Developmental Psychology Flashcards
(131 cards)
1
Q
Developmental Psychology
A
- Study of how (and why) physical, cognitive and emotional abilities develop throughout childhood
- How the mind develops in early years and what happens in development to make your mind change
2
Q
Importance of studying development
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- Children’s abilities are very important precursor to what you will be able to do as an adult
- Interesting to isolate when things that we do automatically do as adults immerge in childhood (e.g. lie)
- Helps understand why disorders like autism is different from someone who has dyslexia
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Q
Infant development begin
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- When children are in Utero
- Gestation: roughly 40 weeks
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Infant development: by birth
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- Brain is similar in structure to an adult brain
- Brain is only about 1/4 in size compared to adult brain
- Brains neurons are not fully myelinated or connected
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Q
Myelination and synaptogenesis is
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- The forming of synapses between neurons
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Myelination and synaptogenesis continues
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- Until about 2 years
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Consequences of a synapses not being used regularly
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- If after the age of 2 the synapse is not regularly used then its trimmed away throughout development
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Q
Neural Plasticity
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- the ability of the brain to form and maintain synapses
- Diminishes with age
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Child brain damage or harmful experience (infant development)
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- Will have every lasting consequences
- Damage can occur before the child is born
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Q
Teratogens
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- Substances which cause atypical development for a child if they are exposed to them in utero
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Types of Teratogens
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- Alcohol and tobacco
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Teratogens in pregnancy
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- Have an adverse effect on development
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Example studies on Teratogens
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- Perera et al. (2002) = air pollutions leads to genetic mutation in newborns
- Latini et al. (2003) = exposure to PVC elements can shorten pregnancy leading to early development
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Foetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders (FASD)
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- A more specific type of teratogen is Alcohol
- The consequences of Alcohol on a child in utero is had been grouped into FASD
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Foetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders (FASD): Potential outcomes
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- Can’t say what is going to happen as there are many potential outcomes
- The baby can experience physical, mental, and behavioural impairments
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Foetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders (FASD): Cognitive and Behavioural impairments
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- Infancy: Longer reaction times
- Pre-schoolers: Decreased attention, hyperactivity
- Childhood: Learning problems, memory deficits
- Adulthood: Impaired problem solving and higher rates of substance dependence
17
Q
Psychologist who invented the stage theory
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- Jean Piaget (1896-1980)
- Constructivist
- Founding researcher for developmental Psychology
- Wanted to know how children formed knowledge, how they learn and how people get to know things
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Q
Stage theory
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- Like Sigmund Freud’s developments from the oral/anal/phallic stages of childhood
- Children go through a series of stages through their cognitive development
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Jean Piaget formation of the Stage Theory
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- Tracked at what age children would make similar mistakes and at what age they started doing specific patterns of behaviour = forming Stage Theory from this
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Q
Piaget argument
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- That you can track at what stage a child is at by asking them to do certain things
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Piaget view on children
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- As a progressing through a series of cognitive stages towards adulthood
22
Q
All stages of the Stage Theory
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- Sensorimotor (0-2 years)
- Preoperational (2-7 years)
- Concrete (7-12 years)
- Formal Operational (Beyond 12 years)
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Q
Sensorimotor Stage (Stage Theory)
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- 0-2 years
- Infants can sense things and can move their bodies
- Little cognition between the two (can’t think yet)
- Key cognition ability that children can’t do is object permanence
24
Q
Object Permanence
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- The idea that things exists in the world, even when we cannot perceive them
- The concept that even though you can’t see something, you still know it’s there.
