Sensation and Perception

• Sensation: The processing of basic information from the world through the sense organs (eyes, ears, skin, etc.)

• Perception: The process of organizing and interpreting sensory information about objects, events, and the world around us

Vision and Visual Acuity

• The least matured sense of a newborn

• Improves rapidly in first months

• Visual Acuity: Determine how sharply or clearly infants can see

  • Adults and Children: Eye Charts

  • Infants: Pattern Distinction

  • Limited at birth

    • What an adult can see at 600 ft, and infant can see at 20 ft.

    • Adult level by 6 months

• Cone Cells: The light senstive neurons that are highly concentrated in the fovea

  • Involved in seeing fine details and color

  • Spaced 4 times farther apart than adults

  • Infants prefer unique hues like blue

  • Do not see color for the first few months

• Fovea: The central region of the retina

  • Infants foveas catch 2% of light, compared to 65% for adults

• Retina: Light-senstive layer of tissue at the back of the eyeball

  • Image comes through and focuses on the retina

  • Created the images that you see

  • Have 20/120 vision at birth

Preferential Looking Technique

• Two different visual stimuli are displayed side by side. If an infant looks longer at one of the two stimuli, the researcher can infer that (a) the baby can discriminate between them, and (b) the infant prefers one over the other

• Established by Fantz

• Modern versions use automatic eye trackers

  • Use a camera that mesaures eye movements via infrared light reflection

  • Head-mounted infant-eye trackers that show where infants are looking as they move their eyes freely around the room.

Pattern Perception

• Newborns perfer patterns over plain stimuli due to inability to see small features

  • High contrast

  • Ex: Black and white checkerboard

• Older infants prefer more complex patterns

• Contrast sensitivity: Infants can detect a pattern only when it is composed of highly contrasting elements.

Object Perception

• Perceptual Constancy: The perception of objects as being of constant size, shape, color, etc., despite phsycial differences in the retinal image of the object

  • Evident in the first week of life

  • Not dependent on experience

  • Ex: A door opening and closing

• Object Segregation: The identification of seperate obhects in a visual array

  • Experience with specific objects helps infants understand their physcial properties

  • Common Movement: It refers to the perception of objects moving together in the same direction, speed, or pattern, aiding in the organization and recognition of objects in the visual field.

  • Ex: A box going over a line, do they focus on the full line or the two seperate lines?

Depth Perception

• Depth Perception: The ability to judge distance of objects from one another and ourselves

• Depth Cues Used by Infants

  • Optical Expansion: The visual image of an object increases in size as the object comes toward us, occluding more in the background

    • By 1 Month

  • Binocular Disparity: The closer the object, the more diiferent retinal images of it from the two eyes will be

  • Stereopsis: The process by which the visual cortex combines the different neural signals from each eye to create depth perception

    • By 4 Months

  • Monocular/Pictorial Cues: The perceptual cues of depth that can be achieved by one eye alone (e.g., relative size, interposition)

    • By 6-7 Months

• Visual Cliff Study

  • Based on Visual Cliff Apparatus

  • It involved a glass-covered platform with a shallow and deep side to see if infants would perceive the drop and hesitate to cross, indicating depth perception development.

  • Showed depth perception develops within 1-2 months after baby begins to crawl

Hearing

• Most developed sense at birth

• Auditory Localization: the perception fo the spatial location of a sound source

  • Newborns turn towards a sound

  • Improves with growth

• Infants can discriminate sounds

  • Volume

  • Duration

  • Pitch

• Infants prefer listening to “baby talk,” their mothers voice over unfamiliar adults, and their native language

• Lose senitivity to sounds not needed for home language

Taste & Smell

• Innate responses in infancy

  • Sweet taste (preferred) → relaxed facial muscles

  • Sour taste → pursed lips

  • Sweet vs. Rotten smell → Happy vs. Unhappy expression

• Prenatal Experiences

  • Early exposure to bitter flavors increase likelihood of preference for those flavors

  • Prenatal exposure to garlic → more likely to like garlic

• Newborn Preferences

  • Prefer smell of mother’s breast milk

    • Can distinguish it

Intermodal Perception

• Intermodal Perception: The combining of information from two or more sensory systems

