Topic 2: Developmental Psychology

Define developmental psychology

 the study of how people change & stay the same across their life from changes to & factors affecting development

list 3 reasons why we would want to study developmental psychology

1. understand human nature

2. Shape social policy

3. Enrich human life

How can studying developmental psychology help to understand human nature, from the perspective of both child & lifespan development?

• Child development: the role of genetics & the environment affecting development

• Lifespan development: understanding how we change/stay the same across the lifespan

How can studying developmental psychology help to shape social policy, from the perspective of both child & lifespan development?

• Child development: conducting research w/ children while protecting their human rights

• Lifespan development: understanding how to recover from trauma & what support systems are effective from what sources

How can studying developmental psychology help to enrich human life, from the perspective of both child & lifespan development?

• Child development: understanding effective child-rearing & child mental health

• Lifespan development: understanding the extent to which one shapes their lives & passively responds to their surroundings

Identify the 7 enduring themes of development

1. continuity & discontinuity

2. mechanisms for change

3. universality & context specificity

4. individual differences

5. research & children’s welfare

6. nature & nurture

7. the active child

According to continuity & discontinuity, state & describe the four types of change

1. Continuity: the features that remain the same across someone's life (stability)

   • E.g. a person's name

   • Affects how someone interacts w/ the world

     • Establishes a sense of consistency (know where we stand in the world)

2. Discontinuity: change

   • E.g. a person's title

   • Affects how we interact w/ the world --> used to help us understand our place in the world

   • Can occur through unexpected events

3. Continuous change: quantitative (measurable), reversible

   • E.g. height of a tree, memory capacity

4. Discontinuous change: qualitative, irreversible

   • E.g. puberty, theory of the mind (our understanding that other people have their own perceptions & understanding that may be different from our own)

   • Descriptions, categories, etc.

   • 'Stage-like' change

   • Children of different ages seem qualitatively different

State the two mechanisms for change & provide examples for each

• Changes in species:

  • Migration

  • Genetic drift

  • Natural selection

• Changes in behaviour:

  • Precontemplation --> contemplation --> preparation --> action --> maintenance --> relapse

What is effortful attention, and what enduring theme of development is it considered under? Provide some examples of what it involves

• Effortful attention: voluntary control of one's emotions & thoughts

  • Inhibiting impulses, controlling emotions, & focusing attention

  • Difficulties --> behavioural problems, weak math & reading skills, & mental illness

  • Physiological mechanisms: controlling thoughts & emotions --> intense brain activity in connections b/w the limbic area & anterior cingulate + prefrontal cortex

    • Connections develop significantly during childhood

    • Development of these areas reflects environmental circumstances & genetics

How does sleep during infancy relate to the idea of mechanisms of change as an enduring theme of development? Relate this to the findings of Werchan & Gomez (2014)

• Sleep promotes learning & generalization; infants spend much of their lives sleeping --> promotes changes within maturation of the hippocampus (important for learning & remembering)

• Werchan & Gomez (2014): the benefits of sleep on infants' memory for general patterns reflect functioning of the cortex, whereas the benefits of sleep on preschoolers' memory for specific experiences reflect functioning of the hippocampus

How does universality & context specificity pose questions as an enduring theme of development?

• To what extent is development universal across contexts & culture?

  • Desire for happiness, connectedness, & success

• To what extent is development exclusive to specific contexts & cultures?

  • Individualist & collectivist cultures; values, expectations, & what is typical for the self & the community

What is cumulative risk and how does it relate to the idea of universality & context specificity as an enduring theme of development? What happens to resilient children, who are placed under cumulative risk?

• Children from impoverished families tend to face more challenges than other children

  • Cumulative risk: the accumulation of disadvantages over years of development

  • Resilient children are more likely to have:

    • Positive personal qualities

    • A close relationship w/ at least one parent

    • A close relationship w/ at least one adult other than their parents

How does the idea of individual differences pose a question as an enduring theme of development?

• How do people w/ a shared background become different from each other?

