Social World Flashcards
What is the learning view?
- The view that children learn from the environment
- Children learn a great deal from the environment through trial and error and statistical learning
- Caregivers play an important role in children’s cognitive development via teaching and the quality of environment provided
How do children learn from the environment?
- children actively learn from the environment on their own: trial and error and statistical learning
- caregivers play an important role in children’s learning: teach children skills via scaffolding and determine the quality of children’s environment
What is statistical learning?
- the ability to track patterns in the environment
- example of observational learning
Can infants use statistical learning?
- by 2 months there is evidence that infants are sensitive to statistical regularities in their environment
- they can see patterns
What are the implications of statistical learning in infants?
- babies are actively interpreting the world around them and drawing conclusions
- statistical learning is innate and domain general
- it is a mechanism through which infants learn in various domains
What is scaffolding?
- a process in which a caregiver provides a temporary framework that supports children’s thinking at a higher level than children could manage on their own
What are examples of scaffolding?
- physically assisting a child
- demonstrating a skill
- providing explicit instructions
- breaking down a task
What is the zone of proximal development?
- the different between what a child can do without help and what they can achieve with scaffolding from a caregiver
What is private speech?
- children regulate their own behaviour with private speech
- tell themselves out loud what to do the same way their parents do
- more likely on more difficult tasks
- thinking out loud
When do children use private speech?
- start around 3 years
- most frequent in 4-6 year olds
- stops around age 7, when private speech decreases and goes underground, becoming thought
How is the home environment measured?
- through Home Observation for the Measurement of the Environment (HOME)
- it is the gold standard
- researchers visit a child’s home and observe the environment and interview the caregiver
- checklist of characteristics that reflect 2 factors: emotional support and cognitive stimulation
- higher scores indicate higher quality home environment
What is the emotional support factor?
- parents’ degree of responsiveness to their child and expression of positive emotions
What is the cognitive stimulation factor?
- degree to which the parent engages and involves the child, provides them with stimulating toys, and variety in daily life
What do higher scores on the HOME indicate?
- higher scores positively predict children’s cognitive skills and development
- higher IQ
- better math and reading comprehension
- better language ability
How many kids use childcare outside the home?
- 60% of Canadian children under the age of 5 attend childcare outside home
- 52% of these children attend daycare centres
What are the effects of a daycare environment?
- high quality child care, especially daycare centres, linked with better cognitive and language skills in the first 3 years of life
- low quality child associated with lower cognitive and language skills
- language stimulation was a particularly important factor
- children in daycare centres performed better than children in at home child care centres
- no difference between kids in the exclusive care of mom vs. out of home child care
How does SES play a role in home quality and cognitive development?
- low SES associated with lower quality home environment
- plays an important role in why children from poorer families tend to score lower on tests of cognitive skill before starting school
What are the results of daycare programs for lower SES children?
- day care interventions to foster cognitive development of children from low SES families by focusing on cognitive stimulation
- children who participate in these programs have better cognitive skills than the children who don’t
- but the cognitive effects don’t last once the program is over
- participants tend to be more likely to finish high school and enroll in university, less likely to be held back a grade, and are less likely to engage in criminal activity
What’s in a mind?
- intentions
- desires
- knowledge
- all of these have to be inferred, cannot be observed
- children come to understand each of these at different ages
When do children start understanding others’ intentions?
- 6 months
- understand goal directed movement
- understand that only humans can have intentions (not robots)
When do children understand the difference between intentions and accidents?
- 9 months
- can distinguish between intentional and accidental actions
- more frustrated when adult purposely doesn’t give them a toy vs. when an adult tries but accidentally drops it
What is the importance of understanding intentions?
- step towards understanding the minds of others
- but cannot yet understand the psychological motivations behind intentions
- enables joit attention
- enables imitation
What is joint attention?
- the shared attention of 2 people on the same object or event and awareness that they are paying attention to the same thing
When does joint attention emerge?
- between 9-12 months
What could difficulty with joint attention indicate?
- autism spectrum disorders
How is joint attention critical for learning from others?
- teaching can only happen if children are paying attention to the same thing as their caregiver
What is imitation?
- voluntarily matching another person’s behaviour
When does imitation emerge?
- between 9-12 months
Innate basis of imitation?
