Psych 210 Exam 2

Neurons

Form a communication network that allow the brain and the nervous system to communicate with each other

Synapse

A gap between two neurons where messages are sent across from one neuron to another

Neurotransmitters

Chemical messengers that cross the synaptic gap

Neurogenesis

• Formation of new neurons

• Most neurons are created about 6 months into pregnancy

Synaptogenesis

• Formation of new synapses

• Process that begins rapidly before birth and continues until about the age of 6. It slows down after 6 and continues for the rest of our lives

Synaptic Pruning

• Getting rid of unused synapses

• Our brain ends up getting rid of 40 percent of the synapses we develop

• Rids the brain of clutter and makes communication easier

• Use it or lose it policy/ road building

Myelination

• Insulating neurons

• Myelin - a fatty substance that coats the outside of the neuron in order to insulate it

• Allows the electrical current to pass through neurons faster

• Myelination occurs from the inside of our brains to the outside, it occurs first in the brain areas needed to survive.

  • Myelination of the prefrontal cortex happens relatively late. It controls logical thinking and reasoning, which is not necessary for survival.

Plasticity

The ability of the brain to adapt to its environment

Experience-Expectant Plasticity

• Changes in our brain that we are genetically prepared for

• Experiences that we expect everyone to have, so if you have a normal developmental experience, you will develop normally

• Hubert and Wiesel kitten experiment — kittens exposure to light impacted their development of vision.

  • Sensitive Periods: Development needs a certain amount of environmental stimulation to continue normally; a period of time when the brain is especially susceptible to stimuli

Experience-Dependent Plasticity

• How development can turn out differently based on different experiences

• One group of baby rats were raised into an enriching environment and another group were raised in a bare environment. The rats in the enriching environment developed more synapses and had a denser brain development

Visual Acuity

The ability to focus our vision to see things in greater and sharper detail; blurry vs. sharp vision

• Infants have low visual acuity

Preferential Looking Paradigm

Giving infants two similar but different looking stimuli. If they infant reliably looks at one stimuli over the other, then it is predicted that they can differentiate between the two. It is theorized that if they look at both equally, then they can differentiate between them.

Habituation

Decreases to sensitivity to stimuli that are repeated or constant over time

Contrast Sensitivity

The ability to detect differences in light areas and dark areas in a visual stimulus

• Infants have low contrast sensitivity; can only recognize different shades if it is drastic

Infants prefer to look at:

• Faces more than inanimate objects

• Human faces over animal faces

• Their mother’s face

Development of the senses

• Infants’ sense of hearing is working before they are born

  • Infants recognize and show a preference for their moms’ voice

• Infants can recognize their mothers’ scent

• Infants prefer sweet-tasing foods

  • Exposed to flavors of local food through the womb

Infant Reflexes

Rooting, sucking and swallowing, Moro, palmar grasp, stepping

Rooting

When touched, turn head in that direction and open mouth

• Lasts until four months

Sucking and Swallowing

When roof of mouth is stimulation

• Lasts until two months

Moro

Startle Response — Throwing head back, extending arms, and bringing them back in quickly

• Lasts until three months

Palmar Grasp

Clasping fingers around an object that touches the palm

• Lasts until six months

Stepping

Dancing with feet when upright and feet on a surface

• Lasts until 3 months

Myelination of Motor Neurons is….

Cephalocaudal and proximodistal

Cephalocaudal

Refers to growth and development that proceeds from the head-to-tail/ top-to-bottom

1. Head & Neck

2. Neck & Shoulders

3. Shoulders

4. Arms & Chest

5. Hips

6. Thighs

7. Legs

8. Feet

Proximodistal

Development from the center of the body to the extremities

1. Torso

2. Arms/Legs

3. Hands/Feet

4. Fingers/Toes

Visual Cliff

Eleanor Gibson found that infants can perceive depth, but do not show fear of the “drop off” until they are experienced at crawling

Piaget’s Approach to Cognitive Development

Children are trying to actively understand experiences which drives cognitive development

Schemas

Mental representations of a concept; the storage of ideas in our mind

What are the driving forces behind cognitive development?