• 2 people's experiences of any given event are never the same

• Differences in children arise from differences in:

  • Genetics

  • Treatment by parents & others

  • Reactions to similar experiences

  • Choice of environments

• Children may strive to live up to the niches that their families label them as; e.g. the "smart" one

What is the importance of research & children’s welfare as an enduring theme of development?

• How can researchers conduct meaningful research w/ infants & young people?

  • E.g. using EEG --> physiological & behavioural measures

• How can we protect infants' & young peoples' welfare in research?

• Children are likely to give their full capacities & willingness in psychological studies

• Programs to help w/ anger, education innovations

  • Reasoning, remembering, conceptualizing & problem solving = inherently related to education

What is the key question posed by nature and nurture as an enduring theme of development? Provide an example as an interaction of the two, and two factors which may influence such results

• How do nature & nurture together shape development?

• All human characteristics are created through joint workings of nature + nurture

• Example: schizophrenia --> twin 40-50% likely to develop schizophrenia if their twin has it, but also 50-60% of children w/ twin do not develop schizophrenia if they were raised in a typical household as opposed to a troubled environment

  • Tienari et al., 2004: the only children who had a substantial likelihood of becoming schizophrenic were those who had a schizophrenia parent (nature) and were also adopted into a troubled family (nurture)

    • Epigenetics: experience influences the activity of histone proteins that turn gene activity on or off

    • Genome --> experiences AND experiences --> genome

    • Methylation: reduces the expression of a variety of genes & is involved in regulating reactions to stress

How does the idea of the active child pose a question in the enduring themes of development, and how might this be explained in terms of individuals responding to their environments & shaping their own development?

• How do children shape their own development?

  • How active a person/child is in shaping their own development + passively responding to their environment

• Infants shape their own development through selective attention; attention directed towards objects that move & make sounds

What does the idea of the active child suggest with development of a relationship between a child & its mother, & how do later childhood stages influence development?

• Infants shape their own development through selective attention; attention directed towards objects that move & make sounds

  • Fixation of infants at mother's face as opposed to strangers:

    • End of second month --> smiling & cooing of infants hen looking at mothers face

    • Mother smiles & talks --> cooing & smiling by infant …

    • **Infants' preference for attending to their mother's face leads to a social interactions that can strengthen the mother-infant bond

• 9-15 months: development becomes evident

  • Toddlers talk when alone --> only internal motivation can encourage toddlers to practice talking when no one else is present

• Young children: play by themselves just for the joy of doing so --> learn lots in the process

  • Teaches children valuable lessons e.g. how to cope w/ fears, resolve disputes, & interact w/ others

Define cognitive development and what it involves

• Cognitive development: how children/people think, learn, explore, remember, and solve problems

  • Perception, attention, language, problem solving, reasoning, memory, conceptual understanding, & intelligence

What are the 5 enduring themes in cognitive development?

• Continuity & discontinuity

• Nature & nurture

• The active child

• Universality & context specificity

• Mechanisms of change

Define theories of cognitive development

 psychological frameworks that explain how our cognitive skills develop

List the 3 main theories of cognitive development

1. Piaget’s cognitive-developmental theory

2. Vygotsky’s socio-cultural theory

3. Information-processing systems

What does Piaget’s cognitive developmental theory suggest about children’s role in forming their own development & how development changes over time?

• Children play an active role in exploring the role & forming their own development of cognitive skills from their experiences

• During each stage of development, people will engage in some continuous change in their cognitive development

Why is Piaget’s theory so influential?

Provides a good overview that children have different thinking abilities & capacities @ different stages, & how humans develop cognitive functions over their life

What does Piaget suggest are the 3 most constructive processes in children?

• Generating hypotheses

• Performing experiments

• Drawing conclusions from their observations

How does Piaget suggest cognitive development through continuity (AAE)?

1. Assimilation: people incorporate incoming information into concepts they already understand

2. Accommodation: people improve their current understanding in response to new experiences

3. Equilibrium: people balance assimilation & accommodation to create stable understanding

How does Piaget suggest cognitive development through discontinuity (CBBI)?

