L1 - Methods in Developmental Research

Question 1

What does developmental research seek to do?

Answer 1

1. Describe and explain developmental change
2. Uncover earliest instances - origin of knowledge

Question 2

What does it mean to describe and explain developmental change?

Answer 2

Describe
- specify children’s abilities and limitations as development proceeds
- describe trajectories (steep or gradual, linear or new shape)
- development varies across different age groups

Explain
- why children behave the way they do at certain ages
- understand cognitive underpinning or emotional factors
- what is the nature of change and development, factors driving change

Question 3

What issues are important when conducting developmental research?

Answer 3

Consent
Watching cues
Keep children engaged
Use simple questions
Select appropriate age
Types of design
Ethics
Age appropriate tasks
Testing preverbal infants
Difficulty of interpreting behaviour
Cofounds
Biases

Question 4

What is the difference between competence and performance?

Answer 4

Competence - conceptual understanding required to solve the problem, the knowledge you need to solve the problem

Performance - other cognitive skills required to express understanding e.g. ability to remember key info, focus attention, inhibit bias
(6 year olds has different performance limitations to a 4 year olds)

Question 5

What are the three different design types?

Answer 5

Cross-sectional design
Longitudinal design
Microgenetic design

Question 6

What is a cross sectional design?

Answer 6

Take place at a simple time point and compare the behaviour of different age groups on the same task, resulting in a group average result

Question could be: Do girls show a consistent average over boys in their vocabulary size through primary school?

Question 7

What are the advantages and limitations of cross sectional design?

Answer 7

+ Time and cost efficient
+ Fast method to reveal data in a few weeks

• Interindividual differences = intraindividual age related changes (they may go through the same changes at different ages?)
• Doesn’t tell us about the process of development
• Assumes other children will go through the same changes

Question 8

What is a longitudinal design?

Answer 8

Examines and compares the abilities/behaviour of a particular group of children over several time points
Varying time scales across studies

Question could be: A longitudinal study of children in the first and second grade

Question 9

What are the advantages and limitations of a longitudinal design?

Answer 9

+ Can observe change within individuals
+ Observe the stability of behaviour
+ Reveal driving behaviours - environment, behaviour, ability?
+ Which variables are antecedent and which are consequences
+ Which early behaviours predict later abilities

• Resource intensive (takes years)
• Subject attribution (schools may have to be heavily involved)
• Practice effects
  Repeated testing may actually change the course of development so won’t be a true reflection
• Participant dropout

Question 10

What is a microgenetic design?

Answer 10

In depth depiction of the processes of change
Study children on the verge of a developmental change and intensively study the change
Shows the illusive change to see if it sudden or gradual

Overlapping wave model - as children grow they use more advanced strategies, relative frequencies, they overlap and go back and forth

Much more intuitive but requires many more resources

Question 11

What are the problems with different methods?

Answer 11

Can produce a different developmental theory
Depends on the lens you study

Question 12

What are the different levels of knowledge?

Answer 12

Explicit - easily accessible knowledge, measured via elicited responses e.g. verbal answers

Implicit - unaware knowledge, measured via spontaneous responses e.g. gestures, eye gaze, facial expressions

Question 13

What did Church & Goldin-Meadow 1986 and Alibali & Golden-Meadow 1993 research?

Answer 13

Gesture-speech mismatch - information conveyed in gesture may not appear anywhere in speech

1 - children will fail the task through gesture and speech
2 - children will fail task verbally but show knowledge via gesture (transitional knowledge)
3 - children will pass the task through speech and gesture

Question 14

What are the common ways of measuring infants’ knowledge?

Answer 14

Preferential looking
Inter-modal preferential looking
Habituation/dishabituation
Violation of expectancy
Anticipatory looking
Pupillometry

Question 15

What is preferential looking?

Answer 15

Determine if an infant can distinguish between different visual stimuli and if they have an attentional preference for one over the other
There must be a discrimination if they look at one for longer

Question 16

What are the strengths and limitations of preferential looking?

Answer 16

+ If they look at A longer than B they must discriminate, find one more interesting

• If they look equally at A or B they either can’t discriminate between the two or they find them both equally interesting

Question 17

What is the inter-modal preferential looking paradigm?

Answer 17

Used to determine if infants can link stimuli across different modalities

• Gives children a choice between two visual stimuli
• Only one matches the accompanying verbal stimulus
• If infants comprehend the link between verbal and visual stimuli, they are predicted to look longer at the matching one

Question 18

What is habituation/Dishabituation?

Answer 18

Used to determine if infants can distinguish between different stimuli
- Stimulus is presented repeatedly until infant’s attention wanes and looking time reaches criterion
- Novel stimulus is presented: increase looking compared to last habituation trail (dishabituation)
There should be no change for old stimulus

Question 19

What is violation of expectancy?

Answer 19

Used to determine if infants have an expectation about events in the world
- Compare looking time when they see a possible vs impossible situation
- If they look longer at an impossible event taken as evidence as surprise and have some level of knowledge

Question 20

What is anticipatory looking paradigm?

Answer 20

Used to determine if infants can predict events in the world
- Measure the direction of an infant/child’s first look after an event
- Participant looking behaviour is analysed to determine if they correctly expect what will happen next
- Requires prediction

Question 21

What is pupillometry?

Answer 21

Pupil dilates to cognitively demanding, novel and emotional events
Can be used to find out how infants respond to different stimuli
New technique

Question 22

What are some problems and controversies?

Answer 22

Novelty preference vs familiarity preference?
Negative results always hard to interpret
Levels of interpretation: perception vs cognition
Looking: active information processing or blank stare?
Fussiness and drop out rate