tends to simplify the baby’s world in tandem with their initial immaturity.

Question 82

Overlapping coordinations (Smith & Breazeal)

Answer 82

Smith & Breazeal emphasized the idea that moving oneself through the world involves the coordination of a lot of different, coordinating systems.
For example, looking at the A-not-B test, the traditional explanation for passing the test is increased milnation at months 12 of age leading to the development of object permanence. But actually, passing the test requires an infant to have experience moving through the world and thus to be able to coordinate vision, arm-leg movement, and memory.

Question 83

Independent variable

Answer 83

Independent: variables that the experimenter controls and that are part of the overall design of the study. In the A-not-B study, IV’s include posture (whether the baby is sitting or standing), weight on arms (whether the baby has a weight on arm or not), where the toy is placed, the walking ability of the baby, etc.

Question 84

Dependent Variable

Answer 84

Dependent: variables whose performance of the research subject depends on the independent variable. In the A-not-B study, the DV is where the baby reaches.

Question 85

Extraneous Variables

Answer 85

Extraneous: variables that the researcher cannot necessarily control or manipulate/elements of individual difference among participants that the study isn’t necessarily controlling and testing for. In other words, they are variables that vary randomly across the subjects.
In the A-not-B study, extraneous variables include the fact that some babies might simply have more stable reaches than the other babies in the study or that some babies are simply more accurate than others.

Question 86

Confounding Variables

Answer 86

Confounding Variables: variables by if an extraneous variable does not vary randomly across the participants and ultimately comes to systematically change with the independent variable. They provide alternative explanations for the results of a study.
Researchers try to avoid this with good experimental contorl, subject randomization, etc. But sometimes confounds can go undetected.
In the A-not-B study, a confounding variable could involve testing 7 month old babies in the straight up experiment but then running 10 month olds in the study with weights. So the experiment is running weights on older babies but not on younger ones, posing the question of whether or not the result (passing the test) is due to the weights or the age of the subjects.
This confound can be avoided by randomizing age across conditions.

Question 87

Reliability

Answer 87

Reliability: refers to the consistency of a measure (retest, alternative-form test).

Question 88

Validity

Answer 88

Validity: refers to the accuracy of a measure (comparing research results to other theories)

Question 89

“Cake Metaphor” of development

Answer 89

The “cake” metaphor: The traditional view/approach to learning, development, growth, etc. is unidirectional and maintains that genes serve as the blueprint (recipe) for development and exist in its own space and that experience are the ingredients for this recipe to drive development.
Metaphor implies dichotomy (division/ separation)

Question 90

Problems with the “Cake Metaphor” of development

Answer 90

Problems with the metaphor: The cake metaphor assumes unidirectional causality and doesn’t allow for dynamic interactions between brains, bodies, and behaviors.
It doesn’t account for the blueprint/ recipe (the genes) can actually be modified by the ingredients (experiences), meaning that the body and its development can be impacted by experiences and the external environment.
So in reality, the idea is that the blueprint can actually be affected and altered by experience, thereby yielding bidirectional causality.

Question 91

Problems with the “Cake Metaphor” of development cloned kittens example

Answer 91

2 kittens were cloned cats that have exactly the same genes. But they don’t look the same. They have different body sizes, different coloring, different activity levels, different eating habits.
Rainbow and CC are very different animals with the exact same genome. This demonstrates that it’s not just genes that cause outcomes (outcomes aren’t driven unidirectionally). Rather, one’s environment influences the genome and generates certain outcomes (bidirectional approach)

Question 92

Bidirectional causality across levels of organization (Gottlieb):

Answer 92

As time goes from left to right, interactions go up and down between various levels of organization (genetic, neural, behavioral, and environmental) to ultimately influence development. Therefore the question of development is not one of nature vs. nurture, genes vs. environment.
Rather, it is a question about how all the parts work together across systems and levels of organization to influence development, as mechanisms work across multiple levels.
This renders development as a multi-causal phenomenon: there are no developmental effects without activity at multiple levels of organization working together. Gottlieb specifically points to the model of probabilistic epigenesis, a framework that maintains the bidirectional and coactive nature of genetic, neural, behavioral, and environmental influences over the course of individual development, thereby going against molecular biology’s central dogma that information flows unidirectionally.

