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.
Detail High amplitude sucking studies on infants
The high-amplitude sucking technique (HAS), also called non-nutritive sucking, is an experimental method appropriate for testing infants from birth to age 4 months. The HAS technique capitalizes on infants’ sucking reflex: infants hear a sound stimulus every time they produce a strong or “high-amplitude” suck. The number of high amplitude sucks produced is used as an index of interest.
Variants of the procedure can be used to test infants’ discrimination of and preference for a variety of
language stimuli.
The results of these studies suggest that newborns can indeed be operantly conditioned (e.g., Siqueland & Lipsitt, 1966; Lipsitt, Kaye, & Bosack, 1966; Siqueland, 1968; DeCasper & Fifer, 1980; DeCasper & Sigafoos, 1983). The
majority of these studies, however, refer to specific situations involving a socalled ‘‘prepared’’ relation between the selected response and the reinforcer. As noted by Sameroff and Cavanagh (1979, p. 362): ‘‘Successful results have generally been reported for those response systems that are connected with the biological survival of the newborn, that is, sucking and headturning.’’
Examples include head-turning responses rewarded by sucking on a blind nipple (Siqueland, 1968) or by food (Siqueland & Lipsitt, 1966), and sucking on a tube rewarded by the delivery of a sucrose solution (Lipsitt et al., 1966).
There are presently however few studies that have established that operant conditioning can be observed in newborns with less privileged response stimulus associations. Of these few, it has been shown that neonates can react to a contingency between the duration of their intersucking burst intervals and the delivery of potent auditory reinforcers during bursts (e.g., DeCasper & Fifer, 1980).
Detail infant imitation studies
This study investigated whether or not newborn infants could imitate head movements. The subjects were shown both tongue protrusions and head movements in a repeated-measures design, with the specific aim of conducting a replication of the tongue-protrusion effect in newborns and using these same subjects to test a new non-oral gesture that had not previously been examined under experimental conditions in infants this young.
There is a rekindling of interest in the origins and early development of imitation in infants. This rekindling has been engendered, in part, by the reports of imitation in early infancy (Flavell, 1985). The proposition has been offered that there exists at birth some primitive capacity for matching the acts of others (Meltzoff & Moore, 1977, 1983a). Such an ability would be an important building block for subsequent social and cognitive development.
Meltzoff and Moore’s (1977) report of neonatal imitation sparked a two-pronged discussion—one concerning the existence of the effect and the other concerning the psychological mechanism that might mediate it. The first of these issues, that of existence, has now been addressed in numerous studies. After an initial period of debate, the findings of neonatal imitation have been confirmed and extended in at least eight independent laboratories since 1977.
Name the perceptual skills of infants
▪ Taste ▪ Smell ▪ Touch ▪ Vision ▪ Hearing
Detail taste perception in infants and how this develops through childhood
▪ 4 basic tastes: sweet, sour, bitter and salty
▪ Taste buds at 7-8 weeks gestation (flavours from mothers diet transmitted to amniotic fluid which is then swallowed by fetus and by breastfeeding.
▪ Prefer sweet but learn to enjoy other tastes(salt tasting doesn’t develop until around 4 months. Infants can be poisoned by salt and go undetected)
▪Neophobia - fear of trying new foods
▪ Exposure to flavours
▪ E.g., carrot juice - Mennella et al., 2001.
Describe the method and results of Mennella et al., 2001
Pregnant women who planned on breast-feeding their infants were randomly assigned to 1 of 3 groups. The women consumed either 300 mL of carrot juice or water for 4 days per week for 3 consecutive weeks during the last trimester of pregnancy and then again during the first 2 months of lactation. The mothers in 1 group drank carrot juice during pregnancy and water during lactation; mothers in a second group drank water during pregnancy and carrot juice during lactation, whereas those in the control group drank water during both pregnancy and lactation. Approximately 4 weeks after the mothers began complementing their infants’ diet with cereal and before the infants had ever been fed foods or juices containing the flavour of carrots, the infants were videotaped as they fed, in counterbalanced order, cereal prepared with water during 1 test session and cereal prepared with carrot juice during another. Immediately after each session, the mothers rated their infants’ enjoyment of the food on a 9-point scale.
