Intro Flashcards
Where does knowledge come from: Plato
Innate knowledge
Where does knowledge come from: Aristotle
All knowledge comes from experience
Locke (1960s): empiricist
He relied on observation and experimental to determine the truth about something
Tabula rasa: children born with a blank mind, they learn through social interaction
Rousseau (1979s)
Noble savage: innocent child corrupted by the society
Nature - Nativist theories
The role of genetics in forming our behaviour, our personality or any other part of ourselves
Nurture: empirists
The role of family, society, education and other social factors in forming our behaviour, our personality or any other part of ourselves
Darwin (1870s): baby biographies
Intensive studies of individual children
Study of children
Hall (1890s): large-scale norming studies (questionnaires, etc)
Mechanisms proposed
Genetics, with development unfolding automatically (flower
Freud and Erikson (1900s)
Resolution of conflict between biological drives and social expectations
Watson (1920s): behaviourist approaches
Learning, particularly punishments and rewards
Piaget, Vygotsky, etc: experimental
Piaget (1930-): cognitive stages
Vygotsky (1930-): zone of proximal development
Ontogeny: Development of an organism during its lifetime
Continuous: progression
Discontinuous: developmental stages
How do we refer to age?
Years;months.days
Months
What are the issues we might face when testing children?
Language limitations
Attention span
Trust
Rapport: understanding between
Their agenda
Usual adult methods
Questionnaires / interviews
Tasks (like what?)
Psychophysical measures
Continuous development
Change that occurs at a steady pace, perhaps showing a constant, consistent improvement or growth
Discontinuous development
Change that occurs in what appear to be great bursts of achievement following a period of steady consolidation of perhaps knowledge or skill
Marshmallow test: Mischel & Ebbesen (1960)
A measurement of delayed gratification
The children who waited for reward tend to have better life outcomes:
Academic achievement
Body Mass Index
A follow-up brain imaging study in 2011 found different levels of activation in the original groups when trying to resist temptation (Marshmallow test)
Delayers – Prefrontal cortex (planning, decision making)
Gratifiers – Ventral striatum (addiction)
Considerations for research with children
Suitability of the task / question / language: Measuring maths abilities with 7-year-olds vs 17-year-olds
Suitability of test environment: lab, school, home?
Test situation: Power differential, Aiming to please adults?
Tracking abilities across age: Longitudinal, Cross-sectional?
What can infants do?
Make faces
Suck on a pacifier/dummy
Look at things
(Psychophysical changes)
Pacifier Sucking Rates: Eimas (1985)
Demonstrated that 2-month-old infants can discriminate a wide range of phonemes
Sucking rates were measured while listening to phonemes
Initially rates are high, before slowing: habituation
Rates would increase when a novel phoneme (e.g., /ba/) was then introduced
Infant looking behaviour
how?
Following
Boredom
Preference
1st look
Infant looking behaviour – Following
Newborns more likely to follow face-like images
