Infant Psych - History

Historical Evolution

• Baby diaries

• 1700s

• 1800s

• Charles Darwin

• Jean Piaget

Emergence of Areas

• Social Development

• Attention & Cognitive Development

• Emotional Development

Contemporary Areas

• Connectionism

• Neuroscience

  • looks at how the growth and development of different brain areas affects overall development

Historical w/in Civilizations

• Early civilizations

  • Infanticide — fathers/heads of households got to decide whether infants lived/died

• Middle Ages & Renaissance

  • orphaning as substitute to infanticide

• Enlightenment (romanticism v. empiricism)

• Modern science (maturation vs. behaviorism vs dynamic system)

  • Head start

Topics w/in Infant Development

• Perceptual/Sensorial skills

• Sensorimotor/tool use

• Conceptual thinking

• Representational/symbolic

• Communicative/linguistic
  ]

• social/interactive

• Expressive/emotive

• Self-regulatory/coping

Key Concepts

• Development change: stable, irreversible

• Development stage: stable and persistent patterns of behaviors

  • fully mastered abilities of the previous stage; won’t make mistakes from previous stages

• Research methods

• Quantitative — behavioral processes have a numerical index

• Qualitative — emphasize the meaning/quality of the behaviors

• Experimental

  • Random assignment is most challenging with infant studies due to ethics and logistics

• Physiological recording

  • heart rate, hormonal activity, ERPS

• Observational research

  • Longitudinal, cross-sectional

  • Predictor, outcome variable (cannot IV/DV because you are observing not experimenting)

• Be clear in what target behaviors you are observing and why it matters

• In infant studies, it’s common to have up to ~30% attrition

• Microanalysis: observers record the presence or absence of the predefined categories

  • e.g. behavioral coding

• Macroanalysis

Cross-Cultural Psych

• became popular because it could be used to prove that certain behaviors/capacitites are innate

• If a capacity were innate it would be true are sociocultural contexts

Documentary —

• link between parenting and cognitive development unexplored

• less connected in early times, partly due to Piaget

• epistemology—study of learning about origins of knowledge

• Piaget never claimed to be a developmental psych, instead was interested in learning how people acquire knowledge

• John Piaget

• First paper at 10, studying insect behavior

• PhD in natural sciences

• Got into child development after fatherhood

• Study — babies reach for toy, continue push it out of their reach till they stop reaching → demonstrates comprehension of distance and scope of abilities

• Dr. He’ study — add a cloth under/over toy so that it is in arms reach (but the toy is not); babies can pull cloth to bring toy closer → demonstrates tool use

• Origins of Knowledge

• Nativism (Rationalism)

• Empiricism (Associativism)

• Constructivism

• Piaget took middle ground, stated not just nature or nurture is important but rather how it comes together in the environment

• Hereditary factors

• Structural: related to the constitution of our nervous system and sensory organs, thus we perceive e …

• constant exchange between the individual and the environment

• …

• Adapation is the equilibrium of:

  • Assimilation (modify interpretation of new elements to fit schema)

  • and accomadation (modify schema in light of new elements)

• Piagets’ Developmental stages

• Sensorimotor

  1. reflex schemas exercised

  2. primary circular reactions — using body parts, extending arms, thumbs

  3. secondary circular reactions — involving an object outside their body

     1. Object permanence — signs: child will still look for object that has been obstructed from view

     2. A not B error: babies can find toys in location A but not in location B

  4. coordination of secondary

     1. Visable displacement: child will search for missing objects outside of trajectory the object followed while the child was playing with it

     2. Invisible displacement: Child with search multiple locations even they didn’t see the toy going there

  5. tertiary circular reactions —- coordination, multiple secondary reactions

     1. begin to understand that the object is independent of the child but only as long as movement id perceived

  6. beginning of symbolic representation —- testing behaviors e.g. dropping tools to watch parents pick it up

     1. begin to understand that the object is independent of the child

• Pass: symbolic processing

• Freud, through the study of personality, emphasized the importance of early experiences

• Piaget focused on the origins of knowledge, the beginning point

  • first one to propose motor abilities are important

  • Motoric activities: crawling, cruising, walking, etc

  • Gross - throwing, turning, talking

  • Fine — swiffering, pointing/poking,

• David Anderson paper

• Self-produced locomotion

• Central questions of developmental psych

• Origins — what and when?

• Process — how?

• Gibson: invariant

• motor activity plays a crucial role in

• Anderson paper — metaanalysis

• Infant crawling is linked to many psychological changes

  • visual perception

  • fear of heights

  • spatial coding strat

    • Egocentric — directions change based on where you are

    • Allocentric

  • joint visual attention

  • parent-child communication

  • Search for hidden objects

  • Cross cultural: certain tribes continue to use egocentric coding strat

• Epigenesis: the emergence of a new skill creates experiences that bring about new psychological developments

• eg onset of prone locomotion

• Theorectical Framework of Developmental Process

• crawling → fear of height

• Infant that have newly learned crawling will cross without worry, while e

• Visual proprioception: the awareness of ones own movement and posture produced by eyes alone (Ginson 1979)

• plays a role inn height vertigo

• utilizes peripheral vision

• Infants don’t necessarily use vp the way adults do

• Optica flow

• Center

• Study:

• Pre-crawling don’t res

• Crawling infants or infants with locomotor experience were more sensitive to peripheral vision change