what does developmental research seek to do?
- describe how performance changes with age.
- explain why children behave the way they do at certain ages (how do new levels of understanding develop from earlier less advanced ones)
- uncover earliest instances of knowledge
response on any cognitive task reflects at least 2 factors…
- competence
- performance
competence =
conceptual understanding required to solve the problem
performance =
other cognitive skills required to access and express understanding e.g ability to remember key info, focus attention, comprehend the question, inhibit bias.
what are cross-sectional studies/ design?
- take place at a single time point
- compare the behaviour of different age groups on the same task
- for research Qs like; does children’s verbal recall capacity increase with age?
advantages of cross-sectional studies
ADVANTAGES: time/ cost efficient, provides fast and easy method for revealing similarities and differences between older and younger children.
limitations of cross-sectional studies
LIMITATIONS:
- Cross-sectional studies often assume that differences between people of different ages (interindividual) reflect how individuals change as they age (intraindividual). In cross-sectional designs, you can’t tell whether age differences are truly due to aging, older and younger groups grew up in different historical, cultural, educational, and health contexts (cohort effects)
So differences might reflect generation effects, not aging itself.
- the design doesn’t in itself tell us much about the process of development. only get a series of snapshots from different age groups.
interindividual differences =
comparing different people of different ages at one point
intraindividual differences =
how the same person changes as they age
what is a longitudinal design?
- examines and compares the abilities/ behaviour of a particular group of children over several time points.
- has a varying time scale dependent on the study
- can involve experimental manipulation or an analysis of naturally occurring behaviours.
- use on research Qs like: acquisition of literacy (a longitudinal study of children in first and second grade).
advantages of longitudinal studies
ADVANTAGES:
-can observe change over time within individuals,
-can examine the stability of a behaviour in an individual,
-can reveal the proportion of children who show a particular developmental trajectory.
-reveals how early abilities, behaviour, environment influences subsequent abilities/ behaviour
-can determine temporal primacy of constructs
-can determine longitudinal predictors
temporal primacy of constructs =
some psychological constructs emerge earlier in time and shape the development of later constructs—so timing matters for how development unfolds.
Some abilities, traits, or processes come first, and because they come first, they influence or constrain what develops later.
earlier development lays a foundation for future skills.
longitudinal predictors =
earlier-measured characteristics or experiences that are used to predict later developmental outcomes within the same individuals over time. e.g infant attachment security predicting adult relationship quality
disadvantages of longitudinal research
DISADVANTAGES:
-resource intensive
-subject attrition
-practice effects (subjects may learn from previous exposure/ get bored with repeated task)
-repeated testing may actually change the course of development so won’t be a true reflection of normal development.
what is a microgenetic design?
-designed to provide an in-depth depiction of the processes of change.
-study children on the verge of an important developmental change and intensively study the change as it is occurring.
-same children are studied repeatedly over a short period of time on the same problem-solving task.
-is cog development a fundamental restructuring or a gradual change?
-example: what is the nature of change in children memorisation strategies - a rapid jump from non-strategic to strategic or a gradual development in strategy use?
explicit knowledge =
- knowledge easily accessible to the child.
- measured via elicited responses e.g verbal answer to a Q
implicit knowledge =
- knowledge the child is unaware of.
- measure via spontaneous response e.g gesture produced alongside speech, eye-gaze, facial expression.
Church & Goldin-Meadow (1986); Allibali & Goldin-Meadow (1993) - more than just handwaving
- gestures produced alongside speech can demonstrate partial knowledge not shown in speech.
- gesture speech mismatch: information conveyed in gesture may not appear anywhere in accompanying speech
STUDY:
-at age 1 > children will fail the task through their gesture and speech.
at age 2 > children will fail the task in their verbal response but show knowledge via gesture. (inconsistency taken as an indication of transitional knowledge).
at age 3 > children will pass the task through their gesture and speech.
when verbal responses are not an option, the most common way of measuring infants knowledge is?
their looking behaviour
- preferential looking
- inter-modal preferential looking
- habituation/ dishabituation
- violation of expectancy
- anticipatory looking
- pupillometry
looking time method 1 -
to identify if infants can tell difference between facial expression can comparing looking times of infant:
look longer at one face, look equally towards both faces.
preferential looking =
used to determine if infant can distinguish between different visual stimuli and if they have an attentional preference for one over the other.
problem with preferential looking method
-works with positive results but not with negative results
- show babies A and B: if they look longer at A then at B they must discriminate A from B, find A more interesting. but if they look equally at A and B, could mean either they fail to discriminate between the two or they find A and B equally interesting or equally boring.
looking time method 2 -
- an alternative method to determine if infants distinguish between different stimuli.
-first you show an infant the same stimulus over and over e.g happy face and measure how long they look at it, as they see the face more looking start to decrease.
then you show a new stimulus e.g angry face and see whether looking increases or continues to decrease. (likely that looking increases).
