Ch.10 Flashcards
Post-hoc fallacy and bidirectional influence
post hoc fallacy:
— false assumption that because one event occurred before another event, it must have caused that event
Bidirectional influence:
— Human development is almost always a two-way street: Developmental influences are bidirectional. Children’s experiences influence their development, but their development also influences their experiences.
Cohort effects
effect observed in a sample of participants that results from individuals in the sample growing up at the same time
Research designs (including cross-sectional and longitudinal (strengths/weaknesses of each))
Cross-sectional:
• research design that examines people of different ages at a single point in time.
— don’t control for cohort effects: effects due to the fact that sets of people who lived during one time period, can differ in some systematic way from sets of people who lived during a different time period.
Longitudinal:
• research design that examines development in the same group of people on multiple occasions over time.
— ideal for studying change over time
— they can be costly and time consuming.
— attrition: participants dropping out of the study before it is completed.
— Selective attrition, when the dropout of participants is not random, but drawn disproportionately from a particular definable group (women, older adults, Indigenous Peoples, etc.).
- Aren’t experimental designs, can’t use these studies to infer cause-and-effect relationships.
Gene-environment interaction and Gene expression
• Situation in which the effects of genes depend on the environment in which they are expressed.
gene expression:
• activation or deactivation of genes by environmental experiences throughout development
— reminds us that nurture affects nature. In turn, nature affects how we react to nurture, and so on.
nature via nurture
• tendency of individuals with certain genetic predispositions to seek out and create environments that permit the expression of those predispositions.
For example, as children grow older, highly fearful children tend to seek out environments that protect them from their anxieties B/c highly fearful children select safer environments, it may appear that growing up in safe environments helps to create fearfulness, when the environment is actually a consequence of children’s genetic predispositions.
Zygote
fertilized egg
blastocyst
ball of identical cells early in pregnancy that haven’t yet begun to take on any specific function in a body part.
embryo
• second to eighth week of prenatal development, during which limbs, facial features, and major organs of the body take form.
- Once different cells start to assume different functions, the blastocyst becomes an embryo
- During this stage, many things can go awry in fetal development.
fetus
• period of prenatal development from ninth week until birth after all major organs are established and physical maturation is the primary change.
(- The last third of pregnancy in particular is devoted almost entirely to “bulking up.”)
teratogens
An environmental factor that can exert a negative impact on prenatal development
sucking reflect
an automatic response to oral stimulation. (In babies)
rooting reflex
serves the same survival need: eating.
- If we softly stroke a hungry infant’s cheek, they’ll automatically turn their head toward our hand and begin casting about with their mouth, eagerly seeking a nipple to suck.
- These reflexes help keep infants alive because if they needed to learn through trial and error that sucking on an object yields nourishment, they might starve trying to get the hang of it.
menarche
• the onset of menstruation
-tends not to begin until they’ve achieved full physical maturity.
- Menarche is the body’s insurance plan against allowing females to become pregnant before their bodies can carry an infant to term and give birth safely.
- timing of puberty in both sexes is genetically influenced
spermarche
• first ejaculation by males.
- comparable milestone in males and occurs, on average, at around 13 years of age.
- Because males need not be fully physically mature to reproduce children, spermarche isn’t as closely tied to physical maturity as menarche.
changes associated with aging and how to minimize decline
Many of the changes we typically associate with aging are actually due to diseases that are correlated with age, like heart disease and arthritis.
As we age:
• decline in muscle tone.
• increase in body fat.
• Basic sensory processes decline
- vision
- hearing
- smell.
• Fertility in females declines sharply during their 30s and 40s.
• Males experience nothing equivalent to menopause.
• gradual decline in sperm production.
• decline in testosterone levels increases difficulty of.
- maintaining an erection
- achieving ejaculation
• individual and task-specific differences in the effects of aging on motor coordination.
- simple motor tasks, show relatively small declines.
- Older adults become less flexible in learning new motor skills.
