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Chapter 11
11.1 Key Questions in Studying Human Development
Developmental psychology: examines how people change—physically, cognitively, socially, and emotionally—from infancy through old age
Psychologist study every part of the human lifespan to understand the continuous and dynamic nature of the human and and how to later it course in ways that benefits individuals of society
Two Central and Unifying Questions about nature of psychological change across the life span
Question 1: What development happens in stages and what happens continuously?
Some aspects of development occur in stages, while others happen gradually.
Stages imply distinct, qualitative changes, as in the transition from tadpole to frog, where there is a clear difference in characteristics.
In human development, examples of stage-like changes include infants transitioning from crawling to walking, which triggers new behaviors, like carrying objects.
Other aspects of development are more continuous, such as the gradual improvement of memory skills in childhood.
Both qualitative (stages) and quantitative (continuous) changes are essential, and developmental psychology seeks to understand which aspects belong to each category.
Question 2: What are the effects of nature and nurture on development?
Development is shaped by both biological (nature) and experiential (nurture) factors.
Nature refers to inborn tendencies and genetically determined processes (e.g., maturation), while nurture refers to the influence of experiences and environment.
The debate between nature and nurture is akin to asking which dimension is more important for a rectangle’s area—both are essential and intertwined.
For instance, maturation refers to the series of genetically determined biological processes that enable orderly growth
However, these cannot unfold without environmental input, such as learning opportunities.
Development is a result of the constant interaction between genetic factors and experience, emphasizing the necessity of both nature and nurture in shaping human development.
11.2 Tools for Studying Development
Psychologists apply the scientific method to explore whether and how psychological processes change across human lifespan
They experience two challenges when studying development
Measures that work well for assessing one age group may not work for another age group
E.g., language-based assessments cannot be used with infants; elderly people may struggle with technology.
Psychologists must tailor measurement tools to be appropriate for the specific population being studied.
Psychologists can choose from several research methods for making comparisons across the lifespan, each with advantages and disadvantages
Cross-sectional design: compares participants of different ages directly to one another at one point in time
Advantages: Helps identify age-related differences or abilities that change at particular life stages (e.g., comparing language comprehension at different ages).
Disadvantages: Cohort effects may confound results, as differences could stem from varying life experiences (e.g., education, technology access) rather than development.
Longitudinal design: tracks individuals at different time points and looks for differences across those time points
Advantages: It allows researchers to be highly confident about changes occurring over time.
Disadvantages: Time-consuming, resource-intensive, may take decades to complete (e.g., tracking a group across an entire life span), and attrition (participant dropout) can reduce generalizability.
Results may be cohort-specific, meaning findings from one generation may not apply to another.
Sequential design: tracks multiple age groups across multiple time points
Advantages: Reduces the impact of cohort effects and provides high confidence in developmental changes. Also, it is faster than longitudinal designs, as multiple age groups are tracked.
Disadvantages: Expensive and time-consuming, though less so than purely longitudinal studies.
The choice of research method depends on various factors, including the length of time available for the study and the resources required.
All methods work well for shorter studies (e.g., in infancy or childhood) where age differences are minimal.
In longer studies that span greater segments of the life span, the disadvantages of each method become more pronounced, and the best approach depends on time and resources available.
11.7 How Thinking Changes: Piaget’s Theory
Cognitive Development: refers to changes in all of the mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating
Pioneered by Jean Piaget
While administering intelligence tests to children, Piaget noticed that children of the same age made similar errors, suggesting that younger children reason differently than older ones.
He proposed that cognitive development is active and mostly self-driven, with children functioning like "little scientists" who learn through exploration and play.
Piaget introduced the concept of schemas—mental structures that represent experiences.
Newborns start with basic schemas (e.g., sucking, grasping), and children expand their schemas through experiences and play.
When encountering new experiences, children use two processes to integrate them:
Assimilation: Using existing schemas to interpret new experiences (e.g., recognizing a Chihuahua as a dog).
Accommodation: Adjusting schemas to incorporate new information (e.g., expanding the concept of "dog" to include different breeds like Chihuahuas)
Piaget's Four Stages of Cognitive Development
Sensorimotor Stage (birth to 2 years)
Knowledge develops through sensory experiences and actions
Children learn object permanence (objects continue to exist even when out of sight)
Preoperational Stage (2 to 7 years)
Children master the use of symbols but struggle with seeing multiple perspectives.
They classify objects based on one feature, like color or shape.
