Developmental psychology Flashcards
What is developmental psychology about?
It is not just about explaining transition from infancy to adulthood but also about providing explanations of the degree to which individuals are different.
What are the three key concepts of developmental psychology?
1- nature of knowledge
2- nature of learning
3- complexities of measurement
What does nature of knowledge debate?
It debates about nativism versus empiricism. The argument here is how much of our knowledge is inborn or innate?
What is nature of learning about?
This concept coined by Harry Harlow is learning to learn, in which the idea behind this is that organisms learn to take advantage of their environment through learning.
What is complexities of measurement about?
It is the difference between competence and performance when we’re doing measurement.
What does the rapid neurogenesis within the nervous system interact with?
It interacts with the child’s prenatal environment which can go on to affect the child’s behaviour and cognition later on in life.
What did Julie Mennella’s work show?
Her work showed that babies who had been exposed to carrot flavour in utero and babies who had been exposed to carrot flavour through breast milk, both showed preferences for this carrot flavoured cereal.
What are the methods in developmental psychology?
- Observations and interviews
- Measuring movements
- Study gaze
What can measuring movements be used for?
Can use this for studying motor development and also use for studying perceptual and cognitive function.
What can studying gaze be used for?
We can use this as a proxy to see what babies are interested in which allows us to make inferences about what they understand in the world.
What does habituation in babies measure?
It measures babies getting bored with stimulus, then getting interested again when you change something about the stimulus.
What is the violation of expectations method? and how does it work?
It is a variant on the habituation method that’s also been prominently used.
1) this is when you show infants a stimulus
2) then habituate them to it or just familiarise it
3) show variant on that stimulus that should be unexpected
What is another variant on the gaze paradigm?
The visual paired comparison.
What is the visual paired comparison?
This is where you simply ask what babies prefer to look at.
What did Amanda Woodward (1998) use the violation of expectations method to show?
Used this to show 9 months old encode a persons goal.
What did Fantz (1961) show?
He used the visual paired comparison to examine what sorts of stimuli infants preferred to look at using simple black and white images.
What did Pascalis use the visual paired comparison to show?
Used this method to examine infants sensitivity to faces and the degree to which they can recognise similarities and differences in faces.
What did Pascalis find using the visual paired comparison?
He learned that early infants are highly sensitive to differences suggesting that they’re open to learning about a wide variety of faces ad it’s only later on in which they start to specialise in their face perception abilities.
What can eye tracking be used for?
Eye tracking can be used to understand the point at which infants become able to understand the meaning of the world.
What can brain imaging be used for?
Can help understand cognition.
What is electroencephalography (EEG)? and what can it be used for?
It is a set of sensors attached to the scalp that measure the electrical potentials generated by bundles of neurons they fire.
What does fMRI measure?
Measures changes in blood flow around areas of the brain.
What does fNIRS stand for?
Functional near infrared spectroscopy
What does fNIRS measure and what can it help with?
It can measure the amount of blood flow of areas in the brain and helps make inferences about what areas of the brain are working when infants are doing simple cognitive tasks.
What is cross sectional design?
Cross sectional design is the easiest way to measure developmental change and is where you look at a bunch of kids of different ages and examine their abilities.
What is longitudinal design?
This is where you sample same individuals at multiple timesteps.
What is quantitative change?
It is a gradual change in an ability.
What is qualitative change?
It is change in the type of ability.
What did Jean Piaget argue?
He argued that there aren’t innate ideas and that children aren’t just a product of their environment because it’s the child themselves that is constructing knowledge of the world around them.
What is genetic epistemology?
This is the act of active learning about the world i.e. how does the child create knowledge of the world
What is the Piagetian theory?
Children are learning to represent the world in new, more powerful ways.
What does Piaget say stage changes are?
Stage changes are across the board, they permeate all the child’s cognitive abilities and the wholesale changes to how the child actually thinks.
How does Piaget say that you can recognise the different stage changes?
