Lecture 2: Intro to developmental psychology Flashcards
Human phylogeny
the evolution of the species
Human Ontogeny
he evolution of individual organism Ontogeny is thought to recapitulate/ repeat the process of phylogeny
Plato
Plato emphasised self control and discipline
Plato believed that children are born with innate knowledge of how the world works (nativist)
Aristotle
Aristotle was concerned with fitting child rearing to the needs of the individual child
Aristotle believed that knowledge comes from experience (empiricist)
Locke and late philosophers
The English philosopher John Locke, like Aristotle, saw the child as a tabula rasa (blank slate) and advocated first instilling discipline, then gradually increasing the child’s freedom
similar to aristotle (through experience) but also agreed that discipline comes first like plato
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the French philosopher, argued that parents and society should give the child maximum freedom from the beginning
Research based approaches
- Social reform movements provided some of the earliest descriptions of the adverse effects that harsh environments can have on child development
- Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution inspired research in child development in order to gain insights into the nature of the species (studied own son William)
How to study development
The scientific method is an approach to testing beliefs which involves:
Choosing a question
Formulating hypothesis (e.g. an educated guess)
Testing those hypotheses
Forming conclusions
Naturalistic Observation
Good ecological validity Similar to “real-life”- presence of researcher potentially less likely to impact people involved as in their natural env
Can be used to study a range of behaviour
Limitations of Naturalistic observations
Hard to identify causal relationships – there are so many variables, it is often hard to know which ones influenced the behaviour of interest
Painstaking to administer – many behaviours occur only occasionally in everyday environments, so researchers’ opportunities to study them through naturalistic observation are reduced
Interviews
Allows full focus on the individual’s behavioural pattern
Follow up questions can clarify an earlier response- allows follow up on relevant info to the observation
Experimenter: When Teddy said “Oh great!”, did he mean it was nice or nasty? Child: Nasty. Experimenter: How do you know that?
Limitations of interviews
Can be difficult to generalise beyond the individual case
Can be difficult to generate a causal argument
Experiment
Can directly test relationships between variables
Experimental control is relatively easy
Limitations of experiments
“artificial” technique – so perhaps lacking in ecological validity unless using “naturalistic” experiments- ethical issues could arise
Sometimes are not possible due to ethical issues (or practical issues)
Naturalistic experiments
Although experiments have the unique advantage of allowing researchers to draw conclusions about the causes of events, their ecological validity can be questionable
This problem can be overcome by conducting naturalistic experiments, in which data are collected in everyday settings such as the home or in a special playroom at the testing lab
Cross-sectional designs
(groups of) children of different ages are compared on a given behaviour or characteristic over a short period of time
Common
Longitudinal designs
Used when children are studied twice or more over a long period of time
Time-consuming
Microgenetic
Used to provide an in-depth depiction of processes that produce change
Provides insight into the process and emotional response to it
In this approach, children who are thought to be on the verge of an important developmental change are provided with heightened exposure to the type of experience that is believed to produce the change and are studied intensely while their behaviour is in transition
– e.g. “counting on” (Siegler & Jenkins, 1989)
Ethical issues in developmental research
Researchers have a vital responsibility to:
Ensure the research does not harm the children physically or psychologically
Obtain informed consent from parents/guardians and the child (if s/he is old enough to understand)
Preserve the anonymity of the children who take part
Counteract any negative outcomes and correct any inaccurate impressions that arise during the study
How infants learn and develop- Synaptogenesis
Infants’ brains experience synaptogenesis - density of synaptic connections between neurons greatly increases – before birth and for many months afterwards
Rich learning environments lead to more synaptic connections
Testing learning
Learning begins prenatally
Newborn infants have been shown to recognise rhymes and stories presented before birth
Newborns also prefer smells, tastes, and sound patterns that are familiar because of prenatal exposure
How on earth can researchers know what newborns and older infants know?
How is it possible to test learning experimentally in an ethical way?
