Methods in Developmental Psychology

Question 1

What are the aims of developmental research?

Answer 1

To describe and explain developmental change

To uncover the earliest instances of knowledge

Question 2

In what ways does research describe and explain developmental change?

Answer 2

Describe how performance changes with age
Specify children’s abilities and limitations as development proceeds
Explain why children behave the way they do at certain ages
How do new levels of understanding develop from earlier less advanced ones

Question 3

What are some issues in developmental research?

Answer 3

Appropriate age range when attempting to capture developmental change
Type of design
Confouding variables
Age appropriate task and instructions (especially for multiple ages)
Testing preverbal infants
Biases in children
Counterbalancing
Ethics

Question 4

What does an absence of evidence not indicate?

Answer 4

Evidence of absence

Question 5

Why might a study not show evidence of competence?

Answer 5

Competence doesn’t exist
Study’s design doesn’t allow it to be shown
Infant lacks ability to respond

Question 6

What must be considered when designing a study?

Answer 6

Age range to cover developmental process
Design for data selection (cross-sectional or longitudinal)
Method of data collection
Variables to measure

Question 7

What does response on a cognitive task reflect?

Answer 7

Competence - conceptual understanding required to solve problem
Performance - other cognitive skills required to access and express understanding

Question 8

Describe cross-sectional designs

Answer 8

Take place at a single time point and compare behaviour of different age groups on the same task

Question 9

Why do cross-sectional designs mke up the majority of research?

Answer 9

Due to ease and speed

Question 10

What are the advantages of cross-sectional designs?

Answer 10

Time and cost efficient

Provides fast and easy method for revealing similarities and differences between younger aand older children

Question 11

What are the limitations of cross-sectional designs?

Answer 11

Interindividual differences = intraindividual age-related changes?
Do not tell us very much about the processes of development
Don’t know how changes emerge

Question 12

Describe longitudinal designs

Answer 12

A longitudinal study examines and compares the abilities/behaviour of a particular group of children over the several time points (age-related changes)
Varying time scales across studies
Can involve an experimental manipulation or an analysis of naturally occurring behaviours

Question 13

What are the uses for longitudinal designs?

Answer 13

Can observe change over time within individuals – better observation of individual differences
Can examine the stability of a behaviour in an individual – enduring or transient? (Gradual or sudden)
Can reveal the proportion of children who show a particular developmental trajectory
To reveal how early abilities, behaviours or environmental influences are related to subsequent abilities or behaviours in the same individuals
Can determine the temporal primacy of constructs - which variable is antecedent and which consequent (cause and effect)
Establish which early abilities/behaviours best predict (‘longitudinal predictors’) later abilities/behaviour (‘outcomes’)

Question 14

What are the disadvantages of longitudinal designs?

Answer 14

Resource intensive - practicality
Subject attrition – dropouts, sample no longer representative
Practice effects: subjects may learn from previous exposure or get bored with repeated task
Repeated testing may actually change the course of development so won’t be a true reflection of normal development

Question 15

Describe microgenetic designs

Answer 15

Designed to provide an in-depth depiction of the processes of change
Study children on the verge of an important developmental change and intensively study the change as it is occurring
Same children are studied repeatedly over a short period of time on the same problem solving task (intensive, short-term longitudinal)

Question 16

How can different designs show different theories of development?

Answer 16

Cross-sectional averages across age gaps can lead to the appearance of stage-like changes in development

Question 17

What is explicit knowledge and how is it measured?

Answer 17

Knowledge that is easily accessible to the child

Measure via elicited response, e.g. verbal answer to a question

Question 18

What is implicit knowledge and how is it measured?

Answer 18

Knowledge the child is unaware of
Measure via spontaneous response, e.g. gesture produced alongside speech, eye-gaze response
Cannot act on knowledge voluntarily

Question 19

Gesture-speech mismatch - Church and Goldin-Meadow (1986); Alibali and Goldin-Meadow (1993)

Answer 19

Gestures produced alongside speech can demonstrate partial knowledge not shown in speech
Gesture-speech mismatch
Information conveyed in gesture may not appear anywhere in accompanying speech
Inconsistency taken as an index of transitional knowledge

Question 20

Dissociation of Implicit and Explicit Understanding of False Belief - Clements and Perner (1994)

Answer 20

3 year-olds show greater understanding of Theory of Mind via a nonverbal implicit response (anticipatory looking) compared to an explicit response (verbal response to question)
Children develop an implicit or unconscious understanding of false belief at an earlier age than they develop an explicit or conscious understanding

Question 21

What are some measures of non-verbal response?

Answer 21

Preferential looking
Habituation
Violation of Expectancy
Pupilometry

Question 22

What is preferential looking?

Answer 22

Measures where a child is looking and for how long
If they look longer at A than at B they must:
• Discriminate A from B
• Find A more interesting than B

Question 23

What are some problems with preferential looking?

Answer 23

If they look equally at A and B this could mean:
• Either they fail to discriminate A from B
• Or that they find both equally interesting/boring

Question 24

What is habituation?

Answer 24

Stimulus presented repeatedly until infant’s attention wanes and looking time reaches criterion, e.g., half of looking time during first presentation (= “habituation”)
Novel stimulus is presented: increased looking compared to last habituation trial (=“dishabituation”). Should see no change for old stimulus.

Question 25

What is violation of expectancy?

Answer 25

Look for longer at something unexpected
Compare looking time when they see an impossible vs possible event
If infants look longer at impossible event, taken as evidence that they are surprised and have some level of knowledge about physical/social world

Question 26

What are some issues with looking responses?

Answer 26

Novelty preference vs. familiarity preference? (Familiar is comforting)
Negative results always hard to interpret
Levels of interpretation: Perception vs. cognition?
Looking: active information processing or blank stare?
Fussiness and drop out rate: when do you exclude?