• Ex: Sucking on a pacifier without seeing it and able to recognize it once visible

• Ex: Sight and sound of a ball

• Ex: Matching Facial Expression with Voice

• Helps with perception

  • Easier for infants to detect changes in stimulation that occur at the same time in two modalities

Piaget Core Principals

• Constructivist Approach: Children as constructing knowledge for themselves in response to their experiences (“Little Scientists”)

  • Generating hypotheses

  • Performing experiences

  • Drawing conclusions

• Schemas: Organized unit of knowledge used to understand and respond to situations

  • Become more “cognitive” over time

  • Considered a set of linked mental representations

• Mental Representations: Internal depictions of information the mind can manipulate

• Adaption

  • Assimilation: The process by which people incorporate incoming information into concepts they already understand

    • Ex: Calling a zebra a horse

  • Accommodation: The process by which people improve their current understanding in response to new experiences

    • Ex: Creating a new schema for zebras

  • Equilibration: The process by which people balance assimilation and accomodation to create stable understanding

    • Three Phases

      • People are satisfied with their understanding of a particular phenomenon

      • New information leads them to perceive that their understanding is inadequate

      • Develop a more sophisticated understanding

• Continuity and Discontinutiy

  • Piaget’s stages are discontinuous

  • Qualitative Change

    • Moral judgements change based on age

• Invariant Sequence: Everyone progresses throught the stages in the same order without skipping any of them

• Broad Applicability

  • Characteristic of each stage influences children’s thinking across diverse topics and contexts

Sensorimotor Stage

• Birth to 2 years old

• Thinking via senses and motor skills

• Substages

  • Basic Reflex Activity: Proficient in innate reflexes

    • Birth - 1 month

  • Primary Circular Reactions: Infants produce repetitive behavioris focused on own body

    • 1 month - 4 months

    • Ex: Sucking thumb

    • Pleasureable response to chace event → repeated occurrence

    • Lacks object permanence, but begin to search for objects the disappear from sight

  • Secondary Circular Reactions: Repetitive behaviors now focused on external objects

    • 4 - 8 months

    • Behaviors still not intentional

    • Can imitate familiar, but not novel, behaviors

  • Coordination of Secondary Circular Reactions: Schemas can be comined into complex sequences

    • 8 - 12 months

    • Ex: hitting + reaching + grasping

    • Behavior intentional and goal-directed

    • Gain object permance but show A-not-B error

  • Teritary Circular Reactions: Toddlers experiment with external objects

    • 12 - 18 months

    • Use of actions not previously linked to the objects variation → new outcomes

    • Improved problem solving

    • Display accurate A-B Search

  • Mental Representation: Reach ability to “think” befoer you act

    • 18-24 months

    • Arrival at solutions suddently suggests mental representation of different actions

    • Deffered imitation appears

    • Leads to development of make-believe play

• Object permanence: The understanding that objects continue to exist even when they are not visible

• A-not-B Error: a phenomenon observed in infants where they continue to search for an object in the initial hiding place (A) even after seeing it being hidden in a new location (B)

• Deferred Imitation: the ability to observe and remember another person's actions and then imitate those actions after a delay

Preoperational Stage

• 2 - 7 Years

• Large increase in mental representations

• Make believe play

  • Reinforces Schemas

  • Kids become detached from real-life conditions

  • Kids become less self-centered

  • Involves more complex cominations of schemas

• Symbolic Representation: The use of one object, word, or thought to stand for another.

  • Ex: 5-year olds will play games involving pirates while wearing a patch over one eye

  • DeLoache’s Snoopy Study

    • Hiding a snoopy doll in a scale model of a room and then hiding a bigger snoopy doll in an identical room

    • Older kids could find it, younger kids couldn’t

    • Demostrates dual representation

• Dual Representation: Viewing a symbolic object as an object and a symbol

• Limitations

  • Egocentrism: Perceiving the world solely from one’s own point of view

    • Three Mountains Task - Kids younger than 4 could not imagine what the researcher was seeing from the other side of the mountain, so they assume they see from their own point of view

    • Pencils/Smarties Task - Kids were shown a box of smarties and asked what they believed was in the box. The kids said it would be smarties. But, when they were shown that the box of smarties had pencils in the box, the kids said they always believed pencils were in the box and others would think the same way.

