Module 5

Question 1

At birth, an infant’s visual system is not fully developed. They have poor visual acuity (sharpness), resulting in blurry vision until about _______ months of age.

They also need to develop control over their eye muscles, but can track objects with their eyes by ______ months (if not earlier).

Lastly, infants also have limited colour perception at birth, and therefore prefer stimuli with ________________.

Answer 1

8

3

high contrast.

Question 2

What are 3 common eye gaze methodologies that developmental psychologists use to study infant cognition?

Answer 2

1) Habituation

2) Preferential looking

3) Violation of expectation

Question 3

What is the habituation eye gaze method of studying infant cognition?

Answer 3

• Uses “looking time” as an index of infant cognition.
• the infant must be at least 3 months to obtain reliable data. Younger infants tend to fall asleep or cry.

-Using eye gaze, researchers record time to habituate decreased response to a stimulus after repeated exposure.

-This method (Habituation) is commonly used to study infant visual development (e.g., can they perceive tiny differences in perceptual stimuli, can they discriminate colours, etc), as well as conceptual development.

Question 4

What must an infant be able to do in order to demonstrate habituation behaviour?

Answer 4

1) They must be able to see

2) They have to be able to control where their eyes are aimed

3) The infant must be able to recognize the repeated object.

4) They must have a functioning memory

Question 5

We can assume an infant is able to discriminate between the old and new stimuli if _________________________.

Answer 5

the infant demonstrated a longer looking time at the new stimulus.

(If the infant did not demonstrate renewed interest with a new stimuli, we could assume that she could not discriminate between the stimuli.)

Question 6

True or False?

Faster habituation time during infancy predicts later intelligence.

Answer 6

True.

Research consistently demonstrates that faster habituation time during infancy predicts later intelligence (and is often a better predictor of later IQ than infant IQ tests!).

Question 7

What is the preferential looking eye gaze method of studying infant cognition?

Answer 7

-When presented with two stimuli, the infant will demonstrate preferential looking towards the stimulus that is more interesting to them.

Question 8

True or False?

Infants prefer to look at faces over other stimuli.

Answer 8

True.

Question 9

What is the violation of expectation eye gaze method of studying infant cognition?

Answer 9

-experiments also involve looking time and habituation. Generally, infants are first habituated to an initial stimuli in a control condition. The infant’s looking time is then compared to a test condition, in which an “impossible” event occurs.

Question 10

What did Professor Renée Baillargeon’s object permanence task in the Module 5.1 video (using “violation of expectation eye gaze” method) show?

Answer 10

-infants will look longer at an impossible event. You can think of this like they are surprised or confused that the event could happen.

• and that contrary to Piaget’s findings - she found that babies as young as 3.5 months old understand that objects continue to exist while hidden. This suggests that their physical knowledge is more rich and sophisticated than previously thought.

Question 10

Flip for a reminder of how theories of cognitive development can help us to understand conceptual development.

Answer 10

Piaget: Emphasized that we need interactions with the world to form concepts.

Information-processing theories: Humans have general learning mechanisms that allow us to form associations and develop concepts.

Sociocultural (Vygotsky) theories: Adults and other people in the infant’s life help to scaffold concepts based on how their culture sees the world.

Question 11

Developmental psychologists are interested in studying whether 4-month-old infants can discriminate between the colours red and green. What research design would be a good fit to test this hypothesis?

a) Violation of expectation, because the researchers can measure surprise when the infant is presented with a different colour.

b) Preferential looking, because the researchers can see if the infants prefer one colour over the other.

c) Habituation, because the researchers can present one colour until the infant becomes bored, then switch to the other colour to see if interest resumes.

d) Habituation, because the researchers present both colours at the same time to measure which one the infant looks at.

Answer 11

c) Habituation, because the researchers can present one colour until the infant becomes bored, then switch to the other colour to see if interest resumes.

Question 11

There are almost endless ways to categorize concepts. For infants, however, one of the first categories they develop is _______ vs ____________.

Answer 11

living vs. non-living things.

(Importantly, people tend to be in their own categories separate from other living things like animals (so you can think of the category as living vs. non-living vs. people).

Question 12

Why is making categories is an important cognitive ability?

Answer 12

Because they allow us to distinguish functions and relations between objects.

