PSY210 - Midterm Study Guide TERMS

Precocial vs.Altricial

Precocial:
Born able to do almost everything an adult can do

Altricial:
Born dependent (humans)

Differences between humans & apes (3)

Brain Size, Maturity, Weaning

• Brain Size

  • Chimpanzee brains are 50% of adult size
    Human brains are 25% of adult size
    At 3 months: human infant brains are 50% of adult size

• Maturity

  • Humans take longer to mature

• Weaning

  • longer for chimpanzees

Inter-birth interval in humans vs chimpanzees

Humans: 3 years
Chimpanzees: 6 years

How can humans maintain a small inter-birth interval?

Extended caretaking involving multiple caregivers, siblings, and peers

Effect of Shorter weaning time:

mom can have more babies = larger families with children closer in age

more siblings = greater competition of resources

How has the evolution of bipedalism changed human development?

Standing upright = narrow pelvis = cannot birth large head = smaller head at birth = earlier birth = very dependent at birth

Nature vs. Nuture -- which is Nativism & which is empiricism

Nature = Nativism
Nurture = Empiricism

Hobbes' view of children

kids are inherently evil, and require control

Ghost in Machine?

Rosseau's view of children

kids are inherently pure "noble savages" that are corrupted by society

Locke's view on children

"tabula rasa"

- kids are malleable by society

- Human knowledge is based in perceptual experience

Tabula Rasa

a baby is born knowing nothing and learns everything from environment

Jean Piaget belief on Nature vs. Nurture

believed that both occur in development —> aka constructivism

• Children are born with reflexes and mechanisms for change but development occurs through interaction with the environment

Why is nature vs nurture worse than useless?

• Naturalistic fallacy

• Belief that 'natural' things can't change

• Belief that 'environmental' things can be fixed

Discontinuous (Stage-like) vs. Continuous Development

Theory on whether development is gradual or whether children develop in bursts

Active vs. Passive

Active: involved in own learning (experiments)
Passive: sitting & taking in information (in a class)

Global vs. Local

Global: skills resulting to a certain development (not caring about skill progression just about destination)

Local: skills developed independently & reached the same point (caring about skill progression)

sensation

registration of sensory information from the external world by the sensory receptors in the sense organs and brain

perception

process of organizing and interpreting sensory information

Perceptual System

Interpreting stimuli & adapting behvaior

How do we know what babies know? (2)

1. Preferential Looking Procedure
2. Habituation procedure

Preferential Looking Procedure

which do babies prefer to look at
(longer looking = preference)

Setback with Preferential Looking Procedure

What does it require?

A baby just does not have a preference
**pre-existing preference (through trials)

Habituation Procedure

when does the baby stop looking

Visual Acuity

sharpness of visual discrimination

How do you know if a child has visual acuity?

they would look longer at one image than the other

Relationship between age & vision

as age increases, baby's vision gets sharper

How does Acuity develop? (eyeball growth)

babies are born with astigmatism
when eyeball grows, leads to slightly less blurry image

Critical period

time period where specific experiences are necessary for typical development to occur

Categorical Perception

tendency to cluster stimuli that vary along a continuum into discrete categories

Baby's favorite color?
Baby's least favorite color?

Yellow, Green

Robert Fantz

developed a "looking chamber" to show babies displays.

• Concluded that babies prefer looking at faces

STUDY - Protractor Method

Measures how far infants turn its head while looking at faces. Concluded that babies prefer facial features in the correct orientation

testing infantss after 1st hour of birth causes what?

Infants turned more to follow most face-like image showing FACE PREFERENCE

babies preferences for faces

Prefer “top-heavy” faces until 3 months, then lose top-heavy preference

New-born Face Preferences

• They do not show preference to own race vs. other race

• They do not show preference for human / monkey

3 Month-Olds Face Preferences

• Prefer caregiver-race faces over other race

• Prefer human faces over monkey faces

6 month old Face discrimination

• Can discriminate between 2 human faces

• Can discriminate between 2 monkey faces

9 month old Face discrimination

• Can discriminate between 2 human faces

• Can NOT discriminate between 2 monkey faces

Perceptual narrowing

increase in precision of perceptual processing in one category at expense of perceptual processing outside category

auditory system in the womb

fully functional by third trimester

New borns auditory preferences:

Mom's voice &
Hearing a story they heard in the womb (3rd trimester)

Infants prefer people who (3)

Look like parents
Speak in infant-direction fashion
Speak in parents language & accent

Smell & Taste Preferences

sweet tastes, Tastes they have had exposure to in the womb, Own mom's smell

When do smell & taste develop

in the womb

Intermodal Perception

integration of information across sensory modalities

Baby's Criteria for agents

mental states
If it has a face
If it behaves contingently
Symmetry along one axis
Self-propulsion
Irregular path of travel
Eyes
Contingent and reciprocal interactions with other agents
Non-rigid transformation (ex. breathing)

Baby's knowledge of intention
6 months / 8-9 months / 12 months

At 6 months, infants follow gaze of faces

8-9 months: gaze following = social referencing (checking with others for reactions to events)

