1
Q
Piagetian
A
- Nature and nurture, continuity/discontinuity, the active child
-Believed that societies should be concerned
with the raising and education of children - Constructed a theory of developmental
psychology by observing his 3 children in
great detail and conducting informal
experiments - believed that every child went through the same 4 stages in the same order
2
Q
Information-processing
A
- nature and nurture, how change occurs
- emphasize precise characterizations of the mechanisms that give rise to children’s thinking and that produce cognitive growth.
- attempt to precisely specify processes and steps involved in children’s thinking
- focus on mechanisms development/change (e.g., increases in speed and accuracy of mental operations leads to cognitive growth)
- cognitive development as continuous
- memory, Executive Functioning, Child as Limited-Capacity Processing System
3
Q
core-knowledge
A
- Nature and nurture, continuity/discontinuity
- focus on the surprisingly early knowledge and skills that infants and young children show in areas thought to be of evolutionary importance.
- children are born with specialized learning mechanisms that allow them to quickly and effortlessly acquire infromation that has been important over the course of evolution (face recognition, learning language, theory of mind)
- focus on the sophistication of thinking in infancy and early childhood
- children’s reasoning more advanced than what Piaget thought
4
Q
Sociocultural
A
- Nature and nurture, influence of the sociocultural context, how change occurs
- emphasize the ways in which children’s interactions with other people and with the products of their culture guide cognitive development.
- guided participation - more knowledgeable individuals organize activities in ways that allow less knowledgeable people to engage tham at a higher level than they could manage on their own (scaffolding)
- interactions occur in a broader sociocultural context that includes cultural tools (language, values, manufactured objects)
5
Q
Dynamic-systems
A
- nature and nurture, the active child, how change occurs
- highlight the variability of children’s thinking, even from moment to moment.
- dynamic - always changing and adapting in response to a changing environment
- systems - varied aspects come together to form an integrated whole (e.g., integrating perception, attention, and motor actions to perform simple and complex behaviors)
6
Q
Piaget’s sources of continuity and discontinuity
A
- Assimilation
- Accommodation
- Equilibration
7
Q
Assimilation
A
The process by which people incorporate incoming information into concepts they already understand
- Ex: child has seen a dog before and knows what it is. Child sees a cat for the first time and calls it a dog because they are both furry and have 4 legs.
- Assimiliates the word cat by adding it to their representation of a dog (schema)
8
Q
Accommodation
A
the process by which people adapt their current understandings in response to new experiences
- New experiences challenge existing schema, forcing child to adjust their thinking
- Learns different characteristics of cats than dogs is told to child, then child can adopt a new cognitive structure for cat
9
Q
Equilibration
A
The process by which people balance assimilation and accommodation to create stable understanding of the world
- satisfied with understanding, then confused, then come up with advanced understanding
10
Q
Centration
A
The tendency to focus on a single, perceptually striking feature of an object or even
11
Q
Conservation
A
Failing the conservation task means failure to understand that changing the appearance of objects does not change their key properties.
Children easily pass conservation problems in the concrete operations stage.
12
Q
Sensorimotor Stage
A
- Birth to 2 years
- infants know the world through their sense and through their actions. For example, they learn what dogs look like and what petting them feels like.
- rapid development
- Early: out of sight out of mind (lack object permanence)
- Late: Deferred imitation (repetition of other people’s behavior much after it occurred)
- Coordinating actions - reaching and grabbing objects to obtains goal (e.g., get toy)
13
Q
Preoperational Stage
A
- 2 - 7 years
- Toddlers and young children acquire the ability to internally represent the world through language and mental imagery. They also begin to see the world from other people’s perspectives, not just from their own.
- mix of equally impressive cognitive acquisitions and limitations
- children acquire symbolic representation, or the use of one object to stand for another
- See a lot of pretend play
- egocentrism and centration
14
Q
Concrete operational
A
- 7-12 years
- children become able to think logically, not just intuitively. They now can understand that events are often influenced by multiple factors, not just one
- Develop more logical thinking (no just relying on intuitive thinking based on perception)
- can solve logic problems like conservation but limited to concrete situations
- thinking systematically remains difficult (i.e., testing one variable at a time)
15
Q
Formal operational
A
- 12 years and beyond
- Adolescents can think systematically and reason about what might be, as well as what is. This allows them to understand politics, ethics, and science fiction about alternative political and ethical systems, as well as to engage in scientific reasoning
- formulate hypotheses and systematically test them - e.g., testing one variable at a time in the pendulum task
- Attain ability to think abstractly (e.g., x can take on a value) and seeing relationships between things
- individuals can imagine alternative worlds; reason systematically about multiple possible outcomes of a situation.
