psych 2aa3

How do psychologists answer questions about development?

Theme 1: Continuity vs Discontinuity

• Continuity: Information processing theorists are more into continuous development. This describes development that is continuous, we are always building towards that final result/outcome. We as human beings start off as tiny plants that grow into huge trees. It is the same plant growing in the same way (eg: keeping your inner child would be continuous development)

• Discontinuity: Qualitative changes, the same way that a caterpillar to a butterfly are different. They are the same being, but there are qualitative differences between both (eg: if you think you are completely, fundamentally different than who you were at 6, you are in the discontinuous camp)(think Piaget*) 

Theme 2: Nature vs Nurture

• Our genes and environment interact to become what we are

Nativism: Genes = the person

• Historically the pendulum has swung between these two conversations. 

• Francis Galton was a strong believer of nativism

• You are born with your entire life planned out for you because of your genetics

• Everything that you do or will do is dependent on your genes. Your entire development is

Empiricism:

• Pioneered by Watson and Skinner, says that no matter where you come from, who your ancestors are, your environment is in complete control of your development. All of your growth is dependent on your environment and conditions. 

Theme 3: Active Child

• Children are active in their development, they are changing their environment, it’s not just their genes or environment. 

TEXTBOOK: Chapter 1 Notes

Child/individual development is described as the pattern of changes that occur from conception all throughout somebody’s life, including growth and decline. This pattern is created through the intersectionality of three different key processes that are integral and imperative:

• Biological processes: the changes and biological characteristics in an individual’s body (eg: genes from their parents, the development of the brain, height, weight, hormonal changes and growth in motor skills all reflect the role of biological processes in development).

• Cognitive processes: changes in an individual’s thought process, intelligence, and language (eg: memorizing a line of dialogue in a script, putting together a two-word sentence, imaging a secondary world, solving a math problem are all cognitive processes).

• Socioemotional processes: changes in the relationship with other people, emotions and personality (eg: a baby’s smile at a mother’s touch, a tween’s laughter after scoring a soccer goal, a toddler fighting with another toddler, a young child’s first display of assertiveness and aggression are all examples of socioemotional processes)

These key processes are all integral to a child’s development, and are deeply intertwined. They influence one another as well. For example: a baby smiling in response to their mother’s hands. This is an example of the biological process that happens in the baby (the physical nature of touch and the responsiveness towards it), the cognitive process (the ability to understand the intentional act of others) and the socioemotional process (smiling reflects positive feelings and allows us to become closer to one another). Physical growth can influence cognitive processes (eg: a baby learns to crawl because their legs are getting stronger, and because of this they learn more about the area beyond where they are just seated). 

A healthy development is obviously what child development theorists, policymakers, early childhood educators, and everyone in general wants to achieve for children around the world. There are many influences that exist that effect that outcome though:

• Health/Well-being: the health of the baby while it’s in the mother’s womb, the diet and nutrition of the child while it grows up, the emotional and psychological well-being of the child throughout their development (eg: there’s concerns about children’s mental health as child and youth emergency room visits for mental health issues have increased drastically from 2006 to 2017, and because of the pandemic there are more worries about children’s well-being as a result of social distancing).

• Education: as children often learn about who they are and their capabilities in educational settings, children’s educational experiences often impact their development. Relationships and perceptions around their educators/education can also impact their academic and socioemotional development. This obviously is important as because education is influential in a child’s development, society must work to improve educational systems for the betterment of the kids going through them. 

• Parenting: warm, safe and supportive parental relationships help with healthy development, while other things like emotional unresponsiveness, divorce, and unhappy parental couples may negatively influence development.

• Sociocultural contexts:

  • Socioeconomic status: differences in socioeconomic status create unequal opportunities and disparities that will impact a child undergoing poverty

  • Gender: gender identity shapes how a child might see themselves, their experiences, their relationships with others, etc. 

  • Culture: influences the behaviour of the members in it, including children 

Gender, Families and Child Development (connecting with diversity): An analysis from UNICEF 2004 found that a higher percentage of girls than boys around the world are uneducated, with the countries having the most uneducated girls being in Africa, and the countries with the least uneducated girls being Canada, U.S and Russia. In developing countries, 67% of women over the age of 25 are uneducated compared to a 50% rate for men. 80 million more boys than girls were found in primary and secondary educational settings around the world at the start of the 20th century. Violence, mental issues and uneducation are just a few problems that adolescent women around the world have to face. In many countries restriction of sexual expression/freedom is more present upon women than men, alongside low to nonexistent educational and career opportunities, and gender-based discrimination. Doly Akter, a Bangladeshi teenage girl living in the slums, created an organization backed by UNICEF where girls go door-to-door monitoring the hygiene habits of those in the household. This organization improved familiar hygiene/health, stopped many child marriages, improved the future of many daughters, and educated girls on their rights. 

Resilience, Social Policy and Child Development: Resilience is a trait that we ascribed to children who’ve undergone troubles (eg: poverty, trauma, abuse, discrimination) and seemed to triumph over them. Studies show that resilience is something that can be developed and learned if you have the proper resources and opportunities to practice coping skills in the presence of supportive relationships. It is determined by somebody’s experience with social, familial and individual factors, and those who have experience with these things are more likely to be resilient and thrive against adversities. Michael Ungar calls a child’s resilience a multisystemic phenomenon that is connected to the adult resilience that they encounter in their lives, as the well-being of the adults in a child’s life impacts how supportive and helpful that adult can then be to the child. Thus, building a child’s resilience must involve and address the health and well-being of the adults responsible for their development. 

Social Policy: pertains to a government’s actions towards promoting the good welfare of its citizens. For policymakers involved in promoting healthy child development, child poverty is an obstacle that they want to beat. However, poverty still continues to impact 18% of Canadian children, and this disparity is not distributed equally among the Canadian population. The highest distribution occurs in racialized groups, recent immigrants and Indigenous kids. 

Poverty is an aspect of life that leads to unhealthy development. Non-poor kindergarteners show more skill in reading and word recognition than poor kindergarteners (72% against 19%). Childhood poverty is also linked to adolescent crime. One American study showed that a higher percentage of kids in poor families than in middle-class families were exposed to family turmoil, violence, poor housing, etc—all things linked to high stress levels in children. 

Alongside this, there are periods of development in childhood:

• Prenatal period: described roughly as the 9-month period from conception to birth. 

• Infancy: a period of development that stretches from birth to 18-24 months of age. Marked by extreme dependency on their adult caretakers. Many cognitive/psychological developments are happening at this time as well—learning to speak, to coordinate sensations and physical actions, to think with symbols, and to learn from others

• Early childhood: extends from end of infancy to 5-6 years of age. Marked by playing with peers, the development of self-regulation, and self-sufficiency.

• Middle and late childhood: 6-11, marked by a mastery over educational skills like reading, writing, arithmetic, and a greater exposure to the outside world and its many cultures. Self-regulation increases.

• Adolescence: childhood to early adulthood, 10-12 to 18-19 years. Marked by physical changes—change in height, weight, body shape, development of sexual characteristics like breasts and hips, pubic hair, deepening of the voice, essentially puberty. Independence and identity grow. More time spent with peers, and thought patterns become more abstract and idealistic.

Feral children can help our understanding of the dynamic between genes and environment, while also understanding how children develop with no nurturing. For example, Genie was a 6 year old girl chained to a stool in the dark of her LA home with little to no human nurturing. She was unable to walk or talk, and though she went through intense rehab, her language skills forever remained impaired. This seems to suggest that children must experience language before a certain age so that normal language skills can develop. 