Due to patterns of systematic error.
How does Piaget argue that stage changes occur?
Stage changes occur through the process of equilibration.
What can Piaget’s stage theories be split up into?
Sensorimotor stages, preoperational stage, concrete operational stage and formal operational stage
What is the starting state in the sensorimotor stage?
The starting state is just impingement of sensations on the body.
What does the pre-operational stage allow children to represent?
Allows children to represent the world in more abstract terms than sensorimotor patterns but no reversible operations on those representations.
What does equilibrium explain for Piaget?
Equilibrium describes Piaget’s proposed process by which observation of the world, having caused significant changes to a schema through assimilation and accommodation results in a major representational change in the infant’s understanding of the world-a-stage change
What are the criticisms of Piaget’s theory?
One key criticism is that his theory is very detailed in some aspects but rather vague in other ways.
Another criticism is that his account focuses on the children’s competence rather than their performance.
What did Leo Vygotsky come up with?
He came up with the idea that there are huge social contributions to children’s development and that if you want to understand children’s development appropriately you need to think about cultural and linguistic tools within which they are embedded.
What was Piaget’s theory focused on?
Focused on internal changes in the child’s mind that allow them to represent the world in different ways. There is universal patterns of development.
What was the main idea of Vygotsky’s theory?
The key thing for him to understand are the child-external processes that help them to develop. Children under different cultural circumstances should develop in very different ways.
Vygotsky’s key contribution is getting psychologists to pay attention for social support for child development. How did he do this?
He did this by focusing on children’s cognitive limitations when working alone vs working with others.
What does zone of proximal development measure?
It explains the maximum range of representations, processes or skills that a child is capable of mastering at a point in time.
Social learning works under scaffolding. What is scaffolding?
It describes how adults help children to acquire new knowledge either through explicit instruction or implicit means.
In regards of scaffolding, what does explicit instruction mean?
It may be something you see in preschools when teachers are telling kids where to put the blocks etc.
In regards of scaffolding, what does implicit scaffolding describe?
It describes a set of behaviours that adults may not think they’re doing in order to teach children but still allow them to learn.
What did Vygotsky argue about the influence of cultural tools?
Vygotsky argued that the cultural context of development, the degree of cultural progress made by a society is going to impact the rate of development.
What is the key idea surrounding observational learning?
Key idea here is that children’s development is more than trial-and-error. They actively observe and copy behaviour from models.
What does Bandura argue?
Bandura argued that children’s social learning is driven by at least two factors:
1) Vicarious punishment - do not model those who are punished
2) Selective imitation - model older, more competent individuals
What did Koenig’s et al.’s study show?
It was used to show that there’s a selective process of social planning which has been influential when we’ve learnt more about how people are seen by children as trustworthy.
What do Meltzooff and Moore show?
They showed that infants are able to imitate facial expressions as well as the fact that 14 month olds will imitate something a week after learning it suggesting that imitation is something that sticks, imitative actions remain in memory for significant amount of time.
What is a key point surrounding over imitative capacities?
Children seem to be sensitive to pedological cues.
Who is the most important social relationship between?
Between caregiver and child
What is the attachment theory?
It is a body of psychological work that originates in John Bowlby’s work of infants and young children learning bonds with caregiver.
What did Bowlby argue about his approach to attachment?
He argued that in early life infants have an instinct to act to gain security from their caregiver by producing a series of behaviours that are designed to bind the caregiver to them e.g. crying, following, clinging, smiling
Ainsworth developed the Strange Situation. What was it designed to do?
It was designed to reliably explicit attachment behaviour in a way that could be reliably coded.
What can be measured throughout the strange situation?
Throughout this procedure you can measure behaviours like proximity, seeking, contact maintenance, resistance and avoidance.
What are the four types of attachment styles?
Secure
Avoidant
Ambivalent
Disorganised
What is secure attachment?
Secure attachment may display separation anxiety, and is quickly calmed by return
What is avoidant attachment?
