cogs 120d exam #1

Goals of Developmental Psychology

1. Describe what development looks like

2. Explain how humans develop

3. Apply research findings into practices and programs

Quantitative Change

• Change in the amount, frequency, or degree of behavior

→ Ex: Height, fish → bigger version of fish, 1 word → 50 words

Qualitative Change

• Change in the type of behavior

→ Ex: Frog or butterfly life cycle (done in stages), words → phrases → sentences

Gene-Environment Interactions

• Genes affects how you respond to the environment, or your environment changes how your genes affect you

Developmental Cascades

• The idea that one domain of development impacts another, which impacts another, etc.

Darwinian Evolutionary Theory

• Charles Darwin: Behaviors we see today are a result of the behaviors that were most adaptive to our survival

• Example: infant crying - get more attention, communicate pain, be rescued from danger

Psychodynamic Theories

• Behavior and personality are a result of conscious and subconscious forces

• Sigmund Freud: kids move through stages, learning to satisfy subconscious “sex” drives in socially acceptable ways; qualitative change

• Oral, anal, phallic, latency, genital

Erikson’s Psychosocial Theory

• Erik Erikson: people go through a series of “stages” where they must “resolve” crises & how they resolve those crises shapes their personality

• Qualitative change

• Explains individual differences

Behaviorism

• Critique of psychodynamic theory: behaviors should be observable

• Human behavior can be fully controlled by environmental input

• John Watson: classical conditioning - putting a stimulus before a reflex forms an association

• B.F. Skinner (mid 1900’s): operant conditioning

→ focuses on how consequences affect behavior.

• Positive reinforcement: add something good to increase a behavior

• Negative reinforcement: remove something bad to increase a behavior

Constructivism

• Jean Piaget (mid 1900’s): Children actively construct their knowledge as they encounter the world

• Assimilation = incorporating new information into an existing schema

• Accommodation = modifying a schema to accommodate new information

• Disequilibrium = mismatch between reality and schema

Socio-Cultural Theory

• Lev Vygotsky (early 1900’s): kids learn best with guidance from a more knowledgeable person, on tasks in their ZPD.

→ Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD): the gap between what a kid can do alone vs. with help. Sweet spot = challenging but not out of reach.

Bioecological Theory

• Urie Bronfenbrenner (late 1900’s): Children are born into a complex interconnected system that impacts their development

• Development is therefore a two-way process: Environment affects child → Child affects environment

Operational definition

• How one chooses to define a variable

Ways to Dimish Confounds

• Random assignment = people are randomly assigned to group 1 or group 2

• Counterbalancing = systematically varying presenting the order of options

Convenience sampling

• Asking people who are convenient (friends/family) to participate in your study

Things That A Good Study Should Have

• High reliability (internal validity): Measured behaviors should be objective

• Construct validity: The thing you’re trying to measure relates to what you want to study

• Ecological validity (external validity): What you measure in the lab translates to the “real world”

Longitudinal study

• Pros: Observe how the same people change over time

• Cons: Extremely expensive and time-consuming; attrition - some people will move, drop out of the study, etc.

Cross-sectional study

• Pros: compares people of different ages at about the same time, lower-cost, less attrition

• Cons: cohort effect - research results are influenced by the unique historical, cultural, or environmental experiences shared by a specific group of people; can’t track individual change, stability, or cascades

Constructivism Stages (pt. 2)

1. Sensorimotor Stage (Birth - 2 years)

• Infants learn about the world using their senses and actions

• Develop object permanence

2. Preoperational Stage (2 - 7 years)

• Children begin using language and thinking in symbols (like using a block as a phone). They engage in pretend play.

• Thinking remains egocentric, and they do not grasp logic or conservation.

3. Concrete Operational Stage (7 - 11 years)

• Children start thinking more logically about real, physical events and objects.

• Understanding conservation and reversibility.

4. Formal Operational Stage (12+)

• Adolescents and adults develop the ability to think abstractly and reason through hypothetical problems.

• Systematic, logical, and scientific reasoning, allowing individuals to ponder moral, philosophical, and ethical issues.

Bronfenbrenner's Environmental Systems

1. Biology

→ Characteristics of the child that influence development and interactions

→ Examples: Age, Physical characteristics

2. Microsystem

→ The environments where children directly interact with people.

→ Examples: Family, Home, School, Friends

3. Mesosystem

→ The connections between different microsystems.

→ Example: The relationship between a child's home and school.

4. Exosystem

→ Environments the child does not directly participate in, but that still affect them.

→ Examples: Parent's workplace, Healthcare system

5. Macrosystem

→ The larger cultural and societal environment.

→ Includes: Cultural beliefs, Values, Economic systems, Government institutions, Social expectations.

6. Chronosystem

→ Changes across time.

→ Includes: Major life events, Historical events

Cross-sectional sequential design

• Pros: Can compare ages across and within individuals; less attrition

• Cons: Very expensive; may still get attrition

Microgenetic Study

• Pros: Can look at developmental onset of a skill (when a skill first emerges)

• Cons: Very expensive, but not as much as longitudinal studies; may still get attrition

William James

• Believed infants perceive the world as a "blooming, buzzing confusion."

