Methods in developmental research Flashcards
What does developmental research seek to do?
- describe and explain developmental change
- describe = how performance changes with age
- explain = why children behave the way they do - uncover earliest instances of knowledge
What are some issues when conducting developmental research?
- capturing developmental change - select appropriate age range.
- Type of design – cross-sectional, longitudinal
- Ethics
- Childrens responses to adult researchers
- Age-appropriate tasks and instructions
- Testing preverbal infants
- Difficulty of interpreting behaviour
- Confounding variables
- Beware of biases
What do responses on any cognitive task reflect? 2 things
- competence - conceptual understanding required to solve the problem
- performance - other cognitive skills required to access and express understanding
What is preferential looking?
Aim: 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 works with positive results but not with negative results
* Show babies A and B:
If they look longer at A than at B they must:
* discriminate A from B
* find A more interesting than B
But if they look equally at A and B, this could mean:
* EITHER they fail to discriminate A from B
* OR that they find A and B equally interesting, or equally boring.
What is habituation/discrimination?
Aim: Used to determine if infants can distinguish between different stimuli
- 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.
What is violation of expectancy/expectation?
Aim: Used to determine if infants have an expectation about events in the world.
* Compare infant’s 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.
What is the anticipatory looking paradigm?
Aim: Used to determine if infants can predict events in the world.
* Measure the direction of an infant/child’s first look after an event.
* Participants’ looking behaviour is analysed to determine if they correctly expect/anticipate what will happen next.
* Requires prediction (cf. with VOE, which relies on reactive looking)
What is the inter-modal preferential looking paradigm?
Aim: Used to determine if infants can link stimuli across different modalities.
* Gives children a choice between two visual stimuli presented simultaneously.
* Only one of the visual stimuli “matches” an accompanying verbal stimulus.
* If infants comprehend the link between the verbal and visual stimuli, they are predicted to look longer at the matching than the non-matching display.
What is pupillometry?
- Pupil dilates in response to cognitively demanding tasks, novel events and emotional stimuli.
- Can be used to find out how infants respond to different stimuli.
- Relatively new technique.
What is a cross-sectional design?
- Cross-sectional studies take place at a single time point and compare the behaviour of different age groups on the same task.
- Less interested in individual differences, but rather group averages.
What are some strengths of a cross-sectional design?
- Time & cost efficient
- Provides fast and easy method for revealing similarities and differences between older and younger children.
What are some issues with a cross-sectional design?
- Interindividual differences = intraindividual age-related changes?
- Cross-sectional designs do not in themselves tell us very much about the processes of development. E.g. even when comparing 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 & 10 year-olds, still only getting a series of snapshots of an ongoing process
- Don’t know how changes emerge.
What is a microgenetic design?
- 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.
What is a longitudinal design?
A longitudinal study examines and compares the abilities/behaviour of a particular group of children over several time points.
- Varying time scales across studies
- Can involve an experimental manipulation or an analysis of naturally occurring behaviours.
What are some strengths of a longitudinal design?
- Can observe change over time within individuals.
- Can examine the stability of a behaviour in an individual – enduring or transient?
- 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.
- Establish which early abilities/behaviours best predict (‘longitudinal predictors’) later abilities/behaviour (‘outcomes’)
