Lecture 1: Intro & Visual Development Flashcards
reasons to learn about child development
- Raising children
- Choosing social policies
- Understanding human nature
raising children
Child development research helps answer questions about how to raise children
choosing social policies
Child development research can help inform social policies that affect children
understanding human nature and individuals
- Child development research is vital to understanding how nature and nurture shape human psychology
- Can also help explain individual differences between people
child
every human being below the age of 18 years
what does it mean to be a child?
- dependent on adult caregivers
- fundamentally about learning
humans’ childhood length
- Longer childhood compared to other species (Humans have the longest childhoods among primates)
- Long childhood makes them very vulnerable; thus, caring for them is very time-consuming
learning during childhood
- Long childhood is adaptive for maximizing learning
- A focus on learning is only possible if they are taken care of by adults
Large-brain, narrow hips trade-off
- Our brains are large for our size and more complicated/neuron-dense than any other animal
- Larger brains necessitate larger heads
- At the same time, the evolution of our ability to stand upright favoured narrower hips
how was the large-brain, narrow hips trade-off resovled?
- To solve this, babies evolved to be born earlier
- The brain continues to develop once born, allowing for more learning
what aspects of childhood demonstrate that children are adapted to focus on learning?
- Highly curious
- Highly suggestible, not critical thinkers
- Readily imitate others
- Overestimate own abilities
- Brains are malleable
child development
The process of learning perceptual, cognitive, emotional, and social capacities that allows an individual to grow from the dependence of infancy to the independence of adulthood
why do we focus on infancy when studying child development?
- Very rapid changes in the first 2 years of an infant’s life
- Changes in one area enable changes in other areas
- Methods for studying infants are different than methods for studying older children who can communicate more clearly with adults
- Sheds light on the nature/nurture debate
what do babies see?
From birth, babies visually scan the environment and pause to look at stuff
methods in infant research
- Preferential looking paradigm
- Habituation paradigm
what does the preferential looking paradigm take advantage of?
infants’ preference to look at “interesting” things
preferential looking paradigm method
Present the baby with 2 stimuli beside each other at the same time
interpreting the results of the preferential looking paradigm
If the baby looks longer at one stimulus than the other, it means that:
1) They can distinguish between the two & 2)
Have a preference for one over the other
what does the preferential looking paradigm assess?
infants’ preference for stimuli
what stimuli do infants prefer to look at?
- More complex
- More saturated in colour
- Familiar
two types of familiarity
lab-induced & natural
natural familiarity
stimuli infants experience often in their lives
lab-induced familiarity
familiarize infants with a stimulus by exposing them to it for some time
what does the habituation paradigm take advantage of?
babies’ natural preference for novelty