Concrete Operational Stage (7 to 12 years)
Children can use multiple perspectives and solve complex problems, but only for concrete objects or events
Formal Operational Stage (12 years and up)
Adolescents develop the ability to reason about abstract and hypothetical situations.
Piaget emphasized that children are self-driven learners and that active exploration is essential for understanding.
His theory led to the development of educational methods that focus on hands-on learning and discovery.
Piaget’s focus on active learning is reflected in the design of educational toys and informal learning opportunities, promoting discovery-based learning through activity.
11.8 Learning About Objects: The Role of the Developing Brain
Physical interaction requires understanding basic principles, such as that objects drop when unsupported or continue to exist when hidden.
Infants learn these principles through intuitive, unconscious exploration and interaction with objects.
Jean Piaget proposed that in the sensorimotor stage, babies gain knowledge through their senses and actions, such as touching, looking, and tasting objects.
He argued that infants' thinking is limited to what they can see or physically interact with and that they lack object permanence (awareness that objects continue to exist when out of sight).
Piaget’s conclusion about object permanence came from observing that babies younger than 8 months often do not search for hidden objects, suggesting "out of sight, out of mind."
However, this conclusion is debated as infants may understand that objects exist but lack the memory or self-control to search for them.
Violation of expectation method
This method measures infants' understanding of physical laws by observing how long they stare at events that violate natural expectations, such as an object disappearing or stopping in midair.
Research shows that infants are surprised by these violations, suggesting an earlier understanding of object permanence than Piaget proposed, developing gradually over the first two years.
Many of the skills required to search for hidden objects, such as working memory and planning actions, are controlled by the prefrontal cortex, which is relatively immature in infancy.
The prefrontal cortex is involved in rational planning, working memory, and self-control, but it matures slowly compared to other brain regions
Key processes in brain development include:
Neural proliferation: Creation of new synaptic connections.
Synaptic pruning: Elimination of unused synapses (use it or lose it).
Myelination: Insulation of axons to speed up information processing.
Sensory areas of the brain (e.g., occipital lobe) mature earlier, while the frontal lobes (involved in planning and decision-making) mature later.
11.9 Early Social and Emotional Understanding
Beyond understanding the physical world, infants must develop social skills to interact and reason about the social world.
Newborns are drawn to human faces and learn to interpret behaviors through observing and interacting with people
Between 4-7 months, infants can distinguish between happy, sad, and angry facial expressions, especially from familiar caregivers.
This ability becomes important when infants begin to crawl, as they face potentially dangerous situations.
Infants engage in social referencing, looking to caregivers' facial expressions for guidance on how to react to unfamiliar or potentially dangerous situations (e.g., judging whether a doctor is safe based on a caregiver’s reaction).
Caregivers' emotions can significantly influence infants’ reactions.
By around 6 months, infants learn to predict behaviors, such as calming down when they hear a caregiver approaching.
Infants also develop an ability to infer intentions behind observed actions, an essential step in understanding why people behave as they do.
In a study, 6-month-olds showed interest in an adult’s goal (reaching for a ball) rather than the motion itself. When the experiment was done with a mechanical claw, infants didn't show the same interest, indicating that their understanding of intentions is tied to understanding human behavior.
11.12 Getting Savvy With Symbols
Childhood: refers to the time span between the end of infancy and the start of adolescence
Word suggests curiosity and freedom to pursue it, supported by cognitive development
Children develop the capacity for symbolic representation, using words, sounds, gestures, and objects to represent other things.
Symbols help with communication (e.g., language) and problem-solving (e.g., using x and y in mathematics or maps for navigation).
Piaget identified the preoperational period (ages 2 to 6/7) as the stage when symbolic schemas emerge.
Children at this stage use language as a system of symbols and understand pictures as representations of real objects.
Imaginative play is a major indicator of symbolic thinking, where children pretend that objects, places, and roles are something else (e.g., a doll as a companion, a playroom as a jungle).
In a study, children were shown a scale model of a room where a toy was hidden, and were asked to find a full-size version of the toy in the real room.
3-year-olds successfully used the model to find the toy, while 2½-year-olds struggled, not due to memory but because of difficulty understanding the symbolic nature of the model.
Symbols are complex because they represent two things at once—a literal object and what it represents.
It takes practice to grasp this concept, and certain conditions can either help or hinder this ability.
For instance, making the model appear less like a toy (e.g., placing it behind glass) helps younger children see it as a symbol.
