Developmental Psychology I Flashcards
Define Developmental Psychology.
The study of the biological, cognitive, social and emotional changes that occur in people over time.
Developmental Psychology, despite popular belief is not just confined to ____ and _____, it is for all throughout a person’s ________.
Childhood, Adolescence, Lifetime.
Name the Highly Influential Theorist to do with Cognitive Development.
Jean Piaget (1896-1980)
_____ observed that children were incapable of doing things at certain ages.
Piaget.
What did Piaget call his general theoretical framework?
Genetic Epistemology.
What did Piaget believe that cognitive abilities developed on the basis of?
That cognitive abilities developed on the basis of;
Interaction between innate capacities (nature) with environmental events (nurture).
Regardless of their whereabouts in the world, what did Piaget believe that all children pass through?
Piaget believed that all children pass through a hierarchy of qualitatively different stages.
How many stages of cognitive development did Piaget come up with?
4
Name this:
A mental operation (framework) which can be applied to objects, beliefs, ideas or anything in the child’s world.
A Schema
What do Schemas change as a result of?
Schemas change on the basis of experience.
Piaget said that we learn through our ________.
Interactions.
What is the reason that as young children we experiment/explore/try new things?
To expand this mental framework (our schema).
We will have a _____ for learning to ride a bike, this will then evolve so that we can ride any bike.
Schema.
Name the 2 key processes responsible for cognitive development.
Assimilation and Accommodation.
What is a schema?
The mental framework a child holds that guides their interaction with the world.
Define Assimilation.
The cognitive process by which we incorporate new information into existing schemas.
Define Accommodation.
The adjustment of schemas to fit with the nature of the environment. (never seen cow before eg. lived in city all life, then schemas will have to adjust).
What is meant by “constructivism”?
That schemas are internally constructed by the child.
Children _____ their own knowledge.
Construct.
Name Piaget’s 4 stages of cognitive development.
- Sensorimotor
- Preoperational
- Concrete Operational
- Formal Operational
What is the stage from Birth to 2 Years called?
Sensorimotor Stage.
What ages does the Preoperational Stage include?
2 to 7 years.
The concrete operational is from ___ to ___ years.
7, 12.
What age is the formal operational stage from?
From 12 years and older.
In the sensorimotor stage, where does most learning come from?
Learning comes through Immediate Sensory and Motor Experiences.
The sensorimotor stage is made from a combination of _________ schemas. Give an example of this.
Behavioural.
Sucking and grasping the same object. (combo)
At the sensorimotor stage there is an eventual achievement of what?
Internal Representation/ Representational Thought.
Do children in the sensorimotor period have object permanence?
No.
Name this:
The understanding that objects continue to exist even when they cannot be observed.
Object Permanence
Describe the Object Permanence test/results with children in the Sensorimotor Period.
- They look at an object in front of them
- But when the object is obstructed (hidden) by a bit of paper, they won’t look behind the paper.
What period would a child only interact with the world on a physical level?
Sensorimotor Period.
In the Sensorimotor Period what do we have no sense of?
We have no sense of self.
In the preoperational period, what skills emerge?
Representational skills emerge.
There is rapid construction of _______ between ages 2 and 4.
Language.
What do children in the preoperational stage often display?
Egocentrism
What is Egocentrism?
The difficulty in taking the perspective of another person. eg. just think of themselves.
At what period can children represent objects eg. draw faces, sky and trees?
Preoperational Period
In the preoperational period, what is their thinking dominated by?
The appearance of objects.
Name an experiment to test Egocentrism.
Three Mountains Experiment (Piaget and Inhelder, 1956).
What is the result of the three mountain experiments in preoperational children?
The kid describes the view that they themselves see, instead of the view that the doll sees.
Preoperational children have the failure to ______.
conserve.
What is Conservation?
The ability to determine that a certain quantity will remain the same despite adjustment of the container, shape, or apparent size.
At the preoperational stage, children can only focus on 1 aspect and therefore neglect any other aspects that may be important in its analysis. Name this.
Centration.
In the preoperational stage, if there are 2 containers, containing the same volume, and 1 is poured into a taller container, what will the child think?
The child will think the taller container has more water in it. This displays centration :)
At what period do children have success on conservation tasks?
Concrete Operational Period.
In the concrete operational period, a child is able to _____ and _______.
Classify and order.
At the concrete operational stage, children have more _______ thought.
Logical.
At age 7-12, what period of development would a child be in?
Concrete Operational Period.
At the concrete operational period, there’s a development of ________ called ______ _______.
Strategies, concrete operations.
At the concrete operational period, what can children think about at the same time?
Children can think about 2 dimensions at the same time.
