PSYC LSD V2 notes 2

Chapter 7: Physical and Cognitive Development in Early Childhood

Cognitive Changes: Piaget’s Preoperational Stage

  • Semiotic (Symbolic) Function:

    • Understanding that one object or behavior can represent another.

    • Children proficiently use symbols for thinking and communicating, but struggle with logical thought.

  • Pretend Play:

    • Emerges around ages 2 or 3.

  • Egocentrism:

    • Continues to persist in young children.

  • Centration:

    • Influences performance on conservation tasks (understanding that quantity does not change despite changes in form).

  • Animism:

    • Belief that inanimate objects have feelings and intentions, may stem from egocentrism and centration.

Challenges to Piaget’s View

  • Children often demonstrate mastery of concepts earlier than Piaget concluded.

  • Egocentrism and Perspective Taking:

    • Complete egocentrism is not always evident.

    • 2-3-year-olds show stage 1 perspective taking (understanding others see things differently).

    • By ages 4-5, children show stage 2 perspective taking, developing complex rules for understanding another's viewpoint.

Appearance and Reality

  • Around age 4, children start solving tasks about distinguishing appearance from reality and false beliefs.

Theory of Mind

  • Theory of Mind:

    • Set of ideas to explain others' ideas, beliefs, desires, and behaviors.

  • Understanding Thoughts, Desires, and Beliefs:

    • 10 months: Understand people act with goals and intentions.

    • 3 years: Struggle with hiding feelings and fail false-belief tasks.

    • 4 years: Hide feelings effectively and pass false-belief tasks.

    • 6 years: Understand knowledge via inference.

Page 2: Influences on Theory of Mind Development

  • Correlations:

    • Theory of mind ties to performance on Piagetian tasks.

    • Influenced by pretend play and parental discussions about emotions.

    • Related to language skills, especially terminology that expresses feelings and desires.

    • More developed in children with older siblings.

Alternative Theories of Early Childhood Thinking

  • Information-Processing Theories:

    • Short-term Storage Space (STSS): Case's term for working memory.

    • Operational Efficiency: Refers to max number of schemes processed in working memory; improves with age and practice.

    • Metamemory: Understanding memory work capabilities.

    • Metacognition: Awareness of one's thought processes.

Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory

  • Stages of cognitive development:

    • Primitive stage similar to lower animals.

    • Naïve psychology stage: Early language use without symbolic understanding.

    • Egocentric speech stage: Using language as problem-solving guidance.

    • Ingrowth stage: Internalization of self-directed speech.

Page 3: Language Development

Fast-Mapping

  • Ability to link new words to their real-world referents after minimal exposure.

  • Can lead to overextensions and underextensions in word usage.

Grammar Explosion

  • Inflections:

    • Grammatical markers indicating tense, gender, etc.

    • Usage evolves from basic forms to more complex actions over time.

  • Overregularization:

    • Application of regular grammatical patterns to irregular words (e.g., "goed" instead of "went").

    • Developmentally normal until around age 7.

  • Children progress to creating complex sentences and mastering questions and negatives.

Phonological Awareness

  • Understanding sound patterns in language helps predict literacy development.

  • Developed through play and nursery rhymes.

Language and Numeracy

  • Language impacts number learning; shorter, simpler terms in languages can speed acquisition.

Page 4: Intelligence and Cognitive Development

Differences in Intelligence & Measuring Intelligence

  • The First Tests:

    • Constructs like Binet-Simon focused on mental age for school placement.

    • Stanford Binet updated for broader assessment.

Modern Intelligence Tests

  • WISC:

    • Assesses verbal comprehension, perceptual reasoning, working memory, and processing speed.

Stability and Predictive Value of IQ Scores

  • Correlation of current IQ with future academic performance: 0.50-0.60.

  • Stability increases from age 6 onward with high scores correlating (around 0.80) for middle childhood.

  • However, many children show significant changes over time.

Limitations of IQ Tests

  • Do not assess underlying competence or many critical skills (creativity, social intelligence).

Origins of Individual Differences in Intelligence

  • Heredity Evidence:

    • Identical twins have more similar IQ than fraternal.

    • Adopted children reflect biological parents' IQs more.

Environmental Evidence

  • Children from low-SES families who are adopted into higher-SES families tend to have higher IQs.

Page 5: Influences on Development

Evidence for Preschool Influences

  • Enriched programs like Head Start show temporary IQ increases (~10 points).

  • Long-lasting effects seen in programs starting from infancy to school age.

Readiness to Learn at School

  • Gender differences at school entry:

    • Girls generally excel in communication, attention, and self-control.

Combining the Information

  • Heredity and environment interconnect in shaping intelligence, described using reaction ranges (boundaries set by genetics, influenced by environment).

Chapter 8: Social and Personality Development in Early Childhood

Theories of Development

  • Psychoanalytic Perspectives:

    • Freud (anal & phallic stages), Erikson (autonomy vs. shame/doubt, initiative vs. guilt).

Social-Cognitive Perspectives

  • Improvement in cognitive skills correlates with social and personality development.