The results demonstrated that the infants who had exposure to the flavour of carrots in either amniotic fluid or breast milk behaved differently in response to that flavour in a food base than did non-exposed control infants. Specifically, previously exposed infants exhibited fewer negative facial expressions while feeding the carrot-flavoured cereal compared with the plain cereal, whereas control infants whose mothers drank water during pregnancy and lactation exhibited no such difference. Moreover, those infants who were exposed to carrots prenatally were perceived by their mothers as enjoying the carrot-flavoured cereal more compared with the plain cereal. Although these same tendencies were observed for the amount of cereal consumed and the length of the feeds, these findings were not statistically significant.
Detail smell perception in infants and how this develops through childhood
▪ Closely linked to taste - impairment of one affects the other
▪ Recognise mothers at 4 days, prefer mother over stranger important for establishing bond
▪ Prefer smell of lactating women to non-lactating (evolutionary) Prefer own mother’s milk than other lactating women
- React strongly to unpleasant smells e.g. vinegar and rotten eggs and prefer other smells e.g. vanilla or banana
Detail touch perception in infants and how this develops through childhood
▪ Sensitive to temperature (Pratt, 1954) - changes in temperature, may get more active if temperature drops
▪ Operations without anaesthesia - In young children, the safest way to perform most surgeries is under general anesthesia. The medications used for sedation have the same side effects as general anesthetics and vary depending on a child’s age, weight, developmental level, health history, physical exam, and the type of test being performed. Previously conduced without
▪ Newborns can feel pain - A 1 day old infant cries more when pricked with a needle for a blood test compared to an infant who is 5-11 months old.
▪ Distress at injections
▪ Soothing - evolutionary, facilitates bond and ensure survival, calming and promotes neural activity. Has led to baby massage
Exploratory
If reflexes are still present when they should have gone, what does it show?
Development delays and problems - e.g. may have cerebral palsy
Why do psychologists refer to the competent infant?
Researchers first found that infants have, for example, size and shape constancy, and progressively more experimentation demonstrated the same constancies in new-born infants. In areas like this, the increase in studies with newborn infants has supported the idea of the competent infant - one that is born with many abilities (Slater, 2001). if newborn infants have size and shape constancy, it is unlikely that the infant’s experience will have much effect on the ability to detect such constancies. However, other perceptual abilities may only be partially developed, or not developed at all, at birth and these are ones that will be dependent on learning and experience.
Detail sight perception in infants and how this develops through childhood
▪ 20/400 to 20/800 acuity (detail); adult level by 1yr
▪ Can track slow objects, vast improvement at 6-10 weeks (Banks & Salapatek, 1983)
▪ See colour, but difficulty distinguishing some
▪ Rapid development at 2 months
Detail depth perception in infants and how this develops through childhood
Depth perception involves:
▪ Kinetic cues (3 months) - cues from motion, objects close move more than those further away
▪ Binocular cues (4 months) - both eyes, see different pictures of same image helps determine depth
▪ Pictorial cues (5-7 months) - how far away based on image, artist representation?
▪ Looming objects
▪ Gibson and Walk (1960) used the ‘visual cliff’ to investigate infants’ depth perception. The visual cliff was a glass table with a checkerboard pattern underneath the glass. There was a central platform and on the shallow side of this platform the pattern was immediately below the glass. At the other, deep, side the pattern was several feet below the glass. They argued that if infants had no depth perception they would be willing to crawl over the ‘deep’ side of the table. But if they did, they would be unwilling to go over the edge. The children were 6-14 months old (old enough to crawl) and placed on the central platform and observed to see which way they moved. Infants were willing to cross the shallow side but not over the ‘cliff’.
▪ By 6½ mo: 90% won’t cross
Outline all the reflexes - there are 9
- Eye blink -permanent
- Rooting - 3 weeks
- Sucking - permanent
- Swimming - 4-6 months
- Moro - 6 months
- Palmar Grasp - 3-4 months
- Tonic Neck - 4 months
- Stepping - 2 months
- Babinski - 8-12 months
Outline Steiner’s research into flavour perceptions
- waters
Different tasting waters produced different facial responses
Outline preference for faces - types of faces they prefer
Infants have a preferences for:
• Human faces (Fantz, 1961)
• Mothers face (Walton et al 1992)
• Attractive faces
Outline Fantz (1961) - preference for Human faces
- faces were either normal, jumbled facial features,
or control with same overall brightness (so top 3rd was dark for the hair, other 2/3’s were light) - they had a preference for the actual looking faces
Outline Walton et al 1992 - preference for mothers faces
- Survival/ forming bond
- Have a preference for mother a few hours after birth
- we know this from high amplitude sucking experiments
What are the two ideas about why we have a preference for faces?
