intro to child development

Question 1

what is the psychological definition of childhood?

Answer 1

• dependent on adult caregivers
• period of time fundamentally about learning

Question 2

why do humans have a longer childhood compared to other species?

Answer 2

1. large brain/narrow hips trade-off: requires babies to be born earlier as their brain continues to develop after birth
2. being born not fully formed allows for more learning: long childhood is adaptive for maximizing learning

Question 3

what is child development?

Answer 3

process of learning perceptual, cognitive, emotional, and social capabilities that allows an individual to grow from the dependence of infancy to the independence of adulthood

Question 4

why does the study of child development focus on study of infancy?

Answer 4

• very rapid changes occur within the first two years of life
• changes in one area enable changes in other areas
• sheds light on nature/nurture debate

Question 5

name the two methods in infant research

Answer 5

1. preferential looking paradigm
2. habituation paradigm

Question 6

what is the preferential looking paradigm?

Answer 6

• method of infant research
• takes advantage of infants’ preference to look at interesting things to assess preference for stimuli
• when presenting a baby with 2 stimuli beside each other and the baby looks longer at one of them, it means that they can distinguish between the two and they have a preference for one over the other

Question 7

what makes a stimuli “interesting” to infants?

Answer 7

complex, saturated in colour, familiar

Question 8

what is the habituation paradigm?

Answer 8

• method of infant research
• takes advantage of baby’s natural preference for novelty to assess their ability to discriminate between stimuli
• involves repeatedly presenting an infant with a stimuli until they’re used to it, then if they show greater interest in a second newly introduced stimuli it means they can tell the difference between the two

Question 9

do infants generally prefer familiarity or novelty?

Answer 9

• general preference for familiar
• but, repeated exposure to the familiar will cause an infant to switch their preference to novel stimulus
• short exposure = familiarity preference
• long exposure = novelty preference