All People Review

Sigmund Frued: Created a theory known as Freud’s psychosexual stages of development, which include the oral, anal, phallic, latent, and genital stages. Freud was one of the first researchers to identify the importance of childhood experience on later social and cognitive experiences.

Noam Chomsky: Linguist who theorized that the cognitive structures for learning language are almost entirely inborn, and that language and other forms of learning will naturally occur from interactions with the environment.

Jean Piaget: Proposed that cognitive development happens in four stages: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational. Thought about development as a “stair stepping” process of inevitable growth.

Lev Vygotsky: Proposed the zone of proximal development in which children learn new skills just outside of what they are currently capable of. Thought about development as impacted by culture and experience and as more of a continuous process.

Erik Erikson: argued that many adolescents want to solidify their own identity as an individual separate from their families, which might lead to tension between parents and children. To explore this, adolescents might attempt to define or understand who they are by acting differently in different settings (at home, at school, with friends, etc.).

Lawrence Kohlberg: proposed that humans go through moral developmental stages. He divided development into three basic levels of moral thinking: preconventional, conventional, and postconventional, each with different frameworks.

Konrad Lorenz: Studied imprinting, the process by which certain animals form strong attachments during early life. Lorenz’s research helped to demonstrate critical periods, or limited time windows for certain developmental milestones

Harry Harlow: Studied attachment and care needs using monkeys. Harlow’s research demonstrated the importance of emotional and physical care and love in appropriate social and emotional development.

Mary Ainsworth: Designed the “strange situation” experiment to test the attachment styles of babies.

Diana Baumrind: Researched the four parenting styles: permissiveneglectful, permissive-indulgent, authoritarian, and authoritative. Baumrind’s research showed the importance of parental behavior in child development