1. Qualitative change: people of different ages think in qualitatively different ways

2. Broad applicability: type of thinking characteristic of each age influences children's thinking across diverse topics & contexts

3. Brief transitions: children pass through a brief transitional period in which they fluctuate b/w the type of thinking

4. Invariant sequence: everyone progresses through the stages in the same order w/o skipping any of them

What are Piaget’s 4 stages of cognitive development & what do they involve?

1. Sensorimotor stage: birth - 2 y/o

   • Children explore & understand the world through the senses

   • Intelligence is expressed through sensory & motor abilities

2. Preoperational stage: 2 - 7 y/o

   • Young children have the ability to internally represent some ideas through language or mental imaginations (brief & simple --> related to intuition)

   • Not able to think about more complex ideas related to their wants; only able to think about the topic when they want it

3. Concrete operational stage: 7 - 12 y/o

   • Children are able to think logically (as opposed to intuitively)

   • Events are influenced by multiple factors & dimensions --> thinking in different perspectives

4. Formal operational stage: 12 y/o ---

   • Systematic, abstract & hypothetical thinking

What are some limitations of Piaget’s theory?

• Only vaguely describes mechanisms of how changes in cognitive development happen

• Underestimates the abilities & cognitive competencies of young infants & children (very simple mental representations; we now understand there is a lot more potential in children (they just do not know how to represent themselves))

• Underestimates the diversity & variety of capabilities of different people

What is Vygotsky’s key idea regarding sociocultural theory, & how can this be explained?

• Key idea: individuals' cognitive development is largely shaped by the social & cultural context

  1. Infants have basic cognitive skills (attention, sensation, perception, memory - we are born w/ these skills)

  2. As infants interact w/ others, these skills become more sophisticated

     • Dependent on the people around us & the environment

What is guided participation in relation to Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory, & how does it relate to social scaffolding?

• Guided participation: more knowledgeable individuals organize activities in a way that allow less knowledgeable people to perform the activity at a higher level than they could manage on their own

  • Social scaffolding: adults & others w/ greater expertise organise the physical & social environment to help children to learn

What are some limitations of Vygotsky’s theory?

• Over emphasises the role of social factors

• Underestimates the active role of children in their own development (opposite of Piaget)

What do sociocultural theorists believe is the foundation of cognitive development? What can this be related to and how is it beneficial?

• intersubjectivity = mutual understanding that people share during communication

  • Joint attention: infants & their social partners intentionally focus on a common referent in the external environment

    • Increases ability to learn from other people + enables infants to evaluate the competence of other people (& use the evaluations to decide whom to imitate)

What is the key idea regarding Information-processing theories as a model for cognitive development, & what does it focus on?

the human mind is a complicated information-processing system, similar to a computer

• focuses on mechanisms for how cognitive skills develop, not so much the developmental process

How do information-processing theories explain the mechanisms for development of cognitive skills?

The brain is like a computer; information is stored in its initial format --> start to briefly process information --> working memory (transfer to brief abstract idea) --> express ourselves (output) --> LTM (hard-disc); information in our brain gets more abstract the more we process it

How are task analysis and computer simulation related to information-processing theories, & how can they be used to understand cognitive development?

• Task analysis (Klahr): identification of goals needed to perform a task, obstacles that prevent immediate realization of gals, prior knowledge relevant to achieving goals, & potential strategies for overcoming obstacles & reaching the desired outcome

• Computer simulation: fuelled by task analysis, regarding a mathematical model that expresses ideas about mental processes in precise ways

• Understand & predict children's behaviour + rigorously test precise hypotheses about how development occurs

According to information-processing theories, how is cognitive development a gradual process in children?

• Cognitive development occurs continuously in small increments that happen @ different ages

• Cognitive development arises from children gradually surmounting their processing limitations --> expand amounts of information they can process @ one time --> faster information processing

• Idea of executive dysfunction --> how we coordinate different parts of our cognitive abilities so that we can coordinate as a whole entity

What is a limitation of information-processing theories regarding cognitive development?

