Developmental Psychology Midterm II

Constructivism

Piaget’s theoretical approach. It is the idea that the child plays an active role in constructing their own knowledge.

Cognition

The knowing and the process of acquiring knowledge. It includes attention, perception, learning, thinking, and memory.

Cognitive Development

The study of changes in knowledge that are age-related. Children are seen as active, learning many important lessons on their own, and are intrinsically motivated to learn.

Intelligence

A basic life function that enables an organism to adapt to its environment and change its brain to match whatever environment it is born into.

What is intelligence?

It comes in the form of schemes, organized patterns of thought that change with age from motor-based to idea-based, and reflect a match between thought and environment known as cognitive equilibrium.

Cognitive Equilibrium

Everything is copacetic. A match between thought processes and one’s environment, when what is believed to be true about the world is true.

What happens when there is a mismatch between thought and environment?

That is where learning happens. When there is a mismatch, it pushes adaptation and organization of what is in the mind.

Adaptation

The tendency to respond to the demands of the environment to meet one’s goals.

Organization

The tendency to integrate particular observations into coherent knowledge.

Forms of adaptation

Assimilation and accommodation

Assimilation

The process by which people translate incoming information into a form they can understand. It involves fitting new information into an existing schema and adjusting understanding without changing the original framework.

Ex) This makes knowledge more accurate, such as recognizing a new kind of dog as still being a dog.

Accomodation

The process by which people adapt their current knowledge structure in response to new experiences that do not fit existing schemas. It occurs when information violates what is already known.

Ex) When a child thinks a furry animal is a dog but learns it meows and is actually a cat, requiring them to adjust their concept of “dog.”

How do you gain intelligence?

Intelligence develops through a continuous cycle of equilibrium, assimilation, accommodation, and organization. Each new equilibrium represents a smarter, more accurate understanding of reality.

Piaget’s view of learning

Children are active participants in their development and build their knowledge by acting on objects to understand their properties. They are constructivists who experience universal changes in intellectual growth, using a small set of mental ingredients to create increasingly complex understanding.

Invariant developmental sequence

Cognitive development occurs in a fixed, hierarchical order where each stage builds on the one before it. Development moves from simple motor actions to abstract thinking.

Stage 1: Sensorimotor Stage (0–2 years)

Characterized by circular reactions, intentional behaviors, and early problem solving. The goal is to move from behavioral schemas to symbolic understanding.

Stage 2: Preoperational Stage (2–7 years)

Symbolic thought becomes available, but children cannot yet perform mental operations. Magical thinking decreases during this stage.

Stage 3: Concrete Operational Stage (7–11 years)

Children become logical, flexible, and organized thinkers but can only apply these operations to real or concrete information.

Stage 4: Formal Operational Stage (12 years and beyond)

Thinking becomes abstract and hypothetical, shifting from operations on reality to operations on ideas themselves.

Three types of schemes

There are three main types: behavioral, symbolic, and operational. Each represents a different way of organizing and expressing knowledge.

Behavioral schema

Patterns of behavior used to represent an experience. These are the earliest and simplest forms of knowledge, expressed through motor actions.

Ex) when an infant repeatedly drops a set of keys and waits for someone to pick them up, they are demonstrating an understanding that objects fall and will be retrieved.

Symbolic schema

Internal mental symbols are used to represent an experience. These allow thinking without direct action, such as reading or understanding numbers, or picturing an object in one’s head.

Operational Schema

Internal mental activities are performed on objects of thought. These act on symbolic schemas, like verbs applied to nouns in the mind.
Ex) Imagining smushing a banana and then putting it back in its peel demonstrates understanding of what is and isn’t possible.

Object permanence

Knowing that objects continue to exist even when they cannot be seen. This understanding develops during the sensorimotor period.
Ex) Infants enjoy peek-a-boo because they do not remember that your face still exists when it is hidden, so its reappearance feels surprising.

