Developmental Psychology Flashcards
What is Active Learning?
Learning by doing
What is Passive Learning?
Learning by observation or direct instruction
Who invented “empiricism”?
Locke
What is “empiricism”?
- Children are born as a clean slate (tabula rasa)
- Individual is not pre-determined
- Societal influences effect human development
Who invented “nativism”?
Rousseau
What is “nativism”?
- Natural predisposition shapes a child
- Believes education should be kept to a minimum
- Children should make their own developments
Give an example of someone who was effected by a critical period
Genie (1957)
Who invented “constructivism”?
Piaget
What is “constructivism”?
- Children are not born with innate capabilities
- They construct knowledge using schemas
Who invented the “Sociocultural Theory”?
Vygotsky
What is “sociocultural theory”?
- Language is crucial to development
- “More Knowledgeable Others”
- Zone of proximal development
Who created the “preferential looking paradigm”?
Fantz (1961)
What is the “preferential looking paradigm”?
- “looking chamber”, through a peephole in the ceiling experimenters could see tiny images of the objects mirrored in the infant’s eyes
- Time infant spends looking at each object - - Infants preferred the real face, looked a but less at the scrambled face and ignored the control pattern
- Eye-tracking
What is the “habituation paradigm”?
- Make a child bored of one stimulus
- Pair it with a novel stimulus
- If the infant look more at the new stimulus, they have discriminated the two
What is “eye-tracking”?
- Uses infra-red to measure where a participant is looking
- Allows precise measurement of looking time and fixation
What is “overreliance of looking times”?
- Suggests you can’t always rely on looking times
- Is an infant still focussing or is it a blank stare?
What do fNIRS measure?”
Changes in cerebral blood flow and oxygenation in the brain
What do EEG’s measure?
Electrical impulses that are generated by the neurons in the brain
What is a “teratogen”?
Any environmental agent that may interfere with the development of the foetus (alcohol, drugs, malnutrition etc.)
What is maternal malnutrition related to in the foetus?
Higher risk of schizophrenia, antisocial personality disorder or a mood disorder
What is maternal depression associated with?
Higher chance of prematurity and low birth weight
What is maternal stress associated with?
Natural events with higher objective stress led to lower kids’ IQ at age 5
What is the “high amplitude dummy sucking paradigm?”
Infants can learn to respond to an auditory stimulus through dummy sucking, if they want an auditory stimulus to stop, they suck faster and it stops - conditioning (Skinner)
What is the “maturation viewpoint”?
- Biological change enables behavioural change
- Similar development across cultures
What is the “stage view of development”?
- Orderly, builds skill upon skill
- Requires proficiency in fundamental skills
- How does this explain regression in development tho?
What is “process view”?
- Movement is not hardwired
- Product of cooperation between bodily systems
What is the “dynamic systems theory (DST)”?
- Maturation systems are foundation
- New skills are active reorganisations of existing skills
- Interaction between individual, environment, experience, and maturational systems resulting in affordance or constraints
DST: What is a “behavioural attractor”?
An action performed in a given way in a given situation
What are the 4E’s of motor development?
Embodied: forces act on the body, forced generated by the body
Enabling: movement enables new developments
Enculturated: can be hindered or facilitated by socio-cultural practices
Embedded: perceived affordances of the environment
What is “perceptual narrowing”?
A developmental process where the brain uses environmental experiences to shape perceptual abilities
What is a “language-general capacity”?
Can discriminate differences between any 2 speech sounds from any of the world’s languages, regardless of whether it’s a language they are learning or not - this is universal
- Become specialist in their own language by 12 months
Stages of Piaget’s Object Permanence:
< 1 month: only look at objects in front of them
1-4 months: dropped objects not looked for
4 months: visually searching for fallen object, search for partially visible object, not an entirely hidden one.
8-12 months: search for entirely concealed objects.
12-18 months: permanence of invisible objects; visual tracking of moving objects, search for disappeared object.
18-24 months: full object permanence acquired; understands object as existing independent of sensory-motor action
What is the A not B error (Piaget)?
- Requires an infant to search for a hidden object:
- < 8 month olds won’t search for object at all
- Between 9-12 months, search but in wrong location (A)
What does the Violation of Expectation (VoE) paradigm study?
Object permanence in infants younger than 9 months
- Infants will look longer at an impossible event
Give two explanations for the A not B error:
- Lack of inhibition/response perseveration (
- Memory deficiency (infants might struggle to remember where the object is)
What is “infantile amnesia”?
Don’t remember anything from infant times:
- Brain development: can’t form memories due to hippocampus not fully mature until
- 3-4 years; frontal lobe growth changes that allow for explicit or conscious memories
- Linguistic development: can’t form memories/encode events without language
- Emotional development: can’t form memories without emotion schemes
Define infantile Episodic Memories:
- <6 mo: memories specific to situation in which the initial event occurs - need to be in the same situation and same emotional state as during the original experience
- 12-18 mo: can recall events for long periods - when tested using familiar objects and events, allowed multiple exposures, when they can enact the sequence in action rather than in words, and with specific reminders
Define infantile Conceptual Memories:
- > 24 mo: rooted in verbal descriptions, dependent on semantic knowledge
- Very young children may not structure their experience in memorable ways, particularly if they lack understanding of what is happening (e.g., birth, death)
- Formation of this type of memory is dependent on adults’ scaffolding - rehearsing describing one’s experience, recalling events, recounting to someone else in a verbal narrative
What is the “egocentric stage” (Piaget)?
