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.
