Infant and Child Development Exam 2

Research should be guided by theory because..

1. explain multiple phenomena simultaneously

2. make specific, testable predictions

3. understand the generalizability of an explanation

Empiricism and "Nature"

1. all knowledge comes from experience

2. babies are blank slates = tabula rasa

3. Aristotle and John Locke

Nativism and "Nature"

1. Babies are endowed with knowledge and capabilities

2. Maturation unfolding

3. Plato and Immanuel Kant

John B Watson believed...

he could take any baby an could form them into anything he wanted

Classical Conditioning

A Neutral stimulus can take on a new meaning and lead to a different (conditioned) response after being paired with a meaningful stimulus

Parenting is filled with..

behaviorist principles

Rewards work like..

operant conditioning (reinforcement!)

"Sleep Associations" are meant to work like...

Classical Conditioning

An example of a sleep association could be...

A type of binky, blanket, bottle, or stuffed animal that the child associates with sleep

Chomsky's "Poverty of the stimulus" argument

It would be impossible for children to learn language from impoverished & error-laden speech available to them

During the cognitive revolution in the 1950s...

nativist and constructivist views of development grew, and empiricist traditions (radical ones) decreased or disappeared

Constructivism

Piaget, Bruner, and others emphasized children's active role in their own learning.

Piaget's stage theory..

aimed to both describe and explain development. Emphasized qualitative change

Schema

cognitive representation of the world; how people organize and understand information

Piaget's Stage Theory Stage 1

1. Sensorimotor Period

2. Birth-Two years

3. Schemas are limited to sensory experience

4. No mental representations

Piaget's Stage Theory Stage 2

1. Preoperational Period

2. two-seven years

3. Emergence of mental representations

4. Symbolic play, deferred imitation, object permanence

Piaget's Stage Theory Stage 3

1. Concrete Operational Period

2. seven-eleven years

3. Emergence of logical mental operations

4. flexible thinking, but still restricted to concrete experiences

Piaget's Stage Theory Stage 4

1. Formal Operational Period

2. Eleven years+

3. Capable of abstract thought

4. Logical reasoning, problem solving beyond concrete experience

How do people move between Piaget's stages?

through 4 key processes!

What are the 4 key processes needed to move between Piaget's stages?

Assimilation, Equilibrium, Disequilibrium, Accommodation

Assimilation

Incorporate new information into an existing schema

Ex: Things that live in the water are fish ->, sees whale in water for first time -> child calls it a fish

Disequilibrium

ex: child calls whale a fish, dad says its not a fish, its a whale, child enters disequilibrium

How do you rectify disequilibrium and return to equilibrium?

Two options! (Using the schema: things that live in the water are fish)

1. My schema is right and what I saw doesn't live in water

2. Maybe my schema is wrong

Accomodation

Change your schema to fit the new reality

Lev Vygotsky thought..

Piaget overlooked social interactions

Zone of Proximal Development

Things a child (or any learner) can do, with help

-Skills in this zone are difficult to master alone, but can be done with guidance from a mentor

Vygotsky argued that the zone of proximal development...

is where learning occurs with the guidance of others

Symbols

Something that stands for something else

Dual representation

When the symbol itself is a thing, like an object

Mental Representation

being able to hold and manipulate objects and events in mind

Mental representation includes...

deferred imitation, displaced reference, object permanence

deferred imitation

copying another persons actions later, hours, or days after the child witnessed the actions, involves memory

displaced reference

when children understand and use words to refer things that are not present, important for language development and pretend play

object permanence

understanding and object continues to exist, even when you don't see it.

Piaget underestimated...

infants' ability to engage in mental representation

Egocentrism

The tendency of children to believe that other people view the world from their perspective

According to Piaget, egocentrism didn't occur until..

Concrete operational stage (age 7)

Although Piaget believed egocentrism didn't occur until the concrete operational stage, Piaget...

overstated children's difficulties with egocentrism and they likely demonstrated some ability earlier during this period (about 3 or 4 years old)

centration

focusing on only one dimension (height of water or length of he line made by the items)

why may a child fail conservation tasks?

centration

by "concrete operational" children can do..

decentration and reversibility

decentration

the ability to focus on more than one part of a problem, situation or object

Reversibility

realization that objects/things can be changed or returned to their original state

classification isn't always...

straightforward!

mental operations allow children to combine..

reversibility and classification

Deductive Reasoning, still difficult until...

11 years+

Instead, they focus on what they know or have experience with. NOT the logical premise involved in the problem

What are the major issues with Piaget's approach?

1. The all or nothing stage theory

2. Piaget tended to underestimate infant and young children's abilities, typically because he relied on complicated tasks that children might fail for other reasons

3. The processes of assimilation and accommodation for explaining change needed to be more precise--how exactly does this happen

All or nothing stage theory

children don't cleanly go from one stage to the next for all tasks

For Piaget, Mental representations..

don't emerge until stage 2!