Encouraging play with the model makes it harder for older children to use it symbolically, as they focus more on its literal, playful nature.
11.13 Reasoning ABout the Physical World
Symbolic schemas: Children in this stage can use symbols (like words and images) to represent things, but struggle to manage multiple schemas at once or see how schemas relate to each other.
Operations: Refers to the ability to mentally manipulate schemas—imagine objects or people in different situations or predict consequences without seeing them.
Preoperational children lack these abilities.
Piaget developed these tasks to test children’s understanding of the principle of conservation—the idea that physical properties (mass, volume, number) remain unchanged despite changes in shape or form (e.g., comparing the amount of liquid in differently shaped glasses).
Preoperational children fail these tasks because they can't relate multiple dimensions (e.g., liquid height and glass width) and can't mentally transform the situation (e.g., imagining the liquid being poured back into a different glass).
The frontal lobe and cognitive control are crucial for overriding automatic ways of thinking
Heuristics (mental shortcuts) are useful most of the time, but in conservation tasks, adults override them to consider other dimensions.
Children’s immature prefrontal cortex makes it hard for them to override these heuristics, leading to failure in conservation tasks.
Concrete Operational Period
Once children reach this stage, they can pass conservation tasks because they can mentally transform objects and situations and understand how changes in one aspect can be offset by changes in another.
However, Piaget argued that children in this stage are limited to concrete operations—they can apply their mental operations only to tangible, physical objects and events.
11.14 Mastering a Sense of Self and Other Minds
Mirror Test: Young infants show a lack of self-awareness by treating their reflection as another child (e.g., hugging the mirror). Around 18 months, most Western, urban, middle-class children pass the "dot test," recognizing their reflection as themselves and pointing to a painted dot on their own nose.
Children from different cultural backgrounds tend to pass the test later, suggesting cultural factors, such as caregiver imitation, influence self-recognition development.
Empathy Development: The ability to recognize oneself coincides with showing concern for others' emotions, such as comforting a peer.
According to Piaget, children in the preoperational stage (ages 2-6) experience egocentrism, where they struggle to perceive situations from others' perspectives.
Egocentric Behavior: In games like hide-and-seek, a 3-year-old may hide poorly, unaware that others can see them, or hide in the same place repeatedly.
Theory of Mind: This refers to the understanding that people have minds, that these minds represent the world differently, and that these mental representations guide behavior.
A key test of theory of mind is the false-belief task (Wimmer & Perner, 1983), where one character has a false belief about where an object is hidden.
Children pass the test around age 4 or 5, predicting that the character will look for the object where they last saw it, even if it has since been moved.
Before age 4, children predictably fail the task, showing they don't yet fully grasp that others may hold different beliefs.
As early as 18 months, children show some understanding of others' emotions and desires.
They can interpret an adult’s emotional reactions to toys or food and choose based on the adult's preferences, even if they personally prefer something else.
Implicit knowledge of others' mental states may develop before children can consciously express it.
11.15 A Little Help, Please? Learning From the Social World
Lev Vygotsky emphasized that children’s cognitive development occurs through interactions with their social environment.
Unlike Piaget, who viewed children as independent explorers (like "little scientists"), Vygotsky saw them as apprentices who learn from the guidance of more knowledgeable individuals (e.g., parents, teachers).
Adults provide a scaffold to help children reach higher levels of thinking.
This involves offering the right level of support for tasks that the child can partially accomplish on their own, like counting or putting on shoes.
Effective scaffolding challenges the child but avoids overwhelming them.
Vygotsky believed that children often repeat what they hear from adults (private speech) as a way of regulating their own behavior and solving problems.
This self-directed speech helps children internalize guidance and apply it independently.
When parents use language that refers to mental states (e.g., thoughts, feelings, desires), they help children develop a deeper understanding of others' minds.
Studies show that children whose mothers frequently use mental-state language early in life perform better on theory-of-mind tasks, like false-belief tests, later in childhood.
The development of autobiographical memory (memory of personal life events) is shaped by early conversations with adults, typically parents.
In the beginning, parents do most of the work, describing events in detail.
As the child’s cognitive abilities grow, parents shift to asking more questions and encouraging the child to contribute.
Studies show that American mothers tend to engage in more detailed conversations about past events with their children than Asian mothers, which may explain why American adults tend to remember earlier childhood events.
Gender differences also exist, with women typically recalling earlier memories than men, potentially due to how parents converse differently with boys and girls.