Issues Flashcards
Developmental research seeks to
1- Describe how performance changes with age
2- Explain why children behave that way at certain ages
3- Undercover earliest instances of knowledge
Ethical implications
BPS Guidelines:
Children younger than 16 cannot give informed consent to research participation
Parental informed consent is needed
Mindful of how they respond to the task; they might start to get distressed but not want to tell you because they’re intimidated by you or they’re too shy.
Researchers must be sensitive to any signs suggesting stress or the child doesn’t want to continue.
Right to withdraw (remind them) and be proactive in offering them the chance to stop.
Name issues that are important when conducting developmental research:
Capturing developmental change
– select appropriate age range
Type of design
- cross-sectional or longitudinal
Ethics
Children’s responses to adult researchers
Age-appropriate tasks and instructions
Testing preverbal infants
Difficulty of interpreting behaviour
Confounding variables
Beware of biases
Counterbalancing
Counterbalancing
Counterbalancing (RM) are steps taken in experimental designs to balance out the potential effects of confound variables/biases on performance across the sample
to maximise the validity of the results.
Essential when testing children who may be responsive to all sorts of confound variables/biases
So, in the example where children had to choose who was kinder of two characters but may simply respond on the basis of the left/right position of the characters, you would need to counterbalance this variable so that for half the sample, the kinder character appeared on the left and the meaner character on the right and vice versa for the remaining children.
Capturing developmental change
– select appropriate age range
Aim to capture developmental change in our study.
By selecting the appropriate age range.
( guided by previous literature )
The more you know about a topic, the better you’ll be able to identify the appropriate ages to be looking at.
Difficulty in interpreting behaviour
Infancy eye-tracking data:
Involves controversy surrounding what we can actually conclude about infants’ knowledge based on just their looking behaviour
Name the 3 type of design
- cross-sectional or longitudinal or microgenetic.
This will depend on the specific research question and practical constraints.
Children’s responses to adult researchers
Design as a game!
Adult stranger= shy
Keep engagement and build rapport to prevent shyness
as the way they perform will not reflect how they would naturally perform/their true abilities
By: having a rapport-building section produces familiarity (read story or play)
to put child at ease before you begin running
experiment
Confounding variables
Confounding variables
extraneous factors are variables that you are not actively manipulating but still may have an influence on your study so you want to control them.
Relevant when researching typical developmental processes
eg. language development
should not include bilingual children in your sample as their language development is unlikely to be representative of children growing up with one language.
Testing preverbal infants/ Infant knowledge
Non-verbal behaviour:
Most methods rely on infants’ looking behaviour
as it doesn’t impose any linguistic or motor demands
Name the Eye-tracking paradigms commonly used:
Eye-tracking paradigms commonly used:
1- Preferential looking
2- Inter-modal preferential looking
3- Habituation/ Dishabituation
4- Violation of expectancy (VoE0
5- Anticipatory looking
6- Pupillometry
Testing preverbal infants/ Infant knowledge
Non-verbal behaviour:
Which eye-tracking method is used to determine if infants can distinguish between different visual stimuli and if they have an attentional preference for one over the other?
Preferential looking
-records how long baby looks at each screen
Age appropriate tasks and instructions
If the demands of a task
are too high for children of a particular age
(language, memory, attention, motor skills)
They won’t be able to follow the instructions,
researchers are likely to underestimate their knowledge.
If task is not sufficiently engaging enough, child loses motivation to perform to their best ability
Comparison of 2 groups:
children in both groups should be able to cope with the task demands.
Or, any age-related changes in behavioural performance that are found may only reflect changes in children’s ability to respond to the task demands
eg. due to developing memory capacity rather than signaling a change in knowledge.
Biases
Control biases through careful experimental design (counterbalancing)
For example, a 4-year-old child being asked to choose which of two story characters is kinder may actually base their decision on the character that happens to be dressed in their favourite colour or that happens to be positioned on the left side, which is their favourite side
Another source of bias is young children’s tendency to respond in particular ways to certain question types.
Eg. 2-year-olds tend to say ‘yes’ if you ask them a ‘yes / no’ Q, regardless of correct answer
The absence of evidence (no evidence of knowledge at a certain age) doesn’t equal evidence of absence (ie- doesnt mean that evidence doesnt exist)
Where may the fault lie?
may be a fault in the design
Response on any cognitive task reflects on which 2 factors:
Competence =
conceptual understanding required to SOLVE problem
Performance =
other cognitive skills required to access and express understanding (e.g. ability to remember key info, focus attention, comprehend the question; inhibit bias)
Which design takes place at a single time point and compares the behaviour of different age groups on the same task
Cross-sectional design
which design does the Overlapping Waves model explain?
Microgenetic design
-as child ages we use a number of different strategies to a more/lesser figure
-measures the relative frequencies with age
Implicit behaviour/ knowledge:
Piaget conservation task
Children during the pre-operational stage
tend to fail: say that there are more counters in the second row even though both have the same amount.
Found:
Age 1 fail through gesture and speech
Age 2 fail through verbal response but show knowledge via gesture
- this inconsistency is transitional knowledge
Age 3 pass through gesture and speech
Preferential looking A03:
Preferential looking works with positive results
but NOT with negative results
Testing preverbal infants/ Infant knowledge
Non-verbal behaviour:
Which eye-tracking method is used to determine if infants have an expectation about events in the world?
Violation of Expectancy/expectation
Show infant a sequence of events
then compare infant’s looking time when viewing impossible vs. possible event
If infants look longer at impossible event:
evidence of surprised (they had an expectation)
= some level of knowledge about physical/social world