- Recognise that objects permanently exists (water bottle example)
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Sensorimotor Stage: The A-not-B error
- You ask a child to search for an object hidden at a set location a number of times
- Then change the location where the object is hidden
- Children will search for the object in the original location even if they have seen it being moved to a new location
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Sensorimotor Stage: The A-not-B error results
- Under the age of 9 months, children fail at this experiment
- Found that children can't separate the location of an object from the object itself
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Sensorimotor Stage: The A-not-B error: Infants display
- Perseverative reaching
| - Usually until they are 10-12 months old
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Perseveration
- When infants persist with a response, even when this response is no longer appropriate
- Piaget argued that this was because infants did not understand object permanence
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The end of sensorimotor stage
- Around 2 years
- Infants begin to use mental imagery
- They understand things exist independently of themselves and can exist in different location
- Children begin to understand symbols (Things which represent or stand for other things)
- They are starting to relate what they see with what they know = moving onto next stage
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Preoperational Stage (Stage Theory)
- 2-7 years
- Children still struggle with egocentrism
- Children are biased by their perceptions and cannot use 'operations'
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Egocentrism
- an ability for children to see/understand things from another person's point of view
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Egocentrism ≠ Selfishness
- Egocentrism= A cognitive inability to understand how things appear to other people
- Selfishness= Attitude of always wanting things your own way
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Preoperational Stage (Stage Theory): Piaget argues
- Until the age of 7 children can't associate what they know and what they see from what they believe other people know and see
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Preoperational Stage (Stage Theory): Piaget's Three-Mountain Task
- A child is asked to sit in front of a doll
- There are 3 mountains on the table in front of the child
- The child is given a series of pictures and is asked to say which of these pictures best describes the view that the doll has
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Preoperational Stage (Stage Theory): Piaget's Three-Mountain Task: Results
- Found that until the age of about 6/7, children couldn't do this task
- Still suffer from egocentrism in their perspective
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Operation
- A set of logical mental rules that can be applied to solve a problem
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Water in different size jugs task: Piaget argument
- In order to pass this task, you need to be able to preform the operation of conservation
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Conservation
- Understanding that changes to the way something looks does not necessarily mean the underlying reality is different
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Preoperational Stage: Children's failures
- Children do not yet use operations, and so fail when judging things like quantity and perspective because they are biased by the ways things look
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Concrete Operational Stage (Stage Theory)
- 7-12 years
- Children begin to be able to solve problems and preform operations, providing that these problems are concrete (real in some way)
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Formal Operational Stage (Stage Theory)
- Beyond 12 years
Children preform operations in systematic, rigorous ways, and employ the use of hypothetical situations
- We learn how to conduct experiments
- You can use hypothetical scenarios and use them to imagine ways to solve problems
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Formal Operational Stage (Stage Theory): Big difference
- The way you solve problems has changed
- You no longer need to focus on visible problems, but can go beyond what you see (scientific reasoning in abstract problems)
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Constructivism
- A child does not blindly absorb information from the world but actively constructs their understanding of the world
- Piaget believes children are constructivists
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Stages of development illustrates
- A learner's shift from an egocentric point of view to an objective, decentred view of the world
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Piaget Theory: Criticism
- Sometimes known as 'Piaget Bashing'
- When you take an ability
- You see what age Piaget said children could do that ability
- Then knock a few years off it
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Issues with Piaget's ideas
- He did not consider all the influences that affect children's learning
- He tended to measure things in limited ways
- Most of his developments he observed focussed on the child by themselves
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Vast majority of children learn by
- Learn from their peers and observing other people
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Psychologist who had a different approach to Piaget
- Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934)
- Russian
- Social constructivist
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Social constructivist
- Children construct knowledge through interactions with other people; learning is guided by communication and relationships with others
- Type of support you get from others will effect how well you will do something and learn
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Difference between Piaget and Vygotsky about how children learn
- Piaget tended to think that if children cant succeed the task then they wont do it as they don't have the ability
- Vygotsky said that maybe if you gave the child a bit of support they will be able to do it
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Vygotsky's ZOPED stand for
- Zone of Proximal Development (ZOPED)
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Vygotsky's ZOPED
