Developmental Psychology Flashcards
Developmental psychology
Study of changes/continuities in an organism from conception to death
True or false: perceptual experience begins in utero
TRUE
- Mother’s voice is most salient external stim that reaches the fetus (speech is low-pass filtered - focused on broader patterns and not finer details)
- Amniotic fluid flavored by what mother has eaten
Evidence
- Newborns prefer mother’s voice + over other woman
- Newborns prefer mother’s native language over other language
- Acoustics of a newborn’s cry exhiit distinctive characteristics of the mother’s native language
- Young infants recognize stories and music they were exposed to while still in the womb
- Carrot juice amniotic fluid study – babies whose mothers drank carrot juice showed more preference for it
3 assumptions infant testing methods are based on
1) infants will attend/orient to stim they find interesting
2) Familiarization: infants prefer to hear/see stim they’ve been exposed to before
3) Habituation: if the infant has been repeatedly exposed to a stim to the point of boredom, they’ll prefer the novel stim
High Amplitude Sucking Procedure (HASP)
- DV is the infant’s sucking response/strength of sucks (strong = high amp)
- Primarily used w auditory stim
Preferential Looking paradigm
- Invented by Fantz 1961
- Infants will look longer at stim they find interesting compared to uninteresting stim
- newborns show preference for faces – esp faces of their own race (due to exposure/familiarity, NOT RACISM)
Perceptual development in newborns
- Dev of sight
- Can see 8-12in away, but after that their vision is worse than ours
- Newborns esp attentive to faces/things that look like faces
Motor development in newborns
- Dev of ability to execute movements (reaching, grasping, crawling, walking)
- Born w small set of motor reflexes (rooting reflex, sucking reflex)
Motor reflex def + 2 types in infants
Def: Motor responses triggered by specific patterns of sensory stim
Rooting reflex: infants move their mouths towards any object that touches their cheek
Sucking reflex: infants suck any object that enters their mouth
Motor reflexes disappear as infants learn more sophisticated motor behavior
Evolutionary benefits of infant motor reflexes
Allows newborns to suckle
2 principles of dev of sophisticated motor behavior
Cephalocaudal/”top-to-bottom” principle: tendency for motor skills to emerge in sequence from head to feet (e.g. head –> arms –> legs)
Proximodistal principle: tendency for motor skills to emerge in sequence from center to periphery (e.g. trunk –> elbow –> hands)
Scale error in infants
Infants treat mini objects as if regular sized (e.g. trying to sit in small model train)
Cognitive development
The development of thinking and understanding across a lifespan
Jean Piaget
- Considered father of modern developmental psychology
- Created Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development; widely accepted bc it explained, not just described, development
Piaget’s view on children
- Children are like “little scientists” – naturally curious
- Play active role in acquiring knowledge
Schema
Organized unit of knowledge the child uses to try to understand a situation
Assimilation
Apply existing schema to a new experience or object
Accomodation
Involves changing or creating new schemas in response to new info or experiences
Criticisms of Piaget
- Theory doesn’t account much the role of other ppl in child’s world (e.g. siblings, parents, friends)
- May have underestimated children’s abilities - age of acquisition for certain things may be earlier
- Undervalues influence of sociocultural environment
Piaget’s 4 stages of cognitive development
1) Sensorimotor
2) Preoperational
3) Concrete operational
4) Formal operational
Sensorimotor stage
- Birth-2 yrs
- Infants experience the world by sensing it and moving in it
- Progress from simple reflex actions to symbolic processing
- Begin to construct schemas (e.g. things come closer if I pull them)
- Develop object permanence
- Will look longer at events that violate their expectations
Object permanence
Type of schema that states that something is still present even if you can’t see it
Baillargeon “violation of expectatoin” studies
- Examined object permanence in infants
- Found that it developed much earlier than Piaget thought – ~3.5 months
Preoperational stage
- 2-7 yrs old
- Dev of prelim understanding of the world (“BEFORE the operations to do the problem-solving tasks”)
- Can mentally represent objects and think symbolically (e.g. use words as symbols for things)
- Don’t pass conservation tasks until 6-7
- Egocentric; Theory of Mind doesn’t dev until later in preoperational stage
- Have difficulty bc of centration and lack of reversibility
Centration
Child’s tendency to focus on one aspect of a situation (e.g. their perspective) and ignore other aspects
Reversibility
Ability to understand that the order of things can be reversed and it still has the same meaning
Conservation + conservation task
Understanding that many of the physical properties of an object are conserved/not changed by changes in the object’s appearance
Conservation task: e.g. pouring water from a short, wide glass into a tall, thin glass doesn’t change the amount of water
(NOTE: conservation task may not be representative of cog abilities; verbally demanding task + transformation is emphasized but superficial)
Egocentrism
- Failure to understand that ppl can perceive things another way
- “Hallmark of preoperational stage”
Theory of mind
- States that other ppl have perceptions of the world different than our own
- Age of acquisition influenced by variety of factors including number of siblings, socioeconomic status, etc – most important determining factor is language skills
- Children w autism have difficulty communicating w others and making friends – some scientists hypothesize it’s bc they have trouble acquiring theory of mind
The 3 Mountains Task
- 3 mountains on a table w chairs around the table –> each chair has a different view
- When asked to describe someone else’s view, children will often describe their own perspective
- Children often don’t pass until 7-8
- Flaws: spatial abilities, memory, verbally demanding task
Concrete operational stage
- 7-11 yrs old
- Children learn how actions can transform the concrete objects of the physical world
- Understand conservation
- Reasoning is limited to real, present objects
- Difficulty w tasks requiring mental manipulation
- Difficulty w abstract thinking and hypothetical reasoning
Formal operational stage
- 11+ yrs old
- Bceome capable of flexible and abstract thought
- Can reason abt concepts like love or hypotheticals