Dynamic systems theorists

wanted more emphasis on in-the-moment contextual influence, rather than mental representations! (Changing features of the experimental context dramatically changes behavior!)

information-processing theorists

posit gradual developmental changes, rather than qualitative stages

Piaget described errors children make, and put people..

into stages

Nativists

Piaget underestimated infants' cognitive ability, other methods of testing show that infants likely do have mental representations, before Piaget believed

The basic observation underlying a lot of nativist perspectives stems from the observations that..

1. Young Children are (likely) the most effective learners on earth

2. It would be (probably) impossible for children to learn so rapidly from impoverished & error-laden input available to them

Core knowledge theory

"Children learn fast and flexibly, because they are endowed with at least six cognitive systems that capture fundamental properties of the things they learn about"

Objects, Numbers, Places, Geometry Agents, Social Beings

Core Knowledge Theory was led by..

Modern and dominant nativist theory, Elizabeth Spelke

Violation of the Expectation Paradigm

Infants watch expected & unexpected versions of the same event. If they look at the unexpected event more than the expected event->they must also recognize that it's unexpected!

(Infants tend to look longer at the unexpected event)

Coew Knowledge: Objects

Infants have innate knowledge or capacity to learn about the physical properties of objects

principles of persistance

The idea that objects retain their physical properties over time and space

permanence

objects continue to exist when they aren't visible

cohesion

objects should hold together, or retain their physical properties, over time

continuity

objects should move along continuous paths in time and space

gravity, support, and contact

objects cannot move on their own or support themselves, only with contact/support

property: height/size

the idea that objects retain their physical properties (such as height)

property: solidarity

by 3.5 months, infants look longer at the impossible event (unexpected) than the possible event (expected)

By 3 months, infants understand

that objects cannot float mid air

By 5 months, infants understand

that objects type of contact matters

By 6.5 months, infants understand

that objects amount of contact matters

because infants only see one object at a time...

they're tracking one index- but they aren't tracking whether it's a shoe or a duck

infants earliest object concepts seem to include..

an object index that specified location information but not featural information

properties of an object index

1. functions like a pointer

2. does not contain information about features or properties of the object, instead "this" or "that"

3. infants only have three or four indices available

4. indices are primarily assigned by location, early in infancy

individuating objects by features...

develops later and depends on the features (ex: shape before color)

Violation of the expectation paradigm

1. the visual input of the event itself is identical

2. the position of the green box (ex) changes the interpretation: one is possible and one is impossible

3. if babies look longer at the impossible (unexpected event) that tells us they "know" something about what made it impossible

Continuous event

the object moves in one continuous motion, "behind" both occluders (the black rectangles)

disocontinuous event

the object moves in two motions that are not continuous-there's a "gap" in the middle where it's not visible

Two sources of numerical information in infancy

1. core object system

2. core number system

Core Object System

supports rapid determination of the exact number of objects up to a capacity limit of about three

core number system

represents approximate (or imprecise) numerical sizes of sets, in any perceptual modality (visual sets of objects, number of tones heard, number of ridges felt)

Infants can track..

small exact number of objects, events, actions. it is precise, happens quickly and automatically

5 month old infants..

looking longer at impossible event

Infants can track of up to..

three objects, events, or actions at a time. Sometimes called "subitizing"

Approximate Number System

supports infants' capacity for tracking large numerical magnitudes, approximately

by 6 months..

infants are discriminating 20 vs. 10 dots (2:1)

Webers Law

the speed and accuracy with which two numbers are discriminated are dependent upon the ratio between the two values

(ex: 8 vs 10 = 24 vs 30)

ANS precision...

improves over development

ANS precision in newborns

3:1 succeed, 2:1 fail

ANS precision in 6 month olds

2:1 succeed, 2:3 fail

as people get older, they get..

better at telling apart numbers that are closer and closer together

Non human animals also..

use an ANS

The intraparietal sulcus (IPS) shows

evidence of approximate magnitude representations

The ANS can also support..

approximate arithmetic, like adding, dividing and subtracting

being able to say the count list in order is...

different from really knowing what the number means

cardinal principle

that the last number word you say when counting represents the size of the set

learning number words are often measured..

using "Give-N"

Estimating with Number Lines

1. Estimating magnitude on a number line

2. Strong predictor of later math ability

at first, children put..

too much space between early numbers, and squish together later numbers.

later, children can do it with..

equal spacing but it depends on the end point. Might be good at 0 to 100, but still struggle with 0 to 100.

Spatial Navigation of our local environment..

is critical for most species and virtually all of history

Children (and rats) only use...

distance and direction of walls, not landmarks to reorient

It seems that children, and rats, orient themsleves...

using distances and directions of the walls that border the floor.