Avoidant attachment do not display separation anxiety and uninterested by return
What is ambivalent attachment?
Ambivalent attachment may display separation anxiety and un-calmed by return
What is disorganized attachment?
Can’t be explained.
What was Bowlby’s idea surrounding infants and their attachment style?
Infants show different attachment styles because they have different internal working models of how their caregivers are going to behave.
What is an internal working model?
It is a cognitive representation of how other people around them are going to operate and gives the child a set of expectations about how their caregiver will respond.
What does Marr say are the three different types of explanation for how the mind works?
Computational explanation
Algorithmic explanation
Implementational explanation
What is computational explanation?
They are the computations that humans try to do when solving a task
What is algorithmic explanation?
They are the algorithms that are used to solve these tasks
What is implementational explanation?
These are how algorithms are implemented in the developing brain
There are many aspects of info processing that change over development. What are the three core aspects that change?
Memory ability, control ability and use of strategies to interact with their environment.
Infants have very poor working memories. How did Diamond’s study show this?
His study showed the child’s memory abilities really do contribute to their ability to pass or fail the A not B test
What are control abilities important for?
They are important for interacting with the world as we need to be able to suppress undesired thoughts or behaviours.
What did Butterworth find?
He found in his study that A not B error sometimes still occurs when objects are hidden in transparent boxes which suggests it’s an inhibition issue rather than an object permanence issue.
What are strategies in regards of child development?
Strategies are the sorts of operations and processes that a child is able to perform.
What did Bob Siegler’s experiment ask?
It asked if you can see an emergence of new addition and subtraction strategies in young children moving from sum strategies to more complex strategies.
What did Siegler’s overlapping waves model suggest?
It suggests that children can have multiple strategies in mind and they are testing them out.
How did Siegler show the overlapping waves model?
He showed this by using a micro genetic testing method which is a form of longitudinal developmental data.
What is the key idea in the core knowledge account?
The key idea is that children’s inductive inferences about all these different domains are constrained by an early emerging understanding
What does the core knowledge account suggest?
Core knowledge account suggests that infants have a skeletal understanding of what the world outside them is like from very early in development and guides them in learning about the world subsequently.
What is experience-expectant plasticity?
Children are remarkable learning machines i.e. they learn about the world each time they’re born
What is experience-dependant plasticity?
Children are remarkable learning machines but they’re born with a bit of knowledge about the world that helps them to learn about it.
What is the theory theory?
It essentially describes some of the same ideas of Piaget, that infants are building up an understanding of the world that allows them to predict how the world works
How do children learn to explain the world through the theory theory?
They learn through deeper properties, and don’t just attend to physical appearance
What does Susan Gelman argue?
Susan Gelman has argued that Locke’s claim might be wrong about essence in terms of what things might be in the world but it captures how people think about the world
What is psychological essentialism?
It is an intuitive belief that Locke’s claim is correct, which guides subsequent learning about categories
What is the theory of mind?
It describes our ability to accurately explain other people’s actions in terms of their beliefs, desires, goals, emotions etc
Who first coined the idea of theory of mind?
Premack and Woodruff (1978)
How can theory of mind be measured in children?
Measure by:
1) egocentrism tasks by Paiget - fail to override their own perspective in mountain task
2) appearance reality task by Gopnik and Astington- are children really ‘mind blind’
What do you need to know to have a theory of mind?
1) Knowledge that there is a true state of the world
2) multiple representations of what that state might be
3) an ability to accurately bind those representations to different people
What is the Sally-Ann task used to test?
It is used to teste false beliefs
What do false beliefs allow us to investigate?
They allow us to investigate whether children can understand that someone’s beliefs differ from the true state of the world and thus indicate that they represent this person has beliefs
What did Michael Tomasello come up with?
He came up with a cultural intelligence hypothesis were they developed a battery of tests that assess 2 different types of cognitive abilities
1) battery of tests for solving physical problems
2) battery of tests for solving social problems
What is the behaviourist theory?