- not everyone reaches this stage
16
Q
Egocentrism
A
the tendency to perceive the world solely from one’s own point of view.
17
Q
Object permanence
A
the knowledge that objects continue to exist even when they are out of view.
- achieved during the sensorimotor stage
18
Q
Why are theories of child development useful?
A
- provides framework for understanding phenomena
- they raise important questions about human nature
- Lead to better understanding of children’s behavior by stimulating more research
19
Q
Nativists
A
- Born with specialized learning
mechanisms - See in domains where there is
universality of acquisition early in
life, without clear effort, and without
clear instruction from other people
(e.g., grammar) - Emphasize domain specificity
(living vs inanimate objects,
number, theory of mind)
20
Q
Constructivists
A
- Emphasize that knowledge in any of these domains is limited at first, and
experience is critical - Blends Piaget, nativism, and information processing
- Young children actively organize their understanding through experience and
construct theories
21
Q
Sensation
A
Processing of basis information from the external sensory receptors in sense organs and brain
22
Q
Perception
A
organizing and interpreting sensory information about objects, events, and spatial layout of surrounding world
23
Q
Contrast sensitivity
A
- The ability to detect differences in light and dark areas in a visual pattern.
- young infants have poor contrast sensitivity - they can only detect a pattern when it has high visual contrast
- due to low density of cone cells in fovea
- studied by fNIRS
24
Q
Perceptual Narrowing
A
- face processing becomes more selective over time
- 6 month olds can easily discriminate both indiviudal human and monkey faces
- after 9 months, have a difficult time with the monkey faces (unless they continue to have exposure to monkey faces)
- can be demonstrated by the other-race-effect
- 3-month-olds prefer looking at own-race faces
- due to differences in what they see in their prototypical, homogenous environments. Infants exposed to more races do not show preference
- own-race preference not present in newborns
-by 9 months, infants have difficulties discriminating between faces of individuals from other races - show looking preference for nocel own-race faces
- being able to recognize phonemes of different languages until a certain age
25
Intermodal Perception
the combining of information from 2 or more senses
- linking sight and sound, oral and visual input, visual and tactile input
- when 2 videos are presented simultaneously, 4-month-olds prefer to watch images that correspond to sounds they hear
- by 5 months, infants associated facial expression with emotions in voices.
- ex: matching video with soundtrack,
26
Visual Cliff Research
- social referencing can play a role in wariness of heights
- Infants do not transfer what they learned about crawling down slopes to walking down them
- must experience each (discontinuous)
27
Visual Cliff Research and Self-Locomotion
- 6-14 month old infants perceive and understand depth cues - won't cross deep side
- campos and colleagues:
- experience moving in the enviornment helps understanding of the signifncae of differences in heights of surfaces (i.e., possibility of falling)
- Not "fear" per se, but wariness due to experience
28
Observational learning/imitation
- newborns can imitate simple actions
- By 6-9 months, infants imitate novel actions they have witnessed, and understand intentions even if the target fail in their action (don't imitate mechanical devices)
- might be supported in part by mirror neurons
- Albert Bandura's doll experiment is an example of observational learning in children
29
Object Segregation
- two month old infants use common movement to perceive object segregation
- older infants and adults use additional sources of information for object segregation, including general knowledge about the world (e.g., gravity)
- - cue: common movement and motion
30
Habituatation
- repeatedly present an infant with a given stimulus until the response declines
- if response comes back with novel stimulus, infer that infant can discriminate between old and new stimulus.
