Week 1 - Developmental - Intro to Theories + Issues in Developmental Psych

What is Developmental Psychology?

= the scientific study of lasting changes in human behaviour and psychological processes across the lifespan, particularly during childhood

Three Main Areas of Development

• Biological (physical + brain changes)

• Cognitive (thinking + learning)

• Social (relationships + social behaviour)

Nature vs Nurture Debate

• nature = refers to biological and genetic influences on development

• nurture = refers to environmental influences, experimental, learning, culture

• modern developmental psychology recognises that both interact with each other

Active Vs Passive Learning

• active = the learner actively explores, interprets and constructs knowledge about the world

• passive = the environment shapes the learner’s behaviour through external experiences and consequences

Main Assumptions of Behaviourism

= behaviour is largely learned through environmental stimuli, trial, error, reinforcement, punishment - with relatively little emphasis on innate knowledge or internal cognition

Instrumental Conditioning according to Skinner

= learning through the consequences of behaviour

• reinforcement increase the likelihood of a response, whereas punishment decreases it

Watson - What did he believe about human development?

= argued that environmental experiences and learning largely determine behaviour and abilities, placing strong emphasis on nurture

What did Tolman’s latent learning experiment demonstrate?

= rats learned about a maze without immediate reinforcement, demonstrated by rapid movement when rewards were introduced

• this challenged strict reinforcement-only explanations of learning

Cognitive Revolution

= a shift in psychology during the 1950s towards studying internal mental processes as explanations for behaviour, rather than relying solely on stimulus-response learning

Nativism

= the view that humans possess innate knowledge, cognitive structures or predispositions that contribute to development, rather than learning everything solely through experience

Spelke - Core Knowledge Theory

= humans possess innate foundational cognitive systems that help infants understand basic aspects of the physical world

What is the violation of expectation paradigm?

= a method that compares infants’ looking times at possible and impossible events

• longer looking at impossible events may indicate expectations about how the world works

Innate Concepts Approach

= the proposal that humans possess specialised innate cognitive mechanisms for processing info, such as language and objects, which become more sophisticated through development

Constructivism

= the theory that children actively construct knowledge and understanding through their experiences and interactions with the world

Piaget - Assimilation, Accommodation, Equilibrium

• assimilation = incorporating new experiences into existing cognitive structures

• accommodation = modifying existing cognitive structures to account for new info

• equilibrium = a balanced state in which existing cognitive structures adequately explain experiences

Vygotsky’s Theory

= proposed that cognitive development occurs through social interaction and cultural experience

Vygtosky’s Zone of Proximal Development

= the difference between what a learner can accomplish independently and what they can accomplish with guidance from a more knowledgeable person