Untitled Flashcards Set

Study Guide for Chapter 5

Early-life adversity and sleeper effects

• Early-life adversity encompasses negative experiences such as trauma, neglect, or unstable home environments during infancy and childhood.

• Sleeper effects refer to long-term developmental consequences of early adversity that do not manifest until later stages in life. These can include emotional regulation difficulties, increased anxiety, and social challenges in adolescence or adulthood.

Crawling, visual cliff, social referencing

• Crawling: Marks a major milestone in motor development, enabling infants to explore their environment more freely, which can enhance cognitive and social skills.

• Visual cliff: An experimental setup that assesses depth perception and the ability to distinguish between safe and unsafe surfaces. Results illustrate that by around 6 to 9 months, most infants will not crawl over the 'cliff', indicating an understanding of depth and potential danger.

• Social referencing: Infants use caregivers' emotional responses to navigate uncertain situations. For example, an infant may hesitate to approach a strange toy if the caregiver shows fear or hesitance, highlighting the role of social cues in development.

Means-end behaviors and object concepts throughout sensorimotor substages

• Means-end behaviors: These are actions taken by infants to achieve a specific goal, showcasing an understanding of cause-and-effect relationships. For instance, pushing a toy away to reach another.

• Object concepts: Infants develop an understanding of objects through interacting with them, and this understanding evolves throughout the sensorimotor stages, which include recognizing object permanence—the idea that objects continue to exist even when not seen.

• Importance lies in these early cognitive abilities leading to more complex problem-solving and reasoning skills.

Major findings of habituation and dishabituation paradigm

• Habituation: A decrease in response to a repeated stimulus, indicating learning has occurred. Infants show this by looking away from familiar objects.

• Dishabituation: An increase in response upon presentation of a novel stimulus, demonstrating the infant’s ability to differentiate between old and new stimuli.

• Studies demonstrate that infants have an understanding of basic physics (e.g., solidity and gravity) and can count or recognize quantity differences (e.g., more vs. fewer objects) earlier than previously believed, suggesting innate cognitive abilities.

Compare Spelke and Baillargeon with Piaget

• Spelke and Baillargeon: Their research indicates infants are born with some core knowledge about objects and their properties (e.g., the continuity of objects, gravity). They utilize experimental evidence to show that infants as young as 3 months understand basic physical laws.

• Piaget: Proposed a constructivist model, suggesting that children actively construct their understanding through experiences and interactions with their environment over time. Piaget believed this understanding develops in stages, each characterized by increasingly complex cognitive abilities.

• The contrast lies in whether knowledge is innate (Spelke/Baillargeon) or learned through experience (Piaget).

Categorization

• Categorization refers to how infants classify objects and experiences into groups, such as shapes, colors, or functions. This ability allows for efficient processing of information and aids memory formation.

• Young children use features like shape and color for categorization, which underlies their ability to generalize knowledge and make sense of the world around them.

Digital technology on child development

• Exploration of how digital media and technology (like tablets and smartphones) affect cognitive, social, and emotional development in children.

• Positive impacts may include improved access to educational content and fostering digital literacy skills. However, excessive screen time may lead to attention difficulties, reduced face-to-face interactions, and potential impacts on emotional regulation and social skills development.

• The nuanced effects require careful consideration of content, context, and duration of exposure to digital technology, emphasizing the need for balanced media consumption in early childhood.