Shape Constancy

• The brain processes that allow infants to see an object as the same shape even when the angle changes and creates a different image

Size Constancy

• We perceive objects as having constant size despite changes in the actual retinal image

Preferential Looking Studies

• Make inferences about what infants prefer, or find novel/surprising based on where infants look longer

Habituation-Recovery Tests

• Showing a stimulus until the infant gets bored, then showing a new stimulus to see if attention recovers

Contingent Reinforcement Studies

• Pairing a natural reflex (e.g., sucking) with a potential reward (e.g., mom’s voice)

Anticipatory Looking Studies

• Making an inference on what babies expect to happen next based on where they look

Taste

Infants can taste starting from in-utero; show taste preferences

Contrast Sensitivity

• The difference in brightness between an image and its background

Visual acuity

• The ability to see fine detail

Color Perception

• Infants could tell the difference between blue and green, but they could NOT tell the difference between light blue and dark blue

Depth Perception

• Newborns perceive objects about 12 inches away

• Gibson, visual cliff experiment

→ By 10 months, infants were nervous about crossing the cliff

→ Development of depth perception explains fear of visual cliff

Face Perception

• Infants prefer (look longer) at faces versus non-faces

Perceptual Narrowing

• We start paying attention to the differences in features between faces we are exposed to

• Younger infants (3 month-olds) are better at other-race face discrimination than older infants (6-month olds)

Absolute threshold

• How loud something has to be in order to hear it

→ Can you hear leaves rustling?

Relative threshold

• Minimum difference in loudness or pitch needed to distinguish between two sounds

→ Can you tell the difference between 30 leaves rustling and 500 leaves rustling?

Speech Perception

• Infants prefer:

→ Speech to non-speech

→ Mom’s voice to other voices

→ Mom’s voice in utero to Mom’s voice on the outside

Arnold Gesell

• Maturation: genetically predetermined process that controls the order of behaviors and the skills

Piaget’s Sensorimotor Stage (6 substages)

• Substage 1 of Sensorimotor: Reflexes

→ Birth - 1 month

→ Things they’re born with: sucking, grasping, moving fingers, limbs

→ Inborn, mostly spontaneous movements. Building blocks for later thinking.

• Substage 2 of Sensorimotor: Primary Circular Reactions

→ 1-4 months

→ Repeating actions focused on own body. Simple habits (Infants begin to repeat their actions. They combine actions into recurring, purposeful behaviors organized around the immediate environment of their bodies.

→ Infants will repeatedly suck their thumbs or kick their legs.

• Substage 3 of Sensorimotor: Secondary circular reactions

→ 4-8 months

→ Repeating actions on objects to recreate an effect. Infants enjoy watching the effects their actions have on the world, and they often attempt to recreate events by repeating their actions with objects.

→ A baby might swipe at a mobile, watch the dangling parts move, and then swipe again and again to reproduce the effect.

• Substage 4 of Sensorimotor: Coordination of secondary circular reactions

→ 8-12 months

→ Infants' actions now appear to be "goal directed" and intentional. Infants coordinate and combine several actions to accomplish a goal (means-end analysis)

→ The infant might try to move a pillow aside to get a toy that is behind it.

• Substage 5 of Sensorimotor: Tertiary circular reactions

→ 12-18 months

→ Infants are capable of means-end analysis and can search for new solutions to solve problems. Infants display increased flexibility and creativity, often engaging in trial-and-error experiments to explore the consequences of their actions with objects.

→ Dropping different objects to hear the sounds

• Substage 6 of Sensorimotor: Mental representation

→ 18-24 months

→ Infants are able to mentally represent and manipulate objects and events in their minds, as seen in the use of language, symbolic play, and deferred imitation. Can think before acting: hold, plan, and predict in their head

→ Imitating another person's action of pulling a mitten off a stuffed animal) or Pauses, figures out how to open a box, then does it.

→ Mental representation allows toddlers to think about goals and how to accomplish them, objects that are not currently visible, and possible solutions to problems

→ This ability contributes to deferred imitation, language, symbolic/pretend play, object permanence

Displaced reference

• Referring to objects even when they aren’t there

Deferred Imitation

• Being able to reproduce another person’s actions hours or days after the fact

→ Requires memory recall, and representing the actions even when they’re not in front of you

Imitation

12-18 months: toddlers imitate intended actions only (Carpenter et al., 1998)

→ Rational vs. irrational

Nativism

• The theory that we are born or “hard-wired” with certain core capacities

→ agency & intentionality

→ intuitive physics

→ number

• Piaget: believed these concepts develop as children act on the world

• Nativists: believed we are born with them

Early Object Permanence

• Baillargeon et al., 1985: believed infants were capable of object permanence

→ Violation of expectations paradigm (possible vs. impossible event)

→ Babies look longer at impossible events = they have some idea that objects can’t just disappear and reappear

Do Infants Perceive Intentions?

• Infants infer goals and intentions, because they are surprised when the goal target changes.

Why Do We Over-Imitate?

• We infer the action was intentional and therefore…

→ Possibility #1: We infer a social norm (“this is what you’re supposed to do”)

→ Possibility #2: We actually think the [irrelevant action] is important (“this is how you retrieve the toy”)

Notes about Overimitation

• May be a uniquely human ability

• Bonobos don’t overimitate

• Lots of animals don’t

• Dogs over-imitate their caregivers

Intuitive Number Sense

• Two distinct early abilities (number systems)

→ Ability #1: approximating large numbers

→ Ability #2: Processing exact quantities of small numbers

• Researchers have proposed that we process small numbers (1, 2, and 3) differently than large numbers (4+)

  → It’s easy for us to quickly “intuit” how many of a set of small numbers there are (1-3)

  → It’s harder for us to figure out how many of a set of large numbers there are (4+)

  
  

Ratio Dependence

• How difficult it is to tell the difference between two stimuli depends on the ratio between them