- decrease in responsiveness to repeated stimulation
- habituation speed is believed to reflect the efficiency of the infant's processing of information
- link between habituation speed in infancy and cognitive development in childhood
31
Classical Conditioning
- A neutral stimulus is paired with a stimulus that evokes a reflexive response (unconditioned response)
- plays a role between environmental events important to them
- It is thought that many emotional responses
are initially learned through classical conditioning (e.g., little Albert experiment)
32
Instrumental/Operant Conditioning
* Positive reinforcement – a reward reliably
follows a behavior and increases the
likelihood that the behavior will be repeated
* There is a contingency relation between the
infant behavior and the reward
* Infants as young as 2 months of age learn that kicking moves mobile, and increase rate
of kicking
* Infant smiling is decreased in the context of
maternal depression
33
Meltzoff
Dumbbell experiment
- one group of 18-month-olds observed an adult attempting to pull apart a dumbbell toy
when the infants were given the dumbbell toy the imitated what the adult intended to do, not what they actually had done.
- imitative actions are limited to human acts
- A second group of 18-month-olds watched a mechanical device with pincers grasp the dumbell. Regardless of what the infants had seen the mechanical device do, they rarely attempted to pull apart the dumbbell themselves.
- infants attempt to reproduce the behaviors/intentions of other poeplebut not inanimate objects
34
View of Child as Limited-Capacity Processing System
- Child as "computation system"
- cognitive development arises from increasing processing ability through:
- expanding memory capacity
- increasing efficient exceution of basic processes
- acquisition of new strategies and knoweldge
35
Executive Functioning
- cognitive control functions needed when you have to concentrate and think, when acting on your intial impulse would be ill-advised
- helps children to
- pay attention
- initiate tasks and stay focused on them
- resist temptation
- take time to think before acting
- inhibition (simon says, marshmallow task)
- cognitive flexibility (task switching)
- Rooted in prefrontal development; predictive of important outcomes in short and long-term
36
Encoding
- people encode information that draws their attnetion or they consider important
- memory is not a tape recorder; fail to encode a lot of information
- encoding ability improves with age and specific experience/content knowledge
37
What facilitates development?
processing speed:
- biological maturation and experience contribute to increased processing speed
- myelination and increased connectivity support faster processing
Mental Strategies
- rehearsal - repeating information over and over to aid memory
- selective attention - intentioanlly focusing on information that is more relevant
- 4 year olds vs 7/8 year olds differ in use of selective attention for memorizing objects
38
Communication And Language
communication - broad exchange of information, ideas, and emotions.
language - structured, symbolic tools used in communication.
Both aim to convey meaning; communication, however doesnt have generativity component to be considered language
39
phonemes
the smallest unit of meaningful sound.
- sign language does have phonemes
40
morphemes
the smallest unit of meaning in language
41
Language involves:
- language comprehension - understanding what others say, sign, or write
- language production - actual speaking, signing, or writing to others
- language comprehension precedes production
42
generativity of language
we can use a finite set of words to put together lots of sentences to express lots of ideas.
43
Can non-human primates learn language?
- A human brain is required for langauge
- Language is a species-specific behavior - only in humans
- language is also species-universal - virtually all humans develop language
- Animals can communicate but cannot use language
44
Sensitive Period for Language Development
- learning language depends on exposure to others using language
sensitive period ends sometime between age 5 and puberty
- evidence:
- deprivation of language experience (e.g., Genie)
- Effects of brain injury on language differ depending on age at which injury happened
- Second language acquisition capabilities differ depending on age of acquisition
45
Neural Evidence for a Sensitive Period
- Second languages acquired in adulthood are spatially separated from native language in the brain
- Second languages acquired in early life are represented in common areas of the brain as native languages
- More over lap in Broca’s area with first and second languages for those who learned second language earlier on in life
46
Behavioral evidence for a sensitive period
- performance on a test of English grammar by adults orginally from Korea or China
- Directly related to the age at which they came to US
- Scores of adults who emigrated before age 7 are indistinguishable from those of native English speakers
47
Language Development and Socioeconomic Status
- 30 million word gap between high and low SES by age 4
- Study of low-income spanish speaking families in California
- a lot of variability across families in the amount and types of speech that infants hear
- Infants who experience more CDS at 19 months became more effeicent in processing familiar words
48
Syntactic Bootstrapping
- children figure out the meanings of new words by using the grammatical structure of the sentences in which those words occur
- 2-year-old children either heard: "the duck is kradding the rabbit" or "the rabbit and the duck are kradding" and see a video of a duck pushing with left hand and both animals waving right arm in circles.
- does kradding refer to the pushing ot the arm waving in circles?
