Development psych people

Konrad Lorenz

A biologist who discovered that some infant animals become attached (imprint) on individuals or even objects they see during a critical period after birth

Harry Harlow

The researcher that raised baby monkeys with two artificial wire frame figures made to resemble mother monkeys; one mother had a bottle for the infant to eat from and the other was wrapped in soft material. It was found infant monkeys when frightened preferred the the soft mother figure over the mother who fed them, which demonstrated the importance of physical comfort in the formation of attachment to parents

Mary Ainsworth

Researched the idea of attachment with her 'strange situation' experiment; parents left their infants alone for a short period of time and then returned, resulting in the following reactions from the infant: secure attachments, avoidant attachments, and anxious/ambivalent attachments

Diana Baumrind

Researched parent-child interactions and described three categories of parenting styles: authoritarian parents, permissive parents, and authoritative parents

Lev Vygotsky

Developed the concept of "zone of proximal development" in response to the continuity vs discontinuity debate; specified that a child's zone of proximal development is the range of tasks the child can perform independently and those tasks the child needs assistance with

Sigmund Freud

The first psychologist the theorized that we pass through different stages in childhood; five psychosexual stages

Erik Erikson

A neo-Freudian who developed the psychosocial stage theory; thought that our personality was profoundly influenced by our experiences with others

Jean Piaget

The psychologist that developed his theory of cognitive development; described how children viewed the world through schemata, cognitive rules we use to interpret the world

Alfred Binet

Creator of the first intelligence test

Lawrence Kohlberg

Developed a stage theory that studied development in morality with the purpose of wanting to describe how our abilities to reason about ethical situations changed over our lives

Carol Gilligan

A researcher who criticized Kohlberg's theory of moral development for assuming that boys and girls come to moral conclusions in the same way