Language not aimed at communication of thought; self-directed speech as a monologue, which disappears with development
What is the “socialised stage” (Piaget)?
Language clearly directed towards someone else; exchange of thoughts - dialogues
What are Vygotsky’s views on early communication?
- Language is inherently communicative
- Self-directed and social language are initially merged, then divide into egocentric and communicative language; both remain present throughout life
- Internalised language also remains as private monologue – shortened, fragmentary and unintelligible, evolutionary product of egocentric language
What is “gestural communication”?
Body language and hand gestures - pick me up, wave etc.
What are the 5 “communicative intentions”?
Socio-emotional – non-informational needs
Imperative – instrumental, or requestive («Get me that!»)
Declarative – sharing attention or interest («Look at that!»)
Information-seeking – e.g., from more knowledgeable others
Informative – providing information to less knowledgeable others
Why do infants smile?
- Initially, just intrinsic - related to contentment
- 6-10 weeks, need to form connection with caregivers
- 2-3 months: when experiencing a contingency between action and effect
Why do infants feel anger?
- Initially, to display hunger
- Anger expressions increase as they’re able to perform intentional behaviour
Why do infants feel joy/surprise?
Recognise they have control over their surroundings and therefore the outcomes
Why do infants feel fear?
- Fear rises from 6 months onwards
- Infants develop balance between approach (curiosity etc.) and avoidance (fear)
Provide evidence for innate imitation:
Meltzoff & Moore (1977 & 1989) - infants showed imitation as young as 42 minutes old
Provide evidence against immitation:
Some say infants move their facial muscles when they’re aroused (flashing lights, someone else making faces at them).
We can’t rely 100% on observation because we can’t ask the baby why it’s doing that
Why do infants prefer faces?
- It’s an innate reflex to orient to face-like stimuli (CONSPEC)
- As you grow, you build a detailed representation of faces because of how many you see (CONLERN)
How do infants differentiate facial expressions?
They can differentiate from 6 months onwards, but they learn to tell what the expressions mean from 3-months to 7-months.
Describe Repacholi & Gopnik’s (1997) study into understanding emotions:
- Experimenter exhibits disgust towards one of the foods they are presented with
- Infants must then offer a food to the experimenter.
- 14-months-olds provide the food they most enjoy, while the 18-month-olds provide the food the experimenter favours
Criticise Piaget’s theory:
- No clear evidence for stages
- Observations were not small-scale enough, the picture was too sweeping
- The way of testing children involved too many complex responses
- Explanation of the mechanisms of cognitive change was insufficient
- Focused on children learning in isolation, not from others
What do “core-knowledge theorists” believe?
Children are born with specialised learning abilities (modules) that allow them to acquire information quickly and efficiently
What are “rich interpretations”?
Assumes that infants go through a complex process of reasoning and therefore deliberately ‘choose’ where to look
What are “lean interpretations”?
Looking behaviour can be explained by low-level, simple perceptual processes
What is “neuroconstructivism”?
A theory that suggests that the brain constructs cognition through a combination of genetic and environmental factors
What is “experience-dependent neural development” (Encellment)?
The neural system in a brain region wires itself up in response to experience with an environment
What is “enbrainment”?
Different parts of the brain interact during development and in this way shape each other’s structure and function
What is “embodiment”?
Increased ability to manipulate and move in the environment
What is “ensocialment”?
The environment constrains the range of possible experiences
What are “epigenetics”?
Genes are not just a blueprint for development - they can be switched on and off (expressed) through environmental experience
What are the four ways that children explore?
- Visual: preferential looking, novelty preference, gaze following, sustained attention
- Manual/haptic: touching, grasping, holding, mouthing etc.
- Spatial/locomotor: moving towards interesting information
- Social-communicative: social referencing, pointing, holdouts, vocalisations, questions
What are the two means to exploration?
Physical: object knowledge, causal relation, statistical learning
Social: others’ knowledge, intentionality, context of learning
What are the 4 approaches to curiosity?
Drive - aligned with biological drives
Incongruency - seeking information to resolve uncertainty or novelty
Information Gap - seeking information to close a gap in knowledge
Learning Progress - learning in itself in intrinsically rewarding
What is “play”?
A more complex form of engaging with the world and is vital for social, cognitive and affective development
What are the “social learning strategies”?
- Observation - Rapid nonverbal learning about causality without direct experience
- Imitation - faithfully copying others’ actions
- Overimitation - faithfully copying others’ unnecessary actions
- Information-seeking - asking questions to gain new knowledge
- Teaching - self-explanatory my guy
What is “selectivity in social learning”?
- Sensitivity to direct eye contact, child-directed speech
- Sensitivity to others’ cues of reliability
- Sensitivity to informants’ social characteristics
What is the “discrete emotions theory”?
Says that emotions are innate and are discrete from one another from very early in life. Each emotion is packaged with a specific and distinctive set of bodily and facial reactions
What is the “functionalist approach”?
Emphasizes the role of the environment in emotional development. Maintains that emotions are not discrete from one another and vary somewhat based on social environment.
- Proposes that the basic function of emotions is to promote action towards achieving a goal
When do “self-conscious emotions” develop?
Emerge during the second year of life (guilt, shame embarrassment and pride)
What are the individual differences in experiencing emotions?
Some children feel bad, they’ll try to repair the doll and will tell the adult quickly.
Other children avoid the guilt and delay telling the adult
How does the role of parents influence children?
Influences their sense of security and how they feel about themselves and other people
- Children and environment influence each other, parents’ emotions influence the childs’