At the concrete operational stage, what are children aware of? and what task to they have success in?
- They are aware of the viewpoints of others apart from themselves.
- They have success on perspective-taking tasks.
In the concrete operational stage, what is there a decline in?
Egocentrism.
In the concrete operational stage, children understand the ______ of ________.
Reciprocity, relationships.
At the concrete operational stage, what are children capable of understanding?
Reversibility.
What is this an example of:
1 + 4 = 5
6 - 1 = 5
What one of Piaget’s stages of cognitive development does this involve?
Reversibility.
Concrete Operational Stage.
Describe Piaget’s 1967 test on reversibility?
- Balls stacked in a cylinder from top down= A, B and C
- Ask participants if the bottom falls what order will balls fall in
- Children at Concrete operational stage will recognise that the balls will fall in the order= C, B then A.
What is the final stage in cognitive development?
Formal Operational Period.
Childhood ends when ______ ________ begin.
Formal Operations.
The Formal Operational Period marks the end of _____ thinking.
Childhood.
At the formal operational period we have the ability to ________ _______ about ______ _______.
Reason systematically, Abstract concepts.
What sort of reasoning do we have at the Formal Operational Period?
Hypothetico-deductive reasoning.
What is hypothetico-deductive reasoning?
The reasoning we use to develop a hunch or make a prediction.
At the formal operational period, when faced with the pendulum problem, what can we use to solve the problem?
- trial and error
- Critical/Scientific thinking
“What would happen if…?”, at what period does this speculation arise?
Formal Operational Period.
At the Formal Operational Period, what is realised regarding physical representations?
We realise that not everything has a physical representation, that some things are abstract eg. love, mortality, liberty etc.
Piaget’s theory is the fundamental reference point for understanding _______ _______.
Cognitive Development.
Piaget’s theory is a _______ and highly ______ theory.
Robust, highly regarded.
Some modern research findings have challenged _______ __________.
Piagetian Assumptions.
Other theoretical positions have competed with Piaget’s ideas, name the main one.
Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory.
What is the main challenge to Piaget’s Theory?
That Piaget under-estimated the growth of thought.
A key concept of Piaget’s theory was object ______.
Permanence.
What research evidence showed that babies infact do have object permanence?
Baillargeon et al. 1985
What did Baillargeon et al.1985 use?
They used the violation of expectancy paradigm.
Name the 3 events the babies were shown (Baillargeoon at al. 1985).
- Habituation (screen flipped to other side)
- Possible event (box under screen stopped screen flipping all the way)
- Impossible event (box quickly whipped away- but seems like screen can flip fully even with box under it to the baby)
What were the results and conclusion of the Baillargeon et al. 1985 experiment?
The babies looked longer at the impossible event aka. looking time increased here,
This shows that they understand object permanence-that objects still exist when out of sight.
Borke 1975, revisited what task to measure egocentrism?
The Three Mountain Task.
What did Borke change about the three mountains task?
- He made it more interesting
- The child was able to rotate the scene instead of walking around the scene
- He used displays more familiar to children eg. toys, houses, animals, tv characters etc.
What were the results of Borke’s revisiting of the three mountain experiment?
That most kids were able to see the other viewpoint :)
What change did McGarrigle and Donaldson (1975) make to the conservation experiment?
-The naughty teddy changed the dots.
What did McGarrigle and Donaldson (1975) find when they did the naught teddy conservation task?
That 4 year olds performed correctly so have the ability to conserve (in this case length).
What is the issue with the conservation task?
It may actually test social cues (kids respond in the way they think the researchers want) instead of cognitive development.
________ sociocultural approach challenged Piaget’s theory.
Vygotsky’s.
Vygotsky believed in Internalisation. Define Internalisation.
Process by which children absorb knowledge from their social context.
What did Vygotsky emphasise?
He emphasises the importance of guidance by parents, teachers etc.
Vygotsky believed that children learn from those _____ ______.
Around them.
According to Vygotsky, what must we have in order for the growth of thinking to occur?
A social environment.
Name this:
The gap between what a child knows and what others that they interact with know.
Who came up with this concept?
The Zone of Proximal Development.
Vygotsky.
Vygotsky believed that cognitive development can rapidly occur, with what?
With Intervention.
Piaget said that language _____ _____ thought, whereas Vygotsky said that knowledge passed down via ______, ______ thoughts.
Doesn’t create, language, creates.
What is the main difference between Piaget’s theory and Vygotsky’s Theory?
Vygotsky believes that a child can jump ahead if helped by an adult therefore stages aren’t age related.
Piaget thought that children were active in their own learning therefore passed through stages at specific ages.
