LECTURE 13

Question 1

Development

Answer 1

the physiological, behavioral, cognitive, and social changes that occur throughout human life, which are guided by both genetic predispositions (nature) and
by environmental influences (nurture).

Question 2

infancy

Answer 2

the developmental stage that begins at birth
and continues to one year of age,

Question 3

childhood

Answer 3

the period between infancy and the onset of puberty

Question 4

adolescence

Answer 4

the years between the onset of puberty and the beginning of adulthood;

Question 5

the stages of adulthood itself

Answer 5

including emerging, early, middle, and older adulthood; and finally, the preparations for and eventual facing of death.

Question 6

Challenges of Development as Proposed by Erik Erikson

Answer 6

Oral-sensory Birth to 12 to 18 months: Trust versus mistrust The child develops a feeling of trust in his or her caregivers.

Muscular-anal 18 months to 3 years: Autonomy versus shame/doubt The child learns what he or she can and cannot control and develops a sense of free will.

Locomotor 3 to 6 years: Initiative versus guilt The child learns to become independent by exploring, manipulating, and taking action.

Latency 6 to 12 years: Industry versus inferiority The child learns to do things well or correctly according to standards set by others, particularly in school.

Adolescence 12 to 18 years: Identity versus role confusion The adolescent develops a well-defined and positive sense of self in relationship to others.

Young adulthood 19 to 40 years: Intimacy versus isolation The person develops the ability to give and receive love and to make long-term commitments.

Middle adulthood 40 to 65 years: Generativity versus stagnation The person develops an interest in guiding the development of the next generation, often by becoming a parent.

Late adulthood 65 to death: Ego integrity versus despair The person develops acceptance of his or her life as it was lived

Question 7

Survival Reflexes in Newborn

Answer 7

Rooting reflex: The baby’s cheek is stroked. The baby turns its head toward the stroking, opens its
mouth, and tries to suck. Ensures the infant’s feeding will be a reflexive habit

Blink reflex: A light is flashed in the baby’s eyes. The baby closes both eyes. Protects eyes from strong and potentially dangerous stimuli

Withdrawal reflex: A soft pinprick is applied to the sole of the baby’s foot. The baby flexes the leg. Keeps the exploring infant away from painful stimuli

Tonic neck reflex: The baby is laid down on its back. The baby turns its head to one side and extends the arm
on the same side. Helps develop hand-eye coordination

Grasp reflex: An object is pressed into the palm of the baby. The baby grasps the object pressed and can even hold its own weight for a brief period. Helps in exploratory learning

Moro reflex: Loud noises or a sudden drop in height while holding the baby. The baby extends arms and legs and quickly brings them in as if trying to grasp something. Protects from falling; could have assisted infants in holding onto their mothers during rough traveling

Stepping reflex: The baby is suspended with bare feet just above a surface and is moved forward. Baby makes stepping motions as if trying to walk. Helps encourage motor development

Question 8

Erik Erikson

Answer 8

The challenges that the child must attain in childhood relate to the development of initiative, competence, and independence. Children need to learn to explore the world, to become self-reliant, and to make their own way in the environment.

Question 9

Piaget’s stage model of cognitive development.

Answer 9

Piaget argued that children do not just passively learn but also actively try to make sense of their worlds. He argued that, as they learn and mature, children develop schemas. Furthermore, Piaget thought that when children experience new things, they attempt to reconcile the new knowledge with existing schemas. Piaget believed that the children use two distinct methods in doing so, methods that he called assimilation and accommodation

Question 10

assimilation

Answer 10

use already developed schemas to understand new
information.

Question 11

Accommodation

Answer 11

involves learning new information, and thus changing the schema.

Question 12

Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development

Answer 12

Sensorimotor Birth to about 2 years: The child experiences the world through the fundamental senses of seeing, hearing, touching, and tasting. Object permanence

Preoperational: 2 to 7 years Children acquire the ability to internally represent the world through language and mental imagery. They also start to see the world from other people’s perspectives. Theory of mind; rapid increase in language ability

Concrete operational: 7 to 11 years Children become able to think logically. They can increasingly perform operations on objects that are only imagined. Conservation

Formal operational: 11 years to adulthood Adolescents can think systematically, can reason about abstract concepts, and can understand ethics and scientific reasoning. Abstract logic

Question 13

sensorimotor stage

Answer 13

the cognitive stage that begins at birth and lasts until around the age of 2. It is defined by the direct physical interactions that babies have with the objects around them. During this stage, babies form their first schemas by using their primary senses—they stare at, listen to, reach for, hold, shake, and taste the things in their environments.