Doesn't talk about the effect of socio-cultural contexts on development

Define intelligence & why definitions may vary in different contexts

• Intelligence: a developmental concept referring to the capacity to learn from experience & adapt to one's environment

  • Means different things @ different ages

  • Definitions can vary in different contexts

    • Understanding, getting along w/ people vs being successful, doing lots of work

What is general intelligence (g) and what does it measure?

• General intelligence (g): a person processes a certain amount of general intelligence (g) that influences their ability on all intellectual tasks

  • Cognitive ability

  • General mental ability

  • General intelligence factor

  • Intelligence

Provide & explain an example for a one-dimensional theory of intelligence, and a limitation of this example

• g

• Mental Age: the average age at which children achieve a given score on Binet & Simon's test

  • IQ = (MA/Chronological Age) x 100 --> map the number to determine average intelligence (mental age)

  • Limitation: uses a non-changing number to represent a developmental concept (because a person's IQ remains relatively stable across their life)

Provide & explain an example for a two-dimensional theory of intelligence

• Crystalised intelligence: the store of knowledge, vocabulary, & reasoning skills, built over a lifetime through cultural & educational experiences

  • Supports reading, understanding instructions, making decisions, & engaging in social situations

• Fluid intelligence: the ability to reason, analyse & solve problems in novel situations without relying on pre-existing knowledge

  • Involves logic, pattern recognition, & abstract thinking

Provide & explain an example for a few-dimensional theory of intelligence

• Thurstone 7 / Garner 7

  • Refutes the idea that intelligence can be represented by 1 solid score

Provide & explain an example for a many-dimensions theory of intelligence

• Carroll's 3-stratum model: intelligence is best described in a hierarchical integration of g, 8 generalised abilities, & many specific processes

  • Developmental model; all the different abilities are progressing + change across the course of one's life

How can the Stanford-Binet Scale be used to measure intelligence, & where is it popular & for what ages?

• Uses MA to calculate IQ

  • 5 Cognitive abilities:

    1. Fluid reasoning

    2. Knowledge

    3. Quantitative reasoning

    4. Visuo-spatial processing

    5. Working memory

• Popular in the U.S for clinical & education settings, & comprehension evaluation

• Ages 2 - 23

How can the British Ability Scale be used to measure intelligence, & where is it popular & for what ages?

• Uses g

  • 3 domains:

    1. Verbal ability

    2. Non-verbal reasoning

    3. Spatial ability

• Popular in U.K (uses term UK to reinforce that intelligence is not the same across all cultures)

• Ages 3 - 17

How can the Wechsler Intelligence Test for Children (WISC)-R be used to measure intelligence, & for what ages is it used for?

• Uses MA to calculate IQ

• Two main sections:

  1. Verbal: general knowledge, language, & skills

     • Information, Vocabulary, Similarities, Arithmetic, Comprehension, & Digit Span

  2. Performance: spatial & perceptual abilities

     • Block Design, Coding, Mazes, Object Assembly, Picture Completion, & Picture Arrangement

• Most widely used instrument for children 6+ y/o

What are some issues with current measures of intelligence?

• They don't all target the same aspects of intelligence as represent in the 3-stratum model (is one aspect better than another)

• All 3 scales measure fluid intelligence, crystalized intelligence, & broad visual perception --> can be affected by socio-cultural environment

  • E.g. crystalized intelligence = knowledge in our head --> related to our experiences & the environment we interact w/ (different for people w/ different backgrounds)

    • Fluid intelligence less likely to be impacted by cultural differences (b/c people need to use their thinking to resolve problems)

      • BUT the way people solve problems can still be impacted by their cultural experiences

  • Visual perceptions; the way we view things can be influenced by the environment we grow up in

• WISC scores differ among ethnic groups; average IQ or Euro-American children > African-American children, BUT

  • This doesn't necessarily indicate a cultural difference in intelligence; impacted by discrimination & differences in schooling

  • Impacted by culturally insensitive questions:

What does the Koori IQ Test demonstrate?

• Demonstrates how the value of knowledge is culturally constructed

• Demonstrates what it's like to be assessed & graded on the basis of unfamiliar criteria