Infancy and Childhood Midterm Study Guide

Central Themes and Issues in Developmental Psychology

-Nativism/Empiricism

-Continuity/Discontinuity

-Normative Development/Individual Differences

-Grand theories vs. Mini-theories

-Competence/Performance

-Significance of Context

Nativism vs. Empiricism:

-Longstanding debate concerning origins of knowledge

-Nativism: focus on knowledge, capacities present at birth

-Empiricism: focus on importance of experiences in knowledge aquisition

Different "flavors" of Nativism:

-Knowledge structure: innate grammer, core knowledge

-Heuristics: inborn biases affecting how knowledge is acquired or organized

-General processes of knowledge acquisition: equilibration processes in Piaget

Continuity/Discontinuity:

-Continuous Development: accumulation of small changes, usually quantitative - change in degree/amount

-Discontinuous Development: series of abrupt changes at different points in development, usually qualitative - change in kind/structure

Normative Development vs. Individual Differences:

-Normative Development: general age trends characteristic of a population, what typical individuals are like at a given age

-Individual differences: variation between inividuals within a population, how (and why) do individuals differ from each other/show different developmental trajectories?

"Grand Theories" vs. "Mini-Theories"

-Many classic theories (very) broad in scope (e.g., Piaget's stage theory), extend across different ages, explain wide range of facets of behavior (e.g., all cognition)

-Contemporary theories are more localized, specific, limited in age range and phenomena that explain

Domain-General vs. Domain-Specific:

-Does development involve an all-purpose processor (e.g., a computer metaphor), domain-general

OR

-A number of specialized systems (e.g., swiss army knife metaphor), domain-specific

Competence vs. Performance:

-Competence: knowledge or understanding

vs.

-Performance: what child is able to demonstrate in a given task

What is the Competence vs. Performance challenge of inferring underlying competencies from overt behavior?

-All behavior are reflections of MULTIPLE processes

-There is no 'pure' test measure of a psychological process

What were the main assumptions of Piaget?

-Action realism

-Domain generality

-Stages

-Late representation

Action realism:

-Children actively construct knowledge through interacting with the environment

Domain generality:

-Children's knowledge is general, NOT domain-specific (e.g., spatial domain, number domain)

Stages:

-Development follows a sequence of discontinuous stages

Late representation:

-Infants under 18 months do not have the capacity for mental representation

What are some theorietical perspectives since Piaget?

-Core knowledge

-Evolutionary perspective

-Information processing

-Statistical learning

-Dynamic systems

-Neo-constructivist

Core knowledge:

-Infants are born with innate "core knowledge" representational systems (e.g., number, space) that allow them to make inferences about the world

Evolutionary perspective:

-Infants' complex, innate competencies (such as language) are inherited products of evolution

Information processing:

-Computer is the metaphor for mental activity (input, processing, applying information)

-Development entails improved processing capacities (e.g., memory capacity)

Statistical learning:

-Infants are sensitive to the frequency of events in the environment and can use probabilistic reasoning to anticipate certain outcomes (e.g., word boundaries)

Dynamic systems:

-Development entails the complex, dynamic interaction of multiple systems, which leads to the emergence of new forms of behavior (less emphasis on higher order, top-down processes)

Neo-constructivism:

-An attempt to reconcile Piaget's constructivist approach with the empirical evidence for greater sophistication in infant cognition

-Less continuous than core knowledge (emphasis on conceptual change)

-Leans more domain-general

-Appreciate earlier infant cognitive competence than Piaget

Tools used to study early development:

-Involuntary (or obligatory) responses

-Voluntary responses

-Psychophysiology

-Questionnaires/Interviews

Involuntary responses:

-Engaged in with limited conscious thought or effort

-Many measures in infant cognition research utilize looking time/eye-tracking (e.g., habituation/dishabituation, violation-of-expectation)

Voluntary responses:

-Measures use conscious, deliberate actions

-Researchers may ask older infants/toddlers with more motor control to make a choice (reaching for an object) or have older children complete a task (e.g., solving a puzzle or playing with a toy)

Psychohysiology:

-Measures using biological data (e.g., brain activity (such as EEG), heart rate, hormone levels)

Questionnaires/Interviews:

-Can obtain verbal responses from parents (e.g., Child Behavior Checklist) or children (e.g., Empathy Questionnaire for Children and Adolescents)

Research Designs:

-Correlational studies

-Experimental

-Cross-sectional

-Longitudinal

-Sequential

Correlations:

-Examines the relationship between variables (do they vary together?), strength or relationship, direction of relationship

-Correlations can be: positive (as one increases, so does the other), negative (as one increases, the other decreases) and zero (no relationship between variables)

Limitations of Correlations:

-Can't determine causality

-X could cause Y or vice versa

-3rd variable problem

Experimental design:

-Allows researchers to assess causality by deliberately manipulating variables

-Essential components: manipulation of independent variable, and random assignment to condition

Common research designs in developmental psychology:

-Longitudinal design: studies the same people repeatedly over a period of time

-Cross-sectional design: studies different groups of people (i.e. different age groups) at a single time

Longitudinal advantages:

-Examines changes within individuals over time

-Provides a developmental analysis

Longitudinal disadvantages:

-Expensive

-Takes a long time

-Participant attention

-Possiblity of practice effects

-Cannot examine cohort effects

Cross-sectional advantages:

-Examines changes between participants of different ages at the same point in time

-Provide information on age-related change

Cross-sectional disadvantages:

-Cannot examine change over time

-Cannot examine cohort effects

Sequential design:

-Follow different birth samples longitudinally over time

-Design makes it possible to estimate age changes over the 40 year age period from age 30 to age 70 while controlling for cohort

Sequential advantages:

-Examines changes within individuals over time

-Examines changes between paricipants of different ages at the same point in time

-Can be used to examine cohort effects

Sequential disadvantages:

-May be expensive

-Possibility of practice effects

Cohort effects:

-Differences between groups based on their lived experience (e.g., living through different periods in history)

Guidelines for research ethics:

-Informed consent

-Avoidance of harm (weighed against potential benefits)

-Debriefing

-IRB particularly stringent with child studies b/c they are a "vulnerable population"

IRB decision example:

-Kochanska's "broken toy" experiment

Genes:

-Basic unit of inheritance

-Contain instructions that guide the formation of the individual's traits

-To be more concrete, they are specific sequences of DNA

Genotype:

-An individual's particular set of genes

Phenotype:

-An individual's traits and characteristics (arising from genes X environment)

Heredity:

-Transmission of biological characterics from one generation to the next

Heritability:

-Degree of variability in a particular phenotype due to genetic variability within a population

Most traits result from what?

-Polygenic inheritance and multifactoral transmission

Polygenic inheritance:

-Inheritance that results from multiple genes

Multifactoral transmission:

-Depends on multiple factors, both genetic and environmental

Behavioral genetics:

-Studies contributions of heredity to psychological/behavioral traits, including: psychopathology (e.g., schizophrenia, depression), intelligence, and personality

Methods used in behavioral genetics to study heritability:

-Twin studies

-Adoption studies

-Identical twins rearded apart

Twin studies:

-Compare similarity between identical MZ (monozygotic) and fraternal DZ (dizygotic) twins

Monozygotic twins:

-One zygote before splitting off within the first few weeks

-Basically genetically identical

Dizygotic twins:

-Two separate ova fertilized by two separate sperm

-No more similar genetically than siblings born at different times

Adoption studies:

-Studies children reared apart from parents

-Assess whether children are more similar to their biological or adoptive relatives (e.g., compare children and their adoptive or biological parents)

Identical twins reared apart:

-Famous example of this is Bouchard's Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart

-Case of the "Jim Twins", who shared many amusing, coincidental similarities (e.g. marrying women who had the same name)

-More systematic testing revealed great similarity in personality, attitudes, and interests

Gene X environment interaction:

-Growing consensus that not accurate to talk about genes vs. environment

-Traits not just multifactoral, but real gene x environment interactions, the product of the two (not just how much of one versus the other independently)

GWAS:

-Genome wide association studies approach

Example of GWAS approach:

-Genes and years of formal schooling

-Research discovers 1,271 genetic variations associated with how long people stay in school

Early nonhuman example of G x E:

-Cooper & Zubeck, 1958

-Rats bred to be "maze dull" or "maze bright"

-Reared in "enriched" vs. "impoveroshed" evironments

-Dull rats in "enriched" condition improved greatly and did not differ significantly from bright rats

How do genes interact with the environment at the biological level?

-Epigenetics and methylation

Epigenetics:

-Changes in the expression of the gene (as opposed to the modification of the genetic code itself)

-Idea is that some genes can be present, but not expressed or "silenced"

Methylation:

-Process that transfers a methyl group to molecules like DNA, proteins, and neurotransmitters to regulate cellular functions

Example of Methylation:

-To use Champagne & Mashood's (2009) metaphor of DNA as books in a library, methyl chemical groups like pieces of furniture blocking access to them

Different forms of gene x environment interactions

-Active and evocative

Active:

-Genetic endowment leads to "niche-seeking"

Evocative:

-Genetic endowment leads to eliciting certain reactions from others (which may reinforce the trait)

Intergenerational transmission:

-Parents' genes indirectly affect children via the environment they provide (which is affected by their own genes)

Determinism vs. probabilistic risk:

-Polygenic scores only predict group-level probabilistic trends NOT deterministic outcomes for specific individuals

Prenatal development periods:

-Germinal period: fertilization - 2 weeks

-Embryonic period: 3 weeks - 8 weeks

-Fetal period: 9 weeks - birth

Organogenesis:

-The formation of organs

Key factors to consider in prenetal development:

-Nutrition

-Teratogens

-Stress

Prenatal nutrition:

-A number of vital nutrients and edequate caloric intake

-Folates particularly important (neural rube development)

Dangers of teratogens:

-Environmental agents that can cause deviations from normal development and can lead to abnormalities or death

Prenatal stress:

-Maternal stress associated with risks for fetus (e.g., premature birth)

-Stress hormones pass through placenta

Basic forms of learning:

-Habituation

-Conditioning: classical, operant

Ruling out learning that may have occured after birth:

-Test as soon as possible

-Control group with no prenatal exposure (experimental design)

Differences between experience in the intrauterine environment and outside world:

-Ex. sounds heard differently in womb

-Process sounds through (low-pass) fulter, some evidence shows preferred by newborns

Conclusions about prenatal learning:

-There is some compelling evidence for prenatal learning in particular, auditory

-Though limited number of rigorous studies

-Less known about mechanism, processes (how it occurs)

What is the classic Piagetian view?

-Acquisition of knowledge

-Emerges in interaction with environment (combination of nature/nurture)

Acquisition of knowledge:

-Guided by senses and motor behavior (sensorimotor intelligence)

-Based on Piaget's stage theory

-Representational thinking does not begin until around 18 months

Object permanence:

-Understanding that an object continues to exist even when not visible

-Important indicator of representational/symbolic thought

-Based on Piaget's method/observations, it doesn't occur until 8 months

What does modern infancy research show about object permanence?

-Evidence has been shown that the capacity for object permanence occurs at a much earlier age

Infant cognition and use of subtle, nonverbal response tasks:

-Dishabituation

-Anticipatory looking (AL)

-Violation of expectation (VoE)

What is one interpretation of infants and object permanence?

-Infants seen as having innate concepts

-E.g., Infants as born with conception of objects as spatially bounded entities that exist in time & space

-In line with a resurgence of nativism (theoretical perspectives that propose innate knowledge)

Evolutionarily significant "core knowledge systems":

-Exist and form foundations for later cognitive development

-These inborn knowledge systems involve sets of abstract principles that guide (and constrain) use in our interpretations of: objects, action/agency, number, space, and social interactions

Actions and agency:

-What distinguishes an agent from an object?

-Principles: goal-directedness, efficiency, contingency

Number:

-Imprecise (especially as get larger)

-Abstract (can be represented in multiple modalities)

-Capable of being added/subtracted (can perform operations on them)

Infants and social affiliations:

-Infants show an early sensitivity to social affiliations and preference for ingroup members

-Inborn "native sociology"?

Do infants expect members of a social group to act alike?

-Powell and Spelke (2013) measured looking time directed toward groups of animated figures

-Found that infants as young as 7 months expect members of a group to behave in a similar way and are surprised when they don't

Schema:

-Representation of the perceptual features of an event

-Based on repeated exposures to same class of events

Semantic structures:

-Involve meaning & conceptual entailments

-Hierarchically nested categories for objects & events

-Goes beyond basic perceptual features

Analogical reasoning in early infants:

-Three-month-olds habituated to toys with either same relationship (same toys) OR different relationship (different toys)

Piaget's Theory of Cognitive Development:

-"Lean" development starting points (late representation)

-Infants knowledge is limited to senses and movement (sensorimotor) - not mental representation

-Development occurs through discrete stages (stage theory)

-Knowledge constructed through interactions with the environment

Core Knowledge Theory:

-"Rich" starting points (nativist)

-Infants are born with certain types of knowledge (objects, agents, numbers, space, social)

-Less emphasis on qualitative (build on core knowledge - more continuous)

-Core knowledge applied when infants encounter entities (e.g., objects, agents)

Violation of expectation:

-Paradigm that provided probably the most lethal empirical tool in the questioning of Piaget's four basic assumptions

Developmental (Piagetian) approach to intelligence:

-Focus on general trends in how kids' solve problems at different ages

Psychometric approach to intelligence:

-Assessing individual differences in intelligence via intelligence tests

More on the psychometric approach:

-Great variability in how intelligence conceptualized

-Single-factor approach - 'g' or general intelligence

-Multiple factors: Sternberg's Triarchic theory, Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences

Bayley scales:

-Developed as a test of infant and toddler intellectual functioning

-Good for tracking norm-graded developmental changes

-Primarily used to diagnose developmental delays

-Not great for predictive individual differences in intelligence later in life