Question 93

Proximate causation

Answer 93

Proximate = developmental cause (“how does it work?”)
Proximate causes are developmental and mechanistic explanations. They provide answers to the “how” question: What are the physiological and behavioral mechanisms at work? For instance, the proximate causes of learning words are the nuts and bolts of how speech works/develops, and they include observation and modeling; physiological changes in your vocal track (having vocal chords); and the growth of lungs and teeth.

Question 94

Ultimate causation

Answer 94

Ultimate = evolutionary cause (“why is it there?”)
Ultimate causes are the evolutionary explanations. They provide answers to the “why” question: Why does a certain behavior have adaptive significance/what is the adaptive significance of a certain behavior? For instance, the ultimate cause of learning words are the adaptive reasons why speech works/develops, and they include expression of wants and needs and the regulation of yourself and of those around you.

Question 95

Precocial development

Answer 95

Precocial development: more development at birth, faster development (chickens)

Question 96

Altricial development

Answer 96

Altricial development: less developed at birth, slower development (humans, rats). There is a tendency when studying altricial animals to define them in terms of what they can’t do/ to define immaturity in terms of incompetence. But this is problematic because altricial doesn’t equal incompetent. In reality altriciality can actually create heightened opportunities for learning via certain mechanisms and information. In other words, immature functions can give rise to the development of adaptive, necessary behaviors.

Question 97

What are possible advantages of immaturity?

Answer 97

Function does not equal maturity; therefore, over the course of development, it is important to focus on the onset of function rather than the attainment of maturity, as immature functions are extremely important in development/ can afford real advantages for learning in a developing infant.
For altricial mammals, it turns out that auditory systems are ready to go before they’re actually exposed to input. This results in postnatal infants having a preference for maternal speech picked up in utero. So, being in a complex environment with a lot of people is a problem that a neonate solves to to the fact that because their vision is very limited, the baby doesn’t have to worry about attaching prenatal auditory preference to the visual mother.
Therefore, having an immature sensory system cna yield great advantages and allows later developing systems (like vision in neonates) to use what earlier-developing sensory systems (auditory) have already acquired.
This shows that more information/maturity is not necessarily better all at once, because it could actually lead to a neonate’s blooming, buzzing confusion. Moreover, a non-functional sensory system allows active sensory modalities to create a straightforward map, therefore solving the problem of the blooming, buzzing confusion of postnatal life, and it allows new modalities to “inherit” pre-existing patterns of stimulation.

Question 98

Three types of nested time scales

Answer 98

1. Real time
2. Developmental time
3. evolutionary time

Question 99

Real time: nested time scale

Answer 99

Real time: learning and social interaction driving development and progress.

Question 100

Developmental time: nested time scale

Answer 100

Developmental time: months, years, ontogenetic stages (how many words babies are learning/ adding every month, every year)

Question 101

Evolutionary time: nested time scale

Answer 101

Evolutionary time: Very slow development, talking about generational changes over eons, a much longer timescale. In an evolutionary timescale, we aren’t talking about mechanisms in exactly the same way anymore.
The way the evolutionary timescale gets important is by taking a comparative approach (e.g. which birds learn song vs. which don’t). In an evolutionary timescale, you can also ask functional questions (e.g. birds that learn song tend to do so to attract mates). This is because function drives evolution in that certain functions have certain evolutionary benefits. Moreover, in an evolutionary timescale, instead of asking how a behavior gets built, like in moment-to-moment/real time, you’re asking why a behavior is present and what advantages it has over time.