Stability and change: Our brains are shaped by early experiences and genetics, but still have the capacity to change throughout life. The extent to which change is possible is still to be determined. 

The complexity of development: The child and caregiver’s relationship quality influences developmental outcomes. A child’s level of reactivity (which is measured by their response to stimuli at 4 months) impacts the extent to which the child will be affected by the caregiving. Children who are high in sensitivity and experience insecurity with their caregivers are more likely to develop anxiety later on in life in comparison to those who are less sensitive than infants. 

Differential susceptibility: suggests that the environment’s effects on child outcomes can be controlled by temperament in both advantageous and maladaptive ways, meaning those who are highly susceptible to negative environmental influences (i.e., children with high negative emotionality) might also receive the best benefit from positive environmental influences/parenting.

Children are a combination of a mixture of vulnerabilities and resilience. A child may be born with a set of vulnerabilities (eg: hypersensitivity to stimulation, a chromosomal abnormality, or poverty). This set of vulnerabilities may be contrasted with a set of resilience factors (eg: physical attractiveness, academic strength, loving parents). The trajectory of a child’s development is somewhat based on the combination of vulnerabilities and resilience. Such factors interact with the child’s environment, producing different effects for each child. Different children need different things for growth. The hope for all children is that they’ll have more resilience than vulnerabilities. Emotionally supportive relationships with family, school, etc act as a source of resilience for a child’s emotional well-being.

Contributions of Neuro: Neuroscience has contributed to showing the brain’s capabilities. Babies don’t come into the world with a fully developed brain, but they come into the world with a brain that will develop according to the experiences they undergo. Through modern technology we gain insight into cognitive, emotional, and physiological processes. 

• Developmental cognitive neuroscience: links between development, cognitive processes, the brain

• Developmental social neuroscience: connections between development, socioemotional processes, the brain

Developmental neuroscience: helps us understand how and why experience interacts with biology to shape the development of a child. Neuroscience gives insight into various aspects of sensory processes and physical development. Socioemotional growth and cognition are special to children's development (eg: the rate of brain growth in the first years of life; impact of stress on brain development; interconnection of emotion and cognition).

Early years = rapid brain growth. This is the time for peak neuroplasticity. The brain is most responsive to experience during this time. More than a million new neural connections happen every second of the first few years of an infant’s life. This, while directed by genetics, is highly dependent on experience. 

Toxic stress: things like hunger, abuse, neglect, etc. shapes a child’s neural circuits underlying social and emotional behaviour and cognitive abilities. When toxic stress occurs early on, the child adapts an elevated sensitivity to stress, which obviously impacts their perception. Research suggests that while adverse experiences can significantly impact brain development, it’s the timing of such adversity that matters more than even the experience itself. Adversity experienced in the first two months has the most impact on later relational health and brain functioning. Safe, nurturing relationships have the potential to act as a buffer for such adversity and the negative impact of stress. 

Inadequate stimulation in the early years can affect the learning capacity and the ability to form relationships/emotional attachments (eg: if a child feels unsafe, it will be harder to learn something). Learning is a neural issue, information is coded in the brain tissue. Behaviour and learning are connected to the release of neurotransmitters linked to feelings of relevance, reward and engagement. 

The long reach of the early years: early experiences are coded into the infant’s neural circuitry. Early experiences and environmental influences affect the genetic predispositions.  

Day 3:

Genes (the smallest unit of biochemical instructions in DNA):

• Most cells have 46 chromosomes (eg: genetic material)

• Egg and sperm each have 23 chromosomes

• Each chromosome consists of one molecule of DNA

• 46 chromosomes = 25,000 genes

• Most of the genetic code builds who you are, and 99% of our genetic material overlap. This is how we are a part of the same species. The individual differences that make us unique is less than 1%

Descriptions of genes:

• Genotypes: sum of all genes a person inherits

  • Allele: different versions of a gene (eg: you receive one allele from each parent for “eye colour”)

• Phenotype: the physical manifestation and expression of genes that are visible

  • Dominant eye colour allele: brown (B)

  • Recessive eye colour allele: blue (b)

  • Expression: BB = brown, bb = blue, Bb = brown eyes

  • Gray eyes? About 3% of the population, involves more than just one gene

Race:

• Recent technology allows us to compare genetic similarity between individuals. These studies show us that when individual genetic variation is compared between pairs of all individuals in a sample, clusters of similar individuals do not align well with the construct of “race” because genetic variation is distributed in a continuous, overlapping manner among populations

• Humans have 3 billion nucleotide base pairs, and on average, two people different by only 2-3 million base pairs (eg: 0.1% of DNA; humans and chimps differ by 1%)

• Of the 0.1% of DNA that differs, 85-90% of the difference is found within Old World continents (Africa, Asia, Europe) and only found between the continents

• There is a chance that you are closer genetically than someone of a different race than someone of the same race

Single-gene inheritance (brown eyes and blue eyes)

Sickle-cell disease

• Red blood cells are sickle-shaped, elongated with sharper ends, which is harder to navigate in blood vessels because of that shape

• Red blood cells cannot pass through small capillaries and block passage of white blood cells

• Symptoms: fatigue, acute pain, prone to infection

• 10% death by age 20; 50% death by age 50

• It is a recessive allele. Heterozygous phenotype: sickle-cell trait

• Most individuals are asymptomatic. May have a mild form of disease if deprived of oxygen.

• Sickle-shaped red blood cells have a protective trait against malaria

  • In regions where the risk of malaria is high, a heterozygous individual will have a higher survival rate

  • In regions where the risk of malaria is low, there is no advantage to having sickle-shaped red blood cells

Down syndrome

• 1/700

• Life expectancy varies by race

• Distinct facial features

• Mental and motor delays

• Extra 21st chromosome. It’s not known why the chromosome is present but the health of the sperm and egg may be involved. 

• There are racial and ethnic differences in rates of Down syndrome, possibly because of maternal age distribution

Evolutionary theory

Evolution = a process of change in gene frequencies over many generations

• Proposed by Darwin (1859; and other scientists around similar time)

Natural selection: environmental conditions allow some members of the species to survive and pass on their genes to future generations, while others do not

• Evolution doesn’t act on individuals, but generations, and doesn’t act on traits that are not hereditary 

Peppered moth example

Pre-industrial revolution = mostly white

Post-industrial revolution = mostly black

• Most people think that the peppered moth changed into black in order to adapt. This isn’t true though. Before the revolution birch trees were dappled with black, so the white moths have the better survival advantage. They thrive, while the black moths die because they’re easily picked off by predators. After the industrial revolution, the trees blacken, so the black moths flourish, and have more offspring, because they can camouflage against predator’s eyes. 

Genes vs Environment:

• False dichotomy: genes selected by evolutionary pressures depend on the environment in which our ancestors were living. Environment controls gene expression. Geographic origin is more relevant than colour of skin

Polygenic inheritance:

• Most characteristics are determined by the interaction of multiple genes. 

• Most psychological traits are manifested through the activities of many genes and their interactions with the environment

• Polygenic inheritance leads to normal distribution (eg: imagine that extroversion is determined with just 4 genes, each with two alleles. A or a, B or b, C or c, D or d. Extroversion = dominant, introversion = recessive)

Evolutionary theory in development

• Selected traits may be maximally adaptive at that stage of development

• Infants’ poor visual acuity

  • Your brain is setting up the environment around you. It’s essentially a blank slate. The visual input is guiding how to step up the neural background. If you come into the world with a prepared visual landscape, it may be harder to deal with the environment once something changes 

• Increased clinginess in toddlerhood

  • We’re nomadic people, we’re moving on land. The same time we begin walking is the same time of clinginess. This could be because for our evolutionary history the children who stayed with and clung to their parents were more likely to live

• Risk-taking in adolescence

  • When your body matures, and are now sexually mature, the risk-taking can create a sexual mate

Heritability:

• Extent to which differences in a value can be attributed to inheritance. 

