IGCSE Psychology - Development

Topic 01. - Development

Parts of the Brain:

  • Frontal Lobe

  • Parietal Lobe

  • Occipatal Lobe

  • Temporal Lobe

  • Cerebellum

  • Brainstem

How does the forebrain, midbrain and hindbrain develop in the foetus?

When a foetus is 3-4 weeks: A neural tube develops in the brain. It is divided up from the front into three distinct round sections – the forebrain, midbrain & hindbrain

By 5 weeks: the forebrain and hindbrain have split into 2 further cavities. Forebrain – anterior (front) and posterior (back). Hindbrain splits through the middle: The cerebellum & medulla oblongata are formed.

How and when do the cerebellum and medulla develop?

By 6 weeks: Cerebellum is visible ‘The little brain’. Controls Physical skills and is involved in fear responses.

By 20 weeks: Medulla Oblongata is fully formed. In the hind-brain in front of the cerebellum. Controls involuntary responses e.g. breathing & sneezing. It connects the brain with the spinal cord.

The Central Nervouse System (CNS) = Brain + Spinal Cord

What is a Neural Connection?

Links formed by one nerve cell (neuron) to another in the brain.

Birth - 3 years old = 700-1000 new neural connections formed every second.

By 3 years old = The brain doubles in size in the first year and by age 3 reaches 80%. This is why babies need stimulations ( colours, sounds, cartoons).

Introduction to Piaget:

Piagets 4 Stages of Development:

  • Sensory Motor Stage ( 0-2 years old)

  • Pre - Operational Stage (2-7 years old)

  • Concrete Operational Stage (7-11 years old)

  • Formal Operational Stage (12+ years old)

Sensori Motor Stage:

Infants “think” and learn using their senses (touch, taste, smell etc.) Children explore by “doing” things – e.g. throwing an object to see what happens. Between 5 and 8 months they develop object permanence (they realise that even if something is out of sight, it still exists) By the end of this stage the child recognises that they exist separately from the world around them (self-concept).

Pre- Operational Stage:

Symbolic Function Stage (2-4 yrs)

  • Symbolic Play

  • Can use words as symbols – beginning of language development.

  • Egocentric – can’t see the world through someone else’s point of view.

  • Animism – believing objects that are not alive can behave like they are e.g. a teddy bear.

Intuitive thought Stage (4-7yrs)

  • Start of reasoning.

  • Lots of questions.

  • Centration – Only focus on one thing

  • Irreversability – Can’t use thought to reverse events.

  • Lack of conservation – cannot understand that things do not change if appearance does e.g. tall and short water glass.

Concrete Operational Stage:

  • Logical thinking is developing.

  • Decentration – can take in multiple views.

  • Seriation, classification, reversibility, conservation are all evident.

  • Abstract thinking – such as morality is difficult.

Seriation - Sorting objects, such as into size.

Classification - Naming objects according to size and appearance

Reversibility - If they know 2 bricks plus 4 bricks equals 6 bricks, they will also know 6 bricks minus 2 bricks equals 4 bricks

Conservation - Length, quantity and number are not related to how things look

Formal Operational Stage:

  • Abstract thinking is possible.

  • Children have the ability to combine various ideas to create new ones.

  • They are able to link actions to consequences.

  • By the end of this stage, children have developed logical and systematic thinking, are capable of deductive reasoning, and can create hypothetical ideas to explain various concepts.

Piaget & Inhelder (1956)

Aim: To study the perspectives of children and to investigate relationships between the childs viewpoint and how they see the viewpoint of others.

Participants: A sample of 100 children were used. 21 were aged between 4 and 6. 30 were aged between 6 and 8. 33 were aged between 8 and 9. 16 were aged between 9 and 12.

What they did: Used a model of 3 mountains, some coloured card, 10 photos and a doll. They asked children questions about what the doll could see.

Key Findings: 4-6 year olds could not accurately identify the viewpoint of the doll. They would eother say there own or a random one. 7-9 year olds began to attempt what the doll could see. 9-12 year olds perfectly explained the dolls viewpoint accurately.

Conclusions: Children in stage 2 ( Pre-Operational Stage) fail to see other viewpoints as they remain egocentric. However children in stage 3 ( Concrete Operational) begin to see other views as they are becoming decentric. By the end of stage 3, beginning of stage 4 ( Formal Operational), children become fully decentric.

Gunderson et. al. ( 2013)

Aim: To investigate the use of praise by parents of children aged 14 months to 48 months. They looked at the category of praise parents gave and what type of praise was most used. They also looked at if person praise or effort praise could predict whether motivation would affect the children in 5 years.

Participants: 53 children from Chicago (29 boys, 24 girls) taken from a larger sample of 63 families who have been taking part in a study for language development. The sample represented the demographics of Chicago (income, race, ethnicity).

What they did: Visited the children at home and videoed interactions between children and parents at 14, 26 and 38 months old to record types of praise. When the children were 7/8 years old, they were given 2 questionnaires about their motivational frameworks. Parents were also given a questionnaire to test how malleable they believed intelligence to be.

Key Findings: Person praise significantly less at 38 months than at 14 months. Effort praise showed no significant change. Boys praised more than girls. Girls = more person praise . Significant correlation between process praise and children’s incremental (malleable) motivational framework scores at 7 to 8 years old. No significant correlation between person praise and children’s entity (fixed ability) motivational framework scores at 7 to 8 years old.

Conclusions: They concluded that the amount of effort praise that parents gave their children between 14 and 38 months old was a predictor of children’s incremental (cognitive traits are malleable, effort is important) motivational frameworks at 7 to 8 years old. They also concluded that girls are given more person praise and this could explain why existing research highlights that girls tend to attribute failures to lack of ability and show decreased persistence and motivation after failure.