  • Animistic Thinking: The belief that inanimate objects have lifelike qualities

    • Corresponds with magical thinking of preschoolers

    • Only applies with objects that move in real life

  • Lack of Conservation: Certain physical characteristics of objects remain the same, despite changes in outward appearence

  • Centration: Focus on a single, perceptually striking feature of an object or event to exclusion of other relevant features

  • Irreversibility: Inability to go through a series of steps in a problem and then mentally revesre direction and return to starting point

Concrete Operational Stage

• 7 - 11 Years

• Characterized by more logical, fexible, and organized though and abilities

  • Conservation

  • Classification: classifying objects into groups and subgroups

  • Decentration: the ability to pay attention to multiple attributes of an object or situation rather than being locked into attending to only a single attribute

  • Spatial Reasoning

  • Reversibility

  • Seriation: The ability to order items along a quantitative dimesion

    • Transitive interference issues

• Transitive interference: the ability to seriate mentally

Formal Operation Stage

• 11 Years Old and Beyond

• Not everyone reaches this

• Characterized by abstract, scientific thinking

• Hypothetical Reasoning: hypothetical "what-if" situations that are not always rooted in reality

• Metacognition: the awareness and understanding of one's own thought processes.

• Cognitive Distortions: irrational thoughts that influence our emotions and behaviors. They are inaccurate or exaggerated beliefs about ourselves, others, or the world.

  • Imaginary Audience: Believing you are the focus

  • Personal Fable: Inflated opinion of self-importance

Critisms of Piaget

• The stage model depicts children’s thinking as being more consistent than it is

• Infants and young children are more cognitively competent than piaget recognized

• Understates the contribution of the social world to cognitive development

• Vague about mechansisms that give rise to children’s thinking and produce cogntitve growth

Information Processing Theory

• Information Processing Theory: Children’s cognitive growth occurs continuously from gradually surmounting processing limitations through:

  • Exanding amount of information they can process at a time

  • Increasing processing speeds

  • Acquiring new strategies and knowledge

• Thinking is a activity that occurs over time, with numerous mental operations underlying a single behavior

• Task Analysis: identification of goals needed to perform the task, obstacles that prevent immediate realization of the goals, prior knowledge relevant to achieving the goals, and potential strategies for reaching the desired outcome

• Computer Metaphor

  • Input devices (sensory memory) → Processor/RAM (working memory) ⬆ ⬇ Hard Drive Storage (long term memory) → Output (response to stimuli)

• Store Model: Assumes we hold or store information in three parts of the mental system for processing

  • Sensory Memory: Represents sensory information

  • Working Memory: Actively attending to, gathering, maintaining, storing, and processing information is limited in both capacity (amount of information that can be stored) and length of time information can be retained.

    • Happnens in less than a second

    • Capacity and duration increases greatly during infancy and adolescence

  • Long Term Memory: Knowledge that people accumulate over their lifetime

    • Factual Knowledge

      • Knowing who one the Super Bowl last year or the capitals of different countries

    • Conceptual Knowledge

      • The concepts of justice and equality

    • Procedural Knowledge

      • Knowing how to shoot a basketball or play a specific video game)

    • Attitudes

      • Likes and dislikes regarding food or politics

    • Unlimited amount of information for unlimited periods of time

• Encoding: The representation in memory of specific features of objects and events

  • Encode info that draws attention or they consider important

  • Faliure to encode means it will not be remembered later

• Role of the Myelin: Increasing the number of axons covered with myelin means faster processing speed and more reliable transmissions of electrical impulses in the brain

Memory

• Selective Attention: Intentionally focusing on the information most relevant to the current goal

• Rehearsal: Repeating information to yourself

• Organization: Grouping related items

• Elaboration: creating relationships between two items not in same category

• Retroactive Interference: The tendency of later learning to hinder the memory of previously learned material

• Control Deficiencies: Kids know strategies but don’t use them consistently

• Utilization Deficiencies: Kids use strategies but don’t benefit from them

• Memory Retrival

  • Recognition: Noticing a stimulus is identical or similar to one previously experienced

