Lecture 2: Intro to developmental psychology

Question 1

Human phylogeny

Answer 1

the evolution of the species

Question 2

Human Ontogeny

Answer 2

he evolution of individual organism Ontogeny is thought to recapitulate/ repeat the process of phylogeny

Question 3

Plato

Answer 3

Plato emphasised self control and discipline

Plato believed that children are born with innate knowledge of how the world works (nativist)

Question 4

Aristotle

Answer 4

Aristotle was concerned with fitting child rearing to the needs of the individual child

Aristotle believed that knowledge comes from experience (empiricist)

Question 5

Locke and late philosophers

Answer 5

The English philosopher John Locke, like Aristotle, saw the child as a tabula rasa (blank slate) and advocated first instilling discipline, then gradually increasing the child’s freedom

similar to aristotle (through experience) but also agreed that discipline comes first like plato

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the French philosopher, argued that parents and society should give the child maximum freedom from the beginning

Question 6

Research based approaches

Answer 6

1. Social reform movements provided some of the earliest descriptions of the adverse effects that harsh environments can have on child development
2. Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution inspired research in child development in order to gain insights into the nature of the species (studied own son William)

Question 7

How to study development

Answer 7

The scientific method is an approach to testing beliefs which involves:

Choosing a question

Formulating hypothesis (e.g. an educated guess)

Testing those hypotheses

Forming conclusions

Question 8

Naturalistic Observation

Answer 8

Good ecological validity Similar to “real-life”- presence of researcher potentially less likely to impact people involved as in their natural env

Can be used to study a range of behaviour

Question 9

Limitations of Naturalistic observations

Answer 9

Hard to identify causal relationships – there are so many variables, it is often hard to know which ones influenced the behaviour of interest

Painstaking to administer – many behaviours occur only occasionally in everyday environments, so researchers’ opportunities to study them through naturalistic observation are reduced

Question 10

Interviews

Answer 10

Allows full focus on the individual’s behavioural pattern

Follow up questions can clarify an earlier response- allows follow up on relevant info to the observation

Experimenter: When Teddy said “Oh great!”, did he mean it was nice or nasty? Child: Nasty. Experimenter: How do you know that?

Question 11

Limitations of interviews

Answer 11

Can be difficult to generalise beyond the individual case

Can be difficult to generate a causal argument

Question 12

Experiment

Answer 12

Can directly test relationships between variables

Experimental control is relatively easy

Question 13

Limitations of experiments

Answer 13

“artificial” technique – so perhaps lacking in ecological validity unless using “naturalistic” experiments- ethical issues could arise

Sometimes are not possible due to ethical issues (or practical issues)

Question 14

Naturalistic experiments

Answer 14

Although experiments have the unique advantage of allowing researchers to draw conclusions about the causes of events, their ecological validity can be questionable

This problem can be overcome by conducting naturalistic experiments, in which data are collected in everyday settings such as the home or in a special playroom at the testing lab

Question 15

Cross-sectional designs

Answer 15

(groups of) children of different ages are compared on a given behaviour or characteristic over a short period of time

Common

Question 16

Longitudinal designs

Answer 16

Used when children are studied twice or more over a long period of time

Time-consuming

Question 17

Microgenetic

Answer 17

Used to provide an in-depth depiction of processes that produce change

Provides insight into the process and emotional response to it

In this approach, children who are thought to be on the verge of an important developmental change are provided with heightened exposure to the type of experience that is believed to produce the change and are studied intensely while their behaviour is in transition

– e.g. “counting on” (Siegler & Jenkins, 1989)

Question 18

Ethical issues in developmental research

Answer 18

Researchers have a vital responsibility to:

Ensure the research does not harm the children physically or psychologically

Obtain informed consent from parents/guardians and the child (if s/he is old enough to understand)

Preserve the anonymity of the children who take part

Counteract any negative outcomes and correct any inaccurate impressions that arise during the study

Question 19

How infants learn and develop- Synaptogenesis

Answer 19

Infants’ brains experience synaptogenesis - density of synaptic connections between neurons greatly increases – before birth and for many months afterwards

Rich learning environments lead to more synaptic connections

Question 20

Testing learning

Answer 20

Learning begins prenatally
Newborn infants have been shown to recognise rhymes and stories presented before birth

Newborns also prefer smells, tastes, and sound patterns that are familiar because of prenatal exposure

How on earth can researchers know what newborns and older infants know?

How is it possible to test learning experimentally in an ethical way?

