Methods in Developmental Research

Question 1

what does developmental research seek to do?

Answer 1

1. describe and explain developmental change (e.g. changes in performance with age, and why children behave the way they do at certain ages)
2. uncover earlier instances of knowledge

Question 2

what issues should be considered when conducting developmental research?

Answer 2

• lack of informed consent (have to be 16 to give consent)
• issues with withdrawal, some children may not understand
• hard to keep child engaged and research appropriate for the age group
• children can’t tell you what they think so hard to gage what they know, could result in lack of reliable data

Question 2

what are important things to be considered when conducting developmental research?

Answer 2

• selecting appropriate age range
• type of design
• ethics
• children’s response to adult researchers
• age appropriate tasks and instructions
• testing preverbal infants
• difficulty of interpreting behaviour
• confounding variables
• beware of biases (e.g. colour preference, 2 yo usually biased to answer yes in a yes/no Q regardless of their actual feelings)
• counterbalancing

Question 3

what is important to remember about absence of evidence?

Answer 3

• absence of evidence does not equal evidence of absence
• a study may not produce evidence of children’s knowledge even when competence exists

Question 4

what is competence?

Answer 4

a conceptual understanding required to solve the problem

Question 5

what is performance?

Answer 5

other cognitive skills required to access and express understanding (e.g. the ability to remember key info, focus attention, comprehend the question; inhibit bias)

Question 6

what is cross-sectional design?

Answer 6

• take place at a single time point
• compare the behaviour of different age groups on the same task
• e.g. seeing children fro years 2, 4, and 6 and looking if verbal recall capacity increases with age

Question 7

what are the advantages of cross-sectional study design?

Answer 7

• time and cost efficient
• provides fast and easy method for revealing similarities and differences between older and younger children

Question 8

what are some limitations of cross-sectional studies?

Answer 8

• we don’t know hie changes emerge, just that they do
• making assumptions that children will all experience the same developmental changes at the same stage of life
• cross-sectional study doesn’t tell us the process of development

Question 9

what is a longitudinal design?

Answer 9

• examines and compares the abilities/behaviour of a particular group of children over several time points
• uses same groups of children
• varying time scales across studies
• can involve an experimental manipulation or an analysis of naturally occurring behaviours
  e.g. a longitudinal study of children in first and second grade
• predict in a title indicates a longitudinal design

Question 10

what are some uses of longitudinal design?

Answer 10

• can observe change over time within individuals
• can examine the stability of a behaviour in an individual - enduring or transient
• can reveal the proportion of children who show a particular developmental trajectory
• reveal how early abilities, behaviours or environmental influences are revealed subsequent or behaviours in the same individuals
• can determine the temporal primacy of constructs - which variable is antecendent and which consequent
• establish which early abilities/behaviours best predict later abilities/behaviour

Question 11

what are the disadvantages of longitudinal design?

Answer 11

• resource intensive
• subject attrition
• practice effects: subject may learn from previous exposure or get bored with repeated task
• repeated testing may actually change the course of development so want to be a true reflection of normal development

Question 12

what is a microgenetic design?

Answer 12

• designed to provide an in-depth depiction of the processes of change
• study children on the verge of an important developmental change and intensivel study the change as it is occuring
• some children are studied repeatedly over a short period of time on the same problem-solving task

Question 13

what is an explicit level of knowledge?

Answer 13

• knowledge easily accessible to the child
• measure via elicited response, e.g. verbal answer to a question

Question 14

what is an implicit level of knowledge?

Answer 14

• knowledge the child is unaware
• measure via spontaneous response, e.g. gesture produced alongside speech; eye-gaze response; facial features expression

Question 15

Gesture-speech mismatch, Church and Goldin-Meadow (1986)

Answer 15

• gestures produced alongside speech can demonstrate partial knowledge not shown in speech
• information conveyed in gesture may not appear anywhere in accompanying speech
• 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 index of transitional knowledge
• At age 3: children will pass the task through their gesture and speech.

Question 16

what are some ways of measuring infant knowledge when verbal responses aren’t an option?

Answer 16

rely on their looking behaviour

Question 17

what is preferential looking?

Answer 17

• used to determine id infants can distinguish between different visual stimuli and if they have an attentional preference for one over the other
• important to counterbalance the items across the trials in case the baby has a preference to looking to one side of the screen

Question 18

possible problems with preferential looking

Answer 18

• works with positive not negative results
• if they look longer at A than at B they must a) descriminate A from B and b) find A more interesting then B
• but if they look equally at A and B, this could mean a) EITHER they fail yo discriminate A from B b)OR they find A equally as interesting, or equally boring

Question 19

what is inter-modal preferential looking paradigm

Answer 19

• used to determine if infants can link stimuli across different modalities
• gives children a choice between two visual presented simultaneously
• only once one of the visual stimuli ‘matches’ an accompanying verbal stimuli
• if infants comprehend the link between the verbal and visual stimuli, they are predicted to look longer at the matching than the non-matching display

Question 20

what is habituation / dishabituation

Answer 20

• used to determine if infants can distinguish between different stimuli
• stimulus presented repeatedly until infant’s attention wanes and looking time reaches criterion, e.g., half of looking time during first presentation ( = habituation)
• novel stimulus id presented: increases looking compared to last habituation trail (= disinhibition). should change for old stimulus

Question 21

Violation of expectancy/expectation

Answer 21

• used to determine if infants have an expectation about events in the world
• compare infant’s looking time when they see an impossible vs possible event
• if infants look longer at impossible event taken as evidence that they are surprised and have some level of knowledge about physical/social world

Question 22

Anticipatory looking paradigm

Answer 22

• used to determine if infants can predict events in the world
• measure the direction of an infant/child’s first look after an event
• participants looking behaviour its analysed to determine if thet correctly expect/anticipate what will happen next
• requires prediction

Question 23

pupilometry

Answer 23

• pupil dilates in response to cognitively demanding novel events and emotional stimuli
• can be used to find out how infants respond to different stimuli
• relatively new technique