Question 102

Constructivist perspective on motor, social, and cognitive development

Answer 102

The constructivist perspective asserts that children play an active role in constructing their understanding of the world and that knowledge is not simply acquired passively through experience. The constructivist perspective emphasizes the importance of environmental factors in shaping development, such as social interaction, cultural context, and experiential learning. Firstly, with regard to motor development, the constructivist perspective is that motor development is an active process of exploration and experimentation. For instance, the constructivist approach to the development of walking is that walking is dictated by a lot of coacting influences in the system (weight to strength ratio, amount of kicking practice which affects the ratio, individual differences in leg strength), and when you manipulate the influences (water, treadmill), you can turn stepping on and off. Secondly, with regard to social development, the constructivist perspective is that children actively construct their understanding of social norms and expectations through their interactions with others. For instance, the constructivist approach to perceiving intentional behavior/to social cognition focuses on the role of perception and associative learning and the kind of information that is present in the infant’s environment. The argument is that infants perceive the structure of others’ actions, find regularities in it, and come to recognize and understand such regularities through the perceptual process of statistical learning. Finally, with regard to cognitive development, the constructivist perspective is that knowledge is built by perceiving and acting on the world, that immature behavior creates important opportunities for learning, and that perceptual learning is very important. For instance, the constructivist approach to the development of numerosity is that numerosity is initially a matter of perception, not of innate cognition and focuses on on the developmental changes in how much “stuff” babies can track and understand, not necessarily whether there are 1, 2, 3, or 4 of them.

Question 103

Nativist perspective on motor, social, and cognitive development

Answer 103

The nativist perspective is that knowledge is innate and biologically determined rather than environmentally shaped. In this view, children are viewed as possessing an inherent set of abilities and knowledge that are genetically predetermined. Firstly, with regard to motor development, the nativist perspective is that motor development is a biologically predetermined process that unfolds according to a genetically determined sequence. This perspective emphasizes the importance of genetic factors in shaping motor development, such as the maturation of the nervous system. For instance, the nativist approach to the development of walking is that infants need a certain point of prefrontal cortex maturation to drive the reemergence of the stepping reflex back into the infant. Secondly, with regard to social development, the nativist perspective is that social development is a biologically predetermined process that unfolds according to a genetically determined sequence. This perspective emphasizes the importance of genetic factors in shaping social development, such as the development of social cognition and the ability to understand the intentions of others. For instance, the constructivist approach to perceiving intentional behavior/to social cognition is that infants have a (predetermined) understanding that other people have goals and intentions such that when people change their goals, infants are surprised (violation of expectancy paradigm). Finally, with regard to cognitive development, the nativist perspective is that “core” knowledge is innate and that perceptual experience is not important. In other words, the nativist approach holds that knowing certain things about the world (knowing ppl are intentional, aspects of physics/solidity) is knowledge that is so adaptive that it must be built in, emphasizing the competence-performance distinction. For instance, the nativist approach to the development of numerosity is that infants possess innate knowledge of individual numbers and basic mathematics based on violation of expectancy studies and that numerosity develops in a U-shaped curve such that they have the competency but cannot always perform it.

Question 104

Piaget’s sensorimotor substages (6 stages)

Answer 104

Sensorimotor substages: babies play an active role in their own development. Learn about the world by acting on it and perceiving regularities; connections with abstract reasoning.
0-1.5 months: Reflect Schemas
1.5-4 months: Primary circular reactions
4-8 months: Secondary circular reactions
8-12 months: Coordination of sensory circular reactions
12-18 months: Tertiary circular reactions
18-24 months: Beginning of symbolic representation

Question 105

Piaget’s stages of cognitive development (4 stages)

Answer 105

Sensory motor (birth-2 years)
Pre-operational (2-6 years)
Concrete operational (6-12 years)
Formal operational (12-19 years)

Question 106

Process of change (assimilation/accomodation)

Answer 106

Schemas are psychological units of action. They are used as building blocks for more complex behaviors that can either be taken along further in development or can be modified/changed for new situations. There are thus two processes/descriptions of change: assimilation and accommodation. Assimilation is the incorporation of new experiences into existing schema, like sucking behavior. Accommodation is the modification of schema to handle a new context, like the grasping reflex. A combination of assimilation and accommodation is common, and it leads to development of things like oral exploration. Babies tend to explore things early on in development by putting it into their mouths because though babies aren’t good at reaching and motor control, they can lick things, taste things, etc. and have more control of their mouths to drive exploration and learning.