The A-not-B error

When presented with two wells, A and B, an infant repeatedly searches in A even after watching a toy be hidden in B. Infants aged 8–12 months make this error because they cannot hold the image of the object in their mind and only search where they last found it. This shows that they do not yet understand that objects exist independently of their immediate experience.

Renée Baillargeon’s research

Demonstrated that infants can recognize impossible events, revealing an early sense of object permanence.
Ex) Infants were shown a rotating screen that should have been blocked by a hidden object. When the screen appeared to pass through the object, infants looked longer, showing awareness that the event was impossible. Even at 3.5 months old, infants displayed this understanding.

Cuevas & Bell reaching experiment

Measured infants’ ability to locate hidden objects using both reaching and eye movements. The x-axis represented different ages, and the y-axis represented mean object permanence performance. Circles showed reaching accuracy, and squares showed where infants looked.
Ex) Younger infants often reached incorrectly to well A but looked toward the correct well B, showing they knew the object’s location even if their actions did not match.

Symbolic thinking

Includes language, pretend play, and drawing. Language relies on symbols, pretend play involves representing real activities through imagination, and drawing transitions from random scribbles to purposeful representations. This marks a major cognitive jump that connects the child more closely to older age groups.

Centration

The tendency to focus on one perceptually striking feature of an object or event while ignoring others.

Ex) In the liquid conservation task, a child focuses on height but ignores width, concluding that the taller glass has more liquid.

Types of centration

Egocentrism and failure of conservation

Egocentrism

A type of centration where children perceive the world solely from their own point of view. Their attention is centered on themselves and their own perspective.

Conservation and reversibility

Children in this stage fail to grasp that changing an object’s appearance does not change its essential properties. They struggle with reversibility, focusing on one dimension at a time and missing relationships between variables like weight and distance.

Inhelder and Piaget’s Pendulum Problem

A task designed to determine how children test variables like string length, weight, and dropping point to see what affects how long a pendulum takes to swing back and forth.

Ex) Children under age 12 often perform unsystematic experiments and draw incorrect conclusions because they fail to isolate one variable at a time.

Differences in Problem Solving for Piaget

Older children and adults in the formal operational stage test all logical possibilities systematically.

Ex) When combining four colors (white, red, blue, yellow), a concrete thinker lists only simple pairs like W+R or R+B, while a formal thinker includes all possible combinations, such as W+R+B+Y.

Piaget’s Educational Implications

Teaching should align with the child’s stage of cognitive development. Children learn best through physical and mental interaction with their environment, supported by activities and questions that make them reflect on their learning.

Critiques of Piaget’s Theory 

Piaget’s stage model portrays children’s thinking as more consistent than it truly is. Research shows infants and young children are more cognitively advanced than he proposed, and his theory underestimates the role of the social world in cognitive growth.

Core Knowledge Theory

Proposes that some knowledge is innate and that children are born with certain cognitive abilities that are more advanced than previously believed. These core domains of though help children quickly grasp new related information and are linked to evolutionary survival.

Core domains of thought (CKT)

Include face processing, physical understanding (objects and effects), numerosity, language, and psychological knowledge such as morality. Each domain represents specific, evolutionarily based knowledge that supports survival and learning.

Numerosity

Refers to an innate “number sense” allowing humans to represent quantities before verbal counting develops. This sense is present in infancy and shared with many animals.

Spelke’s Numerosity Experiments 

Exp 1: Infants were shown displays of 8 and 16 to test number discrimination. They looked longer at the new number (16) after habituation to 8, showing they could discriminate large differences (1:2 ratio)

Exp 2: When infants were tested on 8 vs. 12 dots (2:3 ratio), infants struggled to discriminate between the sets, suggesting that they can only distinguish numbers that are far apart in ratio 

Two Number Systems (CKT)

Infants and humans use two distinct systems for representing numbers:

• A nonverbal, innate system for approximate numerosity shared with nonhuman animals.

• A verbal system fro exact numerosity, unique to humans, that emerges around age 3 with counting

Puppet show experiment 

Infants watched a scene with one character helping someone and another hindering the same character up a hill. After repeated viewing, about 80% of infants chose the helpful character, suggesting an early, core sense of moral understanding.

