PSYC 101 UCSD - Schachner

Ancient Egypt (~650 BCE)

Shepard raised two kids without talking

Modern Day

- 'Controlled Rearing' Studies

- Behavioral studies with animals

- "Natural Experiments"

Extreme deprivation

- Child Abuse

- Case of Genie 1970

Aristotle

- Knowledge from experience

- Child-rearing should adjust to needs of child

Plato

- Knowledge built-in

- Strict discipline for everyone

John Locke

Emphasized nuture

Noam Chomsky

- Disagreed with Skinner, we have to think about the mimnd

- Development is not just a product of experience, reward and punishment

- Nativist - Some knowledge built-in, babies are not just a "blank-state"

Charles Darwin

- Evolution of Natural Selection

- "Biographical sketch of an infant"

- Diary method

Sigmund Freud

- Focus on the unconscious causes of behavior

- Type of drive changes over development

- Psychosexual drives

Behaviorist Theories (1920s - 60s)

John Watson

Main Principles of Behaviorism

• Only talk about observable things

• No vague mental constructs

• "The most scientific approach to studying the mind"

Also:

• all behavior = response to external stimuli

• don’t need to consider thoughts, emotions, etc

• child behavior can be controlled by consistently rewarding/punishing behaviors

Jean Piaget (1896 - 1980)

- Father of modern developmental psychology

- Founded the field of Cognitive Development

- Wrong and right ideas

- Jumpstarted study of Child Development

Piaget research findings

- Kids are surprisingly bad at some things

- Development happens in stages

- Learning is an active, constructive process

"A child's capacity to understand concepts is limited by their stage of development"

Prepared Learning

Genetic factor affect how easy it is to learn different associations

Major themes of the History of Developmental Psychology

1) Nature or Nuture?

2) The Active Child

3) Continuity vs. Discontinuity

4) Mechanisms of Developmental Change

5) The Sociocultural context

6) Individual Differences

Continuity theories

Quantitative change

Discontinuity theories

Qualitative Change

Sperm Competition

Type of natural selection

Cryptic Female Choice

Egg can choose sperm

stages of embryonic development

cell division, cell migration, cell differentiation, cell death

cell death important because it gets rid of webbed hands and feet

Why are males more vulnerable to developmental disorders? (X-linked recessive disorders)

Due to physical structure of sex chromosomes

When does learning begin?

Third trimester

Teratogens

environmental agents that can potentially cause harm during prenatal development

Sensation

Getting information from external world from sensory receptors

Perception

The process of organizing and interpreting sensory information, to understand what's out there in the world

Instinct Blindness

The feeling that something is automatic and effortless can hide its mental complexity

What are the two methods that test how infants perceive the world?

1) Preferential Looking Method

2) Habituation

Preferential Looking Method

Measure looking time for each target

Habituation

tendency of the brain to stop attending to constant, unchanging information

Inter-modal Perception

Relationship between senses

Object Permanence

the awareness that things continue to exist even when not perceived

Taste Aversions

The "Garcia Effect", we are prepared to learn a link between illness and food (more than illness &non-food experiences)

What are the Learning mechanisms?

1) Habituation

2) Classical Conditioning

3) Instrumental Conditioning

4) Prepared Learning

5) Rational Inference

6) Observational Learning/Imitation

Face perception is...

Quick, automatic, intuitive

Do newborns perceive faces?

Newborns (one hour old) turn to follow faces more than non-faces

Is facial recognition for babies "built in"?

What's 'built-in' is a tendency to look at top-heavy patterns (more stuff on the top half, like a face)

Newborns infants selectively attend to which social stimuli

faces, biological motions

Do infants have social concepts, before they can talk?

Yes, within the first year of life:

1) Infants distinguish between things that are ANIMATE and inanimate

2) Infants understand human behavior as rational, goal-directed actions

Do infants understand human behavior?

By 5 months, infants understand goals

Violation of Expectations Method

Habituate babies to a particular event and then present two variants of the event , a possible and impossible variant

Sticky Mittens study

Experience of grasping things makes the 3 month old infant more interested in goal directed behavior

By 1 year, infants know alot about goals

They expect agents to act rationally (take the most efficient path)

Naturalistic Observation

observing and recording behavior in naturally occurring situations without trying to manipulate and control the situation

Why do young children help?

Children seem naturally motivated to help others, without requests or rewards