Week 7 Flashcards
Def: Theory of Mind and what it involves
A person’s developing concepts of mental activity
-Implies organizing facts & predicting
-aids in cooperation, competition, social interactions
What are the two prerequisite skills for theory of mind
- ability to view self and others’ behaviors as intentional
- Ability to take others’ perspectives
Describe the content false belief task
- smarties box contains pencils
- Child asked 3 questions
1. What do you think is in the box
2. what will your friend think is in the box
3. When you first saw the box, what did you think was inside
What are often the results of the content false belief task
- 3 year olds tend to fail - cant separate their thinking from others
- 4 year olds tend to pass - are able to make seperating (developed theory of mind)
Unless smarties are put back into the box, then they will say their friend thinks there are pencils in the box, indicating that there understanding is shaky
Location False-Belief Task
- Sally places a marble in a basket
- Sally exits the room
- Anne transfers marble to box
- when sally returns were will she look for the marble?
What is often the results of the location false-belief task?
- 3 year olds tend to fail
- 4 year olds tend to pass (have developed theory of mind)
Sources of failure in Theory of Mind tasks
- Dual representation: Failure to represent both the current location and the previous location at the same time
- Poor Executive function (Planning, executing, inhibiting actions): difficulty in regulating behavior
Affect of social contexts on theory of Mind tasks
-Children are more likely to pass at a younger age if given the context that sally wants to trick Anne
-Familiar contexts also increase chance of passing at a younger age
Autism Spectrum Disorder
- Developmental disorder characterized by atypical social interactions
- Heritable
- Abnormal brain functions
- Typically preform poorly on false-belief tasks
Rovee-Collier experiment
- Ribbon attached to infants 2-3 months old
- infants learn that kicking moves the mobiles
- Several days or weeks later, when infants shown mobile again, they forget
- Rovee-collier moves the mobile for the baby which triggers memory
-Next day, tie foot to mobile again - infants kick - Remember better in context which association is learned
What are the implication of the Rovee-Collier Study?
- An event from the past is remembered
- Over time, event can no longer be recalled
- A cue can serve to dredge up forgotten memory
Where is memory stored
Hippocampus
What part of the brain is responsible for memory retrieval
Frontal cortex
At what rate does memory development occur
- Linear increase in memory with age over first 2 years
- After 2 years, improvements in executive functioning, use of strategies, and knowledge base
Fuzzy Trace Theory Experiments
- Words presented orally to children aged 7, 11 and adults
- Highly associated critical word not given
- Participants are given a list of words and tasked to identify which words were heard previously
Fuzzy Trace Theory Results
ACCURACY
- Adults: 88%
- 11 year olds: 76%
- 7 year olds: 71%
CRITICAL WORD
- Adults: 60%
- 11 Year olds: 40%
- 7 year olds: 22%
7 year olds are most accurate because older children and adults remember the gist of experience, which will falsely trigger recognition of highly related words
What are the implications of fuzzy trace theory?
- Older siblings are less reliable because they are more likely to be biased by “the gist”
- Younger child more likely to remember precise events
- Must be recent event for child to remember
Eyewitness Testimony
Children show poor face recognition accuracy
- Faces are shown with a novel expression
- Faces are shown from a new viewpoint
- impaired by external paraphernalia
Ceci et al (1994) Eyewitness Testimony experiment
- Interviewed Children about 2 true events and 2 false events
- Children interviewed about events on multiple occasions over 11 weeks
FALSE EVENTS
- 50% of 3 to 4 year olds said false events happened
- 40% of 5 to 6 year olds said fase events happened
Cognitive limitations for children recalling events
- Executive function
- Strategies
- Knowledge
- Metacognition
- Memory Capacity
What aspects of interviewing children on eyewitness testimony may influence their response?
- Stereotype inducement
- Authority figures
- Delayed recall
- Bribes/ treats
Matthew Effect Reading
Good readers become better readers and poor readers are left behind more and more, so that the gap widens
Phonemic Awareness
Knowledge that words consist of separable sound
- number one predictor of reading ability
Phonemic awareness in english
- Deep orthography (system for converting letters into sounds is irregular)
- 40 phenomes - > 1120 letter combinations
Dyslexia
- reading disability
- reading ability is significantly worse than intellectual ability would predict
- phonological processing is best predictor
- neurological basis likely genetic
- manifestation depends on grapheme-phoneme correspondence
Reading ability in males compared to females
- Girls tend to preform better on reading tests than boys
- Consistent across studies and countries
- Statistically significant but minor difference
- Dyslexia more prevalent in boys
- Boys affected more by interest
Heritability of cognitive abilities
- Executive function highly heritable
- Greatly influenced by the environment
- Physically fit children performed better at allocating attentional resources
Heritability of intelligence
Genetic influence is mostly indirect
- Passive effects: how parents behave towards children
- Child’s genes dictate evocative and active effects on the environment
Effect of the environment on intelligence
- Children from high SES homes have higher IQ and academic achievement
- SES correlates with home environment, friend selection, neighborhood, academic expectation and academic opportunity
- Greater negative effect of low SES in children who experienced perinatal stress
Factors effecting SES
family income, parents’ occupational status, years of parental education
Results of familial studies of intelligence
Correlations increase as genetic similarity increases
- Heritability of IQ = 0.5
- Effects of prenatal environment significant
Affects on IQ of African American children being adopted into white middle-class families
IQ is 20 points higher than comparable children
- correlation between child and biological mother remains higher than child and adoptive mother
How does early experience influence cognitive development?
Hymovitch (1952)
MICE IN 3 ENVIRONMENTS
- normal cage (limited visual/motor experience)
- Free environment (lots of visual/motor experience)
- Stove pipe (negligible visual/motor experience)
4 GROUPS: 30-75 days -> 75-120 days
- Free environment -> Stovepipe
- Stovepipe -> free environment
- Free environment the entire time
- normal cage the entire time (Most deprived)
TEST
- measured the # of errors in a 12-point maze
FINDINGS
-having the free environment early was important
Role of early experiences on intelligence
- Humans use naturalistic observations
- Unresponsive parenting, low SES, lack of stimulating play materials correlates with lower IQ
Cumulative deficit effect
As risk factors increase, IQ decreases
Romanian Orphanages
Under Romanian leader Nicolae Ceausescu policy to increase Romania’s population were put in place
- Abortion illegal, contraceptives forbidden
-Children abandoned in orphanages and turned over to state care
- Adverse conditions in orphanage such as overcrowding, insufficient funding , inadequate caregiving
Effects of Institutionalization
- Physical effects: Decreased height, weight and head circumference
- Cognitive effects: Lowered IQ, often within intellectually disabled range
- Effects on brain: reduced cortical activity in prefrontal cortex, temporal lobe, hippocampus, and amygdala and less white matter in pathways between limbic system and frontal lobe
- Some effects of deprivation may be reversible if removed within first 2 years of life