Maturation and Experience — part of cognitive development is developing and refining our schemas over time

Assimilation

Using what we already know to categorize information

Accommodation

When we don’t know something and need to create a new schema

Stages of Cognitive Development

• Object Permanence - the knowledge that objects continue to exist even when they are out of sight

• Egocentrism — the inability to understand things from someone else’s perspective

• Conservation — the understanding that the amount of something

• Hypothetico-Deductive Reasoning — ability to form hypotheses about the world and reason logically about those hypotheses

Criticisms of Piaget

1. People don’t apply stage-relevant reasoning across the board; e.g. you don’t need formal operations to solve every problem

2. Cognitive development continues into early adulthood— dialectical thought (problems have more than one solution) and pragmatism (practicality) are proposed to be additional stages

Vygotskian Theory

Learning and development is a result of cultural phenomena

1. Cultural Influences

2. Social Interactions

Zone of Proximal Development

Children can accomplish a task above their capabilities if they have the guidance by a more cognitively developed person

Scaffolding

Children use the knowledge of others to scaffold their own development — only temporary as they remove this scaffolding when they have learned the knowledge themselves

Private Speech

Talking oneself through a behavior to remind oneself about what you’re supposed to be doing

Spelke’s Theory of Core Knowledge

Humans are born with innate cognitive systems that prepare us to understand certain aspects of the world

Violation of Expectation Procedure

Infants look longer at events that violate their core knowledge

Criticisms of Core Knowledge Theory

1. Just because knowledge is present early on doesn’t mean it’s innate

2. What about the role in culture in shaping knowledge? Wouldn’t different cultures have different sets of core knowledge?

Information Processing Theory

• Metaphor: brain as a computer

• Componential approach: developing “components of thoughts”

Selective Attention

Our ability to focus on relevant info and ignore irrelevant information

Sustained Attention

Our ability to maintain focus or awareness over time; how long we are able to pay attention

Automaticity

The ability to do things automatically, without having to think about them.

Frees up more processing capacity (how much our brain can process over time)

Multitasking = a myth

• Just attention shifting; brain is unable to focus on two unrelated tasks at once

• “Multitasking” increases in adolescence and is related to texting and driving and poorer performance on school work

What did the Rovee-Collier study demonstrate about infants’ memory?

Infants develop an increase in length of memory

The experiment had babies’ legs attached to a spinning decoration over their bed, when they kicked the device spun

• 3 months old remembered to kick for a week

• 18 months old remembered to kick for 13 weeks

What does it mean that infants’ memories are context-specific?

Infants cannot apply what they learned in one situation to other situations

What is infantile amnesia? Why does it happen?

Infantile Amnesia is the inability to remember experiences before the age of three, has to do with language

Magic Shrinking Machine Study - found that children have operational memories but are unable to describe these memories

Memory in childhood

Increases in working memory capacity — our ability to mentally manipulate info, and use that info to solve problems

Increases in processing speed — the quickness of which we can perform cognitive tasks

Executive Functioning

Coordination of attention, memory, an behavior to achieve a goal

Begins during early childhood (ages 4/5)

Cognitive Flexibility

The ability to shift thinking and see situations from multiple perspectives

Inhibitory Control

The ability to stop, pause, or control impulses, behaviors, and automatic responses

Intelligence includes the abilities to…

• Learn from experience

• Solve problems

• Use Knowledge to adapt

Charles Spearman’s Theory of Intelligence

• Believed that intelligence is just one general ability, the g-factor

• G-factor—an overarching ability that influences everything we do and influences every type of intelligence

Crystallized Intelligence

Refers to the accumulation of knowledge and skills acquired through experience and education, such as vocabulary and general knowledge

Increases and improves throughout the lifespan

Fluid Intelligence

Encompasses the ability to reason, think abstractly, and solve problems in novel situations

Peaks @ 19 y.o.

