Studies Flashcards
Aknin, Hamlin & Dunn 2012: Prosociality
- 23- months old
- Warmup gives 3 puppets treats, eating treats themselves
- Experimental period (happiness coded at each stage)
1. Meet Monkey
2. Child receives 8 treats in own bowl
3. Experimenter gives “found” treat to Monkey
4. Child gives “found” treat to Monkey
5. Child gives own treat to Monkey
Conclusion: Toddlers happy when prosocial
Happier after share spontaneously versus in
response to request (Lennon & Eisenberg,
1987)
Happier after benefit others (and, the self)
versus no one (Hepach et al., 2017)
Rene Spitz: Orphanage vs Prison Studies
Orphanage v Prison Studies
- Compared sterile (but physically supportive) orphanages to prison nurseries
After 4 months, babies in orphanages (NOT in prisons):
- Movement diminished: lay in one place
- Vacant, expressionless faces
- Infants unstable and hyper-fearful: sudden dramatic
clinging, biting
- Stereotyped motor behaviors (rocking, banging heads
against crib, thumb sucking)
- 37% of orphanage babies did not survive past second birthday
- Zero prison babies died
Anna Freud & Sophie Dann: Concentration Camp Children
Concentration Camp Children
- Group of 6 infants separated from parents in concentration camps; no stable adult figure; essentially raised each other
- Discovered at age 3
- Initially quite hostile towards adults, but lovely to each other: shared, took turns
- Fared better than orphanage children (with no relationships); became relatively normal adults
- Peer relationships may help in atypical attachment
Harry Harlow: Wire mom vs Cloth mom
Wire mother was made up of wire, provided food; cloth mother was soft, did not provide food
Harlow’s monkeys turned out atypically,
especially if no cloth mother
- Lacked social skills, abused their own
offspring
- Cloth-mother infants able to use mother as
“secure base” from which to explore - Orphanage-reared children also atypical
- Recall international adoption studies: age
adoption matters - As with peer-raised kids, peer-raised monkeys
fare better 14
Mary Ainsworth: Attachment style
Strange Situation (Attachment styles)
Mirror Rouge (Mark) Test
- Mirror Self Recognition = Is it me, or another baby in the mirror
Pass by 18 - 24 months
- Autistic kids have particular trouble
Ross et al., 2016: Sense of physical entity
- Non-Western Children outperforming Western in Shopping Cart Task
Shopping Cart Study
- The baby is standing on a mat that is tied to a shopping cart
- The baby is asked to push the shopping cart to their mother
- 18 months babies realizes that the cart won’t more because they are standing on it - A sense of body as physical entity
The Still-Face Paradigm
- Mothers interact normally with babies for 2 minutes, then go totally neutral for 2 minutes, then go back to interacting
Infants find “still-face” phases extremely distressing
Thomas and Chses: New York Study
New York Longitudinal Study
- Studied 141 children from infancy to adulthood
9 dimensions on which to characterize infants
Babies categorized:
- 40% “easy” = happy, adaptable, regular routines, not over- nor under-sensitive
- 10% “difficult” = unhappy, unadaptable, irregular, intense reactions
- 15%. “slow to warm up” = negative, low activity and intensity, unadaptable, withdrawn
- The rest didn’t fit cleanly
Predicts functioning years later
- Difficult children at high risk for adjustment problems
- Shyness in slow to warm up children
Jerome Kagan et al.: Inhibition
Inhibited and Uninhibited infants
~20% of 4-month-olds can be characterized as “inhibited” (or, upset by novelty)
- More likely to end up shy children (who have peer difficulties and are 4-6X more likely to develop anxiety)
40% of 4-month-olds “uninhibited” (or, delighted by novelty)
- More likely to end up sociable children
Genesee et al., 1996: Bilingual
- 1 and 2-year old French-English bilingual infants
- Videotaped while interacting with monolingual strangers
- Infants changed their language depending on the language of the stranger
- However, infants still used words from the other language
Weikum et al., 2007: Visual Language Discrimination
Visual Language Discrimination
- All infants succeed at 4 & 6 months
- Only bilingual infants maintain at 8 months
Bialystok, 2015: Adaptation Hypothesis
“Adaptation Hypothesis”
Enhanced executive function (EF)
- Inhibitory control
- Task switching
- Attentional allocation
Spelke et al, 1995: Physical law in object v agent
People are not limited to laws of billiard-ball physics
- Infants distinguish agents from objects
- They differentially respond to their actions
- They know that objects are subject to physical laws like contact causality, but think humans/agents may not be
Woodward, 1998: Mental States
Infants viewing others’ behaviors in terms of mental states
- A ball and a bear placed beside each other
- Reaching for either is its respective goal
- New goal, old location vs New location, old goal
Infants look longer at the change in goal object than at a change in location
Inanimate Claw condition
- Claw shows no specific cues to agency, therefore contact objects
Infants do not distinguish these test events showing that goal representation is specific to the actions of agents
Gergely et al., 1995: Rational Behavior
Habituation: Little ball repeatedly jumps barrier to get to big ball
Experiment
- The barrier is removed but little ball continues to jump even when barrier is removed (infants look longer)
- Indicating that they expect agents to act rationally, even if that means changing their physical behavior
False Contents task: False-Belief
“What do you think is in the box?”
“Smarties”
“Why don’t you open the box and see?”
“Oh it’s pencils”
“Let’s close the box. What do you think your friend Jenny would is in the box if she saw it?”
“Pencils!”
- Passing false-belief tasks
The Sally Anne Task: False-Belief
- Sally has a basket and Anne has a box
- Sally put hers red ball in the basket
- Sally goes out of the room and leaves Anne alone
- Anne takes the ball out of the basket and puts it in the box
- When Sally comes back and she wants to play with the ball, where will Sally look for her ball
For a participant to pass this test, they must answer the Belief Question correctly by indicating that Sally believes that the marble is in her own basket.
DiGiogio et al., 2016: Autism
Compared 13 HR and 16 HR newborns preferences for face-like, direct gaze, and biological motion stimuli
Basis of the difference
- HR: No preference
- LR: Preference for social
- Differences between HR and LR newborns suggests innate subcortical orienting mechanism may not exist in HR infants
Suggests successful orienting to social stimuli from 2 mos in HR infants because cortical mechanisms do develop
- However, cortical mechanisms develop atypically/decline in function, because not supported by subcortical ones
Izaard et al., 2009: Familiarization of sounds
After familiarization to # of sounds (4 or 12), newborns look to matching display
Wynn, 1922: Unexpected Problem
Babies look longer at unexpected problem
1+1=1
McKenzine & colleagues: Peak-A-Boo
- Peek-a boo Paradigm: Train babies to anticipate location of peek-a-boo-er in circular surround (30 degrees to their right etc)
- Then turn them and see if they anticipate egocentrically or allocentrically
Gets better and better from 4-8 months (pre-crawling)
Sandbox Paradigm
- Different-shaped sandboxes used to test different things
With younger babies, hide toy in one location, find it in another, 5-months-olds are surprised