how infants learn and develop
Habituation
Perceptual Learning
Statistical Learning
Classical Conditioning
Instrumental Conditioning
Observational Learning
Habituation
A decrease in responsiveness to repeated stimulation reveals that learning has occurred
The infant has a memory representation of the repeated, now-familiar stimulus
The speed with which an infant habituates is believed to reflect the general efficiency of the infant’s processing of information
Some continuity has been found between these measures in infancy and general cognitive ability later in life
Habituation- sucking
At 2 months of age (Eimas, 1985):
Allow infant to suck on a dummy that is connected to a computer and measure baseline sucking rate
Present phoneme (/pa/) sound repeatedly
Sucking rate first increases and then infant habituates (i.e., returns to baseline sucking rate
Present new phoneme (/ba/)
Infant dishabituates (i.e. sucking rate increases)
Infants as young as two months of age can tell the difference between sounds
Habituation- heart rate
At 32 weeks’ gestation, the fetus decreases responses to repeated or continued stimulation
In 9th month of gestation, a fetus can habituate to one sound “babi”
Presentation of a novel stimulus “biba” causes foetus to dishabituate (Lecanuet et al.,1995)
Perceptual learning
From the beginning, infants use their perceptual abilities to search for order and regularity in the world around them
Perceptual learning is involved in many, but not all, examples of intermodal coordination
– An infant does not need learning to detect standalone events (e.g., seeing and hearing a glass smash on the floor)
– But only through experience does an infant learn what perceptual experiences go together (e.g., that a particular tinkling sound means a glass is being broken)
Differentiation
Differentiation is the extraction from the constantly changing stimulation in the environment of those elements that are invariant or stable (Gibson, 1988)
With age and experience, infants become increasingly efficient at differentiating and extracting information and can make finer and finer discriminations amongst stimuli
For example, infants learn the association between certain facial expressions and tones of voice, even from different people- infants can learn that these go together
Affordances
A particularly important part of perceptual learning is the infant’s discovery of affordances, the possibilities for action offered by objects and situations (Gibson, 1988) - possibility for actions in the environment
For example, an infant must learn that small objects (such as the yellow shapes) afford picking up but large ones (such as the container) do not, that round shapes afford pushing into the container though the round hole but square and star shapes do not, etc
Statistical learning
Involves picking up information from the environment, forming associations among stimuli that occur in a statistically predictable pattern. Infants can pick up on similar stimuli in an environment
The natural environment contains a high degree of regularity and redundancy
Certain events occur in a predictable order, certain objects appear in the same time and place, certain stimuli co-occur in patterns
From quite early on, infants are sensitive to the regularity with which one stimulus
follows another
Classical conditioning
A form of learning that consists of associating an initially neutral stimulus with another stimulus that always evokes a reflexive response
Plays a role in infants’ everyday learning about the relations between environmental events that have relevance for them
It is thought that many emotional responses (both positive and negative) are initially learned through classical conditioning
Classical conditioning stimuli
Classical conditioning involves an unconditioned stimulus (UCS) that reliably elicits a reflexive, unlearned response – an unconditioned response (UCR)
Learning or conditioning can occur if an initially neutral stimulus, the conditioned stimulus (CS), repeatedly occurs just before the unconditioned stimulus.
Gradually, the originally reflexive response – the learned or conditioned response (CR) – becomes paired with the initially neutral stimulus
Pavlovs dogs- classical conditioning
In a famous example of classical conditioning, the Russian researcher Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (1890s) began to train dogs using classical conditioning
Dogs naturally salivate (UCR) when presented with food (UCS)
Pavlov presented dogs with a ringing bell (CS) before feeding
After a few repetitions, the ringing bell alone was enough to make the dogs salivate (CR)
Positive reinforcement
Positive reinforcement means behaviour is reliably rewarded by a positive experience (for strong ethical reasons, most instrumental conditioning research with infants involves positive reinforcement)
negative reinforcement
Negative reinforcement means behaviour is reliably rewarded by stopping an ongoing negative experience.
Punishment
Punishment means behaviour is reliably penalised by a negative experience
Extinction
Extinction means behaviour is neither reliably rewarded or penalised (i.e., nothing happens)
Infants may also learn that there are some situations over which they have no control
- E.g., Infants of depressed mothers tend to smile less and show lower levels of positive affect than do infants of nondepressed mothers
This may be because infants of depressed mothers have learned there is no contingency relation between such friendly displays and being rewarded by their preoccupied parent (Campbell et al., 1995)
Observational learning
Some have reported that the ability to imitate others may be present early in life, although in an extremely limited form
For example, reports of newborns sticking out their tongues after watching an adult model repeatedly perform this action
By 15 months, infants can imitate actions they have seen an adult perform on television
In choosing to imitate a model, infants appear to pay attention to the reason for the person’s behaviour (i.e., the person’s intention)
Evidence against observational learning
Recent work from Oostenbroek et al. (2016) suggests that young infants cannot imitate-
e.g children stick their tongues out anyways even if the adult was doing something different (due to interest)
Imitating intentions
When 18-month-olds see a person apparently try, but fail, to pull the ends off a dumbbell, the infants imitate the action by actually pulling the ends off
i.e., They perform the action the person intended to do, not what the person actually did (Meltzoff, 1995)
They do not imitate a mechanical device at all
Children just understood intention
