Psychology Test 2

Developmental psychology

Study of change/continuity over a life span

Teratogens

Agents that negatively affect development (i.e. drugs and alchohol)

Not always chemical - extreme neglect can damage growth

Are stages dependent on what infants can or can’t do?

CAN’T do

Prenatal Stage

2 week period that begins at conception

Zygote

A fertilized egg that contains chromosomes from both a sperm and an egg

Embryonic stage

Period from 2nd week until about the 8th week

Cells continue to divide and differentiate

Important systems developing

Very sensitive to harmful stimuli

Fetus stage

Period from 9th week until birth

Fetus growing stronger and larger, body organs maturing

What do infants develop physically?

The ability to execute motor actions (i.e. crawling and grasping)

Dynamic systems theory

The view that development is a self-organizing process, in which new forms of behavior emerge through consistent interactions between a biological being and cultural and environmental contexts

Cognitive development

The development of the ability to think and understand

4 stages of cognitive development according to Piaget’s Theory

Sensorimotor, pre-operational, concrete operational, formal operational

Schema

Theories about, or models of, the way the world works

Ways of thinking based on experience

How do stages of development build on previous ones?

Assimilation: New information is folded into existing schema

Accommodation: New information forces child to create new schema or overhaul an existing one.

Sensorimotor stage

Birth to 2 years

First develop schemas

Key cognitive limitation - object permanence

Pre-operational stage

Age 2 to 7 years

Children have a preliminary understanding of the world

Key limitations: egocentrism: the failure to understand that the world appears differently to different observers; errors of conservation: not understanding that even if a substance’s appearance changes, its quantity may remain unchanged (cups of water test)

Concrete operational stage

Age 7 to 12 years

Children learn how various actions or “operations” can affect or transform “concrete” objects

Understand that they have minds with mental representations of the world

Key limitation: still not capable of abstract thought

Formal operational stage

Age 12 to adulthood

Can solve non-physical problems

Capable of systematic reasoning about abstract concepts

False-Belief Task (Sally Anne)

Shows whether a child understands that minds of other people are different from their own (theory of mind)

Theory of mind

the ability to infer what another person is thinking/feeling

Language is important for ToM development

Social referencing

Looking to other people’s reactions to inform your own

Imitation

Ability to do what another person does (achieving goals another person has achieved)

Joint attention

Shift of your attention to what another person is paying attention to

Moral development - Piaget’s three stages

Realism to Relativism, Prescriptions to Principles, Outcomes to Intentions

Realism to Relativism

Right vs wrong is objective —> morality is relative, not univerally the same

Prescriptions to Principles

Learning what they can/can’t do from parents, morality is only derived from rules —> principles, knowing WHY something is wrong

Outcomes to Intentions

Focusing on the outcome of a situation and depending morality on it —> focusing on the intentions behind people’s choices

Secure attachment (60%)

Confident enough to play in an unfamiliar environment as long as a caregiver is present

Readily comforted by the caregiver in times of distress

Insecure attachment (40%)

Avoidant - not distressed when caregiver leaves, ignores caregiver upon return

Anxious/Resistant (aka ambivalent) - almost always distressed when caregiver leaves, inconsolable when caregiver returns

Temperments

Biologically based personality tendencies

Characteristic patterns of activity level, emotionality, and sociability

Stable and predictive of adult behavior

Sensation

Detection of external energy by sense organs

Transduction

Converting external energy to neural signals

Neurons converting into action potential, neural signals = sensory coding

Perception

Construction of interpretation, conscious percept by the brain

Psychophysics

Quantifying sensation and perception (ie. absolute threshold)

Absolute threshold

Minimum level of sensation it would take for you to notice (50% of the time)

Difference threshold

Just Noticeable Difference (JND) in sensation

About ratio of change, not absolute intensity

Signal Detection Theory

Detection of stimulus requires a judgement - not an all or nothing process

Noise

Anything that obscures the stimulation you are trying to detect

Response bias

Tendency to or not to detect

Liberal response bias - tendency to think there is more stimulus

Conservative response bias - tendency to not think there is stimulus

Adaptation

Sensory system is sensitive to change in environment —> diminished response in consistent stimulation

Acuity

Ability to discriminate between stimuli, sharpness/sensitivity of senses

Higher acuity = smaller receptive fields closer together, more smaller receptive fields in center of eye/periphery

Accomodation

Process by which lens change shape to focus on the images in the retina

Retina

Sheet of photosensitive cells at the back of eye

Contains ganglion cells and rods and cones

Fovea

Region of retina where vision is sharpest (highest acuity)

Rods

Very sensitive to light, no rods in fovea

Cones

Less sensitive to light, 3 sub-types (Short (Blue-Violet), Medium (Yellow-Green), and Long (Red-Orange))

Retinal Ganglion Cells (RGCs)

Collects info from photoreceptors and sends to the rest of the brain

Primary vision pathway

Info from visual field is sent to contralateral brain hemisphere - first processed in LGN then sent to primary visual cortex

Ventral stream (visual processing stream)

“What” pathway

Object identification and recognition (“that is a ___”)

Dorsal stream

“Where” pathway

Spacial location (there is something there)

Object agnosia

Demonstrates the difference between what and where/”how” pathway

Damage to “what” pathway —> dial lock

Optic ataxia

Damage to “where” pathway not “what” pathway, unclear where objects are

The Binding Problem

How are different aspects of vision (color, shape, etc.) bound together to be seen/processed at the same time

Feature integration theory

Attention is the “glue” that binds features

Not necessary for detection, but is necessary for binding

Perceptual constancy

Brain expects constancy in vision

Depth perception

Seeing distance, seeing the world in 3D

Image projected onto retina in 2D as it is a sheet

Binocular depth cues

Based on angle of offset between each eye’s vision; creates 3 dimensions when converging together

Monocular depth cues

Occlusion, Relative size, linear perspective, texture gradient, position relative to horizon line

Occlusion

Things blocking others behind

Relative size

Expectations of normal sizes of things

Linear perspective

Parallel lines converging

Texture gradient

Ability to see different textures

Position relative to horizon line

Closer to horizon = further

Bottom-up processing

Data is relayed in the brain from lower to higher levels of processing

Top-bottom processing

Information at higher levels of processing can influence lower, “earlier” levels in the processing hierarchy

What we expect to see influences what we do see

Consciousness

A person’s subjective experience of the world and the mind

All associated with brain activity and are different and similar

Variations in consciousness occur naturally (i.e. sleep)

Levels of consciousness

Brain death/coma, vegetative state (arousal, now awareness)

Minimally conscious (arousal, awareness that comes and goes)

Locked-in syndrome (Normal arousal and awareness but have no control of body

Left hemisphere function

“The Interpreter", makes sense of the world

Right hemisphere function

Experiences the world, takes in information as is

Inattentional blindness

Not noticing things that you are not focused on

Change blindness

Failure to detect changes to the visual details of a scene

REM atonia

State of paralysis during sleep

Sleep paralysis happens when REM atonia continues after waking