Child Development Final

What did Plato think were the most important goals of education?

Self-control and discipline.

Why was the Earl of Shaftsbury’s effort at social reform during the industrial revolution so important?

It brought about the first child labor laws (the Factory Act of 1833), which forbade the employment of children younger than 9 years of age.

What view is currently supported in the nature/nurture debate?

The bidirectional interaction of nature and nurture; they work together to shape development.

What term describes the physical, social, cultural, economic, and historical circumstances that make up a child's environment?

Sociocultural context.

What are the advantages of structured observations?

Ensures that all children being studied are encounter identical situations, allowing for direct comparison of different children's behavior.

Why are Romanian orphans who were young in the late 1980s and early 1990s studied by psychologists interested in development?

To examine the effects of early severe deprivation on development and whether the timing of adoption (nature of the environment) affects recovery.

Which philosophers viewed the child as a tabula rasa (or blank slate) for the purposes of development?

John Locke.

If an experimenter asks two students to separately view the videotape of a baby and record where they believe the baby is looking, then compares the two students' data, what is he calculating?

Interrater reliability.

If someone tests a group of children in the first grade, and then charts their progress when they reach the third, fifth, and then seventh grades, this research would best be described as an example of what kind of design?

Longitudinal design.

A researcher is quietly and unobtrusively observing how children play. What method is she using for gathering her data?

Naturalistic observation.

Why would an experimenter use a quasi-experimental design?

When random assignment is not possible or ethical (e.g., comparing children who have been abused vs. not abused).

In what type of study are cohort effects a problem because they can look like developmental effects?

Cross-sectional design.

What type of design allows you to actually MEASURE cohort effects, instead of just avoiding them or falling victim to them?

Cross-sequential (or Sequential) design.

What is present in a TRUE experiment but not necessarily in a quasi-experiment?

Random assignment of participants to groups.

If there is good reason to believe that your test for friendliness is actually testing friendliness, what kind of validity is this?

Construct validity.

If you assess jumping skill in your lab, and those results do a good job letting you know how well somebody will jump on the basketball court, what kind of validity has been satisfied?

External validity.

If you run an experiment and you can be sure that your manipulation is the thing that caused you to get a result, what kind of validity has been satisfied?

Internal validity.

What type of cell division produces germ cells?

Meiosis.

What is the most sensitive period during prenatal development?

The embryonic period (the first 2 to 8 weeks), when the major organs are being formed.

What is the relationship between REM sleep and age?

The proportion of REM sleep decreases significantly as a person gets older (newborns spend about 50% of sleep in REM).

What auditory preferences does a newborn have, based on prenatal experience?

Newborns prefer the sound of their mother’s voice and the language they heard in the womb.

During what time of pregnancy would teratogens be the most dangerous?

During the sensitive period of organogenesis (the embryonic period).

How does a fetus get exposed to different tastes?

By swallowing amniotic fluid, which contains flavors from the foods the mother has eaten.

Pick out a true statement about the cries of an infant (such as: when are they the most intense? When are they different from other newborns and under different circumstances?)

Crying peaks at around 6 to 8 weeks of age and typically decreases in the afternoon or evening.

What is the name of the phenomenon that happens when an infant gets bored with a stimulus?

Habituation.

According to experts, what seems to be the best pattern for parents responding to the crying of their newborn?

A prompt and consistent response to crying in the first few months leads to less crying later in the first year.

The text suggests that colic may be associated with issues in which of the newborn's systems?

The digestive system (specifically, an immature or easily upset gastrointestinal tract).

Humans exhibit a pattern of cephalocaudal development. What does this mean?

Areas near the head develop earlier than areas farther away (the "head-to-toe" pattern).

The idea that REM sleep in newborns helps the visual system to develop is known as what?

The autostimulation theory.

What is the "norm of reaction"?

The range of all possible phenotypes that can result from a single genotype in relation to all the environments in which it can survive and develop.

What does it mean to be heterozygous for a trait like curly hair?

Having two different alleles for the trait (one dominant and one recessive).

What have studies found to be the approximate heritability of intelligence quotients?

Approximately 50%.

What is likely to be true of the brain development of a cat that was raised in a small cage at an animal shelter with few toys and little interaction with other cats?

The cat will have fewer synapses and a less developed cerebral cortex compared to cats in enriched environments.

What factors have been ruled OUT (that is, found to be NOT true) by extensive research as a cause for the increase in diagnoses of autism spectrum disorder?