- nativists argue that newborns’ matching of sticking tongue out is evidence that imitation is innate
BUT - newborns don’t match any other behaviour, except sticking tongue out
- sticking tongue out is a common, more general newborn response to stimuli they find interesting
- suggests that newborns’ matching of adult’s sticking tongue out is coincidental and simply indication of interest
How is imitation critical for observational learning?
- one of the most fundamental ways that children learn most things
- not passively imitating, but actively interpreting actions to figure out what to imitate
- will imitate when it makes sense to
- children are actively thinking about what they are observing
What is theory of mind?
- ability to attribute mental states to oneself and others, and to understand that other people can have desires, knowledge, and beliefs that differ from one’s own
When do children start understanding desires?
- 1 year
- understanding that desires lead to actions
What does fully understanding others’ desires require?
- the appreciation that other people are separate from the self
- implicit and explicit sense of self
What is the implicit sense of self?
- rooting reflex: knowing the difference between someone else’s hand and their own
- born with it
What is the explicit sense of self?
- recognizing self in mirror
- 18-24 months
What changes once children can distinguish themselves from others?
- being able to distinguish self from others enables better understanding of others’ unique desires
- 2 year olds can predict a character’s actions based on the character’s desires, rather than based on their own desires
When do children start understanding others’ knowledge?
- 3 years
- understand what people know and what they don’t know
- make judgments about others’ reliability
When do children start understanding expertise?
- 3-4 years
- understand that specific people may have specific knowledge in certain areas
How does understanding others’ knowledge help with learning?
- children are selective in who they choose to learn from
- learn from reliable others
- learn specific knowledge from people that they perceive to be experts in that topic
When do children start understanding that knowledge leads to action?
- 3 years
- emergence of rudimentary understanding that beliefs’ lead to actions
- but limited; false belief problems
What are false belief problems?
- tasks that test a child’s understanding that other people will behave consistent with their knowledge/beliefs even if a child knows this knowledge/belief is false
- most 3 year olds fail
- most 5 year olds pass
When do children have a developed theory of mind?
- around 5 years
- when they correctly respond to the false belief problem
Social cognition development timeline (theory of mind timeline)
- 6 months: understanding others’ action intentions
- 9-12 months: attention and imitation
- 1 year: basic understanding others’ desires
- 1.5-2 years: explicit sense of self indicated by passing Rouge test
- 2 years: greater understanding that others’ desires can be different from one’s own
- 3 years: sensitive to whether someone is knowledgeable in a topic or not + basic understanding that beliefs lead to action but fail at false-belief tests
- 5 years: more fully developed theory of mind and pass false-belief tests
What is used to explain developments in theory of mind?
- nativist theory
- improvements in executive functioning
- contribution of social interactions
How does the nativist theory explain theory of mind?
- theory of mind module (TOMM)
What is the theory of mind module?
innate brain mechanism devoted to understanding other people that matures over the first 5 years of life:
- newborns have an inherent interest in faces
- culturally universal developmental trajectory of theory of mind: across countries, most 3 year olds fail and most 5 year olds pass false belief tasks
- temporoparietal junction and autism spectrum disorder: TPJ active across theory of mind tasks, children with ASD struggle with theory of mind and have atypical sizes and activity in TPJ
What is executive functioning?
- set of cognitive processes that enable cognitive control of behaviour, such as planning, focused attention, inhibiting impulses, and juggling multiple tasks
How do improvements in executive functioning explain developments in theory of mind?
- false belief tasks require executive functioning skills
- evidence that as executive functioning improves, so does theory of mind
- implies that individual differences in executive functioning are responsible for individual difference in theory of mind
How does the contribution of social interactions explain developments in theory of mind?
- interactions with other people are critical for the development of theory of mind
- caregivers’ use of mental state talk is correlated with preschooler’s theory of mind ability
- preschoolers that have siblings are better at theory of mind tasks, especially if sibling is of a different gender
What is mental state talk?
- statements and questions that refer to other people’s “minds” using words such as think, know and want
What are the implications of the contribution of social interactions?
caregivers can foster children’s social cognition by:
- using mental state talk
- providing opportunities for interactions with different people
- encouraging joint attention
How does theory of mind develop?
- nativist theory, improvements in executive functioning, and contribution of social interactions all play a role
- maturation of brain regions involved in understanding others
- improved executive functioning ability
- interactions with other people
How do children learn?
- trial and error
- statistical learning
- observation and imitation
- being taught by others