- see 2 videos side-by-side: one pushing only, one with arm circles only
- Children looked at the video that matched the sentence they heard
49
bilingual Children and language
- bilingual children do not have a harder time learning language
- cognitive advantages: better cognitive control and flexibility
- bilingual infants perform better on some word-learning tasks involving unfamiliar sound patterns
50
Word Production
- most infants produce their first words between 10-15 months of age, which typically include names for people, objects, and events from everyday life
- holophrastic period: characterized by one-word utterances ("NO", "JUICE")
- overextension: using a given word in a broader context than is appropriate, represents an effort to communicate despite limited vocabulary
51
Babbling
- Around 6-8 weeks, infants begin producing drawn-out vowel sounds
- around 6-10 months, begin to babble by repeating strings of consonant-vowel sounds (BC-CA-DA)
- Congenitally deaf babies sign with thier hands
52
Manual babbling
- badies who are exposed to the sign language of their deaf parents engage in manual babbling
- hand movements produced are slower in rhythm but correspond to the rhythmic pattern of adult sign
53
Infants' vision research methods: preferential looking
- preferential-looking technique - infants are shown 2 patterns or 2 objects at the same time
- looking time is used to infer
- infants can discriminate between two visual stimuli
- infants prefer one visual stimulu over other
54
Eye Tracking
- Saccades - eye movements related to orienting
- fixation - keeping gaze for sustained attention
- Vision is the primary method used by infants to gather information from the environment. select particular things in the world to study/explore/basic building blocks for other aspects of cognitive development
- eye tracking - most common behavioral method for studying infant visual perception (as well as a lot of other things)
55
Audiotory Perception
- although the human audiotory system is relatively well developed at birth, auditory processing is not adult-like until age 5 or 6 years
- newborns turn toawrds sounds, a phenomenon referred to as auditory localization
- infants are remarkably proficient in perceiving subtle differences in human speech
- 6-8-month-old English-learning infants can distinguish foreign speech sounds that older infants (10-12 months) an adults cannot
55
Music Perception
- prefer infant-directed singing to infant-directed speech
- infants have strong preferences adults have for some musical sounds over others
- 6-month-old North American infants respond to violations of simple/complex musical meters characteristics of non-western music; 12-month-old infants don't detect violations in complex meters.
55
Taste and smell
- sensitivity to taste and smell develops before birth
- newborns prefer the smell of breast milk to other smells
- by two weeks of age, infants can differenitate the scent of their own mothers from that of other women
56
Touch
- infants learn about the enviornment through active touch
- oral exploration dominates for the first few months
- around 4 months of age, manual exploration gradually takes precedence over oral exploration
- manual control facilitates visual exploration
57
Reaching
- pre-reaching movements - clumsy swiping movements by young infants toward the general vicinity of objects they see
- successful reaching for objects appears around 3-4 months of age and is reliable aroung 7 months (sitting upright)
- sticky mittens experiement with pre-reaching infants
- led to increased interest in objects and earlier ability to reach independently for objects
58
Statistical learning
- infants pick up information from the enviornment, forming associations among stimuli that occur in a statistically predictable pattern
- infants are sensitive to the regularity with which one stimulus follows another
- goldilocks effect - allocate attention to sequences that are not too simple or too complex
59
Acitve Learning
- learning by doing and being actively engaged
- 16-month-old infants learn more about objects that they choose to explore
- 2-year-old learn more about object locations from a computerized task if they actively touch the screen during training compared to just passively observing the screen
60
Symbols
- systems for representing thoughts, feelings, and knowledge
- help us to communicate with each other
- can be spoken, gestural, written
- the creative and flexible use of symbols is (arguably) the capacity that most sets humans apart from other species
61
Infant Directed Speech
- exaggerated speech and facial expression
- infants prefer IDS over adult-directed speech
62
Babbling is preparation for production
- a start to turn-taking with sounds (important conversational skill)
- facilitated by parent-infant games (peek-a-boo, sharing objects)
- may serve as a signal that the infant is attentative and ready to learn
- some evidence that infants are better at learning labels for objects right after babbling than if they hear labels in the absence of babbling
63
Nativist view of language
- language requires a universal grammar, innate and common to all languages
- modularity hypothesis - the human brain contains a language module that is separate from other aspects of cognitive functioning
- evidence based on universal and species-specific nature of language
64
Intelligence as a Single Trait
- each individual possess a certain amount of g (general intelligence)
- g = general ability to think and learn
- measures of g correlate with
- indicators of school achievement
- information-processing speed
- speed of neural transmission in the brain
- knowledge of subjects not studied in school
Evidence:
- most measures (IQ tests) correlate strongly despite lack of surface similarity
65
Intelligence as a Few Basic Abilities
- 2 types of intelligence
- crystallized - factual knowledge about world
- fluid - the ability to think on the spot to solve problems
Evidence
- measures of crystallized intelligence correlated more highly with other measures of crystallized intelligence (same for fluid), and not necessarily with the other.