Question 13

Categorization also allows children to make inferences. If an object belongs to a specific category, we know that it’s going to be like other things in that category. What is an example of an inference they might make?

Answer 13

If they know that “cat” belongs in the “animals” category, they can guess that it probably moves and makes noise like other animals.

In general, infants tend to start developing categories using perceptual features (e.g., how an object looks) and functional features (e.g., does an object move or make a sound?).

Question 14

Flip to see the levels of categories children progress through.

Answer 14

1) General categories - Infants would start with large general categories like living vs non-living things.

2) Superordinate categories - These categories have some conceptual similarity but they may not be perceptually very similar. For example, this could include “mammals”.

3) Basic categories - Things like dogs, cats, balls, bottles. Often types children learn these types of categories before superordinate and subordinate categories like “mammal” or “Golden Retriever.”

4) Specific categories - also known as subordinate categories). For example, a dog breed like “Golden Retriever” is a specific category.

Question 15

Flip to see a brief summary of the 4 levels of categories in conceptual thinking.

Answer 15

General (living things), superordinate (mammals), basic (dogs), and specific (Golden Retriever).

Question 16

Another concept infants and children have to develop is ____________ – that when one event occurs, it can cause another event to occur.

Answer 16

causality

Question 17

Causal reasoning is present very early in development. What is an example of casual reasoning?

Answer 17

Infants need to figure out what causes them to feel happiness or discomfort. Generally, when two things occur closely together in space and time, infants tend to believe that the first event caused the second event.

(With development, children’s understanding of causality becomes more complex. For example, they can begin to figure out that if two things are happening at the same time, only one of these events may cause a second event.)

Question 18

What is magical thinking?

Answer 18

Magical thinking occurs during the preschool years while causal understanding is still developing. This can sometimes interfere with causal reasoning as it is easy for children at this age to believe that anything could happen.

Question 19

By approximately age _______, children no longer engage in magical thinking on a consistent basis.

Answer 19

5

(While it is common to maintain cultural aspects of magical thinking (e.g., Santa Claus), they largely understand causal reasoning and impossible events by this point.)

Question 20

Why do early preschoolers usually not enjoy magic tricks?

Answer 20

They do not yet grasp the causal reasoning behind many magic tricks (e.g., that a rabbit cannot logically come out of a hat).

Seeing impossible events “happen” is much more exciting for children who understand causality.

Question 21

Which of the following categories is a young child likely to develop after having an understanding of living vs. non-living things?

a) Reptiles (a superordinate category)

b) Garden snake (a subordinate category)

c) Bull frog (a subordinate category)

d) Frogs (a basic category)

Answer 21

d) Frogs (a basic category)

(Remember - basic level categories are likely to develop before superordinate and subordinate categories.)

Question 22

Dr. Alison Gopnik’s “blicket detector” experiments demonstrate that:

a) Young children need input from adults in order to learn how to the blicket detector works.

b) Through hypothesis testing, children as young as 4 years old can understand the causal relationships between objects.

c) Preschoolers must rely on previous knowledge in order to make causal inferences.

d) 4-year-olds pass the blicket detector experiment through chance factors alone.

Answer 22

b) Through hypothesis testing, children as young as 4 years old can understand the causal relationships between objects.

Question 23

Infants have a concept of living things from very early on. 9-month-olds are more interested in rabbits than objects (although people are still more interesting than the rabbits)! Indeed, young children tend to have difficulty understanding that humans are animals, and tend to treat people as a separate category for a long time.

By ________ months, young children generally understand that living things are self-propelled and can act to achieve goals.

Answer 23

12-15

Question 24

In contrast to animals, why do children have more difficulty understanding that plants are alive?

Answer 24

Due to their lack of movement.

(The “liveliness” of plants, however, can be emphasized for children by indicating how they move towards the sun.)

Question 25

By the preschool years, children come to understand that living things have many elements beyond movement that differentiate them from non-living objects. List of these elements:

Answer 25

1) Growth - Children understand that animals can grow and change, whereas non-living things do not.

2) Inheritance - Children understand that only living things have offspring that resemble the parents.

3) Internal Parts - Children know that the internal parts of living things are different than non-living things. For example, preschoolers understand that bones are most likely to be inside living things, whereas they believe things like cotton and metal are more likely to be inside non-living things.

