Developmental Psychology Flashcards
Who described himself as a constructivist? Freud/Piaget/Meltzoff/Locke
Piaget
Which of the following are NOT stages of prenatal development
Embryonic stage/germinal stage/foetal stage/sensori-motor stage
Sensori-motor stage (in child development not prenatal)
Longitudinal design does NOT allow for investigation of:
Developmental change/Cohort Effect/Developmental Continuity/Individual Differences
Cohort Effect
Describe 2 flaws of Darwins method with his baby biography
- too generalised/biased
- didn’t pick up on visual abilities in children
When might case studies be the only valid method?
If the individual has a unique disability, ability or gift
Which method is best used for providing NORMATIVE data?
Cross-sectional method
Problems with cohort effect
Measure of spatial ability may improve and be influenced
Diescribe a longitudical design study
Long study with big research group; documenting development
Describe a longitudinal design study
Long study with big research group; documenting development
What does attrition mean?
Fall-out rate
Disadv of Longitudinal design (3 things)
- expensive
- practically difficult
- dropouts
Describe Cohort Design
compares individuals born at different times in history at the same stages of development
What does ecological validity mean?
if ecologically valid; the research in labs can be related to real life
Which design would you use to learn about the effects of historical change?
Cohort design
Name 2 ways of improving observational records
- inter-rater reliability — more than one recorder, video recorder (deals with bias)
- ## video coding the behaviours
Types of interview
semi-structured (allows u to obtain info more directly related to the research Q. the way diagnostics work)
open-ended (not good to draw data from)
questionnaires
Which 3 things can longitudinal design investigate?
developmental change
developmental continuity
individual differences
By what age do infants prefer symmetrical to asymmetrical patterns?
4 months
Infants prefer patterns with curved or straight edges?
Curved
At what age does preference for faces emerge?
2 months
At what age does depth perception come into play
6-14months, will not crawl over cliff section
At what age does shape constancy occur
Newborns
Perception of object at whole occurs at what age
2 months old were aware of whole shape whereas newborn are not
Empiricism meaning and examples of empiricists
Argues for blank slate, tabula rasa
John Locke 1960
Who said ‘blooming buzzing confusion’ and what did they mean
James 1990
Meaning the idea of empiricism that infants are a blank slate, v confused
Nativist meaning and examples of nativists
Argues for innate abilities and templates
Descartes 1638, Kant 1781
Constructivism
Knowledge is continuously created not pre formed
Piaget
When might eye tracking not be a useful experimental study method
When the infant is younger than 2 months, as visual acuity is poor
What can be used in infants to measure habituation
High amplitude sucking
Sucking declines as they habituate and increases when dishabituation occurs
Describe the Entrainment Study by Phillips-silver and Trainor 2005
7mnth old infants were bounced in synchrony to one of two rhythmic patterns , preference was found for the one they had been bounced to - shown by how long they listened
Explain the expectancy violation method
Tests the ability of infants to predict by looking at their eye movements in response to a change in object sequence. Allows you to tell if the infant had learned the sequence or not
Explain conditioned head turning
Newborns turn their heads to new/interesting sights or voices, allows hearing thresholds and auditory discrimination to be tested
Give an example of an experiment that used contingency or operant learning techniques
Ribbon attached to infants wrist, after baseline a stimulus was introduced that causes singing when the infant pulls. After 8 weeks increased pulling, showing an instinctual understanding that actions have consequences, OPERANT CONDITIONING THROUGH REWARD
Describe Perceptual Narrowing
The loss of discrimination between phenomes to allow the child to focus on their own language
By what age is the ability to discriminate between phenomes in other languages lots
12 months