- different developmental trajectories
- crystalized intelligence increases linearly through life
- fluid intelligence peaks in early adulthood and slowly decreases there after
66
Intelligence as Numerous processes
allows more more precise specification of mechanisms involved in intelligence
- remembering
- perceiving
- planning
- comprehending
- solving problems
- encoding
- reasoning
- forming concepts
67
Intelligence Quotient (IQ)
* Quantitative measure of a child’s intelligence relative to other children of the same age
* The WISC & Stanford-Binet tests produce IQ scores
- What is the mean IQ of any group at any age in the US?
- 100
- scores are standardized at different ages (normed)
- easy to comapre IQ scores at different ages
68
IQ predicts important outcomes
- reasonably good predictor of academic (some estimates are .60 correlation), economic, and occupational success (correlations of .30 - .50)
- negatice predictor of criminal behavior and mental health difficulties
- better predictor of occupational success than family SES, the school that child attends, or other variables that have been considered
- self-discipline - ability to follow rules, avoid impulsive reactions, persistence, etc.
- practical intelligence - abilities not assessed on IQ tests cuh as working well with others, understanding others.
- education - those with similar IQ have higher income with greater education
69
Attending School Boosts IQ
- children only slightly older but who had a year more schooling did better on IQ tests
- IQ & achievement test scores rise during the academic year and are atable or drop during the summer (summer slide)
- magnified in low-SES children
70
Influence of Society on IQ
- the flynn effect - average IQ scores have risen over past 70 years in many countries
- potential reasons
- better nutrition
- health care
- sccess to education
- increased importance of reasoning skills in society
71
Effects of Poverty on IQ
- path from poverty to lower IQ
- nutirtion, healthcare, intellectual stimulation, emotional support, missing school
- disparities related to poverty can be seen in Kindergarten and widen over time
- effects of poverty are magnified in the US
72
genetic contributions to intelligence
- genetic contribution is greater in adolescence and adulthood than in childhood
- similarly, adopted children IQ becomes more correlated with biological parent IQ over time
- why?
- some genetic processes may not impact IQ until later childhood/adolescence (e.g., brain connectivity)
- with development, increasingly select environments that are compatible with preferences
73
Gene-Environment Correlation (intelligence)
- environments are partially influenced by genes
- passive genes - overlap between parents' and children's genes and correlated envrionmental experience
- evocative effects - children elicit or influence other people's behavior
- active effects - children actively create or select environments they enjoy
74
Family influences
- HOME (home observation for measurement of the enrionment) - measure of family influences (e.g., safety, stimulation, emotional support, books)
- children's IQ scores are positively correlated with the quality of their family enviornment as measured by the HOME
- unclear if causal relationship with IQ
- correlation of HOME and IQ are lower in adoptive families
- home environment affected by parents; genetic makeup
75
Effective Intervention: Carolina Abecedarian Project
- 6 months - 5 year olds in a program that would meet multiple days a week for all day for an extended period of time
- extensive focus on communication, resposivemeness, exploration, academic skills
- parent education
- nutrition
- health care
- child development
- control group - got nutrition/health care benefits but no educational intervention
76
Dyslexia
- inability to read well despite normal intelligence (5%-10% of children in the US)
- most children with dyslexia are poor at reading primarily because of a general weakness in phonological processing
- strong genetics component (84% similar diagnosis in monozygotic, 48% in dizygotic)
- less brain activation in regions important for discriminating phonemes and integrating audiotory and visual information
- intervention should focus on phonological recoding skills (using sound patterns to recognize words more efficiently; breakinf sounds down and putting together)
PSYC 2400
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