4) Healing - Children understand that animals can heal themselves, whereas non-living things must be fixed by humans.

Question 26

How do children come to understand where we are in relation to other things?

Answer 26

1) Cultural tools, like language, help us form spatial categories. Infants learn the spatial categories of the language they are exposed to in their environment.

2) Self-propelled locomotion (e.g., crawling, walking) is also an important factor contributing to infants’ understanding of space.

Question 27

Early spatial navigation tends to be very ____________. Babies tend to navigate from where they are – if they are moved around, it is more difficult for them to navigate.

Answer 27

egocentric

Question 28

As children develop, their concept of space becomes more complex. What are 2 examples of activities that contribute to children’s increased spatial awareness?

Answer 28

Puzzles & video games.

Question 29

Concepts of numbers and quantity are also present from very early in development. Even very young infants have some number sense, long before they can count.

One example of this is ________, the ability to quickly glance at a quantity and tell the difference between up to three items.

Another example is a ___________, which allows infants to discriminate between large quantity differences.

Answer 29

subitizing

ratio system

Question 30

What did the Duke University study in the module 5.3 video show?

Answer 30

Number sense in infancy predicts mathematical abilities in childhood.

Question 31

In order to truly understand numbers and counting children need to understand what 5 principles?

Answer 31

1) One-To-One Correspondence - When you’re counting, each thing you count only gets one number.

2) Stable Order - You have to count in the same order every time (1,2,3… not 5,3,8).

3) Cardinality - The number you stop at is the number of objects you have.

4) Order Irrelevance - You can count the items in any order (e.g., counting blocks right to left is the same number as left to right).

5) Abstraction - You can count anything! Blocks, flowers, ideas…

Question 32

Hee-young is a toddler, just learning to count. When counting her blocks, she says: “1, 3, 4, 2” and exclaims that she has 2 blocks. Hee-young has yet to grasp which of the following principles?

a) Abstraction

b) Order irrelevance

c) Cardinality

d) Stable order

Answer 32

d) Stable order

Question 33

Which of the following is the primary reason that young children have difficulty categorizing plants as living things?

a) Plants generally lack voluntary movement

b) Plants are a superordinate category, which is not learned as easily as basic categories

c) Plants do not have facial expressions

d) They don’t understand that plants can heal themselves

Answer 33

a) Plants generally lack voluntary movement

Question 34

Social-conceptual development begins very early. Why is understanding the social world is evolutionary advantageous?

Answer 34

Because it helps provide us with an understanding of the behaviour of others, thus promoting social cohesion.

In other words, it helps us to survive by helping us to understand complex social interactions. Our minds are primed for social interactions so much that we often attribute intentions and expressions to inanimate objects.

Question 35

Infants demonstrate very early biases to social stimuli. Early biases provide a starting point for infants, directing them to pay attention to socially relevant stimuli. What are 3 of these biases?

Answer 35

1) Preference for faces and biological motion - Which leads to higher volumes of socially relevant stimuli.

2) Imitation - Which highlights the connection between one’s own and others’ behaviour.

3) Gaze / orientation detection - Which emphasizes the connection between gaze/orientation and relevant aspects of the environment.

Question 36

What can we learn about these social biases from Johansson’s biomotion technique as depicted by point-light walkers?

Answer 36

While participants were unable to decipher what was occurring in the still photos, participants were able to extract the human figure when it was in motion.

Since then, this technique has been used to learn about the socially-relevant information within biomotion, such as intentions and emotional states. Research demonstrates that even newborns demonstrate a predisposition to attend to biomotion.

Question 37

The foundation of understanding other people lies in ________________ – having a ‘theory’ (i.e., knowledge of) other people’s mental states and how those mental states relate to behaviour.

Answer 37

Theory of Mind

Question 38

What are mental states?

Answer 38

Things like emotions, intentions, perceptions, desires, and beliefs. Essentially, a mental state is anything that a person has going on in their head that influences how they act.

Question 39

Major milestones in the development of Theory of Mind include understanding of what 3 things?

Answer 39

1) intentions, 2) desires, and 3) false beliefs.

Question 40

The first component of ToM that infants develop is the understanding of intentions. How is theorized to occur?