Analytical Intelligence

The ability to solve well-defined problems that have one, single answer

Creative Intelligence

Our ability to adapt well to new situations; the ability to create, design, invent, and imagine

Practical Intelligence

Dealing with everyday problems that are ill-defined and have multiple solutions that each have advantages and disadvantages

Which type of intelligence do schools emphasize?

Analytical intelligence

Divergent Thinking

Involves thinking “outside of the box”; exploring multiple possible solutions to a problem or multiple possible meanings to a concept

Convergent Thinking

Using all of the information we have to find one correct answer

Howard Gardner’s 9 Multiple Intelligences

Human intelligence is not a single, general ability (IQ), but rather a composite of at least nine distinct, relatively independent types. This framework highlights that individuals possess varying strengths and learn in unique way.

Mental Age (Alfred Binet)

A measure of a individual’s intellectual performance based on the average performance of their specific age group

Used to identify children who were falling behind and needed to be moved to specialized schools

Intelligence Quotient (IQ)

(Mental age divided by chronological age) x 100

The average IQ score is 100

Age Norms in IQ

An individual's score is compared against peers of the same age

What does it mean if a characteristic (like intelligence) is normally distributed?

Normally distributed means scores follow a symmetrical, bell-shaped curve where most people (about 68%) score near the average (100), with fewer individuals having very high or very low scores

Our intelligence is both the result of ______ and ______

Nature and nurture

What characteristics of teachers promote the best achievement?

• Responsive — teacher cares about students; is warm and sensitive to students

• Demandingness — the extent to which teachers challenge their students; sets challenging but realistic goals

What is the relationship between class size and achievement?

Smaller class sizes are not necessarily better for achievement

• In elementary school, small classes = better for achievement

• Past elementary school, class size doesn’t make a difference in achievement.

  • The sweet spot for class size is between 20-40 students

What is the relationship between gender & achievement?

Girls are higher achieving, but they have lower performance in STEM testing (which may be influenced by stereotypes)

What is the relationship between race/ethnicity & achievement?

There is a gap in performance between White, Black, and Latino students

Why? — expectancy effects, self-fulfilling prophecy, stereotype threat

Expectancy Effects

• The impacts that expectations have on behavior

• Stereotypes about someone’s pursuit of achievement may impact their achievement

• Different treatment in education may influence a student’s achievement — teachers tend to have lower expectations for their poor and low income students

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

When expectations change our behavior and causes these expectations to come true

• (if you expect someone to be bad, you treat them bad, and they treat you bad in response)

Stereotype Threat

The fear that we might confirm a negative stereotype of a group we belong to, which leads to less achievement due to performance anxiety

Poverty has a ______ (strong/weak) correlation with achievement

Strong

Head Start Program

Educational program that starts at 3. The idea behind this program is to help impoverished students and give them resources to confront the problems associated with poverty — not a “magic cure all,” once the program is over the support disappears and some children do not benefit

Extrinsic Motivation

External Motivation; because it can provide something in exchange

Intrinsic Motivation

Motivation that comes from internal factors; because it provides personal satisfaction

Does extrinsic motivation increase or reduce intrinsic motivation?

Reduce

What’s the difference between mastery motivation, a helpless orientation, & a performance orientation?

• Mastery Motivation: believe that mastering/achieving something is the result of hard work; work toward mastering something/goal and believe that hard work is required to get there

• Helpless Orientation: believe that innate ability is the most important thing in achievement; if a task is too challenging, they think that they must not have an innate ability to do it and give up

• Performance Orientation: motivated to win and achieve at all costs; don’t care about mastery, only care about success and achievement (e.g. motivated by good grades)

What’s the difference between a fixed mindset & a growth mindset?

• Fixed Mindset: abilities are stable; leads to failure avoidance and lower achievement

• Growth Mindset: abilities can improve; leads to resilience, effort and high achievement

Self-Efficacy

Belief in ability for success

What can we do to encourage students’ achievement?

1. Setting goals

2. Give kids resources and experiences to succeed

3. Parenting/Teaching — challenge the child; high expectations = increased achievement