Intro to Child Development (CH 1) Flashcards
What is Metanalysis?
-Method for combining the results of independent studies to reach a conclusion based on all of them
Who are Nativists?
- Major group of contemporary psychologists & philosophers
- Believe evolution created hella cool capabilities that are present in infancy
- Understanding the basic properties of physical objects= plants, animals, & other people
Who are Empiricists?
- Major group of contemporary psychologists & philosophers
- Believe that children already possess general learning mechanisms= allow them to learn quickly
- Infant & young children lack the special capabilities that nativists claim
What did Plato believe about children?
-Children have innate knowledge= are born w/ concept of animals= allows children to recognize dogs, cats, other creatures they’ve encountered
What did Aristotle believe about children?
-All knowledge comes from experience= the mind is like a blackboard where nothing is written
What was Locke’s view on Children?
- English philosopher (1632-1704)
- Viewed child as a blank slate (Tabla rasa)
- Development largely reflects nurture provided by parents & society
- Parents must exemplify honesty, stability, gentleness
- Parents must avoid over-indulging their child at an early age
- Authority should be relaxed with age= child will act more mature
What was Rousseau’s view on Children?
- French philosopher (1712-1788)
- Parents & society should give children freedom from the beginning
- Freedom= allows the child to learn from their own adventures w/ objects & people
- Children should receive an education until age 12= “Age of Reason”
What was Freud’s theory?
- Psychoanalytic Theory
- Biological drives especially sexual ones= crucial influence on their development
What was Watson’s theory?
- Behaviorist Theory
- Children’s development is determined by biological factors especially rewards & punishments that follow their actions
What’s Nature?
- Biological endowment
- Genes from our parents= influence every aspect of our makeup= broad characteristics like appearance, personality, intellect
- Also mental health to specific preferences, political views & propensity to thrill seeking
What’s Nurture?
- Wide range of enviorments a child is reared in= physical & social
- Includes womb
What’s a Genome?
- Each persons complete set of hereditary info
- Influences behavior & experiences, vise-versa
- Contains proteins that regulate gene expression by turning gene activity on & off
- Can change response to activity w/o structurally altering DNA= changes in cognition, behavior, emotion
What is Epigenetics?
-Study of stable changes in gene expression that are mediated by environment
What is Methylation?
- Biochem process = reduces expression of variety of genes & is involved in regulating reactions to stress
- Influences behavior by suppressing gene activity & expression
What is Continuous Development?
-The idea that changes w/ age occur gradually= pine tree growing taller & taller
What is Discontinuous Development?
-The idea that changes w/ age include occasional large shifts= Caterpillar to cocoon to butterfly
What are Stage Theories?
- Development occurs in the progression of distinct age-related stages
- Cocoon to butterfly
- Entry into new stage= relatively sudden, qualitative changes that affect a child’s thinking/behavior in unified ways
- Move the child from one way to another to experience the world
What is Cognitive Development?
- Jean Piaget theory
- Between birth & adolescence= children go through 4 stages of cognitive growth
- Each stage= characterized by distinct intellectual abilities & ways of understanding the world
- 2 to 5 yr/old only focus on ONE aspect of info/ event at a time
- 7 yr/olds= focus & coordinate 2 or more aspects/events
What is Effortful Attention?
- Involves voluntary control of one’s emotion & thoughts
- Includes process of inhibiting impulses= obeying requests
- The process of controlling emotions
- The process of focusing attention
- Difficulty of exerting this = behavioral problems, weak math & reading, mental illness
- Learning experiences change the wiring in the brain that produces E.A
What is the role of the Limbic Area?
-Plays large role in emotional reactions
What role does Anterior Cingulate & Prefrontal Cortex play?
-Involved in setting & attending goals
What are Neurotransmitters?
-Chemicals that are involved in communication among brain cells
What is the Active Systems in Consolidation Theory?
- Werchan & Gomez
- Hippocampus & cortex simultaniously encode new info during learning
- Hippocampus can learn details after 1-2 experiences
- Cortex= abtraction of general patterns over many experiences
How does the Active System in Consolidation Theory work?
