Psych Main - Development Flashcards
Prenatal Development
Zygote –> Germinal Stage –> Embryo –> Fetus
Examples of Rapid Neurogenesis interacting with Pre-natal Environment
- Fetal Alcohol Syndrome
2. Auditory Preferences (DeCaspar & Fife, 1980)
Mennella et al. 2001
Prenatal and Postnatal Flavour Learning
- Asked pregnant women to drink carrot juice 4 days a week during last 3 weeks of pregnancy.
- At 5-6 months after birth, when infants began eating solid Food, they reacted more positively to cereal prepared with carrot juice
as opposed to water (they ate more and made less negative faces when eating it
Xu and Spelke (2000)
Dots study. Used infant gaze Habituation (boredom) vs. Dishabituation (excitement) when showed more numerous dots. Only if the difference was significant though e.g. 8–>14 but not 8–>10. Also shows that children have analogue magnitude from a very young age.
Woodward (1998)
Violation of Expectations study. Hand grabs either a teddy or ball. Infants stared longer when the hand grabbed a new object then when it switched sides.
Pascalis et al. (2002)
Showed that children have a preference for looking at human faces vs. other stimuli. This happens less so >3 months old and are better at differentiating monkey faces compared to older children
Rich vs. Impoverished Interpretations of data
Rich = e.g. child's mind is very adult like and has higher understanding etc. Impoverished = e.g. children's brains are simple and there is always a lower-thinking explanation to why they've displayed a particular behaviour
Jean Piaget
- Genetic Epistemology (Nature (a little) + Nurture)
- Sensory-motor –> Quasi-scientific/Pre-Operational –> Concrete Operational –> Formal Operational
- Stage changes (looking at errors)
- Equilibration (Assimilation fail –> Disequilibrium –> Accommodation –> Equilibrium)
- Object permanence, A-not-B error (hiding objects studies)
- Egocentricity
Criticism of Piaget
- Vague in some aspects
- Competence vs. Performance?
Baillargeon, Spelke & Wasserman (1985)
Habituation to a draw-bridge. A box is placed behind + 2 events: 1. bridge hits the box and stops, 2. bridge continues to go all the way. More surprised by impossible event. Children might have Object permanence?
McGarrigle and Donaldson (1974)
Teddy shuffled coins. Children did better in deciding whether the rows are identical compared with original studies. Therefore demands of the task/experiment layout affect results and children are actually smarter?
Lev Vygotsky
- Social contribution to development
- Importance of language and cultural tools
- Zone of proximal development (difference between what a learner can do without help and what he or she can do with help.)
- Implicit vs. Explicit Scaffolding (e.g. Motherese vs. Tutor)
Miller and Stigler (1987)
Numerical development. Chinese vs. American. 4-5-6 year olds.
Bandura (1961, 1977)
Bobo Dolls. Observational learning. Vicarious Punishment & Selective imitation.
Koenig et al. (2004)
3-4 year olds evaluate models for trustworthiness. More likely to copy a model they trust. Selective Imitation.
Meltzoff & Moore (1977)
Babies at hospitals. Imitation of facial expressions.
Meltzoff (1988)
14-month olds will imitate a complex action after a 1 week delay. Forehead pressing against a box to switch on light.
Gergely et al. (2002)
Hands free vs, Hands occupied turning the light box. Imitation more powerful in the hands free (as it shows specifically not to use the hands)
Overimitation (Lyons et al. 2011)
Children tend to imitate even the actions that aren’t necessary for a certain objective. But only if they think they do it intentionally. .
Harlow and Harlow
Monkeys in isolation. Importance of a care giver. Cloth vs. Feeding mother.
Bowlby
- Infants act to gain security from their caregiver (Crying, Smiling etc.)
- Caregiver supports explorations + Separation anxiety.
- Internal Working Model
Ainsworth
- Strange Situation
- Secure, Avoidant, Ambivalent, Disorganised
Johnson et al. (2010)
Secure babies more surprised by the unresponsive mum. Insecure babies more surprised by the responsive mum. Evidence for Internal Working Model.
Information Processing Approach
- Computational
- Algorithmic
- Implementational
Aspects:
Memory, Control. Strategy
(Marr, 1980??)
How does Information Processing changes during development
- Adding new ways of representing inf.
2. Adding new ways of processing inf.
Diamond (1985)
Changes in working memory development explain the A-not-B error. Delay between searching under the cloth.
Gerstadt (1994)
Day/Night Task. Show Sun/Moon and ask to say the opposite (Sun = Night). Develops over time.
Butterworth (1977)
Inhibition helps to explain the A-not-B error. Trained the child to look under A and they can’t inhibit this habit.
Siegler (1995, 1996)
Types of strategies children use to count and how they switch them over time. Found that children keep switching their strategies. Microgenetic method - longitudinal/close-together sessions.
Spelke - Core Knowledge
- Evolved Knowledge that allows us to learn
- Knowledge is Experience expected rather than Experience Dependent
- Cause & Effect, Grammar, Animates?
Leslie & Keeble (1987)
Children cannot infer causality from young age. 2 balls - one causal, one not - surprised at the causal event when showed backward.
