Past Paper 2 Section B (Developmental Psychology Flashcards
A) The strange situation
B) Gaze monitoring
Another foundational mechanism for understanding psychological causation is infant gaze monitoring behaviour. The information from another person’s eyes is very important for social cognition. For most of us, it is second nature to monitor another person’s gaze. We follow gaze in order to work out what is capturing the attention of another agent, and we look into their eyes to try and infer their emotions, their intentions and their likely future actions.
Contingency learning appears to be a crucial aspect of the development of gaze monitoring and contingency detection can be observed from birth.
One reason that infants may develop psychological understanding relatively early in life is that their caretakers treat them as social partners. When caring for infants, adults usually make their behaviour contingent upon, rather than ignoring of, infant attempts to communicate.
In fact, caretakers may treat their infants as acting communicatively even before infants are intentionally acting in this way. Striano, Henning and Stahl (2005) explored infants’ sensitivity to social contingencies, by studying babies aged 1 and 3 months during face-to-face interactions with their mothers. By 3 months, the infants were behaving differently in response to the different contingencies.
C) Piaget’s formal operations
According to Piaget, the main developmental task during childhood is the development of logical thought. However, Piaget proposed there are important limitations of preoperational thought that prevent logical reasoning.
The concrete operational child, according to Piaget, is still limited to dealing with the concrete - with what is directly in front of them, the tangible and real. What the child at this stage cannot yet do is deal with the hypothetical - with the world of possibility rather than immediate reality. Piaget referred to the capacity for logical reasoning about the hypothetical and about highly abstract notions as “formal operational thought” which he presumed to emerge from adolescence onwards. Piaget’s way of characterising the difference between concrete and formal operations was to talk about a reversal in the relation between reality and possibility.
For the concrete operational child the starting point is always immediate reality. From this point, the child can make very limited extensions into the hypothetical. In a conservation of number task, for example the child who imagines pushing the discs back together is going beyond what is immediately given but in a very limited way.
For the formal operational thinker, the starting point is what might possibly be true, i.e. a hypothesis and then working back to what happens to be true in reality. According to Piaget, formal operational thought continues to develop through adulthood as formal operations are applied to more and more content areas and situations. The changes that take place are not changes in structure of thought, only in its content.
D) Over-extension in child language
A) Fast mapping
Although learning word-object relations is usually supported for infants by other adult behaviours, caregivers report that infants can also learn a new word just by over-hearing it during adult conversation. The idea that a single experience of a new word is sufficient for learning is referred to as “fast mapping”. Some have interpreted the phenomenon as evidence that human brains are specialised to acquire language.
B) The director task
C) Over-extension in semantic development
Overextension is a by-product of stretching a limited vocabulary to communicate as flexibly as possible during the one-word stage. In fact, the first words that are typically used by young children are very similar across languages and cultures. Young children first talk about salient objects and events in their day-to-day lives: family members, pets, words connected to routines like meals and bedtime, and words referring to the movement of people and objects.
D) Pre-operational egocentricity
Piaget proposed that limitations of preoperational thought can also be detected by its “egocentricity”. What Piaget meant by this is the tendency of children’s thought to be centered in a first-person perspective because preoperational thought is unable to co-ordinate multiple perspectives. This can be seen in communicative egocentrism - children at this age make little effort to tailor speech to the needs of the listener and perceptual egocentrism. If asked to judge how a perceptual array looks from another person’s perspective, preoperational children tend to respond on the basis of their own view. Piaget and Inhelder developed the “three mountains task” to demonstrate perceptual egocentrism in preoperational thought, where children sat on one side of a model of three mountains with a toy placed on another side. Children were asked to identify what the toy could see, and often reported their own perceptual view instead.
A) The use of habituation in infant research
The ‘visual preference’ technique was first used by Fantz (1961, 1966), who studied simple perception of forms in a ‘looking chamber’ which enabled the tracking of infant gaze. However, a ‘no preference’ result in the visual preference paradigm is difficult to interpret. A way of finding out whether infants can in fact distinguish two equally-preferred visual stimuli is to use habituation. The infant is repeatedly shown an object (O1) until looking time falls off. A new object is then shown (O2). If the infant shows renewed looking, discrimination between O1 and O2 is assumed. Habituation is assumed to provide a way into infants’ conceptual (cognitive) representations.