- The difference between what a child can do by themselves and what they can achieve with adult supervision or with peers
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Vygotsky emphasise on learning
- The importance of other people in learning
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Pratt, Kerig, Cowan & Cowan (1988)
- Three year old children worked with their parents on a block-building task
- The children were more successful on the task due to many factors
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Pratt, Kerig, Cowan & Cowan (1988): Factors of success
- The amount of suggestive/suggestions given by the parents
- Whether parents gave MORE support after failure and LESS support after success
- Contingent support predicts success
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Pratt, Kerig, Cowan & Cowan (1988): Piaget findings
- Shows the limits that Piaget set on children is not set and stone
- Its not that children under a certain age are uncapable of understanding certain things its just that you need to help them
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Social referencing
- When a child uses emotional responses of others to guide their actions
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Second problem of Piaget's research
- The tasks he used
- He was asking too much from the children
- It didn't mean the children had not developed the skill the tasks were designed to measure
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Piaget Criticism
Conceptual understanding ≠ Procedural ability
- Children may have the understanding needed to pass the tasks, but the tasks may be too difficult for them to show it
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Important developments in infancy
- Newborns very quickly learn their parents smell
- Varied sensory experiments early in development provide a wide-range of benefits to infants
- Infants force to things to happen in adults
- Evidence shows that in the first few hours of being born/days they can start to mimic some facial and motor gestures
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Varied sensory experiments benefits to infants
- Different textures to walk, different things to look at and different sounds
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Interacting with a baby, family members will use
- Motionese
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Motionese
- A specific action style adopted by adults when interacting with infants - like mothernese for language
- Very enthusiastic, high pitched and animated
- Evidence suggest that talking that way helps infants understand better
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Motionese helps
- Process actions
- Adopted by adults towards infants
- e.g. helps scaffold learning
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Infants learn to do things
- Very quickly
- Could challenge the Piagetian view that infants are merely dealing with the world at a very basic sensorimotor level until the age of 2
- Suggest that infants are not just sensorimotor at this age (quite complex cognition)
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Object permanence - Renee Baillargeon view
- Argues that you can find evidence that infants understand object permanence at 5 months
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Object permanence - Piaget view
- If you let a child play with an object and then you hide the object from them, they wont go and look for it.
- He said its because the child doesn't understand that the object is still there
- He claims that the child is so focussed on what is present that it can't understand that the object still exists
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Baillargeon et al. (1985)
- 4 to 5 months old infants looked longer at impossible events than possible events
- Interpreted as a sign that they had expectations about what was going to happen
- Child looks longer = must be surprised
- He claims that these expectations arise because children understood 'contact principle' at 4 months
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Morton & Johnston (1991)
- Present newborns (less than an hour old) with different stimuli
- Face, scrambled face, blank
- Observed what newborns would do when these stimuli moved in front of them
- Newborns followed face more than the other two
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Viola Macchi et al. (2004)
- Newborns = less than 4 days old
- Newborns sensitive to the layout of faces
- Found that newborns were not really biased towards faces but drawn to the configuration of features
- No preference to faces
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The Contact Principle
- Distinct objects move together only if they touch
- 24 week olds appear to recognise this (Leslie & Kneeble [1987])
- Children under 2 years can understand causality
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Causality
- I can effect something by touching it
| - in simple ways using the contact principle
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Sobel & Kirkham (2006)
- Children shown 2 boxes and asked which one activates the detector
- 2 year olds were able to determine which object were likely to be blickets
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In infancy, children begin to develop the foundations of
- Complex perceptual , cognitive and social abilities we use as adults
- In the first year of life children begin to show improved causal reasoning, imitation and social referencing
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Theory of Mind
- Refers to the ability to impute mental states to ourselves and to others (knowing what other people know)
- A foundational ability that involves understanding peoples behaviour
- Understanding that other people have mental states
- Typically assed with False belief task
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Theory of Mind - 3 Mountain Task
- Children had to figure out how something looks from another persons perspective
- Piaget found that children could not pass the task until the age of 7
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Flavell, Everett, Croft & Flavell (1981) - Cat and Dog
- Asked children to preform a number of judgements about what other people could see
- Question was made easier and a child was sitting across from the examiner and showed them a piece of paper
- One side of the paper there was a picture of a cat the other a dog
- Children has to say what they can see and what the other person could see
- Three year olds could do this
- Very good at knowing what they could see and what the examiner could see