12 months: baby points, following other people's pointing

Secure-base attatchment (12 month olds)

look to caregiver for information

infants seek information to regular their own behavior, determine their response

12 month old knowledge on desires

know that people act on their desires

Look in surprise when a person appears to like one thing, but then reaches for a different thing

How do kids show explicit understanding?

asking kids to verbally report what is happening

False Beliefs Findings in 3 year olds

have trouble identifying previously held beliefs

Issues with false belief studies

Younger children have difficulty with inhibition (cannot stop themselves from saying what they know to be true)

Implicit & Explicit flase belief as a different skill

Implicit false belief:
Appears early and continues to adulthood
Spontaneous and automatic
Explicit false belief:
robust, based on language
Appears later in development

Implicit & Explicit flase belief as the same skill

Both measure the same thing but the verbal tasks are hard and make kids fail

Properties of objects

Solid
Exists when im not looking at them
Move continuously
Influence other objects with contact
Obey law of gravity & inertia

Jean Piaget opinion on Constructivism

child is an active leaner

Stance on debates (continuous vs. discontinuous / global vs. local)

discontinuous & global

Assimilation

incorporate new objects into schema

Accommodation

new object does not existing schema

• must adjust schema

Piaget Stages

sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, formal operational

Object Permanance (Sensorimotor)

knowing that an object exists even when they do not see it

The A-Not-B Task (9 months)

Baby has trouble finding toy if you hide it on side A not B after having it on side A before
Why?
The baby incorporates the reaching act in part of their schema

Hidden Displacement Task (14 months)

Children cannot think about paths that could have happened to object & track the object mentally

Reaching in the Dark Test (object permanence)

Light Room: child able to interact with object
Dark Room: child interacted with object even when they couldnt see object

Competence performance distinction

between competence and performance in a given task
Competence: underlying psychological ability / understanding
Performance: articulation / production of competence

Levels of categorization

superordinate (most general), basic, subordinate (most specific)

Shape Bias

shape plays strong role in categorizing objects

How do infants categorize?

perceptual categorization - Based on observed similarities

Magic in kids: 3-4 year olds vs. 5

5 year old understand magic & try to find its cause

Nativists vs. Empiricists

Nativists: infacts possess innate causal system (nature)
Try to extract core information from events they observe
Empiricist: infants' causal understanding arises from observations of innumerable events & it effects their actions (nurture)

What babies have to learn (4)

Objects can act on other objects
Child's own actions can cause events
Some events lead to other events, independently of childs own actions
Events can be related

How do babies learn? (3)

statistics, perform experiments , watch experiments

Piaget findings about Egocentric spacial representation

infant remembered location of objects relative to themselves

Dead reckoning

Think about the location without landmarks

Spiatial reasoning in blind

Very good representation of space BUT some problems may arise

Spatial Reasoning in adults (men vs. women)

Men perform better than women
Training / practice can improve women's performance

Infants reasoning about time:

Infants represents order of events very early (sequences)
Infants understand duration
Infants can reason about ratios of time
How long something took relative to something else

Preschoolers & sense of time

Presechoolers have sense of bigger periods of time
Something happened a week ago is more recent than something that happened months ago

5 year olds & time

confuse past & future

Reasoning about the future

Can understand that as you grow older, you will have physical changes
Psychological changes: resistance to see themselves changing
But understand that other people will

Conservation in 4-5 year olds

do not understand it

What years do they understand conservation

5-8 years old

Estimating magnitudes on a number line kindergartners

Estimates were further to the right the higher the number (correct)
BUT overestimate where small numbers are & underestimate where large numbers go

Estimating magnitudes on a number line 2nd graders

pretty accurate

What do all languages share?

Creative, phonology, morphology

Morphology

smallest meaningful unit

• ★ Single morphemes: Dog, complain

• ★ Multiple morphemes: Dogs, complained

  • dog + s, complain + ed

Phonology

basic sounds & signs

• have to learn to segment speech as part of

• language learning

Syntax

The arrangement of words and phrases to create well-formed sentences in a language.

Recursion

infinite combinations of morphemes & phonemes to make a sentence

Birth - 4 months Language

reference for melody of own language // sensitive to all phonemes

7 months Language

Babbling

Manual Babbling

Babies exposed to sign language babble with their hands (repetitive hand patterns)

18 months

"word spurt" & "naming explosion" & 2 world sentences (telegraphic speech)

Past puberty

outside critical period
language learning is very difficult

How do kids learn language? Common sense view

imitation (nurture

Noam Chomsky - The Original Nativist Theory

children can understand & produce new sentences

Noam Chomsky - Poverty of a stimulus

Not enough stimuli in the environment to explain he level at which children learn language

Noam Chomsky - Constraints on word learning

Children have preexisting biases about what a word is going to mean

Noam Chomsky - impose syntactic structure on linguistic input

using grammatical rules that they learn, they create their own sentence that may be incorrect grammatically

Native Languages & Environment

It must be taught to them / pick it up from those around them