Question 21

how infants learn and develop

Answer 21

Habituation
Perceptual Learning
Statistical Learning
Classical Conditioning
Instrumental Conditioning
Observational Learning

Question 22

Habituation

Answer 22

A decrease in responsiveness to repeated stimulation reveals that learning has occurred

The infant has a memory representation of the repeated, now-familiar stimulus

The speed with which an infant habituates is believed to reflect the general efficiency of the infant’s processing of information

Some continuity has been found between these measures in infancy and general cognitive ability later in life

Question 23

Habituation- sucking

Answer 23

At 2 months of age (Eimas, 1985):

Allow infant to suck on a dummy that is connected to a computer and measure baseline sucking rate
Present phoneme (/pa/) sound repeatedly

Sucking rate first increases and then infant habituates (i.e., returns to baseline sucking rate

Present new phoneme (/ba/)

Infant dishabituates (i.e. sucking rate increases)

Infants as young as two months of age can tell the difference between sounds

Question 24

Habituation- heart rate

Answer 24

At 32 weeks’ gestation, the fetus decreases responses to repeated or continued stimulation

In 9th month of gestation, a fetus can habituate to one sound “babi”

Presentation of a novel stimulus “biba” causes foetus to dishabituate (Lecanuet et al.,1995)

Question 25

Perceptual learning

Answer 25

From the beginning, infants use their perceptual abilities to search for order and regularity in the world around them
Perceptual learning is involved in many, but not all, examples of intermodal coordination

– An infant does not need learning to detect standalone events (e.g., seeing and hearing a glass smash on the floor)

– But only through experience does an infant learn what perceptual experiences go together (e.g., that a particular tinkling sound means a glass is being broken)

Question 26

Differentiation

Answer 26

Differentiation is the extraction from the constantly changing stimulation in the environment of those elements that are invariant or stable (Gibson, 1988)

With age and experience, infants become increasingly efficient at differentiating and extracting information and can make finer and finer discriminations amongst stimuli

For example, infants learn the association between certain facial expressions and tones of voice, even from different people- infants can learn that these go together

Question 27

Affordances

Answer 27

A particularly important part of perceptual learning is the infant’s discovery of affordances, the possibilities for action offered by objects and situations (Gibson, 1988) - possibility for actions in the environment

For example, an infant must learn that small objects (such as the yellow shapes) afford picking up but large ones (such as the container) do not, that round shapes afford pushing into the container though the round hole but square and star shapes do not, etc

Question 28

Statistical learning

Answer 28

Involves picking up information from the environment, forming associations among stimuli that occur in a statistically predictable pattern. Infants can pick up on similar stimuli in an environment

The natural environment contains a high degree of regularity and redundancy

Certain events occur in a predictable order, certain objects appear in the same time and place, certain stimuli co-occur in patterns

From quite early on, infants are sensitive to the regularity with which one stimulus
follows another

Question 29

Classical conditioning

Answer 29

A form of learning that consists of associating an initially neutral stimulus with another stimulus that always evokes a reflexive response

Plays a role in infants’ everyday learning about the relations between environmental events that have relevance for them

It is thought that many emotional responses (both positive and negative) are initially learned through classical conditioning

Question 30

Classical conditioning stimuli

Answer 30

Classical conditioning involves an unconditioned stimulus (UCS) that reliably elicits a reflexive, unlearned response – an unconditioned response (UCR)

Learning or conditioning can occur if an initially neutral stimulus, the conditioned stimulus (CS), repeatedly occurs just before the unconditioned stimulus.

Gradually, the originally reflexive response – the learned or conditioned response (CR) – becomes paired with the initially neutral stimulus

Question 31

Pavlovs dogs- classical conditioning

Answer 31

In a famous example of classical conditioning, the Russian researcher Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (1890s) began to train dogs using classical conditioning

Dogs naturally salivate (UCR) when presented with food (UCS)

Pavlov presented dogs with a ringing bell (CS) before feeding

After a few repetitions, the ringing bell alone was enough to make the dogs salivate (CR)

Question 32

Positive reinforcement

Answer 32

Positive reinforcement means behaviour is reliably rewarded by a positive experience (for strong ethical reasons, most instrumental conditioning research with infants involves positive reinforcement)

Question 33

negative reinforcement

Answer 33

Negative reinforcement means behaviour is reliably rewarded by stopping an ongoing negative experience.

Question 34

Punishment

Answer 34

Punishment means behaviour is reliably penalised by a negative experience

Question 35

Extinction

Answer 35

Extinction means behaviour is neither reliably rewarded or penalised (i.e., nothing happens)

Infants may also learn that there are some situations over which they have no control
- E.g., Infants of depressed mothers tend to smile less and show lower levels of positive affect than do infants of nondepressed mothers

This may be because infants of depressed mothers have learned there is no contingency relation between such friendly displays and being rewarded by their preoccupied parent (Campbell et al., 1995)

Question 36

Observational learning

Answer 36

Some have reported that the ability to imitate others may be present early in life, although in an extremely limited form

For example, reports of newborns sticking out their tongues after watching an adult model repeatedly perform this action

By 15 months, infants can imitate actions they have seen an adult perform on television

In choosing to imitate a model, infants appear to pay attention to the reason for the person’s behaviour (i.e., the person’s intention)

Question 37

Evidence against observational learning

Answer 37

Recent work from Oostenbroek et al. (2016) suggests that young infants cannot imitate-

e.g children stick their tongues out anyways even if the adult was doing something different (due to interest)

Question 38

Imitating intentions

Answer 38

When 18-month-olds see a person apparently try, but fail, to pull the ends off a dumbbell, the infants imitate the action by actually pulling the ends off

i.e., They perform the action the person intended to do, not what the person actually did (Meltzoff, 1995)

They do not imitate a mechanical device at all

Children just understood intention