Sociocultural approaches 

Emphasize the role of other people and cultural context in shaping children’s development. Learning happens through social interaction and participtation in shared cultural activities.

Guided Participation (Sociocultural approach)

A process in which more knowledgeable individuals organize activities so that less experienced individuals can engage at a higher level than they could alone.

Ex) A child attempting a task independently may plateau, but with a teacher’s support, the child can perform at a higher level.

Cultural Tools

The many products of human ingenuity (such as paper, pencils, and laptops)that enhance thinking and learning. Classrooms themselves are cultural inventions that allow teacher and student to work together within a shared sociocultural context.

Lev Vygotsky (1896)

Founder of the sociocultural approach to child development. He viewed children as social beings who develop through interaction with others who are eager to help them learn skills and understanding.

Social nature of learning (Sociocultural approach)

Children are social beings first. Knowledge is socially transmitted, and cognitive development differs across cultures depending on environment, available tools, and social practices.

Cultural influence on thinking (Sociocultural Approach)

How and what people think is shaped by their culture. Because each culture offers different tools, languages, and social norms, cognitive development varies from one culture to another.

View of development (Sociocultural Approach)

This approach sees development as continuous, with gradual, quantitative changes rather than distinct stages. Humans are unique for their strong tendency to teach one another and learn socially.

Vygotsky’s Core Theory

Children acquire their culture’s values, beliefs, and problem-solving strategies through collaborative dialogues with more knowledgeable members of society.

Vygotsky vs. Piaget

Vygotsky argued that cognitive development stems from social interaction and guided learning within the zone of proximal development, while Piaget believed it arises from a child’s independent exploration and construction of knowledge.

Developmental processes across cultures

Sociocultural theorists believe that many processes that produce development, such as guided participation, are universal across societies. However, the specific content of what children learn differs by culture, shaping how they think.

Mental functions & Culture (Sociocultural approach)

Young infants start with basic functions such as attention, sensation, perception, and memory. Humans are not born as blank slates but become more complex over time. Culture transforms basic mental processes into higher mental functions through tools of intellectual adaptation.

Memory Example

In literate societies, writing serves as a tool to enhance memory; people may write things down to remember them. In cultures without writing systems, other strategies, such as tying knots in string, can serve the same purpose. The tools available in a culture determine how inborn processes are developed into more advanced forms of thinking.

Cultural influence on mathematical thinking

Differences in language structure affect how children learn numbers.

Ex) In English, words for “teens” (11–19) do not follow a base-10 system and must be memorized, while Chinese numerals directly reflect the base-10 structure (11 = ten-one, 21 = two ten-one).

Cross-cultural math study

When 3- to 5-year-olds in the U.S. and China were asked, “How high can you count?”, there were no differences at age 3, but Chinese children outperformed U.S. children at ages 4 and 5. This difference was most apparent in understanding and recalling teen numbers, suggesting language structure influences early math development.

Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD)

This is where true learning happens. It represents the space between what a child can do alone and what they can do with help. Teachers or mentors stretch the learner’s cognitive abilities by providing just enough support to move them to the next level.

Scaffolding

A process in which a more competent person provides a temporary framework that supports a child’s thinking at a higher level than they could manage independently.

Ex) A good teacher offers guidance that gradually decreases as the child becomes more capable, removing the “scaffold” once the learner can perform the task alone.

Ex) A poor scaffolder either does too much of the work or fails to offer enough support for the learner to grow.

Information processing approach

A popular approach today that focuses on how our brain processes the information that comes in through our senses. To process means something enters, we do something to it, and it is converted into an output.

Metaphor of computation

Information-processing theories are based on the metaphor of the child as a computation system. Cognitive development arises as children gradually overcome processing limitations by increasing the efficient execution of basic processes, expanding content knowledge, and acquiring new strategies and knowledge.