During the sensorimotor stage, babies’ use of their senses to perceive the world is so central to
their understanding that whenever babies do not directly perceive objects, as far as they are concerned, the objects do not exist. Piaget found, for instance, that if he first interested babies in a toy and then covered the toy with a blanket, children who were younger than 6 months of age would act as if the toy had disappeared completely—they never tried to find it under the blanket but would nevertheless smile and reach for it when the blanket was removed. Piaget found that it was not until about 8 months that the children realized that the object was merely covered and not gone. Piaget used the term object permanence to refer to the child’s ability to know that an object exists even when the object cannot be perceived.

Question 14

preoperational stage

Answer 14

During this stage, children begin to use language and to think more abstractly about objects, but their understanding is more intuitive and without much ability to deduce or reason. The thinking is preoperational, meaning that the child lacks the ability to operate on or transform objects mentally. In one study that showed the extent of this inability, Judy DeLoache (1987) showed children a room within a small dollhouse. Inside the room, a small toy was visible behind a small couch. The researchers took the children to another lab room, which was an exact replica of the dollhouse room, but full-sized. When children who were 2.5 years old were asked to find the toy, they did not know where to look—they were simply unable to make the transition across the changes in room size.

Three-year-old children, on the other hand, immediately looked for the toy behind the couch, demonstrating that they were improving their operational skills. The inability of young children to view transitions also leads them to be egocentric—unable to readily see and understand other people’s viewpoints. Developmental psychologists define the theory of mind as the ability to take another person’s viewpoint, and the ability to do so increases rapidly during the preoperational stage. In one demonstration of the development of theory of mind, a researcher shows a child a video of another child (let’s call her Anna) putting a ball in a red box. Then Anna leaves the room, and the video shows that while she is gone, a researcher moves the ball from the red box into a blue box. As the video continues, Anna comes back into the room. The child is then asked to point
to the box where Anna will probably look to find her ball. Children who are younger than 4 years of age typically are unable to understand that Anna does not know that the ball has been moved, and they predict that she will look for it in the blue box. After 4 years of age, however, children have developed a theory of mind—they realize that different people can have different viewpoints, and that (although she will be wrong) Anna will nevertheless think that the ball is still in the red box.

Question 15

concrete operational stage

Answer 15

marked by more frequent and more accurate use of transitions, operations, and abstract concepts,
including those of time, space, and numbers. An important milestone during the concrete operational stage is the development of conservation—the understanding that changes in the form of an object do not necessarily mean changes in the quantity of the object. Children younger than 7 years generally think that a glass of milk that is tall holds more milk than a glass of milk that is shorter and wider, and they continue to believe this even when they see the same milk poured back and forth between the glasses. It appears that these children focus only on one dimension (in this case, the height of the glass) and ignore the other dimension (width). However, when children reach the concrete operational stage, their abilities to understand such transformations make them aware that, although the milk looks different in the different glasses, the amount must be the same.

Question 16

formal operational stage

Answer 16

marked by the ability to think in abstract terms and to use scientific and philosophical lines of thought. Children in the formal operational stage are better able to systematically test alternative ideas to determine their influences on outcomes. For instance, rather than haphazardly changing different aspects of a situation
that allows no clear conclusions to be drawn, they systematically make changes in one thing at a
time and observe what difference that particular change makes. They learn to use deductive reasoning, such as “if this, then that,” and they become capable of imagining situations that “might be,” rather than just those that actually exist.

Question 17

Piaget’s theories have made a substantial and lasting contribution to developmental psychology

Answer 17

His contributions include the idea that children are not merely passive receptacles of information but rather actively engage in acquiring new knowledge and making sense of the world around them. This general idea has generated many other theories of cognitive development, each designed to help us better understand the development of the child’s information-processing skills. Furthermore, the extensive research that Piaget’s theory has stimulated has generally supported his beliefs about the order in which cognition develops. Piaget’s work has also been applied in many domains—for instance, many teachers make use of
Piaget’s stages to develop educational approaches aimed at the level children are developmentally
prepared for.