    • Easier than recall

    • Young infants do it too

  • Recall: Generating a mental representation of an absent stimulus

    • More difficult than recognition

    • Can appear at one year

    • 2 Year (1-2 items), 4 (3-4 items)

• Overlapping Waves Theory: Individual children usually use a variety of approaches to solve such problems

  • Ex: Examining 5-year-olds’ reasoning on repeated trials of the conservation-of-number problem reveals that most children use at least three different strategies

• Gist Memory: Focusing on details but sometimes lacking the ability to get the core kernel of what happened

  • Farmer Brown Study: Preschoolers and 2nd Graders were given the sentence “Farmer Brown owns three dogs, five sheep, seven chickens, nine horses, and 11 cows”

    • First Test (Vertaim Test) - Asked “How many cows farmer brown owns: either 11 or 9”

    • Second Test (Gist Test) - Asked “Does Farmer Brown have more cows or horses”

    • Showed 2nd graders had better verbatim and gist results but were better overall at gist memory and preschoolers were better at verbatim

Core Knowledge

• Views kids as having innate knowledge in domains of special evolutionary importance

• Domain-specific Understanding: Knowledge systems (“core domains of thought”) that appear early in life and allow infants to grasp new information

  • Allows children to distinguish between living and nonliving things

  • Theory of mind: the ability to attribute mental states—beliefs, intents, desires—to oneself and others, and to understand that others have beliefs, desires, intentions, and perspectives that are different from one's own.

  • IDing faces

• Naïve theorists: Children develop theories of objects (physics), people (psychology) and knowledge of plants and animals (biology)

• Physical Knowledge

  • Solid Objects can’t move through another

  • Size comparisons

  • Gravity

• Numerical Knowledge

  • Infants can do simple math up to three

  • Controversial

• Violation of Expectation: Infants will stare at events that would not be physically possible.

  • This shows they know basic core knowledge principals

  • René Bierijan (?) Study

    • Object Solidity

    • Open-Countainer (expected event)

    • Closed-Container condition (unexpected event)

    • Infants as young as 3 ½ months looked at the unexpected

Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory

• Cognitive Development takes place through direct interaction

• “Teaching is only effective when the road points toward the road for development” - Vygotsky

• Language leads to cognitve change

• Piagetian View: Egocentric Speech

  • Decreased by agruments with peers

  • Replaced by social speech (adapting)

  • Rejected by Vygotsky

• Vygotsky’s View: Private Speech

  • Talking through problem solving out loud

  • Used for guidance and is a foundation for all higher cognitive processes

  • Becomes silent, inner speech as kids age

    • Age 4 to 6 Years

• Guided participation: a process in which more knowledgable individuals organize activites in ways that allow less knowledgable people to perform the activity at a higher level than they could manage on their own.

  • Ex: a child’s mom holds one part of a toy so that the child can screw the two other parts together

• Zone of Proximal Development: Tasks a child cannot do alone but can learn to do with help

  • Furthest Layer: Learner cannot do

  • Middle Layer: Learner can do with guidance

  • Innermost Layer: Learner can do unaided

• Intersubjectivity: Two participants begin a task with different understandings but arrive at a shared understang

  • Creates a common ground

  • 3-5 years do this: I think ___. What do you think?”

• Joint Attention: Social partners focus on the same external object

  • Involved in language development

    • Ex: parents points at and names objects

  • Kids with ASD may struggle with this

• Social Scaffolding: adults and others with greater expertise organize the physical and social environment to help children learn.

  • Learning aided by providing a temporary framework that supprts children’s thinking at a higher level than children could manage on their own

  • Framework includes:

    • Choosing a task beyond kid’s level but able to do with help

    • Demostrating how the task can be done

    • Helping learners accomplish the most difficult parts

  • Kids incorporate parent instruction into private speech

• Reciprocal Teaching: Collaborative group effort leading dialog

  • Cognitive Strategies

    • Questioning

    • Summarizing

    • Clarifying

    • Predicting

  • Active teahcer involvement gradually declines

• Cooperative Learning: Small groups of classmates work toward common goals

• Easier in collectivist cultures

Comprehension and Production

• Comprehension: Understanding what others say, sign, or right

  • Precedes Production

• Production: Speaking, signing, or writing

Components of Langauage

• Phonology: Rules of governing structure sequence of units of sounds

  • i. e. phonemes

• Semantics: What concepts are expressed in words and word combos

  • e. g. vocabulary

• Pragmatics: Rules for engaging in appropriate and effective communication

Generativity

• Generativity: Using finite set of words and our knowledge of the systematic ways in which those words can be combines, we can generate an infinate number of sentences