Vaccines (specifically the MMR vaccine).

What can we conclude if a study finds that correlations between identical twins on a certain trait are substantially higher than between fraternal twins?

The trait has a strong genetic component (high heritability).

What is the myelin sheath important for?

Increasing the speed and efficiency of information transmission between neurons.

What is the word for the genetic material that a person inherits?

Genotype.

When do synapses in the visual cortex tend to be produced, relative to the prefrontal cortex?

Synapses in the visual cortex are produced much earlier (peaking in the first year) than in the prefrontal cortex (which continues into adolescence).

Researches estimate the heritability of a hypothetical trait. What is a correct interpretation of this estimate? (That is, what does heritability MEAN?)

It is a statistical estimate of the proportion of measured variance on a trait among individuals in a given population that is attributable to genetic differences.

If all you know is that you have gotten a trait from your parents, is it heritable or inherited?

Inherited.

When sharing a household makes people more similar to each other, what is this called?

Shared environment.

In what kind of development do genes produce a trait by interacting with something that can be reliably counted on to be present in a human environment?

Experience-expectant plasticity.

When genes and environment interact to produce a final outcome in an organism, what is this outcome called?

Phenotype.

If a child perceives the world SOLELY from their own point of view, what is likely true of that child (from a Piagetian perspective)?

The child is exhibiting egocentrism.

Be able to tell which types of identification are and are not parts of "task analysis”.

Task analysis involves identifying goals, relevant information in the environment, and potential processing strategies.

When does joint attention appear to develop?

By approximately 9 to 15 months of age.

What is assimilation?

The process by which people translate incoming information into a form that fits concepts they already understand.

The idea that children have some innate knowledge in areas that are evolutionarily important to survival is central to which theories of cognitive development?

Core-knowledge theories.

A person with autism spectrum disorder might have difficulty appreciating the distinction between their own mind and others'. From a core-knowledge perspective, which area is creating this challenge?

The Theory of Mind Mechanism (ToMM).

What kinds of things are true of children in the sensorimotor stage?

They lack object permanence (initially) and their intelligence is expressed through sensory and motor abilities.

Bob believes that thought is actually internalized speech. Which theorists' views would be most similar to Bob’s?

Lev Vygotsky.

What kind of a description of infants would Skinner (that is, a behaviorist or even someone like John Locke) support?

The infant as a tabula rasa or "blank slate."

Which theories claim that cognitive development is the result of the continuous development of domain general abilities and the addition of strategies?

Information-processing theories.

Which concept from Piagetian theory describes the process by which a person's experiences cause them to change to a new, different operational structure?

Accommodation.

Chad watches as a ball of Play-Doh™ is rolled out into a long, thin snake of Play-Doh™ . After watching this, he then insists that there is MORE Play-Doh™ than there was before. This error means that Chad is likely in which Piagetian stage?

The preoperational stage.

When a person seems to be able to focus only on one aspect of a problem or presentation (such as focusing only on the HEIGHT of the water in a conservation task but not the WIDTH of the container), what is it called?

Centration.

Infants as young as 1 month blink defensively at an expanding image that appears to be an object heading toward them. Therefore, infants are sensitive to what?

Optical expansion.

Three-month-old Ryan is shown a photo of a horse repeatedly until he loses interest and looks away. Next, he is shown a photo of a fish and he stares at the photo for a long time. What is this an example of?

Habituation(to the horse) and dishabituation (to the fish).

What did Baillargeon's research on infants' mental representation demonstrate?

That infants as young as 3.5 months look longer at "impossible" events, suggesting they have object permanence earlier than Piaget thought.

A young child is touched on the cheek and promptly turns his head to the side that was touched. What does this example illustrate?

The rooting reflex.

In Woodward and colleagues' “teddy bear and ball” studies, what did 11-month-olds do after being habituated to a human arm reaching for an object?

They looked longer when the hand reached for a new object in the old location, suggesting they understood the reach was goal-directed.

In a preferential looking task, an infant is shown an orange sphere and an orange disk. The results show that the infant doesn't spend any more time looking at one than at the other. What is reasonable to conclude from this result?

The infant cannot tell the difference between the two stimuli (or has no preference).

An infant is allowed to play with a toy block in the dark so that she cannot see it. Later, she is shown a picture of the block and a picture of a ball. If she looks longer at the picture of the ball because it is novel, what has she demonstrated?

Intermodal perception.