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Flavell, Everett, Croft & Flavell (1981) - Turtle
- Bit more complicated
- Piece of paper with a turtle on it
- They were asked if the turtle looked like it was on its back to me or on its feet
- They struggled in recognising HOW things looked to others until age 4
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The false - belief task
- 2 baskets, Lisa foes into Kitchen, Tom swaps teddy in basket (example)
- This task requires you to draw a line from what you know to what another person knows
- This task and theory of the mind research = massive areas of development psychology
- Another area is Executive Functions
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Executive Functions
- A set of cognitive abilities that allow you to perform voluntary behaviour (e.g. willpower)
- Help you focus attention, initiate a plan, monitor your actions
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As children develop they get better at developing
- Self control
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Action capabilities of different agents in infants
- Age 3
| - Tall dolls can reach high places, small dolls can enter into narrow places
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Children's reasoning
- Quite systematic (and not always egocentric) during the preschool years
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Two foundational abilities in children
- Developing theory of mind
| - Executive functions
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Mental states
- beliefs and desires that represent a thought/attitudes about the world
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Mental states allow
- You to understand that you know things, and that other people know things, and that different people can know different things
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People believing something that is incorrect
- Explains a lot about their behaviour
| - e.g. you tell flatmate that you'll be in to study, change mind but they still believe you'll be home to study
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Theory of mind allows you to understand
- People believe things about the world
- Those things can be true or untrue
- People act in accordance with their beliefs, even if they are wrong
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Theory of mind: Children
- Under a certain age they don't understand that people can make mistakes about the world
- Find it difficult as they assume that everybody knows what the child knows
- Hard to distinguish what they know from what other people know
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Theory of mind arose
- Out of Piaget' Three Mountain Task
- They have put themselves is someone else's shoes
- What the other person believes
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Folk Psychology
- Reasoning about peoples minds as used by everyone in everyday settings
- What people do in everyday circumstances
- What people think about other people
- They way people try and understand what's going om with other people
- Children very quickly start to predict what people are going to do
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Theory of mind: Social cognition
- Used for reasoning about other people's behaviour and is part of social cognition
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Social Cognition
- The study of the processes used to understand the social world - "thinking about other people"
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Social Cognition improvement
- Thought to improve drastically between 3 and 4 years, as it is at this point that children pass classic false-belief tests
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False-belief task: criticised
- Too difficult
- You ask children to imagine a hypothetical situation about characters they have never met
- Have to remember the names of the characters whilst following the story with multiply alternatives
- Some versions of the false-belief task and require children to respond verbally (explicit theory-of-mind)
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Explicit theory of mind
- The ability to reason verbally about other peoples mental states
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Making False- belief task easier
- People have been doing this by analysing looking-time measures
- This is when you put a child in front of a eye gaze tracker
- Allows you to see where people are going to look and track people gaze and how long they look for
- These look at implicit theory of mind (not verbal)
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Violation of expectation test (Renee Baillargeon, 2011)
- An adult and a child are present, both are in front of 2 boxes
- Adult puts the toy in one of the boxes and then the partition closes
- Adult then moves the toy into the other box and the partition opens
- This is trying to show that the child couldn't have possibly see where the toy was moved
- This measured how long the children looked
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Violation of expectation test (Renee Baillargeon, 2011): Results
- Children aged 2 1/2 tend to look longer when the actor points to where the toy is (showing knowledge which seems impossible)
- The longer they looked this was interpreted as surprise, which indicates that the child expected the actor to not know where the toy was
- At age of 2 and a half, children understand that people should not know things they have not seen (understand that people can be mistaken)
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Argument of implicit theory of mind and explicit theory of mind
- Implicit theory of mind develops earlier than explicit theory of mind
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The unexpected contents task (He et al. 2011)
- Before the task starts, infants observe the experimenter empty the boxes
- The experimenter then places the cheerio's in the pencil box, and the pencils in the cheerio box
- Actor did not see the actor switch
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The unexpected contents task (He et al. 2011): Results
- Found that if somebody displayed impossible knowledge by saying "I want cheerio's I'm going to look in the pencil box, children looked longer at that
- By age 2.5, children look longer at the non-matching box trials
- Children aged 2.5 looked longer when actor points to the crayon box after saying they want cheerio's
- Actor doesn't see initial switch