Ways to Minimize decline:
may minimize some of these declines and increase lifespan
• fertility treatments
• Viagra and Cialis
• Strength training
• increased physical activity
Stage-like vs. continuous changes
• Some propose stage-like changes in understanding (sudden spurts in knowledge followed by periods of stability)
• Others propose more continuous (gradual, incremental) changes in understanding.
domain-general vs. domain-specific accounts of development
• Some propose domain-general account of development, in which cross-cutting changes in children’s cognitive skills that affect most or all areas of cognitive function at once.
• Others propose a domain-specific account, in which the children’s cognitive skills develop independently and at different rates across different domains, such as reasoning, language, and counting (domain-specific).
Assimilation and accommodation
Assimilation:
Piagetian process of absorbing new experience into current knowledge structures.
Ex: If a child who believes the Earth is flat learns that the Earth is round, they might assimilate this knowledge into their schema by picturing a flat disk, like a coin.
- This adjustment allows the child to absorb this fact without changing their belief.
Accommodation:
Piagetian process of altering a belief to make it more compatible with experience.
Piaget’s stages (sensorimotor and object permanence/mental representation
• Piaget’s stages are domain- general, slicing across all areas of cognitive capacity.
• Each stage is characterized by a certain level of abstract reasoning capacity
Stage in Piaget’s theory characterized by a focus on the here and now without the ability to represent experiences mentally.
- between birth and 2 years.
Stage characterized by:
Mental representation-
the ability to think about things that are absent from immediate surroundings, such as remembering previously encountered objects.
Object permanence-
the understanding that objects continue to exist even when out of view.
preoperational and egocentrism/use of symbols
Stage in Piaget’s theory characterized by the ability to construct mental representations of experience but not yet perform operations on them.
- between 2 to 7 years
Stage characterized by:
Egocentrism- an inability to see the world from others’ points of view.
Use of symbols- as language, drawings, and objects as representations of ideas.
—> meaning now have a mental representation that differs from their physical experience.
concrete operations and conservation/mental operations on concrete objects
Stage in Piaget’s theory characterized by the ability to perform mental operations on physical events only.
• between 7 to 11 years
Stage characterized by:
Conservation-
Piagetian task requiring children to understand that despite a transformation in the physical presentation of an amount, the amount remains the same
- Can now pass conservation tasks.
Mental operations-
on physical objects, like sorting coins by size or setting up a battle scene with toy soldiers.
- still poor at performing in abstract or hypothetical situations therefore, need physical experience as an anchor to which they can tether their mental operations.
formal operations and mental operations on abstract concepts/hypothetical reasoning
Stage in Piaget’s theory characterized by the ability to perform hypothetical reasoning beyond the here and now.
• 11 years to adulthood
Stage characterized by:
Hypothetical reasoning-
Can understand logical concepts, such as if-then statements and and either-or statements.
Ex: Pendulum task- Experiment systematically with hypotheses and explain outcomes.
Abstract concepts-
questions, like the meaning of life.
Vygotsky’s ideas of scaffolding and zone of proximal development
Scaffolding:
Vygotskian learning mechanism in which parents provide initial assistance in children’s learning but gradually remove structure as children become more competent.
Zone of proximal development:
phase of learning during which children can benefit from instruction.
- are receptive to learning a new skill but aren’t yet successful at it.
Theory of mind and the false belief task (and how they relate to Piaget’s preoperational stage)
- ability to reason about what other people know or believe.
- false-belief task: tests children’s ability to understand that someone else believes something they know to be wrong.
- children’s failure, may be due to aspects of the task rather than their inadequate understanding of others’ knowledge.
— Children who pass, understand that although they themselves know where the treat is actually hidden, the child in the story holds an incorrect belief about the treat’s location.
— Those who fail, believe if they know where the treat is, the child in the story must know as well.
- typically don’t succeed until around age 4 or 5.
- real-world situation and less of a story, most children can pass it.
- reason for the change was to “trick” someone, they’re more successful at an earlier age.