Question 107

Critiques of Piaget: competence/performance distinction

Answer 107

-competence/performance distinction
Competence/ performance distinction
Babies act on the world in relatively limited ways (very limited competencies); they are competent but can’t perform the competencies to prove it
Babies might have all kinds of rich inner knowledge, but they cant speak

Question 108

Findings/problems from violation of expectancy paradigms:

Answer 108

Violation of expectancy: looking at an infant’s eye gaze to understand or measure their competence/ capability.
Baillargeon’s work on Infants perception of impossible events:
Used Violation of Expectancy; involved habituating the infant to a possible event which refers to gradual reduction in visual looking because they get bored.
Baillargeon’s argument is that infants dishabituate after an impossible event, after being habituated to a possible event, which indicates that infants’ innate expectations that objects can’t pass each other were violated.
Believed that babies have core knowledge of physics

Question 109

Violation of expectancy (VOE)

Answer 109

Violation of expectancy: looking at an infant’s eye gaze to understand or measure their competence/ capability. Eyegaze can show if an infant expects something to happen, thus, violating it if they look longer at something (not supposed to happen) than normal

Question 110

Effects of experience on development: Gottliebs definition/ roles of experience

Answer 110

1. Maintence
2. Facilitation
3. Induction

Question 111

Gottliebs definition/ roles of experience: Maintenance

Answer 111

Maintenance: Maintenance is the most general, low-level mechanism that maintains function with everyday patterns of stimulation. Everyday sensory input and stimulation acts to maintain and stabilize current function. For example, information in the ambient language environment helps to maintain sound categories. Without constant stimulation from the ambient language environment, humans will lose the ability to maintain contrasting sound categories. This proves that normal, everyday sensory input in the environment is necessary for the maintenance of coherent, conscious experience.

Question 112

Gottliebs definition/ roles of experience: Facilitation

Answer 112

Facilitation: Experience as an important regulator of the rate of development. With experience, an organism will get to some better place in development than without experience. There are 3 versions of facilitation: Acceleration, terminal achievement level, and both acceleration and terminal achievement level together.

Question 113

Gottliebs definition/ roles of experience: Induction

Answer 113

Induction: The expression of certain characteristics and traits is dependent on the presence of the right kind of stimulation/environmental event. Inductive events tend to happen during critical time periods. For example, in ovo auditory experience of mallard ducklings is a necessary experience for the adaptive development of a preference for their mother’s call. Another example is that neural tube development, which leads to the development of the brain and spinal cord, during gestation requires cell-to-cell interactions of the notochords along with the limitations of physics

Question 114

Greenough’s categories of plasticity

Answer 114

1. Experience-dependent systems
2. Experience-expectant systems
3. Activity-dependent developmental processes

Question 115

Greenough 1. Experience-dependent systems

Answer 115

Experience-dependent systems: Experience-dependent plasticity is all about environmental information being stored for later use and the brain responding to stimulation during development. If your environment is different, your brain is going to be different. Experience-dependent plasticity explains the differences between experiences of enrichment vs. deprivation in developmental outcomes; everyday processes and experiences changing your brain in real time. Examples include enriched rearing leads to increased dendritic branching and the number of synapses/neurons. Additionally, enhanced or reduced input creates changes in the somatosensory cortex (learning, memory formation).