Over the years, Piagetian ideas have been refined. For instance, it is now believed that object permanence develops gradually, rather than more immediately, as a true stage model would predict, and that it can sometimes develop much earlier than Piaget expected. Renée Baillargeon and her colleagues placed babies in a
habituation setup, having them watch as an object was placed behind a screen, entirely hidden from view. The researchers then arranged for the object to reappear from behind another screen in a different place. Babies who saw this pattern of events looked longer at the display than did babies who witnessed the same object physically being moved between the screens. These data suggest that the babies were aware that the object still existed even though it was hidden behind the screen, and thus that they were displaying object permanence as early as 3 months of age, rather than the 8 months that Piaget predicted.

Another factor that might have surprised Piaget is the extent to which a child’s social surroundings influence learning. In some cases, children progress to new ways of thinking and retreat to old ones depending on the type of task they are performing, the circumstances they find themselves in, and the nature of the language used to instruct them (Courage & Howe, 2002). And children in different cultures show somewhat different patterns of cognitive development. Dasen (1972) found that children in non-Western cultures moved to the next developmental stage about a year later than did children from Western cultures, and that level of schooling also influenced cognitive development. In short, Piaget’s theory probably understated the contribution of environmental factors to social development

Question 18

sociocultural theory of the Russian scholar Lev Vygotsky

Answer 18

argue that cognitive development is not isolated entirely within the child but occurs at least in part through social interactions. These scholars argue that children’s thinking develops through constant interactions with more competent others, including parents, peers, and teachers.

An extension of Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory is the idea of community learning, in which children serve as both teachers and learners. This approach is frequently used in classrooms to improve learning as well as to increase responsibility and respect for others. When children work cooperatively together in groups to learn material, they can help and support each other’s learning as well as learn about each other as individuals, thereby reducing prejudice

Question 19

Self-concept

Answer 19

A knowledge representation or schema that contains
knowledge about us, including our beliefs about our personality traits, physical characteristics, abilities, values, goals, and roles, as well as the knowledge that we exist as individuals

Question 20

social comparison

Answer 20

Soon after children enter grade school (at about age 5 or 6), they begin to make comparisons with other children

Question 21

competence and autonomy

Answer 21

the recognition of one’s own abilities relative to other children. And children increasingly show awareness of social situations—they understand that other people are looking at and judging them the same way that they are looking at and judging others

Question 22

attachment

Answer 22

The emotional bonds that we develop with those with whom we feel closest, and particularly the bonds that an infant develops with the mother or primary caregiver,

Question 23

strange situation test

Answer 23

Developmental psychologist Mary Ainsworth, a student of John Bowlby, was interested in studying the development of attachment in infants. Ainsworth created a laboratory test that measured an infant’s
attachment to his or her parent. The test is called the strange situation because it is conducted in a context that is unfamiliar to the child and therefore likely to heighten the child’s need for his or her parent. During the procedure, which lasts about 20 minutes, the parent and the infant are first left alone, while the infant explores the room full of toys. Then a strange adult enters the room and talks for a minute to the parent, after which the parent leaves the room. The stranger stays with the infant for a few minutes, and then the parent again enters and the stranger leaves the room. During the entire session, a video camera records the child’s behaviors, which are later coded by trained coders.

Question 24

On the basis of their behaviors, the children are categorized into one of four groups

Answer 24

A child with a secure attachment style usually explores freely while the mother is present and engages with the stranger. The child may be upset when the mother departs but is also happy to see the mother return.

A child with an ambivalent (sometimes called insecure-resistant) attachment style is wary about the situation in general, particularly the stranger, and stays close or even clings to the mother rather than exploring the toys. When the mother leaves, the child is extremely distressed and is ambivalent when she returns. The
child may rush to the mother but then fail to cling to her when she picks up the child.

A child with an avoidant (sometimes called insecure-avoidant) attachment style will avoid or ignore the mother, showing little emotion when the mother departs or returns. The child may run away from the
mother when she approaches. The child will not explore very much, regardless of who is there, and the stranger will not be treated much differently from the mother.

Finally, a child with a disorganized attachment style seems to have no consistent way of coping with
the stress of the strange situation—the child may cry during the separation but avoid the mother when
she returns, or the child may approach the mother but then freeze or fall to the floor. Although some
cultural differences in attachment styles have been found

Question 25

temperament

Answer 25

The innate personality characteristics of the infant