Continuous Cognitive Change

Children’s brains are not qualitatively different from adults. Information-processing theorists view children as undergoing continuous cognitive change. Important changes are constantly occurring rather than being limited to special transition periods between stages, and growth happens in small increments rather than abruptly.

Sensory Memory

Refers to sights, sounds, and other sensations that are just entering the cognitive system and are briefly held in raw form until identified. It can hold small or moderate amounts of information for only a fraction of a second, and its capacity remains relatively constant over development.

Sensory Memory Experiment

Participants viewed a 3x4 array of letters flashed on a screen for 1/20 of a second. A tone then indicated which row to recall. When the tone sounded immediately, participants reported most letters correctly, but when delayed by one second, they recalled only about one-third.

Findings: People briefly maintain information in visual sensory memory, but the information is rapidly lost.

Working (Short-Term) Memory

A workspace in which information from the environment and relevant knowledge are brought together, attended to, and actively processed. It is limited in both capacity and duration, but its capacity and speed of operation increase greatly over childhood and into adolescence. Most people can hold about seven items for a short period.

Long-Term Memory

Refers to information retained on an enduring basis. It can hold an unlimited amount of information indefinitely, and its contents increase enormously over development.

How the Three Memory Systems Work Together

Sensory, working, and long-term memory systems all work together. They differ in how much information they can store, how long they can retain it, the neural mechanisms through which they operate, and their course of development.

Atkinson & Shiffrin (1968)

Proposed that working memory is active and interacts constantly with long-term memory through a two-way process (the “double-headed arrow”). To recall information, such as a license plate, one must pull it from long-term memory back into working memory, which is the only system that can produce output.

Working —> Longterm Memory Analogy

Long-term memory is like a saved document on a computer; it is silent and stored until accessed. Double-clicking the file represents pulling information into working memory, where it becomes active and usable again.

Executive control

Manages the movement of information across different types of memory. It regulates attention, selects strategies, and monitors the quality of output.

Processing speed

Refers to how fast we think. The speed with which children execute basic cognitive processes increases greatly over childhood due to both biological maturation and experience.

Biological processes behind processing speed

Two key contributors are myelination and increased connectivity among brain regions. Myelination, the fatty wrapping of axons, allows neural impulses to travel faster, improving mental efficiency.

Sources of Learning and Memory Development according to Information

Processing Theories

Processing Speed, Mental Strategies, Content Knowledge

Mental Strategies

Refers to the approaches the brain uses to solve problems. These strategies are a major source of learning and memory development. Several strategies like rehearsal and selective attention begin to appear between the ages of 5 and 8.

Rehearsal

The process of repeating information over and over to aid memory

Ex) Repeat phone numbers back in the day when you could only write down so you had to remember

Selective Attention

The process of intentionally focusing on information that is most relevant to the current goal

Utilization deficiency

When trying out a new strategy, performance may initially get worse before improving. The new strategy temporarily interferes with performance, but with continued use, it leads to better results.

Chunking

A memory strategy that involves grouping separate pieces of information into meaningful units or “chunks” to make them easier to remember.
Ex) Remembering 135246357468579 as 135 246 357 468 579 makes a long list of numbers more manageable.

Strategy development

Children are active problem solvers who use a variety of approaches to complete tasks. According to the overlapping-waves theory, children simultaneously hold multiple strategies for solving a problem. With age and experience, more successful strategies become dominant.

Overlapping-waves theory

Suggests that children benefit from using multiple strategies at once. Over time, they overproduce strategies and then gradually select the most efficient ones, a process similar to Darwinian selection.

Content knowledge

Refers to the amount of information already known in a given domain. Greater content knowledge improves memory span, learning speed, and the ability to extract meaning from new information.

Ex) A child who knows a lot about dinosaurs will learn new dinosaur facts more easily than an adult with little prior knowledge

Example: language learning (Content Knowledge)

People who already speak two or three languages find it easier to learn additional ones because of their existing linguistic content knowledge.

Example: chess expertise (Content Knowledge)

Adults typically have more general knowledge, but child chess experts have deeper knowledge in the chess domain.