• We know that the plural of the fake word “wug” is “wugs”

• Very complex for young learners

Nativist Perspective and Noam Chomsky

• Nativist Perspective: Developed by Noam Chomsky, the nativist perspective says that children assume much responsibility for learning a language

  • Language is a human accomplishment

• Language Acquistion Device (LAD): Innate sustem that allows children to combine words (with consistent grammar) and understand meaning

• Universal Grammar: Proposed set of highly abstract, unconscious rules governing grammar in all human languages

  • Hard-wired and within the LAD

  • Argues all languages have similar underlying structures despite surface differences

  • Language is mastered spontaneously with limited exposure

  • Language Training is unnecessary

• Nativist Perspective Support

  • Does not really work with other animals

    • Kanzi, along with other primates and some dolphins, can learn basic grammar but cannot use complex syntax

    • Lacks pragmatic knowledge (Social Communication Skills)

    • It took Kanzi years to be able to learn, kids learn much faster

  • There are structures in the brain that are linked to language

    • Broca’s Area (Production)

    • Wernicke’s Area (Comprehension)

  • Proved that the brain has critical periods and sensitive periods for language development

    • Lennenberg proposed brain development must happen during brain lateralization

    • Genie was not taught language early in life, so she was unable to fully be able to speak properly

• Nativist Perspective Critisms

  • Genie: If left hemisphere is damaged, right hemisphere can compensate except for grammar

  • Doubts about universal grammar

    • Kids don’t completly master grammar but learning and discovery continue to shape it

  • Ignores social factors

  • Belived that language prerequisites are the human brain and experience

Interactionist Perspective

• Language Acquistiton Support System (LAS): Views parents as facilitators of language acquisition with several different strategies

• Ex: Playing Games with a Child

• Infant Directed Speech: Speaking with greater pitch variability, slower speech, shorter utterances, more word repetition, and mroe questions.

  • AKA Motherese or Parentese

  • Warm and affectionate tone, higgh pitch, clearer enunciation, slower speech, and exaggerated facial expressions captures a child’s attention but does not overwhelm them.

  • Infants prefer this but may respond less appropriately

  • Seen in other languages (including Sign Language), but not universal

  • Shares Important Information with infants

    • Lowering pitch meand disproval

    • Draws attention to speech

• Expansion: Imitating and expanding a child’s statement

  • Ex: A child says “Daddy Juice” and the adult repeats the phrase but words it correctly “Daddy drinks juice”

• Recast: Rendering incomplete sentences into more complex grammatical form

  • Ex: Child says “Doggy eat” and adult asks “what is the doggy eating”

  • Increases rate of language development

Prelinguistic Development

• Prosody: Characteristic rhythm, tempo, cadence, melody, etc. with ehich a language is spoken

  • Responsible for why languge sounds different from each other

  • Infants sensitive to it

  • May help with learning a child’s native language faster

• Categorical Perception: The perception of speech sounds as belonging to discrete categories

  • Newborns capable

  • By 7-10 months: can detect syllables

  • By 12 months: Stop attending to sounds not useful in natice tongue

  • Voice Onset Time (VOT): the lenght of time between when air passes through the lips and when the vocal cords start vibrating

    • Young infants draw sharp disticntions between speech sounds

• Word Segmentation: Figuring out where the spoken words start and end

  • As Young as 7 Months Old

  • 8 Mo ths of Age: English-learning infants expect stressed syllables to begin words and can use this information to pull words out of fluent speech

• Distributional Properties: Sounds that are part of the same word are more likely to occur together than others

  • Infants can discriminte between the words and the sequences that were not words.

