Test 3 - 'Lifespan Psychology' Flashcards
(50 cards)
Lifespan psychology
It considers the developmental changes that occur at various times in our lives. These encompass biological and physical changes, cognitive changes, and social and emotional changes.
Maturation
A predetermined biological sequence of behaviours which occur at certain ages.
Cognitive development
The development of mental abilities throughout the lifespan.
Emotional development
The learning of types of emotions and how to deal with them throughout the lifespan.
Perceptual development
It occurs as infants grow and explore their environment. It is the selecting, organising and interpreting of the sensations that are sent to the brain from the senses.
Preferential looking technique
A technique used to determine if infants could distinguish one stimulus from another by the length of time they looked at it.
Habituation
When a person (usually an infant) stops looking at a stimulus due to loss of interest.
Dishabituation
The shifting of interest and attention from and old stimulus to a new stimulus.
Dominant genes
The gene that displays its characteristic rather than its paired recessive gene.
Recessive genes
A genes whose characteristic will only be displayed if the paired gene is also recessive (not dominant)
Accommodation
Piaget’s term when new situations, objects or information are encountered and the persons schema is wither modified or a new schema is created.
Assimilation
According to Piaget, is the process where new experiences are combined with existing schema.
Schema
A term used by Piaget to describe a cognitive or mental plan that is a guide for related actions and perceptions.
Developmental norms
indicate the average age that a certain behaviour or skill will be achieved. They are based on the mean age of a large sample. When a child learns to ride a bike.
Gross motor skills
such as walking, kicking a ball, are skills that use large muscle groups.
Fine motor skills
such as holding a pen correctly, use small muscle groups.
Neonate’s vision at birth
- A newborn is unable to use visual accommodation because the nerves, lens and the eye muscles that control the adjustment of the lens to focus are still developing.
- Visual acuity has not been fully developed because the fovea, a structure in the eye is still immature. It is also not clear because the parts of the brain are too immature to send clear messages.
- Colour vision develops as the infant gets older. At two to three months of age, infants can discriminate between some colours and at four months, their colour vision is similar to an adults.
Piaget’s theories
Sensorimotor: Birth - 2
Preoperational: 2-7
Concrete operational: 7-12
Formal operational: 12+
Sensorimotor
Infants learn about their world through their senses (hearing, seeing) and by actions (motor) such as grasping or pulling.
- Object permanence: infants understand that an object still exists when it is no longer seen.
Preoperational
Children continue to develop, and they use symbols, images and language to represent their world.
- Symbolic thinking
- Animism
- Egocentrism
- Centration
- Seriation
- Conservation
- Irreversibility
Concrete operational
Children can perform basic mental problems that involce physical objects
Formal operational
Children are able to think logically and methodically about physical and abstract problems.
Criticisms of Piaget’s theory
Other psychologists suggest that some people never reach formal operations.
Piaget neglected many important cognitive factors such as motivation, memory span and impulsiveness.
Piaget focused on the things that children did wrong to formulate his theories.
Piaget underestimated social influences on development.
Depth perception
Depth perception is the ability to accurately judge 3D space and distance, using cues in the environment.
Gibson and Walk produced an experiment that consisted of a small table covered with glass. On one side of the table was a ‘shallow side’, with a checkerboard pattern directly below the glass. On the other side was the ‘deep side’ with the checkerboard pattern placed a metre below the glass. Gibson and Walk found that 27 infants out of 36 who moved off the centre of the board crawled out on the shallow side at least once. Three infants crept off the edge onto the deep side and many of the infants crawled away from their mother who was calling them from the deep side, while others cried because they realised they couldn’t get to their mother without crossing the cliff.