It is a theory that makes no reference at all to the sort of cognition occurring between stimulus and response
What are theory like theories?
They include behaviours of wondering for example whether the gorilla will take food because he is looking at it indicating he wants it
Imitation can be used to detangle the theory theories, how?
Imitation involves determining the intentions of the model.
Imitation can be used to detangle the behavioural theories, how?
Imitations involves copying the actions of the model.
What did Call and Tomasello come up with?
They came up with a task that can be performed with both human children and chimps as an adaption of the Sally-Ann Task
What did Call and Tomasello’s study show?
Their study showed that chimps only interpret these data in terms of where the communicator is indicating the reward may be. They are unable to reason with the communicators actions in terms of their knowledge.
Why do we care about ape Theory of Mind?
Developmental psychology is typically about how human minds are created. If we want to understand what particularly makes us human, we need to know how our developmental differs from other species.
What are concepts and what do they allow?
They are constituents of thought and they allow creative thought
In adults, what are the two ways in which concepts are built up?
1) built up from statistical summaries of perceived features
2) elements of intuitive theories, that explain and predict the outside world
What is Piaget’s theory of concept?
Infants move in a progression from a sensorimotor understanding of the world to eventually building up an abstract conceptual understanding of the world
What is the core knowledge theory of concept?
Children have early emerging adult like knowledge of the world that isn’t actually necessarily acquired and that helps them to learn.
What was Gelman and Bloom’s study and what did they find?
They carried out an experiment to see whether children are sensitive to deeper properties or surface properties and even 3-year-olds have this deeper abstract understanding of what causes an object to be what, they don’t just rely on surface features
How are numbers constructed?
Culturally/ linguistically
How do children learn about numbers?
They learn about numbers through the core knowledge account
What does the core knowledge account postulate about infants?
They postulate that infants have a couple of core systems for representing something like numerosity from very early life.
What does the core knowledge account provide mechanisms for in regards of numbers?
It also provides mechanisms for moving from core knowledge to an adult like state of knowledge
The core knowledge account suggest that infants possess two systems that are evolutionary conserved allowing them to think about things that are roughly akin to numbers. What are they?
Analogue magnitude and parallel individuation systems
What is analogue magnitude?
It is a system that we have in our minds for representing the approximate magnitude of some stimulus : amount of redness, length of time, no. of houses etc.
(It is not a number, can’t precisely distinguish quantities)
What is the easiest way to show analogue magnitude in infants?
Easiest way to see this system in operation is just to compare different numericities.
What did Xu and Spelke find in their studies?
They showed that infants represent number
What did Feigenson and Carey investigate and what did they find?
They asked infants to remember small quantities of stuff using biscuits, infants showed an item limits of not being able to remember more than 3 items highlighting how their representational system breaks when too many objects need to be tracked.
What did parallel individuation show about pre-linguistic infants?
It showed that they possess inaccurate “analogue” measure of number and precise-but-limited tracking of objects
By acquiring language, what does that allow children to build?
It allows children to build up on understanding of culturally defined natural numbers
Where does the evidence about acquisition of number words comes from?
It comes from a method developed by Karen Wynn called the given number task where you get children to give you one pebble, or two pebbles etc.
What did Karen Wynn’s given number task show?
It allowed us to see whether infants or children know numbers or more assess the sort of numbers they know at this point in life.
What happens once children become three knowers in terms of numbers?
A switch is flipped and they are able to understand the entire count list- they can give you precise numbers as far as they can count.
What does analogue magnitude system allow children to learn?
It allows children to learn that number words are on a number line and that bigger number words mean something.
How does parallel individuation link to analogue magnitude system?
Early on when infants are learning those first few number words, they may be mapping these words to different states that they can hold in mind through the parallel individuation system
Number words are a cultural tool. What do they build upon?
They build upon early developing heritage core systems of number in order to build a much more precise, much more powerful representational system.