  • Days after birth and on, use predictable sound patterns to fish words out of the passing stream of speech

  • Can understand their name as young as 4 ½ months

• Cooing: Drawn-out vowel sounds

  • “oooo” “aaahhh”

  • Emerges between 6-8 weeks

  • Helps infant gain motor control over vocalizations

• Babbling: Repeating strings of sounds comprising a constant followed by a vowel

  • “Babababa”

  • Emerges around 4 Months

  • Deaf infants babble with their hands

  • Will eventually become first words

  • Gradually takes on sounds, rhythm, and intonational patterns of the language infants hear or see daily

• Eye Gaze

  • At 4 months - Infants begin to gaze where adults look

  • Intersubjectivity and Joint Attention

• Gestures

  • Protodeclarative: Used to make statement about an object

    • Holds an object, Points While Looking at Parent

  • Protoimperative: Used to get someone to do something they want

    • Reaching, making sounds at the same time

Phonological Development

• Developing ability to:

  • Attend to sound sequences

  • Produce sounds

  • Combine sounds in understandable words and phrases

• Phonemes: Individual unit of speech sound

  • /p/, /b/, <sh>, <ch>

  • Different languages have different meanings

• Early Phase (10-15 Months)

  • First words during this time, but often mispronounced

    • Ex: Banana becomes “nana” or brother becomes “bubba”

    • First words are often common nouns

    • Some first words common across langugues (bye-bye, night-night, mine, all gone)

• Toddlers

  • Developmental pattern of strategies starts around age 2

  • First Stage: Minimal Words are produces

    • Focus on stressed syllables and constant-vowel combos

    • Ex: “Ju” for Juice

  • Second Stage: Toddlers add ending consonants, adjusting vowel lenght, and add unstressed syllables

    • 2 ½

    • Might be able to say “feed” and stress one syllable

  • Third Stage: Toddlers able to say full words with correct stress pattern but lacks refinement

    • Ex: Says pagetti instead of spaghetti

Semantic Development

• 12 Months: 1-3 new words per week

• 18-24 Months: 1-2 words per day

  • Known as the Naming Explosion or Vocabulary Spurt

  • Why - Working memory is stronger, long-term memory is developing, strategies and limitations are starting to succesfully take more attention, development of categorization, memory retrieval, and imitation

• Pragmatic Cues: To word meaning by paying attention to the social contexts in which the words are used

  • Ex: Kids use an adult’s focus of attention as a cue to word meaning

• Fast-Mapping: Rapidly learning a new word from the contrastive use of a familiar and unfamiliar words

• Syntactic Bootstrapping: Using the grammatical structure of whole sentences to figure out meaning

  • Ex: Children as young as 2 can figure out if a made up word is a verb, noun, etc.

• Gender Differences

  • Until 2 Years Old, Girls learn more words at a faster rate compared to boys

  • After 2 Years Old, it becomes more even

  • Why: There is faster growth of the lest hemisphere early on in girls and parental figures talk more to toddler-aged girls

• Referential Style: Vocabulary consists of object words

• Expressive Style: Vocabulary consists of social formulas and pronouns

  • "Ex: “Thank you” & “Done”

  • Feelings and Needs

  • Children with this style are more sociable

• Underextension: Applying Words too narrowly

  • Ex: A child’s favorite toy is called “bear” and nothing else, even actual bears, are called “bear”

• Overextension: Using a word in a broader context than is appropriate

  • Ex: Calling any animal a dog

Grammatical Development

• Syntax: Rules by which words are combined

• Morphology: Use of grammar markers

• Holophrastic Speech: Child typically expresses a whole phrase with a single word

  • Ex: “Eat”

  • 1 - 1 ½ years old

• Telegraphic Speech: Two-Word utterances

  • Nonessential elements are left out, leaving mostly nouns and verbs

  • Ex: “Drink Juice”

  • 1 ½ - 2 ½ years old

  • Cross-cultural

• Overregularization: Speech errors in which children treat irregular forms of words as if they were regular

  • Men becomes “Mans” and Went becomes “Goed”

Categorization

• Categorization: Dividing objects into general categories

  • ie: vehicles, tools, sports, etc.

• Category Hierarchies: Categories organized according to set-subset relations

  • Superordinate Level: Very Specific

    • Ex: Oak

  • Subordinate Level: Medium/in-between

    • Ex: Plant

  • Basic Level: Least Specific

    • Kids learn first

    • Ex: Tree

• Perceptual Categorization: the grouping together of objects that have somewhat similar appearences.