Person Perception

  • Young children's classification of others often based on recent interactions; categorizations include age, gender, intelligence, etc.

Understanding Rule Categories

  • Children begin distinguishing between social conventions and moral rules by ages 2-3.

Understanding Intentions

  • 3-year-olds balance considering intentions and outcomes in moral judgments.

Page 6: Family Relationships and Attachment

Attachment

  • Attachment behaviors lessen as children gain independence.

  • Quality of attachment influences preschool behavior; insecurely attached children often face behavioral issues.

Parenting Styles

  • Influences on child development include warmth, consistency, expectations, and communication.

  • Positive nurturance linked with better outcomes (e.g., self-esteem, compliance).

Page 7: Parenting Styles and Outcomes

  • Baumrind's Styles:

    • Authoritarian, permissive, authoritative, uninvolved.

    • Different outcomes are seen across parenting styles, with authoritative linked to positive developmental measures.

Parenting and Discipline

  • Discipline strategies include:

    • Inductive Discipline: Explaining why behavior is wrong.

    • Time-out: Remove child from attention momentarily for behavior correction.

Problems with Discipline

  • Complexity in determining effective discipline strategies; effectiveness varies based on child temperament.

Page 8: Ethnicity, SES, and Parenting

Cultural Considerations in Parenting

  • Variations in parenting practices across cultures.

  • Low-SES influences can compound risk factors or offer some protective qualities depending on parenting quality.

Chapter 9: Cognitive Development in Middle Childhood

Piaget’s Concrete Operational Stage

  • Stage characterized by logical thinking about real objects and events.

  • Children navigate concepts like centration/decentration, reversibility, and inductive logic.

Direct Tests of Piaget’s View

  • Horizontal Decalage reflects how children grasp different concepts at different rates.

Information-Processing Skills

  • Processing Efficiency:

    • Ability to effectively use short-term memory capacities.

    • Increases with age and impacts cognitive development.

Executive and Strategic Processes

  • Improvement in executive functions leads to better memory strategies and problem-solving skills.

Page 10: Language Development in Middle Childhood

Language Skills

  • Vocabulary expands significantly; children learn to maintain conversations, interpret ambiguous language, and use various past tenses.

Chapter 10: Social and Personality Development in Middle Childhood

Psychoanalytic Perspectives

  • Freud's Latency Stage: Focus shifts to friendships and social skills.

  • Erikson: Industry vs. inferiority, where children assess their competence through successes and failures.

The Big Five Personality Traits

  • Include traits like extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness, contributing to feelings of competence.

Page 11: Self-Understanding and Self-Esteem

Self-Concept Development

  • Self-descriptions evolve from physical characteristics to ideologies/beliefs.

  • Academic self-concept influences children's overall self-assessment.

Self-Efficacy

  • Belief in one's ability to achieve goals shaped through comparisons, support, and personal experiences.

Self-Esteem Influences

  • Self-esteem is affected by social comparisons, value of traits, and support from others.

  • Cultural impacts shape self-esteem development in individualistic vs. collectivist societies.

Page 12: Meaningfulness and Spiritual Self

Developing the Spiritual Self

  • Exploration of intuition and emotional trust may aid spiritual self-development.

Page 13: Advances in Social Cognition

Shift in Descriptions

  • From surface traits to psychological constructs, reflecting more complexity in understanding others.

Moral Reasoning

  • Development moves from moral realism (rules are inflexible) to moral relativism (rules can change through social agreement).

Chapter 11: Cognitive Development in Adolescence

Piaget’s Formal Operational Stage

  • Reasoning becomes logical and abstract during this stage.

  • Systematic problem-solving ability emerges with hypothetical-deductive reasoning.

Metacognition and Strategy Use

  • Adolescents tend to monitor their progress better and apply memory strategies more effectively than younger peers.

Page 12: Social and Personality Development in Adolescence

Theories of Development

  • Erikson highlights identity vs. role confusion; crises arise as adolescents seek self-identity.

Self-Understanding Over Time

  • Self-descriptions focus more on ideologies and beliefs over physical traits, reflecting differentiation.

Self-Esteem Patterns

  • Rise in self-esteem is generally observed, but not uniformly across genders and ages.

Gender Roles

  • Understanding of gender roles becomes more flexible; adolescents develop gender-related aspects of their psychological self.

Page 16: Ethnic Identity Development

Phases of Ethnic Identity

  • Unexamined identity, followed by a search often influenced by exposure to discrimination, leading to identity achievement.

Moral Development

  • Kohlberg’s Stages:

    • Preconventional (punishment and obedience), conventional (social norms), postconventional (individual rights).

Page 18: Moral Development and Behavior

Correlation of Moral Reasoning and Behavior

  • Higher moral reasoning is associated with positive societal behaviors and a reduction in antisocial behavior.

Cyberbullying and Criminality

  • Cyberbullying as a new form of aggression exacerbated by distance between offenders and victims.

  • Adolescent antisocial behavior trajectories are influenced by peer relationships and family monitoring.