- Author claims that young children understand that other people should not know what they themselves know
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Implicit measures of Theory of Mind
- Violation of expectation, unexpected contacts
- Often use looking times as a way of testing what children expect to see
- Implicit tasks people do well on at age 2.5
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Explicit Tasks of Theory of Mind
- False-belief
| - Children can't really pass those successfully until about the age of 4
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Implicit and Explicit of Theory of Mind suggest
- There is a difference from what you can expect to what you can articulate (communicate)
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Executive Functions allows you to
- Set a plan, monitor your progress on that plan and take action when things do not work out
- Helps you achieve the goals you have made
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Three components of Executive Functions
- Inhibition
- Working Memory
- Shifting
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Inhibition
- Resisting distraction
| - Inhibiting known responses
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Inhibition
Resisting distraction
- Ability to resist something coming in to distract you from what you're already doing
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Inhibition
Inhibiting known responses
- When something happens and you automatically feel like your about to say something
- Your ability to stop what you're automatically prone to do
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Shifting
- Applying new rules to known situation
- Adjusting to changed demands
- Changing perspectives
- (changing your response)
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Working Memory
- Holding information in mind to be used
| - Following arguments, doing mental arithmetic and even reading sentences
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Marshmallow test (Mischel & Mischel, 1987)
- A child, sat them down and put a marshmallow in front of them
- You tell them that they can eat it now or if you wait 5 minutes until I get back I will give you 2
- Child is being asked to go without for an even bigger gain later on
- Very difficult for children if you have given them nothing else to do
- This is a test of hot and cold executive functions
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Hot executive functions
- When you want to give a certain response (eat marshmallow)
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- Cool executive functions
- When you don't care much about giving a response over the other (nothing they really want) (no reward)
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A-not-B error, infants displayed
- Perseverative reaching usually until they are 10 months old
- Piaget argued that this was because infants did not understand object permanence
- Other people have shown that is it more about memory and action control deficits
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Perseverative reaching is affected by
- Context which can be made easier
- Infants as young as 9 months are being able to complete these tasks by : adding more search locations and changing the baby's posture
- Means that getting these children to pass these tests are not a conceptual change (like object permanence)
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Autistic Spectrum Disorders
- A heterogenous syndrome characterised by impairment in social skills, verbal and nonverbal communication, and restricted and repetitive behaviours
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Children with ASD show impaired
- Theory of Mind
- Struggle with typical false-belief task compared to a 4 year old who doesn't have ASD
- In executive functions to a lesser degree
- Imitation
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Symptoms of ASD
- Repetitive patterns of behaviour
- Reduced interest in/poor understanding of social interactions
- Impaired social skills
- ADHD, anxiety, depression
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An important research in Imitation
- Children learn to imitate at about 6 months
- Children are better at imitating certain actions at different stages of childhood
- Infants learn to imitate actions on objects if interesting early on
- Children learn to imitate body actions that don't cause noise/distinct changes
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Imitation ASD
- Show impairment
- Don't imitate as well on actions without visible effects
- Mirror neurons have been related to poor imitation
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One theory about what is impaired in ASD
- Mirror Neurons
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Mirror neurons
- Brain cells which are active when you watch an action being performed and when you preform that action yourself
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Mirror neurons argument
- That they are used for understanding other peoples actions and imitation
- Mirror neurons dysfunction is the underlying factor explaining the impairments in ASD
-
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Mirror neurons: Theory of mind
- Mirror neurons have been related to understanding intentions
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Vivanti, McCormick, Young...(2011)
- Did a looking-time task
- Using eye-tracking, they investigated how children with ASD (10-16 years) use different cues to understand what other people are doing
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Vivanti, McCormick, Young...(2011) findings
- Children with ASD responded similarly to children without ASD in their ability to:
- Figure out what people are doing on the basis of context
- Figure out what people are doing on the basis of emotional expressions
- Respond to people looking at them directly by paying attention to their face
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Vivanti, McCormick, Young...(2011): ASD impairments
- Imitating someone when that person is looking directly at them
- Looking people in the face
- Using only gaze direction to predict a person's intentions
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Vivanti, McCormick, Young...(2011): conclusions
- Children with ASD have some very similar expectations to children without ASD
- They struggle to use direct gaze and gaze direction to infer a person's intentions
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Power experience for Children with ASD
- Direct eye gaze
