Define: Development
- Changes in humans over time (physical, cognitive, psychosocial)
- Bi-directional (parent/child both influence each other’s development)
Infant determinism myth
-Assumption that first few years are most important for our adult lives
Childhood fragility myth
-Assumption that children are easily damaged, when actually they’re very resilient
Post-hoc fallacy (development)
- Assuming that because A came before B, that A caused B
- Ex. couple gets divorced; child diagnosed with autism, therefore divorce caused autism…NO
Longitudinal research design (dev.)
- Study same group of ppl across multiple time points
- Cons: (selective) attrition, time consuming – leading to bias
Cross-sectional research design (dev.)
- Compare different age groups at a single time point in time
- Con: cohort effect (differences based on group growing up at the same time, rather than effect of age itself)
Gene-Environment Interactions
- Often interact and correlate
- Situation in which the effects of genes depend on the environment in which they are expressed
Gene expression
-Environmental effects can trigger gene activity (activation/deactivation)
Newborn capacities
- Reflexes
- Taste, smell, skin senses
- Hearing (can localize)
- Vision (least developed-nearsighted)
Piaget
- Founded what we know as “cognitive development”
- “constructivist”
- emphasized “active” perspective of learner
- Children build knowledge from experience to schemas
Assimilation
-Absorbing new experiences into what you already know
Accommodation
-Altering a belief/schema to make it more compatible with experience/reality
Piagets 4 stages
- Sensorimotor
- Preoperational
- Concrete operations
- Formal operations
Sensorimotor stage
- 0-2
- No thought beyond immediate physical experiences
- Milestone is “Mental representation” - thinking about things absent from view
- Lack “object permanence”
Preoperational stage
- 2-7
- Can construct mental representations of experience but not perform operations on them
- Limitations: egocentrism, fail conservation tasks
Concrete operations stage
- 7-11
- Can use “mental operations” on actual physical events, not abstract or hypothetical
- Pass conservation tasks
- Still anchored to here and now, physical experiences
Formal operations stage
- 11-adult
- Hypothetical reasoning
- Logic (if, then), abstract, hypotheses
BUT:
- Fostered more in western societies and major cities
- Occurs later than Piaget thought
- Only 40-60% of first yr undergrads use it
Vygotsky
- Contemporary of Piaget
- Role of social interaction in cog. dev.
- Dev. does not follow one universal course
- speech is a culturally transmitted intellectual tool
- CON: emphasized verbal instruction, may not apply to other cultures
Private speech (Vygotsky)
- Directed at self, guides child’s thinking
- Helps plan problem solving
- Decreases into middle childhood
Zone of Proximal Development (Vygotsky)
-Range of tasks too complex, but can be mastered with help from “expert”
Scaffolding (Vygotsky)
- Parents provide initial assistance (as if they’ve already learned something)
- Remove as child improves
Social cognition
-Understanding the social world
Theory of mind (ToM)
- Age 4-5
- Understanding that people have hidden mental states and ability to reason about this
“Desire ToM”
-3 yr olds think that only desires —> actions