  • Categorizating objects based on color, size, movements etc.

Naïve Psychology

• Naïve Psychology: Commonsense level of understanding of other people and oneself

  • Crucial to human functioning

  • 3 Concepts:

    • Desires

      • Jimmy wanted to play with Billy

    • Befliefs

      • Billy will be at home

    • Actions

      • Jimmy went to Billy’s house

  • Invisible mental states

  • Have cause-effect relations

  • Develop early in life

  • Debate on whether infants go do this

Theory of Mind (ToM)

• Theory of Mind: Understanding that others have different desires, beliefs, intentions, and emotions

  • Develops between 2 ½ to 5 ½ years old

  • Kids with ASD can have trouble wit this

• False-belief problems: Another person believes something to be true that the child knows is false

  • Sally-Anne False Belief Test: Younger children were showed Sally’s basket. Sally put a marble in her basket and leaves. Then, Anne comes and moves her marble to another basket. Then, Sally comes back. Children were asked if Sally would initally look into her basket or the basket the marble was in. If they said the other basket, the child has not developed ToM.

Theories of Intelligence

• General Intelligence (“g”)

  • Factor analysis showed that all IQ test items are correlated and “g” underlies all

• Fluid Intelligence: The ability to think on the spot to solve problems

  • Depends on:

    • Information Processing (the ability to look at different objects very quickly and be able to label them and spot the difference)

    • Adaptation to novel tasks

    • Working-Memory functioning

    • Ability to control attention

  • Decreases with Age

  • Prefrontal cortex more active

• Crystallized Intelligence: The knowledge of the world, factual knowledge

  • Depends on:

    • Experience

    • Good Judgement

    • Social Customs

  • Increases with Age

  • Ex: Word meanings, State Capitals, and Answers to arithmetic problems

• Primary Mental Abilities: Human intellect is composed of seven categories

  • Word Fluency

  • Verbal Meaning

  • Reasoning

  • Spatial Visualization

    • Fluid Intelligence

  • Numbering

  • Rote Memory

  • Perceptual Speed

• Three-Stratum Theory of Intelligence

  • Comrpomise between single and multiple trait theories

  • “g” is at the top

  • Broad abiltities in the middle

    • Fluid intelligence, crystalized intelligence, etc.

  • More specific processes at the bottom

• Sternberg’s Theory of Successfull Intelligence/ Triarchic Theory: View that intelligence is the ability to achieve success in life, which is based on three abilities:

  • Analytical

    • Academic problem solving and computation

  • Practical

    • Street Smarts and Common Sense

  • Creative

    • Imaginative and innovative problem solving

  • Broader ranges of capabilities then just IQ

• Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences Theory: Proposes that people possess at least eight kinds of intelligence

  • Linguistic

    • Sensitivity to the meanings and sounds of words; mastery of syntax; appreciation of the ways language can be used

    • Professions: Poet, Teacher, Political Speaker

  • Logical-Mathematical

    • Understanding of objects and symbols, of the actions that can be performed on them, and of the relations between these actions; ability for abstraction; ability to indentify problems and seek explanations

    • Professions: Mathematician, Scientist

  • Spatial

    • Capacity to percieve the visual world accurately, to perform transformations upon perceptions, and to re-create aspects of visual experience in the absense of physical stimuli; sensitivity to tension, balance, and composition; ability to detect similar patterns

    • Professons: Artists, engineer, chess master

  • Musical

    • Sensitivity to individual tones and phrases of music; an understanfing of ways to combine tones and phrases into larger musical rhythms and structures; awareness of emotional aspects of music

    • Professions: Musician, Composer

  • Naturalistic

    • Sensitivity to, and understanding of, plants, animals, and other aspects of nature

    • Professions: Biological, Farmer, Conservationist

  • Bodily-Kinesthetic

    • Use of one’s own body in highly skilled ways for expressive or goal-directed purposes; capacity to handle objects skillfully

    • Professions: Dancer, athlete, actor

  • Intrapersonal

    • Access to one’s own feeling life; ability to draw on one’s emtions to guide and understand one’s behavior