Ex) On a graph, the blue line represents a random memory task where adults outperform children, showing the advantage of general content knowledge. The red line represents a chess-specific memory task where child experts outperform adults, showing that domain expertise can lead to better memory within that specific area. This demonstrates that the type of knowledge tested affects performance.

Domain-specific expertise

Demonstrates that memory performance depends on the area of expertise. Individuals remember more within domains where they have deeper knowledge.

Information processing and face processing

Adults outperform children at recognizing faces, possibly because they use different strategies.

Parts vs. configural processing

Parts processing involves analyzing individual facial features separately, while configural (holistic) processing integrates all parts at once, seeing the face as a whole.

Ex) Misaligning the top and bottom halves of faces helps reveal whether someone relies on holistic or part-based processing. Children use parts processing, while adults rely more on holistic processing, which improves speed and accuracy.

Language overview

Language is unique to humans; we are the only species that has evolved with this ability. While animals communicate through calls and gestures, humans use language as one specialized form of communication alongside facial expressions and emotional sounds.

Psycholinguistics

The scientific study of the structure and development of language. It focuses on understanding how humans acquire, produce, and comprehend language.

5 components of language

Phonology, Morphology, Semantics, Syntax, Pragmatics

Phenology

The sound system of a language and the rules for combining these sounds to produce meaningful units of speech

Phonemes

Any of the perceptually distinct units of sound in a specified language that distinguish one word form from another 

Ex) Japanese does not distinguish between “r” and “l,” while English speakers hear “rip” and “lip” as completely different words.

Voice onset time (VOT)

The difference in timing between when the lips release a sound and when the vocal cords start vibrating. For example, “buh” and “puh” are similar sounds but differ in when voicing begins.

Categorical Perception 

Although speech sounds vary continuously, the brain categorizes them into distinct phonemes. This allows listeners to perceive discrete sounds, even when the acoustic differences are subtle.

Acquired distinctiveness

People become better at perceiving sound differences that are important in their native language (e.g., English speakers distinguishing “lah” and “rah”).

Acquired Similarity

We become worse at perceiving properties that are not.

Ex) You lose the ability to understand phonemes in between those two sounds

Foreign Phoneme Perception (Spectograms)

Native English speakers hear two distinct Hindi “d” sounds as the same /d/ because English doesn’t require that distinction. Similarly, a Japanese speaker may not distinguish “r” from “l.” The brain groups unfamiliar variations into one familiar sound category.

Categorical perception experiment

In lab studies, participants hear sounds along a continuum between “b” and “p” (like “beach” to “peach”) and must decide which sound they hear. Results form a sigmoidal plot with an inflection point; the cutoff where listeners switch from hearing one sound to another. This cutoff varies based on experience, accent, and language exposure. Even when hearing imperfect pronunciations, people group sounds into one phoneme category.

Kuhl et al. (1992): sensitive period for phonemes

Newborns can hear phonemes from all languages but eventually lose this ability, and Kuhl’s work asked when this sensitive period occurs. It was thought to be around one year old, when babies usually say their first words.

Magnet effect in phoneme perception

The prototype of a category, the perfect phoneme, acts like a magnet and pulls neighboring speech sounds toward it so irregular sounds get heard as the same category.

Ex) For English speakers, /i/ can be treated as a prototype with a strong magnet effect, while /y/ is treated as a nonprototype.

Kuhl and Werker head turn method

Infants are taught through operant conditioning to turn their heads when a phoneme changes. A new sound is paired with a fun visual reward, and delays are added to test whether the infant can detect the change before the reward appears.

Ex) Using “ah” and “dah” and two different Hindi “dahs,” researchers found that 6 month old American and Swedish infants turned their heads to both native and non native contrasts, but 10 to 12 month old infants easily heard “dah” versus “ah” and not the two Hindi “dahs.”

Morphology

Specifies how words are formed from sounds, using units called morphemes that carry meaning, such as ing, ed, and s.

Ex) Walk and walked differ in meaning because of the added morpheme.