Question 116

Greenough 2. Experience-expectant systems

Answer 116

Experience-expectant systems: Experience-expectant plasticity is all about experience and early input organizing neural structure early on in development and about tuning yourself to ambient, stable sources of information. So, the idea is that typically-available, stable sensory information is used by the developing system/brain to construct its neural structure and that evolution shapes the brain to expect certain inputs to flesh out its own structure. The implication is that the inputs must be stable over developmental time; you have to have enough stable information for the brain to be shaped to incorporate the information and to expect certain things to happen. Examples include the development of ocular dominance columns; development of sensitivity to orientation of line - visual cortex dendrites mirror experienced line orientation; detection of movement; and motor coordination of walking

Question 117

Greenough 3. Activity-dependent developmental processes

Answer 117

Activity-dependent developmental processes (know definition and examples): A concept that refers to how infants are actively involved in/actively drive their own development. Infants aren’t just passive recipients of forms of stimulation and input. Rather, infants actually influence their own development through their own behaviors. Examples of activity-dependent developmental processes include walking, reaching, depth perception, language development, and birdsong learning.

Question 118

Lessons from Braitenberg: simple mechanisms can cause complex adaptive behavior

Answer 118

The main message of Braitenberg vehicles is that small, simple changes to either the sensors on the robot, the connections to the motor, the environment that the robot is in, etc., can yield dramatic differences in behavior. Even simple organisms can reflect complex behavior because it’s imitating the complexity around it, demonstrating that complex behaviors can come from simple mechanisms/systems. This message has implications for both human infant development and for attachment. With regard to human infant development, Braitenberg vehicles show that the complexity of biological systems can come from various sources, even those with simple systems, and that you don’t have to build complexity into the source. Further, it suggests that immature, simple functional systems are in fact extremely functional in producing adaptive, complex behaviors. With regard to attachment, Braitenberg vehicles show that secure base behavior is driven by the fact that an infant has a set of parallel, simple histories/mechanisms of learning (speech, smell, sight, movement, etc.) operating in its environment that dictate its movement and help to organize its complex patterns of going out into the world and then back to mom.

Question 119

Law of uphill analysis

Answer 119

The law of uphill analysis is founded in inference, meaning that when people/things see something acting in the world, they ask what is driving its behavior and then try to reflect that behavior through analysis, inference, and backward engineering methods.

Question 120

Law of downhill invention

Answer 120

The law of downhill invention is designing something new with goals in mind, i.e. inventing something from scratch based on design principles via standard forward engineering techniques. Much easier than uphill analysis/backward engineering.

Question 121

Integrative theoretical frameworks: Gottlieb

Answer 121

Gottlieb argued that there are multiple sources of information operating at multiple levels of organization that are used by biological systems as they develop to perform adaptive skills. In this way, Gottlieb focused on what was going on inside of the kid. In other words, he argued that there exist bidirectional influences from the organism-out and from the outside-in that affect cognitive development and processes.

Question 122

Integrative theoretical frameworks: Brofenbrenner

Answer 122

Bronfenbrenner maintained that there exist multiple levels of organization and multiple contexts of development that affect cognitive development and outcomes. First is the microsystem, which are the most proximal influences and interactions (interactions between child’s behavior and the home, siblings, aprents, religious settings, neighborhood’s opportunities for activity, education/school). Next is the mesosystem, which includes the home environment, larger religious settings, neighborhoods, and schools. In other words, the mesosystem constitutes a context that organizes the kinds of proximal interactions we have. Third is the exosystem, which includes things like school boards, local government, parents’ workplace, mass media, and local industry, which are things that then affect and organize the mesosystem. Finally is the macrosystem, which is what every other system is embedded in. It includes dominant beliefs and ideologies that set parameters that then trickle back down to the individual. In this way, Bronfenbrenner was focused on what was going on around the kid. A key point that he argued was that organisms aren’t just passive recipients of outside influences; rather, they bring their own experiences and functions into interactions.

