Week 1 Flashcards
Define developmental psychology
The scientific study of the changes humans go through from conception onwards.
All aspects of human development: biology, cognition, emotion, morality, social, intellectual, language.
Why study child development?
- Basic scientific understanding
- Understanding human nature
- Caring for children
- Social policy and practice
- Psychological literacy
If we can monitor child development we can track developmental milestones and understand expectations of a child at a particular stage of development. This can be useful for determining whether a child’s development is considered to be typical or atypical and give appropriate support. In terms of education, it is important to know the abilities of children to target learning and encouraging healthy development.
What are baby biographies?
Case studies on babies
How was development studied in the past?
• Piaget’s 3 children
• Darwin “Biographical Sketch of
an Infant” (1877) based on his son William Erasmus Darwin
• Skinner “Baby in a Box” (1959)
+ Detailed first hand accounts
- subjective and unsystematic (choose what to record)
- retrospective
- limited reliability and external validity
How is development studied now?
- Cross-sectional studies
- Longitudinal studies (e.g., ALSPAC)
- Experiments
- Observations
- Interventions
- Surveys
What is the ALSPAC
Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children setup by the university of Bristol which has tracked parents and their children from birth with many follow up surveys with an initial sample size of 14,138. This longitudinal programme is similar to those done in the US (Early Childhood Longitudinal Program) which had 5 follow-ups to 2007-2008, ages 6-7 with an initial sample size of 14,000 and New Zealand (Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study) which had follow-ups aged 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 18, 21, 26, 32 and 38 years; next at 44-45.
What is a cross-sectional design study?
A cross-sectional study involves looking at data from a population at one specific point in time. The participants in this type of study are selected based on particular variables of interest.
What is a longitudinal study?
A longitudinal study (or longitudinal survey, or panel study) is a research design that involves repeated observations of the same variables (e.g., people) over short or long periods of time (i.e., uses longitudinal data).
How do we study development?
- Cross-sectional studies
- Longitudinal studies (e.g., ALSPAC)
- Experiments
- Observations
- Interventions
- Surveys
Outline some of the problems with studying children
- Few longitudinal studies: correlation not causation
- What can children report? - age a big factor
- Use of parents: self-reporting bias
- Ethical issues - BPS has rigid procedures
Given that infants cannot speak how can we study them?
▪ Looking ▪ Reaching ▪ Turning ▪ Sucking ▪ Facial expression ▪ Need to understand their capabilities (innate)
What are reflexes?
Automatic responses triggered by specific, relatively localised stimuli. These reflexes form the basis for later motor skills
▪ Innate
▪ Automatic
▪ Survival function
▪ Basis for further development - reflexes tested and persistence checked by health visitors to establish if an infant is healthy
▪ Nervous system
Detail infants reflexes and their age of disappearance
Eye blink - Permanent
Rooting (if you stroke cheek they turn to the side stroked, find a nipple and feed) - stops after 3 weeks, important for early feeding
Sucking - Permanent
Swimming - 4-6 months
Moro (a.k.a. startle reflex, may involve the infant suddenly splaying their arms and moving their legs before bringing their arms in front of their body) - 6 months
Palmar grasp (when an object is placed in an infant’s hand and the palm of the child is stroked, the fingers will close reflexively, as the object is grasped via palmar grasp. The grip is strong but unpredictable; though it may be able to support the child’s weight, they may also release their grip suddenly and without warning. The reverse motion can be induced by stroking the back or side of the hand.) - 3-4 months
Tonic neck (When a baby’s head is turned to one side, the arm on that side stretches out and the opposite arm bends up at the elbow. This is often called the fencing position or galant reflex) - 4 months
Stepping - 2 months
Babinski - (occurs after the sole of the foot has been firmly stroked. The big toe then moves upward or toward the top surface of the foot. The other toes fan out.) - 8-12 months
Reflexes vary in utility. Some reflexes hold a survival value (e.g., the rooting reflex, which helps a breastfed infant find the mother’s nipple). Babies display the rooting reflex only when they are hungry and touched by another person, not when they touch themselves. There are a few reflexes that likely assisted in the survival of babies during human evolutionary past (e.g., the Moro reflex). Other reflexes such as sucking and grabbing help establish gratifying interaction between parents and infants. They can encourage a parent to respond with love and affection, and to feed their child more competently. In addition, it helps parents to comfort their infant while allowing the baby to control distress and the amount of stimulation they receive.