• Index: 0-1

• Proportion of variance (among the population) in an observed trait that results from genetic variability

TEXTBOOK: Chapter 2 Notes

Jim Springer and Jim Lewis: Twins reared apart, both with extremely similar behavioural patterns (loved math but hated spelling, bit their fingernails down to the nubs, etc.) and life experiences (had a wife named Betty, had a son named James, etc.) There were some obvious differences, but startling and glaring similarities. They were brought together by Bouchard at a Minneapolis study. This study had dozens upon dozens of other participants. When genetically identical people who have been separated and reared differently exhibit such familiar habits, we have to conclude that genes have some hand in the development of those behaviours. 

Natural selection: the process with which the individuals of a species best adapted to their environment survive and reproduce to pass on their characteristics to the next generation (eg: think Darwin’s finches). It favours behaviour that has reproductive success, which is the ability to pass on your genes to the next generation. Adaptive behaviour: behaviour that aids an organism’s survival in its habitat (eg: the attachment between a caregiver and a baby ensures the baby’s closeness to the caregiver for things like feeding and protection, promoting survival).

Evolutionary psychology: emphasizes the importance of reproductive success, adaption, and fitness in shaping behaviour. David Buss says that evolution has influenced our facial/physical appearance, but also our decision-making, aggression fears, and mating patterns. The Hadza people in Tanzania provide an interesting look into a modern hunter-gatherer tribe. In hunter-gatherer tribes, the mother’s foraging supplies a huge majority of the caloric intake, and as such, these foraging skills are highly correlated to the growth of their infant child. However, after the birth of the second child, this correlation disappears, and is instead replaced by a correlation between the foraging skills of the grandmother and the infant growth. 

Evolutionary developmental psychology: There has been an application of evolutionary psychology into human development. Some ideas include:

• Childhood: humans need a longer time to develop a large brain and learn the complexity of the world they’re living in. We also take longer than other mammals to mature in terms of reproduction. These ideas are why we have an extended childhood. 

• Our brains cannot be applied equally to every single kind of problem. We’ve evolved such that we have certain genetic predispositions to certain abilities. These abilities would solve recurring problems that our ancestors faced. Genetic frequencies/parts of the brain work for behaviours that would’ve benefited us in our evolutionary past like mathematics for trading, etc.

• Outdated evolutionary mechanisms: not all mechanisms are adaptive for today’s society. For example, in our prehistoric history we tended to gorge on food and crave high-calorie foods because we lived in environments where food was scarce, so we needed to eat as much as possible. That trait, because of the increased availability of food today, isn’t necessary, and might be the reason for the obesity epidemic. 

Evaluating evolutionary psychology: Evolutionary psychology is just a theory, and like all theories it has its limitations, weaknesses and critics. Bandura argues that social behaviour cannot be seen strictly through evolutionary biology. Thus, we have to take a bidirectional approach, in which environmental and biological conditions impact and influence each other. With this, evolutionary pressures shaped biological conditions that forced us to create new environments, and in turn, environmental conditions caused new selective pressures that led to the evolution of new and unique biological systems specialized for thought, memory, language, etc. American scientist Gould posits that evolution has given us biological potentialities, but they don’t shape behaviour, instead create a broad range of cultural possibilities. 

The wonders of genes: 

• The human genome consists of genes that collaborate with each other and nongenetic factors inside and outside the body. 

• Every gene has its own location, and there’s been a great amount of study into the specific locations of genes that are linked to certain functions/tasks.  This understanding has led to the examination of: genetic variations linked to particular disorders; disease-related genes; genetic influence on development; and ethnic groups around the world for genetic variations in disease.

• There are environmental factors that turn on a gene to express something like creating cortisol or silence a gene’s expression (eg: hormones that circulate in the blood travel into a cell where they can turn a gene on or off, but the flow of those hormones can be influenced by things like nutrition, day length, light and behaviour). Factors such as stress can excite, inhibit, and/or influence gene expression (eg: an increase in cortisol can damage DNA and slow the rate of repair)

Genes and Chromosomes:

Fertilization:

• The egg and the sperm (aka gametes) have 23 unpaired chromosomes, which join in a process called fertilization

• During fertilization the gametes fuse to create a zygote. During this, the unpaired 23 chromosomes from the egg and the sperm combine to form a single set of 23 paired chromosomes—one from mom, one from dad. 

• Females have XX chromosome, males have XY

Genetic sources of variability:

• The fusion into a zygote is what creates genetic variability in a population, which means that natural selection has more traits and characteristics to operate on. This fusion creates a totally unique combination.

• Another kind of variability comes from the chance of mutated genes.

Sex-linked genes:

• When a mutated gene is on the X chromosome, it’s called X-linked inheritance. This has big implications for males, because males only have one X chromosome. This means that if theirs is mutated, they have no backup X chromosome to counter that gene, and may express an X-linked disease. Because females have a backup X, they aren’t likely to show that disease, even if they are carriers. 

Klinefelter’s syndrome:

• 1/600 

• Males have an extra X chromosome, leading to underdeveloped testes, enlarged breasts and taller height. They also have an impairment in language, academic, attentional and motor abilities. 

Fragile x syndrome:

• An abnormal breakage or constriction in the X chromosome. 

• Long face, large ears, soft skin

• Vary in cognitive impairment (could be short attention span, a learning disability, inhibition, memory, etc.)

• More frequent in males than in females because the second X in females negates the effects of the abnormal singular X

Turner syndrome:

• 1/2500

• Disorder in females

• The X chromosome is missing or part of it is deleted, making them XO instead of XX. 

• Short with webbed necks

• May be infertile and bad at math

XYY syndrome:

• Males have an extra Y chromosome

• Originally the extra Y was thought to contribute to aggression and violence, but studies show that XYY males are no more violent than XY males. 

Gene-linked abnormalities:

PKU:

• 1/10,000-20,000

• Disorder in which an individual cannot properly metabolize the amino acid, phenylalanine. 

• Recessive gene 

• Treated by a diet (environmental influence) that strays away from excess accumulation of phenylalanine. If PKU is left untreated though, excess phenylalanine can build inside the child, causing intellectual disability, etc. This shows that the development of this genetic disorder doesn’t occur if the person is raised in a phenylalanine-free environment. Under one environmental condition (the consumption of phenylalanine) intellectual disability occurs, but when other nutrients replace it intelligence develops normally. 

Behaviour genetics: seeks to understand the role of heredity and environment on individual differences in human traits and development. To what extent do people vary because of differences in genes, environment, or a combo of these factors?

• Twin study: study of the behavioural similarities or differences between identical twins and fraternal twins. By studying this, behaviour geneticists are capitalizing on the fact that identical twins are more similar genetically than fraternal

Shared experiences are siblings’ common experiences (eg: the personalities of their parents or intellectual orientation, their socioeconomic status, and the neighbourhood they live in). Nonshared experiences are the child’s own unique experiences within and outside their family, that are theirs alone and not shared by anybody else (eg: different teachers, different friends, etc.)

Robert Plomin says that even though two children may live under the same roof, their personalities are often very different. Furthermore, he explains that heredity influences the nonshared environment of siblings through the heredity-environments (passive, active, evocative). A child with a genetic tendency to be more athletic will find themselves in more sports-related environments than a child with a genetic tendency to be more musical. 