    • Professions: Novelist, Therapist, Parent

  • Interpersonal

    • Ability to notice and make distinctions among the modds, temperaments, motications, and intentions of other people and potentially to act on this knowledge

    • Professions: Political leader, Religious leader, Parent, Teacher, Therapist

  • Existence of prodigies

  • Biological and professional Basis

Measuring Intelligence

• Intelligence Quotient (IQ): A quantitative measure of intelligence relative to that of others of the same age

  • 100 is the average

  • Stability: The consistency and continutiy of IQ as a person ages

    • Closer the time that test was given, the more stability

    • Average change of 13 points from 4-17

  • Outcomes IQ Predict

    • Academic Success

      • The higher the score, the better grades and achievement test scores are

      • Correlation typically between .50—.60

      • Strongest correlation with abstract subjects

    • Economic Success

      • The higher the score, the better performance; likelihood to makes more money; and recieve better promotion

      • Correlation with job performance .50

      • Better Predictors: Educational attainment and practical intelligence

    • Occupational Success

      • Due to standardized tests

    • Psychological Adjustment

      • Lower IQ → School Failure → Delinquency

      • Not Linked to interalizing problems

  • Other Predicators of Success

    • Motivation to succeed, conscientiousness, intellecutal curiosity, persistence in the face of obstacles, creativity, physical and mental health, and social skills

    • Self Discipline: The ability to inhibit actions, follow rules, and avoid implusive reactions

• Alfred Binet

  • Created the first widely used intelligence test.

  • Purpose to identify children who who unlikely to benefit from standard instruction in the classrooom

• Weschler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC): The most widely used intelligence test for children 6+ years old.

  • WISC-V (Current Edition)

  • Produces an overall score, plus separate scores ons everal moderately general abilities

  • Consistent with Carroll’s Three-stratum framework

  • Primary Index Scales

    • Verbal Comprehension

      • Similarities

      • Vocabulary

    • Visual-Spatial

      • Block Design

      • Visual Puzzles

    • Fluid Reasoning

      • Matric Reasoning

      • Figure Weights

    • Working Memory

      • Digit Span

      • Picture Span

    • Processing Speed

      • Coding

      • Symbol Search

Genetic and Environmental Factors

• Heritability of IQ is moderate in early childhood and increases by adolescense and adulthood

  • Changes with age

  • Heritability increases with age

  • 45% varitability in IQ as a child, 35% with siblings

  • Genes 75% in adolescense, almost nothing with relatives

    • Because of independence

• Influence on Nonshared Environment

  • A child’s immediate environment makes more of an impact in adolescense, despite genetics

• Flynn Effect: The constant rise in average IQ scores over the past 80 years

  • United States gains have been roughly 10 points

  • Must be due to changes in society

    • Improvements in lives of low-income families

    • Increases in fluid intelligence due to new technologies

  • Greater increases seen in lower socioeconomic status

  • Linear and continuous

  • Ravens Progressive Matrixes Test: Found that British kids IQ test rose 14 points in only a few decades

    • Seen in other countries

  • Could be the possibility of the reverse Flynn effect in Western Europe (90s on)

• Role of Family Income and Poverty

  • Poverty

    • Effects on IQ are indisputable

    • Due to inadequate diet, reduced access to health care, emotional conflicts, limited intellectual simulation

  • Income Risks

    • Wealthier families tend to have higher IQ

• Race and Ethnicity

  • Highly controversal theory

  • Socioeconomics explain racial/ethnic differences in IQ

  • Studies show that White and Asian children have similar IQ, which is averagely higher then Black and Latino children

    • Due to socioeconomic status

    • Dimishing over time

• Sameroff Environmental Risk factors’

  • Head of household unemployed

  • Mother did not complete high school

  • 4+ Kids in family

  • Large number of stressful events

  • Maternal mental health

• Project Head Start: Federally subsidized early education programs for children to get a “head start” on their formal education

  • Started in 1965 to lift families out of poverty by promoting literacy

  • Initially meant to be a summer program

  • 40 Million children have participated

  • Provides:

    • Dental Care

    • Immunizations

    • Teaching English

    • Helping parents teach their children and solve conflicts

  • Very comprehensive