W1: Intro + Developmental Psychology Flashcards
What is developmental psychology?
The study of human behaviour as a function of age
Areas of study in dev.psy.
Physical development: body changes, motor skills, puberty, physical signs of ageing
Cognitive development: perception, language, learning, memory, problem-solving
Psychosocial development: personality, emotions, gender identity, moral behaviour, interpersonal skills, roles
Early experience
Prenatal development - germinal stage, embryonic stage, foetal
Obstacles to normal foetal development - low birth weight, premmies, exposure to hazardous environmental influences, biological influences ie genetic disorders, error in cell duplication
Motor behaviours
Motor behaviour: occurred due to a self-initiated force that moves bones and muscles
Infants are born with automated behaviour/reflex. E.g. rooting reflex, sucking reflex
Major milestone of motor development
Sitting: 6 months
Crawling: 9 months
Standing: 11 months
Cruising: 12 months
Walking: 13 months
Running: 18-24 months
==> Time periods for these milestones vary, typically influenced by physical maturation, and cultural and parental practices
Jean Piaget’s theory
Stage-like and domain-general
Children’s understanding of the word differs from adults; cognitive changes incentives by equilibration - assimilation and accomodation
Piaget’s 4 main stages of intellectual growth
Sensori-motor intelligence (birth - 2 years)
Pre-operational period (2-7yrs)
Concrete operations (7-11yrs)
Formal operations (11yrs +)
Lev Vygotsky’s theory
Focus on social and cultural influences on learning
Believed that children can gradually learn to perform a task independently, but require assistance at first –> notion of scaffolding
Believed that children can acquire skills and master tasks at different rates –> domain-specific
Zone of proximal development: the phase where children are receptive to learning a new skill but are not yet successful at it.
Jean Piaget’s sensori-motor intelligence stage
No thought
Lack of object permanence (the understanding that objects continue to exist even when out of view)
Lack of deferred imitation (the ability to perform an action observed earlier)
Jean Piaget’s preoperational period
Pre-operational period (2-7yrs): able to think here-and-now, however egocentric, unable to perform mental transformation, unable to perform conservation tasks
Jean Piaget’s concrete operations stage
Concrete operations (7-11yrs): able to perform conservation tasks, can perform mental operations (e.g. organisational tasks) on concrete/physical materials, poor performance on abstract or hypothetical mental operations
Jean Piaget’s formal operations stage
Formal operations (11yrs +): Able to perform hypothetical and abstract reasoning, able to think about abstract questions, e.g. ‘if..then’, pendulum tasks, meaning of life questions
Piaget’s theory pros
Children are not just miniature adults –> their understanding of the world differs fundamentally from adults
Learning is an active process –> this had an influence on education
Enabled today cognitive development to explore general cognitive processes that may cut across multiple domains of knowledge, thereby accounting for cognitive development in terms of fewer - and more - parsimonious - underlying processes
Piaget’s theory cons
Stage-like changes –> too rigid
Universality:
* Western bias
* Context not sufficiently considere
What is a the result of cognitive change in children?
Cognitive change is a result of children’s need to achieve equilibration ( maintaining a balance between our experience of the world and our understanding of it)
When children are in a state of cognitive equilibrium, they accomodate more than they assimilate