The epigenetic view (Gottlieb): development is the result of an ongoing, bidirectional interchange between heredity and environment (eg: a baby inherits genes from both parents at the time of conception. During prenatal development, toxins, nutrition, stress, etc. may influence some genes to stop working, while prompting others to work stronger. During infancy, environmental factors like stress, nutrition, toxins, etc. continue to influence genetic and neural activity. Together, heredity and environment shape a person’s actual genetics while producing their intelligence, temperament, height, weight, etc.)

Gene x Environment interaction (G x E):

• A study has shown that those with a short genotype labeled 5-HTTLPR (a gene involving serotonin) have an elevated risk for depression, but only if they live stressful lives. This gene doesn’t directly cause depression alone. If the genetic makeup of the person interacts with a stressful environment, they could end up with depression. 

Prenatal development:

• The germinal period: first two weeks after conception. Includes creation of the zygote, cell division, and then eventual attachment of the zygote to the uterine wall. After the first week of conception the differentiation of the cells plus their specialization of different tasks has begun. A group of cells called the blastocyst eventually develops into the embryo, and an outer layer of cells called the trophoblast support and nourish the embryo. 

• The embryonic period: 2-8 weeks after conception. The rate of cell differentiation amplifies, support systems for cells form, and organs appear. Three embryonic layers form: the endoderm, the mesoderm, and the ectoderm:

  • Endoderm: inner layer of cells which morphs into the respiratory and digestive systems

  • Mesoderm: the middle layer of cells, forms into the bones, muscles, circulatory, excretory, and reproductive systems

  • Ectoderm: the outer layer, develops into the nervous system and skin. Neural tube develops out of the ectoderm 18-24 days after conception

• The amnion is a shockproof, temperature and humidity-controlled “sac” bag filled with clear fluid that the embryo stays in. The umbilical cord connects the baby to the placenta. The placenta is a grouping of tissues where the red blood cells from the mom and baby intertwine

• Organogenesis: the process of organ formation during the first two months of development

• The fetal period: 7 month period. Three months after conception the baby starts moving its limbs. Facial features are distinguishable. After four months the mother can actually feel the movement of the baby. After month 5 skin starts to form, and the baby chooses a particular position it likes. After month 6 hairs start to form and irregular breathing movements happen. As this happens, the baby is increasing in length and weight. During months 8-9, organs are fully functioning.

The baby’s brain:

• The basic architecture of the brain occurs during the first two trimesters of the prenatal period. Neurons in prenatal development spend time moving around and connecting with other neurons. By the time babies are born, they have 100 billion neurons. Maternal health problems like diabetes or obesity could put the baby at risk for developing neural tube defects. 

Anencephaly:

• Head end of the neural tube doesn’t close, leading to death in the womb, or birth, or shortly after. 

Spina bifida:

• Paralysis of the lower limbs

• Need assistive devices like crutches, wheelchairs, etc.

Teratology and the hazards of prenatal development: 

• Teratogen: any agent that can potentially cause a birth defect or negatively alter cognitive and behavioural outcomes. It may take a while for the effects of teratogens to express themselves, and it’s even difficult to figure out what problem comes from which teratogen. There are so many that everyone is bound to encounter at least one. 

• Teratology: study of the causes of birth defects.

• Behavioural teratology: when teratogens don’t affect a baby physically but cognitively and intellectually. 

• Dose: the greater the amount of teratogen exposure, the greater the effect (similar to a drug)

• Genetic susceptibility: the abnormality’s severity or type is linked to the genes of the pregnant parent and their embryo (eg: how much a parent metabolizes drugs affects how much the drug effects are transmitted). The extent to which an embryo is vulnerable to a teratogen may depend on its genotype. Strangely, male fetuses are more likely to be affected by teratogens than female fetuses. 

• Time of exposure: teratogen damage during the germinal period may halt implantation, while the embryonic period is much more vulnerable than the fetal period. 

Key teratogens:

• Substance abuse: psychoactive drugs that alter consciousness and states of mind (like meth, alcohol, cocaine, heroin, nicotine, marijuana, etc.) are discouraged during the pregnancy

  • Alcohol: Fetal alcohol spectrum disorders are a group of abnormalities in babies whose pregnant mothers drank heavy amounts of alcohol. Facial deformities, defective heart, face and limbs, body malformations, learning problems/intellectual disabilities, deficits in the neural pathways linked to cognition, perception and behaviour, are all results of FASD. Not all women who drink heavily while pregnant give birth to children with FASD, and heavy amounts of drinking is usually the problem, but still, no alcohol should be consumed while pregnant.

  • Marijuana: An increasing number of studies show that premature birth, lower body weight, poorer functioning after birth, and a higher likelihood to be placed in neonatal intensive care are results of smoking weed while pregnant. However, as mothers who smoke mairjuana tend to also be doing other drugs, it’s not certain if just marijuana is causing all of these things. There are many confounds, but marijuana is still advised against for pregnant women. 

• Environmental hazards: there are many environmental concerns in our modern world that would impact the embryo/fetus in development (eg: radiation, toxic waste, pollution, pesticides, etc.). X-rays are also dangerous

• Maternal factors: maternal diseases and infections will obviously impact the child, as many of these bad things will cross the placental barrier. 

  • Syphilis: damaging later in development, usually after 4 months, results in skins and eye lesions, which cause blindness. 

  • Genital herpes: ⅓ of babies delivered through a canal infected with herpes die, ¼ who survive become brain damaged. C-sections are often delivered on women with herpes.

  • HIV/AIDS: Offspring can be infected in 3 ways:

1. During gestation across the placenta

2. During deliver through contact with a mother’s infected blood

3. During breastfeeding postpartum

• Babies born with HIV can be affected in 3 ways:

1. Infected and symptomatic

2. Infected by asymptomatic

3. Not infected at all 

• Diabetes: physical defects are more prevalent in diabetic births. Diabetic mothers may birth babies larger than normal who are then at risk of diabetes themselves

• Paternal factors: The father’s exposure to petrochemicals, radiation, lead, pesticides, etc. may cause genetic changes and abnormalities in the sperm, leading to childhood cancer, or miscarriage, among other difficulties. Paternal smoking has been linked to early pregnancy loss (possibly because of secondhand smoke), various cancers, physical deformities, etc. Due to a random gene mutation found in older fathers, children of men who are over 40 have an increased risk of autism.

Maternal diet and nutrition:

• Children born to malnourished mothers are more likely than other children to have malformations and developmental problems. Being overweight before and during pregnancy can also lead to elevated rates of hypertension, diabetes, respiratory conditions, and infections. Folic acid, a B-complex vitamin, is also important for the formation of the neural tube and the prevention of early delivery. Children of mothers who did not use folic acid or multivitamins had an increased risk of behavioural problems. Mercury is also dangerous for an embryo, and water pollution has caused mercury to sometimes accumulate in fish. Prenatal mercury exposure is linked to miscarriage, preterm birth, and lower intelligence. 

Incompatible blood types:

• Incompatibility between the blood types of the mother and father also poses a risk. Blood type is decided by the surface structure of red blood cells. The Rh-factor is a big part of the problem. If a mother is Rh-negative and their partner is positive, then the baby may be positive, which may lead to the mother’s immune system attacking the fetus, leading to miscarriage or stillbirth, anemia, brain damage, heart defects, etc. 

