Module 5 - Conceptual Development Flashcards
General ideas or understandings that can be used to group together objects, events, qualities, or abstractions that are similar.
Concepts
Infant’s visual system
They have poor visual acuity (sharpness), resulting in blurry vision until about 8 months
They also need to develop control over their eye muscles, but can track objects with their eyes by 3 months (if not earlier).
Lastly, infants also have limited colour perception at birth, and therefore prefer stimuli with high contrast.
Three common eye gaze methodologies that developmental psychologists use to study infant cognition
Habituation
Preferential looking
Violation of expectation
Habituation
Using eye gaze, researchers record time to habituate - decreased response to a stimulus after repeated exposure.
Habituation is commonly used to study infant visual development (e.g., can they perceive tiny differences in perceptual stimuli, can they discriminate colours, etc), as well as conceptual and cognitive development.
Even very young infants have visual perception and control over their eye movements, making this method an ideal tool to use during infancy.
Generally, the infant must be at least 3 months to obtain reliable data.
research consistently demonstrates that faster habituation time during infancy predicts
later intelligence (and is often a better predictor of later IQ than infant IQ tests!).
Concepts help us…
understand the world and act effectively in it by allowing us to generalize from prior experience
What are the themes in research on conceptual development
1) nature and nurture
2) active child
3) how change occurs
4) sociocultural context
Nature and Nurture theme in conceptual develoment
Children’s concepts reflect the interaction between their specific experiences and their biological predispositions to process information in particular ways.
Active child theme in conceptual development
From infancy onward, many of children’s concepts reflect their active attempts to make sense of the world.
How change occurs theme in conceptual development
researchers who study conceptual development attempt to understand not only what concepts children form but also the processes by which they form them.
Sociocultural theme in conceptual development
the concepts we form are influenced by the society in which we live.
What do Nativists believe about conceptual development?
That innate understanding of basic concepts plays a central role in development.
They argue that infants are born with some sense of fundamental concepts, such as time, space, number, causality, and the human mind, or with specialized learning mechanisms that allow them to acquire rudimentary understanding of these concepts unusually quickly and easily.
nurture plays an important role in helping children move beyond this initial level of conceptual understanding, but not in forming the basic understanding.
What do empirists believe about conceptual development?
That nature endows infants with only general learning mechanisms, such as the ability to perceive, attend, associate, generalize, and remember.
Within the empiricist perspective, the rapid and universal formation of fundamental concepts such as time, space, number, causality, and mind arises from infants’ massive exposure to experiences that are relevant to these concepts
2 groups of developmental concepts
1) used to categorize the kinds of things that exist in the world—human beings, living things in general, and inanimate objects—and their properties.
2) involves dimensions used to represent our experiences: space (where the experience occurred), time (when it occurred), number (how many times it occurred), and causality (why it occurred).
Infants and young children divide objects into three general categories:
inanimate objects
people
other animals
(they are unsure for many years whether plants are more like animals or more like inanimate objects)
children form innumerable more specific categories such as:
vehicles, tools, furniture, sports equipment, and endless others.
Children tend to organize these categories of objects into category hierarchies
Category Hierarchies
a category that is organized by set–subset relations, such as animal/dog/poodle
Dishabituated
looking time increased.
How early can infants form categories?
Even in first months of life.
perceptual categorization
the grouping together of objects that have similar appearances
Infants frequently use this.
Category Hierarchies
Superordinate, subordinate, basic
superordinate level
the general level within a category hierarchy, such as “animal” in the animal/dog/poodle example
subordinate level
he most specific level within a category hierarchy, such as “poodle” in the animal/dog/poodle example
basic level
the middle level, and often the first level learned, within a category hierarchy, such as “dog” in the animal/dog/poodle example
Causal Understanding
In their first months, infants have a rudimentary understanding of causal interactions among objects, such as interactions involving gravity, inertia, and support, an understanding that gradually increases during their first year.
understanding cause–effect relations helps children learn and remember. ex: wugs and gillies
naïve psychology
a commonsense level of understanding of other people and oneself
is crucial to normal human functioning and is a major part of what makes us human
What are 3 concepts of naïve psychology that we all use to understand human behavior?
desires, beliefs, and actions
Three properties of naïve psychological concepts
1) many refer to invisible mental states
2) psychological concepts are linked to one another in cause–effect relations.
3) they develop surprisingly early in life, though how early, and the process through which the capability occurs, remains a subject of heated debate
Naïve Psychology in Infancy (Nativists vs Empircists)
Nativists (e.g., Leslie, 2000) argue that the early understanding is possible only because children are born with a basic understanding of human psychology
Empiricists argue that experiences with other people and general information- processing capacities are the key sources of the early understanding of other people.