Answer 40

Through gaining understanding of goal-directed action - behaviours that are oriented towards attaining a particular goal.

For example, say I intend to catch a fish. My goal-directed action is to keep casting my fishing rod into the lake to see if I can get a bite.

Question 41

Summarize Woodward’s study of how infants selectively encode the goal object of an actor’s reach.

Answer 41

1) 6-month-old infants were repeatedly shown a human arm reaching to an object in a display (habituation phase). For example, the arm always reached for the ball, not the bear.

2) Then the toys switch places in the test phase. Now, infants were shown one of two conditions: 1) the arm reaching for the same object in the new location (“old goal”), OR 2) the arm reaching to the new object in the old location (“new goal”).

*Do infants interpret the reaching as a goal-directed action? If they do, they should be surprised when the hand continues to reach in the same place because the desired object is no longer there. What did the results find?

The infants demonstrated a longer looking time for the “new goal” condition, indicating surprise. This suggests that they expected the hand to follow the desired object and that they interpreted hand reaching as a goal-directed behaviour.

Overall, the results from this study demonstrate that infants as young as 6 months old encode human actions in ways consistent with understanding of goal-directed action.

Question 42

Is “understanding intentions” a bias that infants have for people only?

Answer 42

According to Woodward’s study (summarized on previous flashcard) - when they ran the same study design, but used a mechanical arm instead of a person. They found the opposite pattern of results for the mechanical arm! This suggests that understanding intentions is a bias infants have for people only.

Question 43

The next component of ToM to develop is an understanding of diverse desires, which typically develops around ________ months of age.

Answer 43

18

For example, around 18 months, a toddler could understand that although his favorite food is bananas, his mom’s favourite food might be an apple.

Question 44

Young children’s understanding of diverse desires has been explored using the “broccoli and goldfish” paradigm by developmental psychologist Dr. Alison Gopnik. Using this paradigm, researchers brought 14-month-old and 18-month-old children into the lab to examine theory of mind development. What did this experiment show?

Answer 44

18-month-old children understood that Dr. Gopnik had a diverse desire than themselves. That is, she liked the broccoli more than the Goldfish crackers and this was different from what the children liked the best. Whereas:

14 month old children did not understand this.

Question 45

Remember that beliefs are not necessarily true. Beliefs are __________, distinct representations of the world that have the potential to be false.

Answer 45

subjective

Question 46

An understanding of ______________ is considered the best evidence for ToM.

Answer 46

false beliefs

(It typically develops when children are 3-4 years old.)

Question 47

Developmental psychologists typically study false beliefs using the “Sally-Anne” task. This task has several variations that typically involve either a contents change or a location change. What does the video in Module 5.4 show about the different ages of children completing this task?

Answer 47

Children begin to pass the false belief task around age four

Different variations all show similar patterns

Shows children understand that others can have beliefs that are different from their own and indeed, different from reality

Question 48

Overall, theory of mind develops early in childhood. By age 4-5 years old, most children understand that others can have beliefs that are different from their own. What is one exception to this?

Answer 48

Children who have a diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). ASD involves difficulties with theory of mind, which is thought to underlie the social-communication symptoms associated with this developmental disorder.

Question 49

Which of the following definitions BEST explains Theory of Mind (ToM)?

a) Theory of mind is the theory that describes how children understand other people.

b) Theory of mind is the theory that describes the development of mental capacities in the mind.

c) Theory of mind is a social-cognitive skill that reflects the ability to understand mental states.

d) Theory of mind is a social-cognitive skill that reflects understanding false beliefs

Answer 49

c) Theory of mind is a social-cognitive skill that reflects the ability to understand mental states.

Question 50

Bob leaves his toy truck in the toy box when he goes outside to play. Joe comes in and moves the toy truck to the closet. According to a 4-year-old, where will Bob look for his toy?

a) In the toy box, because ToM is developed

b) In the toy box, because ToM hasn’t developed yet

c) In the closet, because ToM is developed

d) In the closet, because ToM hasn’t developed yet

Answer 50

a) In the toy box, because ToM is developed

(Remember - by age 4 most children have develop a theory of mind. Thus, Bob will look in the toy box because he does not know that Joe has moved his truck to the closet.)