Maternal age:

• Adolescence and 35+ are age ranges that are riskful for the baby. The mortality rate for infants born to young mothers is double the amount for infants born to women in their twenties. Prenatal care would reduce the risk, however young/adolescent mothers are less likely to get prenatal care from clinics and health services. For mothers 35+, babies are at risk for low birth weight, preterm delivery and fetal death

Emotional states and stress:

• The emotional state and the stress that a pregnant women feels may affect the fetus, directly or indirectly (the stress may cause the woman to go towards calming substances that will impact the health of their baby)

• One study found that pregnant women dealing with great amounts of stress are at an increased risk of birthing a child with emotional or cognitive problems, ADHD, language delay, etc. Across the nine months of pregnancy, the risk of a baby being born preterm is highest when the mother experiences stress during month 5-6. Maternal depression also results in preterm birth and lower birth weights. 

Prenatal care:

• Described as medical care, educational, social and nutritional services. Counseling and exercise is recommended, and helps prevent constipation, reduced bodily pain, while also elevating mental health. 

Prenatal diagnostic tests:

Noninvasive prenatal diagnosis is an alternative to chorionic villus sampling and amniocentesis.  They have successfully used it to test genes inherited by fathers that cause cystic fibrosis and Huntington’s disease. They are currently trying to use it to find the sex of the baby and to detect Down syndrome. 

Infertility and reproductive technology

• Female reasons for infertility: may not be ovulating; abnormal ova; blocked fallopian tubes; disease that prevents the implementation of the embryo 

• Male reasons for infertility: too few sperm; sperm has no mobility; he has a blocked passageway

• IVF: eggs and sperm are combined in a dish, and the successfully fertilized egg(s) are transferred into the woman’s uterus. Additional prenatal care and attention may be needed for IVF twins because they are more at risk for low birth weight, prematurity, adverse neonatal results, etc. 

  • There aren't any significant differences in any diagnostic categories (behaviour problems like aggression and delinquency, or mental health problems like depression and anxiety) between children who were born through assisted reproductive technologies and those who were spontaneously conceived. 

Adoption:

• Children adopted earlier in life are more likely to have positive outcomes than children adopted later, as the latter often spend time in adverse, traumatic situations filled with environmental risks before being taken out. 

• In a Russian study between children living in orphanages and children adopted, those adopted before 18 months fared better for long-term behavioural and cognitive outcomes than those adopted afterward

• Most adoptees adjust effectively. A recent review revealed no difference in the self-esteem of adopted and non-adopted children, as well as no differences between transracial and same-race adoptees.

Challenges that parents face with their adopted children at different points of development:

• Infancy: few differences in the attachment that adopted and nonadopted infants form to their parents. 

• Early childhood: talks of adoption start to occur, as the child asks where they came from.

• Middle to late childhood: children start to ask more questions about their origin. The adopted parents’ desire to shelter the child and provide a perfect life may also cause strife, because the child may not feel welcome to share negative emotions.

• Adolescence: reflect on their adopted status in more complex and multifaceted ways, marked by identity exploration.

Surrogacy:

• Popular with same-sex couples especially. 

Day 4

Developmental systems theory

• Development occurs within a system of interacting levels. Sure we start with genetics, but then that activity impacts neural activity, which influences your behaviour. You then change your environmental conditions. 

Epigenesis

• Any functional change in the genome does not involve an alteration in the DNA sequence but can impact your behaviour 

• Structure: DNA sequence (eg: blueprint for building)

• Function: gene expression (eg: used as home? School? Office building?)

• Experience does impact gene chemistry

Epigenetics: skink lizards:

• Preyed upon by snakes, especially if small, less reactive, and have short tails

• If the mom has been exposed by a snake and survives, the offspring is more reactive, bigger, and with longer tails. Only the moms exposed to snakes have larger offspring

Good mothering vs bad mothering:

• A good rat mother licks and grooms her pups. She gives them extra space to suckle against her underside. Some female rats spend more time grooming their pups, some don’t. 

• High grooming mothers groom their pups, and when those pups become mothers, they also express high grooming behaviour. Those new mothers also have a lower stress response.

• Low grooming moms on the other hand have offspring that have a higher stress response and go on to become low grooming mothers themselves. 

Cross-fostering studies: when the pups are switched

• When the high grooming moms adopted lowly-groomed pups, the low grooming pups gained decreased stress responses, and became high groom mothers. When the low grooming moms adopted high groomed pups, those pups became low grooming moms

What is the mechanism? Why is this?

• Gene chemistry changed through methylation (adding a methyl group has the effect of “silencing” the gene, making it inactive). Having the methyl group present silences genes for creating neurotransmitter receptions, which creates a poor regulation of stress

• The absence of the methyl group (demethylation) allows receptor formation, which results in a better regulation of stress 

Environment is changing genetics:

• At birth, methylation is equal in high grooming and low grooming pups

• By day 6 though, demethylation has occurred in high grooming pups only

• Their experience is changing the gene activity

• The grooming is leading to demethylation, more receptors are forming, and better regulation of stress occurs

High grooming leads to demethylation, and with the absence of that silencing methyl group, the gene coding for receptors can be freely expressed. This is why cortisol receptors (known for handling stress and anxiety) are found in high formations in the hippocampus of rat pups who have been highly groomed, and why there’s a better regulation of stress within them.

• There is a second variable though, the handling of rat pups by humans. Handling pups increases cortisol receptors, and behaviourally increases the frequency of maternal grooming. The low groomed pups who were handled by humans have the same cortisol receptor levels as the high groomed pups who were not handled by any humans at all. 

What about humans?

• Various studies examining methylation in genes and receptors involved in the HPA (hypothalamus, pituitary gland, and the adrenal gland) axis, involved in perceived stress, affect, immune response, and energy metabolism

• Differences in methylation observed in post-mortem hippocampal tissue of 12 suicide victims with a history of childhood abuse vs 12 suicide victims without a history of childhood abuse, showing that the methylation found in the rat experiment can apply to humans

• Using the saliva of 260 preschoolers, children who had experience maltreatment over a 6-month evaluation period differed in methylation from children who did not experience maltreatment (saliva and cortisol levels)

Genotype -> environment theory

• First proposed by sandra scarr

• Three types of effects: passive, evocative, active. They are not mutually exclusive. Passive effects are more influential in earlier years, active effects more influential in later years. 

  • Passive effects: when genetically related parents are providing the rearing environment. This environment has been chosen for you by your genes

  • Evocative effects: when a child elicits responses from others, the child’s genotype is impacting their environment. They are changing it

  • Active/niche-picking effects: when a child’s genotype influences the types of environments they select and seek out

Breastfeeding and IQ

• Babies who were breastfed had higher IQs as children, adolescents and adults, compared to those who were bottle-fed

  • Explanation: human breast milk contains fatty acids (not found in cow’s milk) that fosters brain development

• Gene on chromosome 11 involved in processing fatty acids. 

  • Can have a C or a G

• When they separate individuals by their genetic makeup, individuals with CC or CG and who were breastfed had higher IQ (IQ = 104) than children who were bottle-fed (IQ = 97)

  • There’s no difference in GG individuals who were breast-fed (IQ = 100). This is a statistical difference but not alot of meaningful difference. 