The emergence of self-consciousness
Infants seem to be born with a kind of implicit self-consciousness, a rudimentary understanding that they are separate from other people
By age four months, infants show basic understanding of what they can and cannot do; they reach for small objects within their grasp, but not for larger or more distant objects
By age 18 to 24 months, they try to wipe smudges off their faces when they see them in mirrors and make efforts to look good to other people, reflecting a more explicit kind of self-consciousness
What are the several important aspects of psychological understanding that emerges in the second year?
(1) a sense of self, in which children more explicitly realize that they are individuals distinct from other people;
(2) joint attention, in which two or more people focus intentionally on the same referent;
(3) intersubjectivity, the mutual understanding that people share during communication.
Theory of mind
an organized understanding of how mental processes such as intentions, desires, beliefs, perceptions, and emotions influence behavior
One important component of such a theory of mind—understanding the connection between other people’s desires and their actions—emerges by what age?
end of the first year
false-belief problems
tasks that test a child’s understanding that other people will act in accord with their own beliefs even when the child knows that those beliefs are incorrect
(3 year olds thinking the next group tested will think pencils are in the smarties box, whereas 5 year olds know the next group will also think smarties are in the box)
**Unless the task is presented to 3 year olds in a way that facilitates understanding. Ex: experimenter gets the child in on the “trick” of filling a smarties box with pencils.
theory of mind module (TOMM)
a hypothesized brain mechanism devoted to understanding other human beings
(Investigators with a Nativists position have proposed the existence of TOMM)
What do advocates of theory of mind module argue?
that among typical children exposed to a typical environment, the TOMM matures over the first 5 years, producing an increasingly sophisticated understanding of people’s minds
What is ESDM
Early Start Denver Model (ESDM) treatment
Autistic children ages 1-2 had roughly 15 hours per week of sessions with trained therapists, during which time the therapists and children practiced everyday activities, such as eating and playing, and used operant conditioning techniques to promote desired behaviors.
After 2 years, children who received the ESDM treatment showed considerably greater gains in IQ score, language, and daily living skills than did peers who received the community-based treatment
Theorists who take an empiricist stance suggest what explanations for the emergence of theory of mind?
Some suggest the role of learning from experiences with physical situations and with other people
Others emphasizes interactions with other people
Other investigators who take an empiricist stance emphasize the growth of general information-processing skills as essential to understanding other people’s minds
pretend play
make-believe activities in which children create new symbolic relations, acting as if they were in a situation different from their actual one
emerges between 12-18 months
object substitution
a form of pretense in which an object is used as something other than itself, for example, using a broom to represent a horse
One way that children learn about other people’s thinking, as well as about many other aspects of the world
Play
earliest play occurs in the first year and includes behaviors such as banging spoons on high-chair trays and repeatedly throwing food on the floor.
majority of college students reported:
-engaged in pretend play at least weekly when they were 10 or 11 years old
-engaged at least monthly when they were 12 or 13 years old
Boys and only children tended to report engaging in pretend play at older ages more than did girls and children with siblings.
sociodramatic play
activities in which children enact miniature dramas with other children or adults, such as “mother comforting baby”
Distinguishing living things from non living things
infants in their first year distinguish people from other animals and that they distinguish both from inanimate objects.
BUT it is difficult to assess knowledge of many other properties of living and nonliving things until the age of 3 or 4 years, when children can comprehend and answer questions about these categories.
it is not until age 7 to 9 years that a clear majority of children realize that plants are living things
Understanding biological processes
Inheritance
Growth
Illness
Inheritance
3- and 4-year-olds know that physical characteristics tend to be passed on from parent to offspring
Older preschoolers also know that certain aspects of development are determined by heredity rather than by environment.
Ex: 5-year- olds realize that an animal of one species raised by parents of another species will become an adult of its own species
essentialism
the view that living things have an essence inside them that makes them what they are
Growth
Preschoolers realize that growth, like inheritance, is a product of internal processes. They recognize, for example, that plants and animals become bigger and more complex over time because of something going on inside them
Three- and 4-year-olds also recognize that the growth of living things generally proceeds in only one direction (smaller to larger) at least until old age, whereas inanimate objects such as balloons can become either smaller or larger at any point in time.
Illness
Three-year-olds have heard of germs and have a general sense of how they operate. They know that eating food that is contaminated with germs can make a person sick, even if the person is unaware of the germs’ presence
Conversely, they realize that psychological processes, such as being aware of germs in one’s food, do not cause illness.
How do children gain biological knowledge?
Nativists propose that humans are born with a “biology module” much like the theory of mind module described earlier in the chapter. This brain structure or mechanism helps children learn quickly about living thing
Empiricists, by contrast, maintain that children’s biological understanding comes from their personal observations and from information they receive from parents, teachers, and the general culture
What three main arguments to support the Nativists idea that people have a biology module?
During earlier periods of our evolution, it was crucial for human survival that children learn quickly about animals and plants.
Children throughout the world are fascinated by plants and animals and learn about them quickly and easily.
Children throughout the world organize information about plants and animals in very similar ways (in terms of growth, reproduction, inheritance, illness, and healing).