Baillargeon & De Vos (1991)
Impossible event - Train meant to hit a box behind a curtain.
Gergely (1995)
Little ball trying to join mum. Children looked longer at when the ball didn’t take a straight path even though they were habituated to it (wall). Proves Animacy knowledge from early age.
Theory Theory
Child has a schema about how the world works and experience fills in gaps and adjusts the schema.
Keil (1989)
Schema of biology is different in young children. Raccoon –> Skunk/Coffeepot –> Birdfeeder study.
Theory of Mind
Theory of mind is the ability to attribute mental states—beliefs, intents, desires, pretending, knowledge, etc.—to oneself and others and to understand that others have beliefs, desires, intentions, and perspectives that are different from one’s own.
Premack and Woodruff (1978)
Do Chimpanzees have a theory of mind?
Gopnik & Astington (1989)
Pencils inside a bag of M&M’s/Smarties. Children make the mistake in assuming somebody else would say there are pencil inside just because they know.
Wimmer & Perner (1983)
Sally-Ann Task. Ann switched the boxes. Children up to 4 would say that Sally will look for the ball in the new box, not the one she put the ball in.
Callaghan (2005)
Mean age/Percentage children passing the Sally-Ann Task. Consistently solved after 48 months.
Warneken & Tomasello
Capacity for altruistic behaviour/Theory of mind. Experimenter cant open a wardrobe - his hands full - the child helps.
Mprton & Johnson (1991)
Face-Paddle study. Measuring the degree to which a baby will move its head to follow a certain face or a blank. Found Newborns have a strong preference fro tracking human-like faces.
Dual-Process Theory:
- Conspec - core knowledge for faces
- Conlearn - learning mechanism for tracking human faces
Sugita (2008)
Monkeys not exposed not any faces. Human or Monkey faces after. If exposed to Human faces for a month - preference for Human faces over Monkeys/Objects. If exposed to Monkeys, preference for Monkey faces over Human/Objects
Scaife & Bruner (1975)
Joint Attention. Children by 11 months follow where another person is looking.
Senju & Csibra (2008)
Children are much more likely to follow a person’s gaze if that person makes eye contact with them first.
Wellman & Liu (2004)
Diverse desires. Knowledge access. False Belief. Real-apparent emotion. (TASKS) - Abilities emerge at about 3-5.
Zaitchik (1990)
Rubber Duck in a bath - takes a picture - moves the duck to a bed - asks child where the duck is on the picture - child says bed.
Onishi & Bailargeon (2005)
Infants stare longer when a person reaches for the box in which the watermelon is rather than the box in which the person thinks the watermelon is in. Shows that 15-month olds have a theory of mind (if the task is easy enough)
Baron-Cohen, Leslie & Frith (1985)
Children with Autisms have a difficulty passing Sally & Ann Task even though (in theory) they have the necessary skills.
Senju (2009)
Adults with Asperger syndrome. Panels and toys. Can’t guess where the person would look for an object - seemingly random choices. Suggests no theory of the mind, but the syndrome is associated with easier ToM in early development so wtf?.
Corcoran, Mercer & Frith (1995)
Individuals with Schizophrenia tend to have difficulty passing ToM tasks
Call & Tomasello (2008)
Chimpanzees engage in Rational imitation but not ToM.
Bruner, Goodenow & Austin (1956)
Concept = Combination of necessary and sufficient features (EARLY ASSUMPTION)
Rosch (1973)
Concept = Statistical summary of perceivable features. Prototype theory. (degrees to ‘ideal’)
Murphy & Medin (1985)
Some features are more important than others when defining concepts.
Armstrong, Gleitman & Gleitman (1983)
We have multiple different ways of representing the same concept e.g. 2 is a better even number than 176.
Quinn (1993)
Cats pics. After habituation show a novel animal (dog). Children prefer to look at the novel animal. Children have concepts as are able to distinguish that dog is a novel concept to cat.
Gelman & Bloom (2000)
Newspaper Hat. If told it folded like this at random (fell down) - children said it was a newspaper. If told it was folded like this on purpose - children said It was a hat.
Gelman & Markman (1986)
Bat - Feeds milk. Bird - Feeds mashed food. Shown a bird that looks like a bat. Children say that the new bird would feed mash up food.
Feigenson & Carey (2005)
Cookies in the bag. Children can’t track more than 4 objects at a time.
Wynn (1990)
Ask for 1 pebble = 1 pebble. Ask for 2 pebble = Handful of pebbles.
Stereopsis
The perception of depth by combining the images from both eyes.
Affordances
An affordance is the possibility of an action on an object or environment. Though additional meanings have developed, the original definition in psychology includes all actions that are physically possible. E.g. Door handle offers an affordance for how it must be gripped.
Conservation
Notion that the quantitative properties of an object are invariant despite changes in the object’s appearance e.g. Preoperational stage children –> Fail the how much water in the flask task.
Deferred imitation paradigm
Where the infant imitates an event demonstrated some time earlier.
Casual Reasoning
When we infer that events happening close together in time and space are linked in some casual way.