Conduct disorder:

• Children (and adolescents) who consistently break rules or violate the rights of others (eg: lying, stealing, arson, truancy, animal cruelty, fighting)

• Emerge by 8 years of age, more common among boys

• Prevalence estimates: 2-9%

• Childhood onset (younger than 10) are more aggressive and more likely to develop antisocial personality disorder

• Difficulty with self-regulation combined with fear/anger leads to dysregulated behaviour (more antisocial behaviour)

• Risk factors: antisocial family members (eg: genes and environment), deviant peers, inconsistent discipline, parental insensitivity, family stress

• Treatment: cognitive behavioural therapy

• Children face consequences for unacceptable behaviour; positive social behaviour is rewarded

• Family-oriented treatment is most effective 

MAOA Gene

• Encodes MAOA enzyme (metabolizes neurotransmitters like norepinephrine, serotonin, dopamine)

• In mice:

  • Deleting MAOA gene causes aggression in them

  • Maltreatment disrupts their neurotransmitter systems

• In humans

  • Altered neurotransmitters linked with aggression

 It is a myth that infants are not impacted by negative experiences that they don't remember. Early experiences are wired into a child's neural circuitry

Day 5:

1. Formation of the neural tube:

• Neural plate forms a neural cleft, then the tube

2. Neurogenesis:

• Neurons form in one region of neural tube

• 5-28 weeks after conception

• About 4000 neurons are created per second

• Typically, no more new neurons after birth (eg: the hippocampus has neuron generation, but elsewhere not at all)

3. migration:

• Neurons move to permanent locations (by 7 months) in the brain via glial cells (eg” the cortex or the midbrain, etc.)

• Faulty migration associated with neural disorders (eg: epilepsy, cerebral palsy)

4. differentiation

• Neurons become larger, produce dendrites and longer axons, become specialized

• Synaptogenesis begins (eg: synapses form)

• Myelination: 

• Fatty sheath to protect axon, insulation

• Starts early infancy, peaks in adolescence, and into early adulthood

• Speeds conduction velocity

• Reduces leakage of electrical signals

5. Cell and synaptic pruning

• Removal of the redundant, irrelevant, unnecessary synapses

• Increased efficiency in remaining neural activity

• Use or lose it phenomenon. If it’s important/being used then it stays, but if not then it gets cut

Thalidomide:

• Sedative prescribed for morning sickness in Europe in the 50s

• Babies born with deformities in arms, legs, hands and fingers

• 10,000 infants affected before it was pulled from the market

• Dr. Kelsey, medical officer of health for FDA (US) in 1960 refused approval

  • Appointed to the order of canada in 2015

FAS: leading cause of developmental disorders in North America

• 0.1% of Canadian newborns; higher in Indigenous communities

Nicotine:

• Secondhand smoke alters telomere length in DNA extracted from umbilical cord blood; prenatal second-hand smoke associated with 10% shorter newborn telomere length

  • Telomere: nucleoprotein complex at the end of each chromosome

Vaping?

• The offspring of female rats exposed to nicotine vape or injection (and edible THC or injection) during the pregnancy suffered various deficits. Prenatal nicotine vape and oral THC caused reduced body weight, while nicotine vape lead to decreased startle reactivity and nicotine and THC co-exposure led to poor inhibition in male pups

Prenatal hearing

• At 16 weeks gestation, a developing fetus perceives sound outside the womb through fluid-filled ears

• Can moms encourage bilingualism? No.

What about deaf parents? 

• No evidence that hearing children of deaf parents experienced language delay

  • After they’re born, 5-10 hours/weeks of exposure seems sufficient

• Newborns of deaf parents demonstrate same preferences as newborns of hearing parents (eg: prefer infant-directed speech over regular speech)

Prenatal hearing and familiarity:

• Mothers instructed to read Dr. Seuss out loud while pregnant

• After birth, newborns controlled their sucking to hear Dr. Seuss more than another story book; also preferred mom’s voice over a different woman’s voice

Prenatal taste:

• Do infants remember what they tasted prenatally? Women who planned on breastfeeding randomly assigned 3 groups to drink the following for at least 4 days/week:

  • Drink 300ml of carrot juice during the last 3 weeks of 3rd trimester; switch to water after birth

  • Drink 300ml of water during the last 3 weeks of 3rd trimester; switch to carrot juice after birth

  • Control group: drink 300ml of water 3 weeks before and after birth

• Results:

  • When babies started eating solid foods after 6 months, they were given cereal with either water or carrot juice. Infants exposed to carrot juice prenatally or after birth:

    • Showed fewer negative reactions towards the carrot juice cereal

    • Enjoyed carrot cereal more than regular cereal (according to moms)

  • Obviously, no difference in the control group

Prenatal taste: direct observation:

• Moms were given (experimental group) flavoured capsules (organic nonbitter carrot or bitter kale) before ultrasound; asked not to eat anything else that day. Facial movements of the fetus studied in utero using ultrasounds showed that babies reacted negatively towards the kale but positively towards the carrot. 

Day 6:

The most common assessment for newborn is the Apgar test, used 1-5 minutes after birth:

• Heart rate

• Respiratory effort

• Muscle tone

• Body colour

• Reflex irritability 

Apgar benefits:

• It identifies high risk infants who need resuscitation

• It’s good for assessing the newborn’s ability to respond to the stress of delivery and its new environment

Apgar limitations:

• Expression of physiologic condition at one point in time

• Maternal sedation/anesthesia may impact newborn’s reflexes or actions

• Scoring of tone, colour, reflex is subjective

• Partially depends on gestational age (low scores correlate with birth weight). If you’re born preterm then it makes sense why you may fail certain things on the assessment

Infant reflexes:

• The rooting reflexes: anything near the baby’s mouth, they will start sucking

• Grasping reflex: anything near your hand you grasp on

• Stepping reflex: prepares the ability to walk maybe

• Babinski reflex: when you touch their feet their toes separate, it may be because they’re checking that stimulus-response works

• Moro startle reflex: a check to see if all systems are working

Neonatal imitation:

• Whatever the adult did the baby imitated. Many subsequent studies failed to replicate the original findings. It can be seen in mother-reared monkeys but not peer-related monkeys, but disappeared by day 10

• It’s not imitation in the way we think, as there’s no intent. Perhaps it’s a newborn reflex. The current interpretation is that it helps establish emotional bonds between the caregiver

Crying:

• Typical newborns cry 2-3 hours/day

• Basic cry: starts softly and gradually becomes more intense. It’s usually a sign of hunger, fatigue, discomfort

• Mad cry: more intense, neglection in this uncomfortable state

• Pain cry: sudden, long shriek, followed by a long pause, then gasp, then more crying

Strategies:

• Age 0-3 months attend to the baby and check for signs of discomfort and try to soothe

• Age 3+ months check for signs of discomfort, otherwise let baby cry for a few minutes and learn to self-soothe

  • Dynamic interaction: balance learning to self-regulate emotions and caregivers’ comfort levels

Shaken baby syndrome

• Abusive head trauma sustained by rough shaking

• Often in an effort to stop baby from crying; impulse, frustrated

• Hard enough impact will result in neuron death

• Brain bleeds/bruises/swells, causes permanent brain damage

• Observed in all socioeconomic statuses and cultures

• Doesn’t necessarily have a safe age

• No treatment after this

Preterm and low birth weight infants

• Low-birth weight newborns: < 2500 grams

• Very low birth weight newborns: < 1600 grams

• Extremely low birth weight newborns: < 900 grams

• Preterm newborns: < 37 weeks gestation

• Small for gestational age newborns: < 10th percentile

  • Highest risk for complications and developmental problems

Low birth weight infants in canada

• In canada (6.5%) and US (8.1%), low-birth weight rate has been increasing in the last 2 decades

• Adolescents have higher risk of low birth weight because their bodies have not fully matured

• Poverty is also a risk factor: obesity, diabetes, hypertension, use of cigarettes, etc.

Kangaroo care

• Method of care for preterm infants

• Diaper-clad infant held skin-to-skin against the mother's breast, under the mother's clothes. Babies have a regular heart rate, better sleep. Moms have better lactation. 