- Imprinting - first thing we see after birth, and mothers is first one?
- Innate - evolution
Does experience wire preference in (Nelson,
2001)?
The fact that the existence of a sensitive period can depend upon occurrence of a particular environment suggests that in early development, portions of networks become perceptually biased, making future modifications more difficult. For example, in the literature on both speech and face perception, the perceptual window through which faces and speech is initially processed is broadly tuned, then narrows with experience. For example, Pascalis, de Haan and Nelson (2002) demonstrated that six- and nine-month-old infants and adults can readily discriminate two human faces, but only 6-month-old infants can discriminate two monkey faces. Similarly, six month olds given three months of experience viewing monkey faces can readily discriminate monkey faces at nine months of age, whereas nine month old infants not afforded such experience cannot (Pascalis et al., 2005).
What can babies hear pre-birth?
DeCasper & Spence (1986) - pregnant mothers read aloud passages, including cat in the hat
- infants recognised these more than new passages they had never heard before. They tested this through high amplitude sucking
What can infants hear in terms of pitch?
- high pitch is quieter but they prefer it! Prefer a mother’s voice
What can infants judge about location of sound?
Can judge general location
- turn heads towards it
Outline infants auditory perception
Speech sounds
- By 1 month, can distinsuihed speech sounds ‘pa’ and ‘ba’ (Eiams, 1975, 1985)
- “synaptic pruning” - keeping sounds in their language
Individual voices
- recognise mums voice (DeCasper & Fifer, 1980), but not their fathers
- Can match face and voice at 6 months
Other sound patterns
- Can discriminate categories of songs - e.g. lullabys
Outline the problem of inter-modal perception
- pickman - train
We receive all sense at the same time, so can infants integrate information from all sensory streams and create a whole?
- can they transfer information across the sense
- e.g. which mouth movements need to be done to get the sound you want to make
- can detect one modality from birth, but senses involve multiple
- pickmans - infants looked at a photo of train more if the sound being played was of a train
Outline sensory processing disorder
- problems with sensory processing
- problems integrating information
- leads to clumsy movements, difficulties learning/ processing new information
- symptoms: not wanting lots of pressure on them, or needing lots of pressure for them to notice
Outline the 2 contrasting theories of infants perceptual abilities/ integration
Enrichment theory (Piaget, 1952/ 1954) Differentiation theory (Gibson and Gibson, 1955)
Outline Enrichment theory
- INNATE SChemas that develop through interaction with the world
- active and exploratory
Piaget (1952/1954)
- critical period for perceptual abilities = sensori-motor stage (0-2)
- skills arent present at birth, but develop over the first year
- as a result of interacting with the environment - performing operations and seeing the results
- sophistication in perceptual skills will develop over several stages
- in this period, they learn to co-ordinate sensory input and motor behaviour
- They use schemas to do this - rely on innate sensori-motor schemas - grasping/ touching (exploratory), to get information about the world
- Use schemas we have to test our knowledge
- schemas allow information integration
Limitations of Enrichment theory?
X - Overestimates things - Even those really good at crawling dont have any difference in depth perception - they have good motor and movement skills but no differences in depth
Outline Differentiation theory
- We learn through finding out differences in the world around us
Gibson and Gibson (1955)
- Integration of senses possible from birth
- Development depends on interaction
- We learn through seeing differences between objects
- identify what makes things different, thats how we learn about perceptual development
- Initially you overgeneralise - see things as the same, cant tell them apart.
- AS you grow, you can make distinctions between objects and events
- Exposure to these events/ objects allows you to identify the properties that make things different
- its not about the objects meanings, its just telling them apart
Outline experimental evidence for Differentiation theory
- Sight/ Sound research (Rosenbloom, 1971)
- Sight/ touch research - dummy
Aronson & Rosenbloom (1971) (Sight/ sound)
- 1 months old were sat behind a sound proof screen, could see their mother
- more distressed when the voice didn’t come from where the mother was.
- they expect voices to come from the face as they have integrated
Sight/ touch research
- had to touch the dummy that looked like the one they were currently sucking