- Hippocampal memories= replayed during sleep= cortex extracts patterns
- The mechanism works in opposite way too
- Learning general patterns= improves retention & details of new experiences of the same type
- Before to 18-24 months= Hippocampus not mature to enable rapid learning of details of specific experiences
What is Socialcultural Context?
-Physical, social, economic & historical circumstances that make up any child’s enviornment
What are Cross-Cultural Comparisons?
-Reveal practices that are rare/ non-existant in one culture but present in another
What does Cumulative Risk?
- Accumulation of disadvantages over the years of development
- Children raised in poverty= lower chance of parents involved in their schooling
What makes each child unique?
- Genes
- Treatment by other people
- Subjective reactions to experiences
- Choice of environment
What is the Scientific Method?
-All beliefs, no matter how probable may be wrong
What does Reliability mean?
-The degree to which independent measurements of a given behavior are consistent
What is Interrater Reliability?
- Amount of agreement of observations of different raters who witness the same behavior
- Observations can be qualitative or quanitiative (#’s) scale
What is Test-Retest Reliability?
-The degree of similarity of a participants performance on 1,2 or more occasions
What does Validity mean?
-Degree to which a test measures what its intended to measure
What is Internal Validity?
-The degree to which effects observed within experiments can be attributed to the factor that the researcher is testing
What is External Validity?
-The degree to which results can be generalized beyond the particulars of the research
What is a Structured Interview?
-Research procedure where all participants are asked to consider the same questions
What is a Clinical Interview?
- Questions are adjusted based on the answers the child gives
- Provides in-depth info about the individual child
What is a Naturalistic Observation?
- Examination of ongoing behavior in enviorment that not controlled by resesarcher
- Minimizes influence of researcher on kids
- Impossible to specify how current situation arose
- Limits researchers opportunity about the behavior
What is Structured Observation?
- Presenting identical situation to each participant & recording their behavior
- Does not provide extensive info about individual children’s subjective experience
- Can’t provide open-ended everyday kind of data
What are Variables?
-Attributes that vary across individuals & situations= age, sex, activity level, socioeconomic status, particular expenses
What are Correlational Designs?
- Determine if children who differ in one variable also differ in predictable ways in other variables
- Agressiveness related to daycare
What does Correlation mean?
- DOES NOT IMPLY causation
- Association between 2 variables
- Strong correlation= accurate prediction
- Range from 1 to -1
What is the Direction-of-Causation Problem?
-Concept that correlation between 2 variables does not indicate which is the cause of the other
What’s the Third Variable Problem?
-Correlation between 2 variables may be result from 3rd, unspecified variable
What are Experimental Designs?
-Group of approaches= allows inferences about causes & effects to be drawn
What are Random Assignments?
-Each participant has an equal chance of being assigned to each group of experiment
What is Experimental Control?
-Researcher determine specific experiences that children in each group encounter during study
What is the Experimental Group?
-Presented w/ experience of interest
What is a Control Group?
- Not presented w/ experiment of interest
- Treated in same way as experimental group
What is an Independent Variable?
-The experience that participants in the experimental group receive & those in the control group do not recieve
What is a Dependent Variable?
-Behavior that is measured to determine whether it is affected by exposure to independent variable
What is a Cross-Sectional Design?
- Research method
- Participants of different ages are compared on a given behavior/ characteristic over short period of time
- Useful for revealing similarities & differences between younger & older children
- DOES NOT YIELD into about stability of behavior over time/ patterns of change shown by children over time
What is Longitudinal Design?
- Method of study
- Same participants are studied twice or more over a substantial length of time= 1 year
- Really difficult to continue the study
- Possible effects of repeated testing
What is Microgenetic Design?
- Method of study
- Designed to provide an in-depth depiction of the processes that produce change
- Recruit children who are on verge of important environmental change, heighten exposure to type of experience & intensively study change as its occuring