Preterm babies and memory:

• Some suggestion that hippocampus development, and therefore memory is affected in preterm children

  • Hippocampal volume was 12% smaller in preterm children compared to control children

  • Very low birth weight young adults had smaller hippocampal volumes and worse working memory than control participants

  • It isn’t known exactly if there’s a correlation between low birth weight/preterm births and SES

Day 7:

Shaken baby syndrome:

• From hospital data 1988-1998 in Canadian hospitals, median age was 4.6 months

• Non-specific symptoms most common; bruising 46%, seizure-like 45%, decreased level of consciousness 43%, respiratory difficulty 34%

• 19% died as a direct result of shaking

• 55% had ongoing issues, 65% had visual impairment, 22% showed no signs of developmental impairment

• Of 80 babies followed from 2005-2013, 3 died in the ICU. 31% had abnormal neurological exams at follow-up

Different susceptibility?

• It’s possible that different areas are more susceptible, however the scope of possible head injuries makes it difficult to suggest significant vulnerabilities

• Most common are diffuse symptoms which spread across large parts of the brain

• The injury is not entirely visible, and cases are based on parental reports; there may be an incentive to change the facts of the case, so we can never be entirely sure what caused the injury

Biological changes/physical growth patterns:

• Differences in height and weight as children grow depends on genetics

• Impact of environment: urban, middle class, firstborn children tend to be taller than rural, lower class, later-born children

• Strongest impact on height and weight is adequate nutrition

Puberty:

• Rapid hormonal and physical changes in early adolescence as body prepares for reproduction

• Individual differences in onset and progression; changes over the decades (nutrition, exercise, body fat)

Hormones

• Timing of puberty governed by genetics and environmental factors (like stress)

• Hypothalamus, pituitary gland and gonads control puberty

Hormones and behaviour

• Findings are inconsistent regarding adolescent behaviours and the level of hormones

• Social factors accounted for 2-4x as much variance in girls’ depression and anger relative to hormonal factors

• Stress also impact cortisol, which impacts the endocrine system (hypothalamus, pituitary, etc)

• Amount of hormones in blood and behaviour (eg: individual difference in number of receptors, reuptake in synapse, cascading effects)

Psychology of puberty:

• adolescents are preoccupied with body image

• Girls less happy with bodies than boys (puberty triggers more fat storage for girls, and more muscle mass for boys)

• Major factor is peer influence

• Early-maturing girls are more likely to smoke, drink, be depressed, develop eating disorders, engage in delinquent behaviour. This is the evocative genetic effects.  

Brain plasticity:

• Neuronal activation patterns and synapses are plastic. They can adapt to new challenges, especially earlier in development

• Michael Rehbein (case study): left hemispheres removed at age 7 to stop seizures. If you’re young enough, the brain can reorganize around the removal of the left hemisphere. It rewires and functions for the entire body. By age 14, the brain had reorganized to reveal activation in the right hemisphere in response to speech (whereas most individuals show left-hemisphere dominance). The most extreme case of brain plasticity but shows that the damage of deprived environments is not irreversible

Adolescent brain development:

• Corpus callosum thickens

• Amygdala matures faster than prefrontal cortex

• Limbic system structures involved in emotional processing and regulation

• End result: adolescents act based on emotions (amygdala) without full consideration of consequences (prefrontal cortex is still immature)

Is more better? High IQ brains undergo the most change from childhood to adolescence. The change is based on cortical thickness

Why does cortical thickness change?

• Prenatal development: formation of neurons, dendrites, and synapses

• Childhood and adolescence: proliferation of myelination (eg: thickening)

• Adolescence: usage-dependent pruning of synapses (eg: thinning)

Bottom line

• Myelination requires on good nutrition

• Synaptic pruning: allow children and adolescents have diverse experiences and practice those skills you want to foster

• Use it or lose it phenomenon

Sleep:

• More REM sleep during infancy; more sleep needed earlier in development

• REM sleep

  • Rapid eye movements phase of sleep

  • Aids in information processing

  • Likely brain is sifting through (re-activating same neural patterns) daily experiences to organize and store information in memory

  • Evidence of perceptual learning after REM sleep with no additional training (learning is disrupted if REM sleep, but not non-REM sleep, is disturbed)

• Co-sleeping and SIDS:

  • SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome): infants stop breathing suddenly, typically during the night while sleeping

  • Highest cause of infant mortality in the US

  • Commonly happens 2-4 months

  • SIDS is correlated with: co-sleeping, soft bedding, abnormal serotonin, material smoking, heart arrhythmia, sleep apnea, low birth weight babies, and lower SES

  • Best practice: keep baby in crib for 6 months, flat on back 

TEXTBOOK Chapter 3 Notes

Stages of birth:

1. Early labour and active labour: longest of the three stages, contractions cause the cervix to open. By the end of this stage the numerous contractions have caused the cervix to dilate enough for the baby to come through

2. Second stage: usually lasts 45 minutes, starts with the baby’s head coming through and ends with it completely out of the mother’s body

3. Afterbirth: shortest of the three, lasts only minutes, the placenta and umbilical cord are detached

Midwifery and Doulas:

• Midwifery is still relatively common, especially in low-risk women, though in Canada it is currently being integrated into the provincial healthcare system. 

• Doulas attend to the childbearing woman, and give physical, educational, and emotional support for the mother before, during and after the childbirth. They remain throughout the labour, and elicit positive feelings for the mother by assessing and responding to her needs

Childbirth methods/medication

1. Analgesia: used to relieve pain (eg: tranquilizers, narcotics, etc)

2. Anesthesia: used during the first stage, block consciousness and/or sensation. 

3. Pitocin: synthetic oxytocin to stimulate or induce labour by stimulating the uterus to make it contract

Natural vs prepared childbirth

• Natural: Aims to reduce the mother’s pain by decreasing her fear through education about childbirth and by teaching her to use breathing methods/relaxation techniques during delivery

• Prepared (Lamaze method): utilizes a specific breathing technique to control pushing in the final stages of labour

Low-birth weight infants: weigh less than 5 and a half pounds at birth. 

• Very low birth weight: weigh under 3 and a half pounds

• Extremely low birth weight: weigh under 2 pounds

Preterm infants: born three weeks or more before the pregnancy reached full term. One of the leading causes of infant mortality. 

• Extremely preterm: born before the 28th week

• Very preterm: born before the 33rd week

The rates of it are on the rise for multiple reasons

• Increasing number of births to women 35 years or older

• Increased stress

• Increased substance abuse

While the survival rates are going up, preterm babies still have many problems they face developmentally

• Increased rates of severe brain damage

• More likely to have cerebral palsy, learning disabilities, sensory issues, ADHD, asthma, etc.

• Correlated with autism; there are many low birth weight students in SpecEd programs

Small for date infants: birth weight is below normal relative to the length of the pregnancy

Progestin:

• Research reviews indicate that progestin is most effective in reducing preterm births when administered to women with a history of a previous spontaneous birth, women who have short cervixes, and women pregnant with one child

Cross-cultural variations in the incidence and causes of low birth weight

• In countries like Pakistan and Uganda, the rates of poverty are very high, and so are the incidence of low birth weight babies. Women living in poverty tend to turn to substance abuse, are obese, stressed, depressed and/or anxious, have diabetes and/or hypertension, and alot of other things. These factors obviously have to do with the infant’s birth weight being low

• In the US and Canada, rates are also rising, while in many European countries it’s the same. 