Question 123

Integrative theoretical frameworks: Faust

Answer 123

Faust’s integrative approach is based on a spectrum of developmental influences ranging fluidly from information that comes from the genes to information that comes from conspecifics. The writing in origin reflects reflexes, the writing in green reflects perceptual capabilities, and the writing in blue reflects social and communicative abilities. The left side of the spectrum includes more innate behaviors (i.e. reflex behaviors which aren’t affected by experience), while the right side of the spectrum constitutes behaviors that cannot be achieved without external, environmental, and social influences. The overall idea is that adaptive skills and behaviors aren’t derived entirely from genes or wholly learned from the environment; rather, there are different proportions of influence from various sources of information. In other words, no matter which end of the spectrum you’re on, most behaviors originate from a combination of genetic and learned factors.

Question 124

Types of family structures

Answer 124

Nuclear: wife, husband, children (bi-parental is key point)

Extended: households shared with grandparents, cousins, and/or nieces/nephews, who may play a major role in child rearing
* can be good if they help raise children etc or bad if they do not help and just add to noise pollution

Single-parent: most data on mother-led families
* 50% of children in this environment at some point in development

Question 125

Define family dynamics

Answer 125

Patterns of interactions among family members

Question 126

Role of reciprocal regulation: how parents regulate children

Answer 126

• Tasks they set, values they promote, behaviors they model, contexts they select

Question 127

Role of reciprocal regulation: how children regulate parent behavior

Answer 127

• Temperament, preferences, appearance, verbal ability
• Emotional regulation, behavioral inhibition

Question 128

What are the parenting styles?

Answer 128

1. Authoritarian
2. Authoritative
3. Permissive

Question 129

1. Authoritarian Parenting Style

Answer 129

Authoritarian
* Parenting behavior:
Demanding and controlling
Favor punitive methods over reasoning
Stress obedience over independence

• Child outcomes:
  Other-directed (look to others for direction; not leaders)
  Lack social competence
  Lack curiosity
  Withdrawn (fewer friendship networks in general)

Question 130

2. Authoritative Parenting Style

Answer 130

• Parenting behavior:
  Demanding but reciprocal relationship
  Favor reasoning over physical punishment
  Encourage independence
• Child outcomes:
  Self-reliant
  Self-controlled
  Shows curiosity
  Content (happy)

Question 131

3. Permissive Parenting Style

Answer 131

• Permissive Indulgent
  Show warm feelings toward child; responsive yet undemanding
• Permissive neglectful
  Undemanding and unresponsive
• Parenting behavior:
  Undemanding; exercise little control
  Allow children learn through experience
  Does not stress independence or obedience
• Child outcomes:
  Dependent on others
  Poor impulse control
  Relatively immature

Question 132

What are some factors that mediate parenting styles?

Answer 132

1. Siblings
2. Cultural differences
3. SES and impact of poverty

Question 133

Factor that mediate parenting styles: Siblings

Answer 133

Siblings
Increased reliance upon older siblings for child care
High variability in sibling relationship
* Influenced by emotional stress of family

Question 134

Factor that mediate parenting styles: cultural differences

Answer 134

Cultural differences (Chao paper on Chinese parenting)
Chao: Baumrind’s categories applicable to Chinese parents?
* Found that parents that are more authoritarian seen as having more positive outcomes for children in China

Question 135

What are the multiple contexts of childhood? (Bronfenbrenner model)

Answer 135

The idea that there are macrosystems, ecosystems, mesosystems, and microsystems within which we develop.

Question 136

Factor that mediate parenting styles: SES and impact of poverty

Answer 136

SES and impact of poverty
Poverty associated with:
* Poor psychological and physical health
* Children at higher risk for depression
* Parents tend to use authoritarian styles of behavior
o Maybe this is good, might only get one change to learn not to hang out in a bad area of town etc.

Question 137

Piaget’s concept of assimilation?

Answer 137

In Assimilation, what is perceived in the outside world is incorporated into the internal world, without changing the structure of that internal world, but potentially at the cost of “squeezing” the external perceptions to fit — hence pigeon-holing and stereotyping.

Question 138

Piaget’s concept of accommodation (mechanisms of cognitive change)

Answer 138

If you are familiar with databases, you can think of it this way: your mind has its database already built, with its fields and categories already defined. If it comes across new information which fits into those fields, it can assimilate it without any trouble.