In this experiment [name extension paradigm], what did the researchers demonstrate to be the most important property that children tend to use to categorize objects?

Shape (the "shape bias").

What is newborn vision like (as compared to adult vision)?

It is poor/blurry; they have low visual acuity and poor contrast sensitivity.

Which of the following cues is most important for infants' object segregation?

Common movement.

Which is the first concept to develop as infants learn about objects being able or not being able to support each other?

Contact vs. no contact.

A two-year-old attempts to slide down a dollhouse-sized slide. What is this is an example of?

A scale error.

What happened when the father added his angry response to change lamp-breaking behavior?

This is an example of positive punishment (adding an unpleasant stimulus to decrease a behavior).

Learning the relations between one's own behavior and its consequences is called what?

Instrumental conditioning (or operant conditioning).

What did this finding [stepping reflex in water] demonstrate?

The reflex doesn't "disappear" due to brain maturation; it is masked by the fact that the infant's legs get too heavy for their muscles to lift.

What are the smallest units of MEANING in a language?

Morphemes.

Thirteen-month-old Lydia calls all men “Daddy.” What is this an example of?

Overextension.

Which phrase is an example of overregularization?

Using "goed" instead of "went" or "mans" instead of "men".

Language is a ____ behavior, which means that only humans acquire language in the normal course of development.

Species-specific.

Studies that demonstrate children being generally better language learners than are adults provide evidence for which idea?

The critical period hypothesis.

Twenty years later, when given a test of English grammar, how might the daughter and mother have performed?

The daughter would perform better, as she arrived within the critical period (before age 7).

What are the most elementary units of language sounds?

Phonemes.

According to Chomsky's nativist view, all languages share common principles and rules that govern their use. What is this phenomenon called?

Universal Grammar.

Which object(s) did children select when they were asked to “Show me the blicket”? Why?

They selected the unfamiliar object because of the mutual exclusivity constraint (they already have a name for the familiar object).

Young children's drawings of the human figure typically take the “tadpole” form. What is a "tadpole" form?

A circular shape representing the head and body with lines attached for arms and legs.

What is an example of overregularization?

Saying "runned" instead of "ran."

"An infinite number of sentences and ideas can be expressed through a finite set of words". What idea does this quote refer to?

Generativity.

How does Arielle figure out that “tickling” is what the boy is doing to the baby?

Through syntactic bootstrapping (using the grammatical structure of the sentence).

What statements about toddlers and word order would be true?

Toddlers understand word order before they can produce full sentences themselves.

According to lecture, which of the following is probably the reason behind much of the increased rate of autism diagnosis?

Changes in diagnostic criteria and increased awareness/detection.

What does the "False Photograph Task" tell us about the abilities of (some) people with autism?

They can understand physical representations (like photos) even if they struggle with mental representations (like beliefs).

When children incorrectly answer the False Belief, False Contents, and Appearance-Reality tasks, their WRONG answer seems to be actually driven by what?

Their current knowledge of reality.

Young children have difficulty understanding that plants are alive because children equate being alive with what?

Self-locomotion (movement).

What is main findings of cross-cultural research on the timing of children's understanding of false beliefs?

The understanding typically develops around age 4 or 5 across very different cultures.

What does this suggest [mailing procedure doesn't help autism] about the nature of autism?

The deficit in understanding minds is foundational and not just a failure to understand the "task" or "trick".

The coding of spatial locations relative to one's own body, without regard to surroundings, is referred to as what?

Egocentric spatial representations.

What is the name for the hypothesized brain mechanism that is devoted to understanding other people?

Theory of Mind Mechanism (ToMM).

Recognize a category hierarchy that moves from the superordinate to the basic to the subordinate level. Animal (Superordinate) → Dog (Basic) → Golden Retriever (Subordinate).

Ted thinks cats have a certain “catness,” dogs have a certain “dogness,” and horses have a certain “horseness.” What concept is he exhibiting?

Essentialism.

What developmental skill will help infants learn about the spatial layout of the house in which they live?

Self-locomotion (crawling or walking).

What answers do young children and older children give to the false belief tasks discussed here?

3-year-olds say the character will look where the object actually is; 5-year-olds say the character will look where they falsely believe it is.

A child who is engaged in lots of pretend play is clearly capable of what cognitive ability?

Symbolic representation.

Which clinical procedure is based on classical conditioning?

Systematic desensitization.

Sam quickly assumes that his classmate did it on purpose. What does this suggest about Sam?

He has a hostile attributional bias.