Describe the preferential looking chamber
Robert L. Fantz (1925-1981) was a developmental psychologist who launched several studies on infant perception including the preferential looking paradigm. Fantz introduced this paradigm in 1961 while working at the Case Western Reserve University. The preferential looking paradigm is used in studies of infants regarding cognitive development and categorisation. Fantz’s study showed that infants looked at patterned images longer than uniform images. He later built upon his study in 1964 to include habituation situations. These situations exhibited an infants preference for new or unusual stimuli.
Fantz (1964) simultaneously presented two visual stimuli to infants, one of which was new or novel on each trial, and one of which remained unchanged. The amount of time infants looked to each stimulus on each trial was measured. Fantz reported that, over the course of ten successive trials, infants displayed progressively less visual fixation to the unchanging (familiar) stimulus and longer fixation to the novel stimulus, indicating that infants had habituated
Conclusions have been drawn from preferential looking experiments about the knowledge that infants possess. For example, if infants discriminate between rule-following and rule-violating stimuli—say, by looking longer, on average, at the latter than the former—then it has sometimes been concluded that infants know the rule.
Common criticisms of this innateness thesis include that the infant has already acquired enough experience of non-teleporting objects to justify its surprise, and that teleporting objects are attention-grabbing for reasons other than expectancy violation.
Findings from preferential looking experiments have suggested that humans innately possess sets of beliefs about how objects interact (“folk physics” or “folk mechanics”) and about how animate beings interact (“folk psychology”).
What is visual acuity?
Visual acuity refers to your ability to discern the shapes and details of the things you see. It’s just one factor in your overall vision. Others include colour vision, peripheral vision, and depth perception. There are several different types of visual acuity tests, most of which are very simple.
What is habituation?
Habituation refers to the gradual decrease in responsiveness due to repeated presentations of the same stimulus. Habituation is commonly used as a tool to demonstrate the cognitive abilities of infants and young children.
Detail Sokolov’s comparator model
Sokolov’s model is the most popular theoretical explanation for infant habituation, even though the most widely-cited source for this model is a brief passage in the appendix of a small book titled Perception and the conditioned reflex (Sokolov, 1963). The model is developed in other publications (Sokolov, 1960, 1966, 1977), and is derived from a long program of work on the orienting reflex.
Sokolov’s model is based on the orienting reflex (OR), a phenomenon first noted by Sechenov (1863/1965), and subsequently by Pavlov (1927) in the context of curiosity and exploration and their effect on conditioning. Behaviorally, the OR is a cluster of responses elicited by the detection of a nonthreatening, moderately intense novel or unexpected stimulus: suppressed heart rate, respiration, skin resistance, pupil dilation, and reduced motor activity, including the fixing of sensory receptors at or toward the source or location of the stimulus. All of these components may be traced ultimately to predominant activation of the parasympathetic nervous system. Stimuli that are more intense or threatening tend to evoke predominant activation of the sympathetic nervous system, which may involve heart rate acceleration, and decreased blood flow to the extremities (Graham & Clifton, 1966).
Detail infant event-related potential studies
ERP studies typically investigate patterns of attention and memory by showing two-dimensional representations of familiar and unfamiliar or target and nontarget objects
Such studies assume that the processes involved in recognition from pictures and in the real world involve the same mechanisms. This assumption has been called into question for adults (Ittelson, 1996). Infant recognition memory research often uses pictures because more complex verbal tasks are not feasible since the subjects cannot respond verbally. There is, however, a literature suggesting that infants do not treat pictures in the same manner as adults.
Infants differentiated familiar from unfamiliar objects when viewing them in both two and three dimensions. However, differentiation between the familiar and novel objects occurred more quickly when infants viewed the object in 3-D than when they viewed 2-D representations. The results are discussed with respect to infants’ recognition abilities and their understanding of real objects and representations. This is the first study using 3-D objects in conjunction with ERPs in infants, and it introduces an interesting new methodology for assessing infants’ electrophysiological responses to real objects.