Habituation need not only be visual. By combining habituation with an action, such as sucking, infants can be enabled deliberately to choose between stimuli. In one famous “sucking” experiment (De Casper & Fifer, 1980), newborn babies were given a dummy to suck.
First, their natural or “baseline” sucking rate was measured. Next, the infants were played a tape recording of their mother reading a story. Each time their suck rate increased above baseline, the tape would play. Each time the suck rate dropped below baseline, a strange female voice would be heard instead, reading the same story. The infants rapidly learned to suck fast to hear their mother’s voice. The following day, the experimenters reversed the contingency. Now slower sucking was required to hear their mother’s voice – and the babies reversed their suck rates.
B) The pendulum task
The classic task used to assess formal operational thought is the pendulum task where children are asked “what makes the pendulum swing fastest”? This requires identification of the critical variables and then systematic testing, holding all variables constant except the one being assessed. Children less than around 12 years are unable to demonstrate systematic thinking on the task. However, we now know from substantial research on reasoning that human minds rarely demonstrate the formal operations Piaget referred to.
C) Zone of proximal development
The importance of learning from others to cognitive development was recognised in the concept of the zone of proximal development.
While acknowledging that it was important to measure a child’s actual level of development, for example, via test of mental function, Vygotsky argued that it was important also to investigate how much further a child could go under the guidance of a teacher
He give the example of two children, who entered school aged 10 years and who could deal with standardised tasks up to the degree of difficulty typical of the eight year level. These two children will have a mental age of eight years however, suppose the experimenter then show the different ways of dealing with some of the problems. Suppose that with assistant one child could deal with problems up to a 12-year-old level , the other was a problem up to a nine-year-old level Vygotsky argued that mentally the children were clearly not the same differ in terms of their zone of proximal development.
D) The A-not-B error
They also make the “A not-B error” at 8-10 months – after retrieving an object from one location A several times, they fail to search when the object is hidden in a new location B, and instead return to the first, now empty, location A. Piaget’s interpretation of the A not-B error was that the infant is still unable to represent objects independently of themselves.
violation of expectation’
A number of studies have used an alternative measure to assess the conceptual abilities of very young infants, known as ‘violation of expectation’. The logic of these studies is that if babies understand certain concepts, they will look surprised (i.e. dishabituate) if an event occurs which violates that understanding. The experimental methods set up conditions that result in physically ‘impossible’ events. If infants look longer at the impossible events compared to a control condition, this implies an ability to represent the causal structure of these relations (work of Baillargeon). Claims have been made that babies of 3.5 months understand object permanence, by using these procedures.
In one famous study, Baillargeon, Spelke and Wasserman (1985) habituated 5-month old babies to a display in which a screen continually rotated through 180’ towards and away from the baby, like a drawbridge. Following habituation, a box was placed in the path of the screen. As the screen began its 180’ rotation, it gradually occluded the box. When it reached 90’, the entire box was hidden from view. For babies who were shown a ‘possible event’, the screen continued to rotate until it had passed through 120’, at which point it came to rest, apparently having made contact with the box. For babies who were shown an ‘impossible event’, the screen continued to rotate until it had passed through the full 180’ rotation. The infants looked longer at the display when the screen passed through an apparently solid object. Baillargeon et al. argued that the babies had represented the box as continuing to exist, even when it was occluded by the screen, demonstrating that babies aged 5 months had an understanding of ‘object permanence’.
Cliff illusion
The infant modulates his or her reaction to an object or event by reference to information gained from the actions of another. One possibility is that infants modulate their behaviour because of a mentalistic interpretation of the reaction of another. For example, they may have an interpretation like “she is reacting like that because she is scared, this is a potentially dangerous toy”. A second possibility is that they modulate their behaviour simply because the emotional display acts as a signal, telling them what to do (for example, “that expression means that I should stop”). Clearly, only the former possibility implies understanding of the internal mental states of another agent. The classic study on social referencing used an apparatus called the visual cliff (Gibson & Walk, 1960). Babies of crawling age (around 9 months) would not crawl over the edge of the “cliff”, even though the solid transparent surface enabled them to do so. Later work showed that crawling behaviour on the visual cliff could be modulated by emotional expressions made by the mother. One study found that, when the mother made a fearful face, no infants crossed the cliff. When the mother made a happy face, the majority of infants crossed the drop (Source et al, 1985).
