Lecture 18- Cognitive Development & Lecture 19- Social Development

What is IQ?

•  Intelligence Quotient. Its tests are designed to quantitatively measure “Intelligence” and create a relative order among people.

 How is IQ calculated?

• IQ= mental age/ chronological x 100.

What are some tests used to measure “intelligence”?

•  Stanford-Binet Test, Wechsler test.

Strengths of IQ tests

• Standardized measure of “intelligence”, scores correlate with a variety of other variables such as school or occupational performance. 

Weaknesses of IQ tests

• Validity issues (asks the question on construct in terms of does it measure intelligence, and what is intelligence anyway?) and ethical issues (racial, lower scoring children, etc)

How do researchers try to unconfund nature and nurture when looking for correlations of IQ scores? (think twin studies and adoptive studies)

• Researchers try to unconfound nature (genetics) and nurture (environment) by examining groups of people who share either genetic material or environments, but not both. The primary methods—twin and adoption studies—work by comparing correlations in IQ scores across these groups.

  • Identical Twins (Apart): Highest correlation.

  • Identical Twins (Together): Very high correlation.

  • Fraternal Twins (Together): Moderate correlation.

  • Adoptive Siblings: Lowest correlation.

What do results of twin and adoptive studies indicate about whether “intelligence” is innate or acquired? -

• Twin and adoptive studies indicate that intelligence is a complex mix of both innate (genetic) and acquired (environmental) factors, with genetics explaining roughly 50% to 80% of IQ differences.

  • “Nature plays a larger role among higher SES; Individuals in higher SES have maximum benefit of nurture, so nature is a stronger determinant”

What is Theory of Mind (ToM)? -

• The understanding of the mental world; how children think about desires, intentions, emotions, and beliefs.

• What is a false-belief task? -

•  the ability to understand that others hold beliefs different from reality and from the child's own knowledge

How did Prof. Renée Baillargeon and her research team demonstrate infants’ understanding of ToM using violation of expectation?-

• Infants watched a puppet actor (agent) hide a toy, then, in the actor's absence, move it, inducing a false belief, leading infants to look longer at unexpected, illogical searches.

  • What was the setup of the study? What was the familiarization phase? - The experiment (Onishi & Baillargeon, 2005) involved a setup where 15-month-old infants watched a female actor interact with a toy and two boxes (one green, one yellow). 

  • What were the possible and impossible events? - 

    • False Belief (Location Change): The actor thinks the toy is in the green box, but it is actually in the yellow box.

      Possible Event: The actor searches the green box (consistent with her false belief).

      Impossible Event: The actor searches the yellow box (violates the expectation that she acts on her false belief).

    • Result: Infants looked longer at the impossible event, showing surprise that the actor did not act on her false belief, indicating an early understanding of mental states.

  • How do we reconcile these results with results from traditional false-belief tasks demonstrating children’s “failure” to understand ToM until age 4-5? - Task demands; It is harder to keep track of the form of question and whether the researcher is asking about “where will Sally look” or “where should Sally look”

What is the rouge test? How is it used to measure self-awareness? -

•  a behavioral technique developed in 1970 to measure self-awareness by determining if a child or animal can recognize their own reflection in a mirror.

  • By secretly placing a red mark on an subject’s face and monitoring if they touch their own face upon seeing the mirror reflection, psychologists determine if they understand that the reflection is themselves. 

What are the three stages of Kohlberg’s Theory of Gender Constancy? When do they develop? -

• Gender Identity (2-3 years): Labeling self and others as boy/girl.

• Gender Stability (4-5 years): Realizing gender is stable over time.

• Gender Consistency (6-7 years): Realizing gender is unchanged even with changes in appearance.

What was Sandra Bem’s criticism of Kohlberg’s theory? How did she show evidence for her view? -

• Argued that the tasks used were unnecessarily difficult. 

  • Proposed the Gender Schema Theory involving that Gender Schema Theory (1981), arguing that children begin to seek gender-specific information and conform to gender roles much earlier—as soon as they can simply identify their own gender (around ages 2-3), rather than waiting for full constancy (around age 5-7). 

What are strengths of using naturalistic observation to study moral development? -

easy to administer, sample variety of situations

What are weaknessess of using naturalistic observation to study moral development? -

•  Demand characteristics →  social desirability: participants may choose the “model answer” to avoid “looking bad.”

What methods are used to study the emotional component of moral development? -

Self-reports, analyzing facial expressions, measuring physiological changes, and doing multi-method approaches.

What are moral dilemmas? -

•  scenarios involving conflict between moral requirements, where choosing one action violates another, equally important, moral principle

• What are the three stages of Kohlberg’s Levels of Moral Thought?-

• Preconventional: Based on rules, obtaining rewards, and avoiding punishment.  

• Conventional: Driven by social relationships and maintaining social system  

Postconventional: Focus on ideals, moral principles.

How has Karen Wynn demonstrated early evidence for morality in infants using indirect experimental manipulation? -

• demonstrated that infants as young as 3 months possess an innate, rudimentary moral sense. Using indirect "puppet show" experiments, infants viewed social scenes and showed a consistent, significant preference for "helper" characters over "hinderer" characters, suggesting a pre-verbal capacity for moral evaluation