Massage therapy on preterm infants:

• Increased weight gain

• Release from the hospital days earlier 

• Vagus nerve is stimulated, insulin is released

Massage therapy on children’s development

• Helps asthmatic children

• Helps ADHD children

• Helps autistic children

In addition to the Apgar test there are 2 others for neonatal care:

1. BNAS: index of neurological competence for infants

2. NNNS: for preterm infants exposed to substance abuse. The NNNS predicted certain developmental outcomes like neurological difficulties, IQ, etc.  at around 4 years of age

Physical adjustments/the postpartum period:

• Fatigue

• Involution (the uterus returns to its normal prepregnant size after 5 or 6 weeks of birth)

• Hormonal changes

Emotional and psychological adjustments: emotional fluctuations are common during this period, and can vary from mother to mother. Postpartum depression is when mothers have a hard time coping during the postpartum period, and occurs within 10-14% of mothers. With cognitive therapy and treatment, regular exercise, and certain antidepressants, it can help

Bonding refers to the connection between mother and child. Early bonding is not critical to the development of a competent infant

Patterns of growth: human development follows both cephalocaudal and proximodistal patterns. Cephalocaudal refers to the fastest growth occurring at the head, and then gradually moving from top to bottom. Proximodistal refers to the growth happening in the centre and then moving along to the extremities 

Infancy and childhood: in the first days of life, newborns lose 5-7% of their body weight, yet once they start adjusting to sucking and swallowing, they rapidly grow (5 or 6 ounces a week maybe) both height and weight increase rapidly during infancy, then slow during childhood. North American babies are usually 20 inches long and 7 and a half pounds. They grow about 1 inch per month during their first year. By 2 years of age they are about 12-14 kg (26-32 pounds) and 89-90cm (32-35 inches). They have doubled their weight by the 4th month and tripled it by their first birthday. During this period, girls are only slightly smaller and lighter than boys. Growth is then slow but consistent during the middle and late childhood. The circumference of the head, the waist, and length of the leg decrease in relation to height. 

Adolescence: puberty happens during this obviously. It involves the rapid maturation with hormonal (testosterone and estradiol are key players in this) and bodily changes. Hormones are secreted in the endocrine glands (hypothalamus, the master gland called the pituitary gland, and the gonads, which are the testes in males and the ovaries in females). Androgens are the main class of male sex hormones, while estrogens are the main class of female sex hormones. Heredity and environmental conditions (family conflict, SES, child maltreatment) plays a role in the onset of puberty. The rising testosterone (an androgen) levels create voice changes in boys, increased height, larger external genitals, growth spurt, etc. In girls, estradiol (an estrogen) helps breast and uterine development, while the growth spurt happens 2 years earlier in girls than it does in boys. They also tend to have a more negative view of their bodies

• Menarche is a girl’s first menstruation. The average age of menarche has declined significantly (eg: in Norway, the average age is 13, while in the 1840s it was 17). In North America children mature up to a year earlier than they do in Europe

• Precocious puberty is a term used for an early onset or rapid escalation of puberty (diagnosed usually when puberty starts before 8 for girls and before 9 for boys). This happens approximately 10 times more to girls than to boys. When this happens there are endocrinological interventions to try and halt puberty temporarily, which is good, as children who experience this phenomenon are more likely to have short stature and engage in age-inappropriate sexual things

The neuroconstructivist view: 

• Biological (like genes) and environmental conditions (if you’re in a rich or poor household) influence the brain’s development

• The brain has plasticity and is context dependent

• The development of the brain and the child’s cognitive development are closely linked

• These factors can either constrain or advance a child’s development

• Much like the epigenetic view it emphasizes gene and environment interaction. 

Brain changes in infancy:

• Experience influences the brain’s development, which is why growing up in a deprived environment can harm the brain

• Myelination continues in infancy and even into adolescence in some parts of the brain (the frontal lobes). It facilitates a number of abilities, like hand eye coordination. Myelination of the visual pathways occurs rapidly after birth and is completed after 6 months. Auditory myelination isn’t completed until 4 or 5 years of age

• Increase in dendritic and synaptic connections which will then get pruned later on

Brain changes in childhood:

• The brain and head grow rapidly during early childhood development. 

• In middle and late childhood there is a shift in activation patterns from larger areas to more focal, small areas as a result of pruning. This shift is accompanied by cognitive control, which includes controlling attention, reducing interfering thoughts, inhibiting motor actions and being flexible between competing choices. 

Brain changes in adolescence:

• The corpus callosum thickens, improving information processing

• Amygdala develops faster than the prefrontal cortex, leading to the risk-taking behaviours in adolescence

Sleep and infancy:

• Sleeps between 16-17 hrs/day. REM sleep occurs more during infancy than in childhood and adulthood. 

Sleep and childhood:

• Recommended that preschool children get 11-14 hours of sleep

• 5-12 year olds should get 9-12 hours a night

• Sleeping problems in childhood development are linked with negative outcomes\

Sleep and adolescence:

• Research suggests that as adolescents get older the hormone melatonin is released later in the night, shifting the biological clock 

• Bad sleep is linked with an unhealthy diet, low exercise level, depression, and ineffective stress management, substance abuse, risk-taking behaviours, less effective attention and sleep disturbance in adulthood

• Adolescents are getting less and less sleep

Illness and injury among children:

• Motor vehicles are the number one cause of death in childhood

• Cancer and cardiovascular disease are of special, particular concern

• In low-income countries there has been a dramatic increase in the number of children being diagnosed with HIV/AIDS transmitted by their parents, so improvements in sanitation, education, etc. are essential 

• Lead is also a problem. The negative effects of high lead levels include lower intelligence, lower achievement, ADHD, and elevated blood pressure

Nutrition and malnutrition:

• Snacking makes up a quarter of US infants daily energy intake by age 1.

• To look modern, mothers in developing countries stopped breastfeeding and started bottlefeeding 

• Breastfeeding is recommended over bottle feeding, and even after contemporary foods are introduced, babies should still be breastfed for up to a year. 

• Breastfed infants have lower rates of gastrointestinal infections, lower respiratory tract infections, among other things. They also have a a reduced risk for obesity by 20%

• Breastfeeding mothers also have a lower risk of cardiovascular disease and metabolic syndrome in midlife, as well as a lower incidence rate of breast and ovarian cancer, and a reduction in type 2 diabetes

• Marasmus and kwashiorkor are diseases caused by malnutrition. They are life-threatening, and though not fatal, they do impair physical, cognitive, and socioemotional development:

  • Marasmus: caused by severe protein-calorie deficiency. The infant becomes very underweight, muscles atrophy, tissues waste away

  • Kwashiorkor: caused by severe protein deficiency. 1-3 years of age. Sometimes appear well-fed but this is because their stomachs and feet have swelled with water; they are actually starving. The disease causes the body to collect nutrients that are there and deprive parts of the body of them. 

• The percentage of overweight/obese children has increased dramatically in recent decades. This can lead to medical and psychological problems. Factors that involve a risk for overweight-ness include:

  • Unhealthy food choices

  • Overweight status of the mother before pregnancy

  • Maternal weight gain during pregnancy

  • Being bottle-fed

• Children’s eating is influenced by their caregivers’ behaviour, and improves when they are:

  • Eating with children on a predictable schedule

  • Eating healthy food

  • Minimize distractions

  • Make mealtimes pleasant 

  • And engage in responsive/sensitive feeding style (when the caregiver is nurturing and attuned to the child’s cues)

• Nutritionists suggest that for every pound that an infant weighs, it should eat 50 calories

Exercise:

• Most children and adolescents aren’t getting enough exercise. As they get older and progress they get less active. Parents, schools and screens can have a big impact on if children and/or adolescents are physically fit or unfit

Day 8: Piaget the constructivist

• Says that development is discontinuous

• Domain-general mechanism

• Children as active agents

• Constructivist approach

Stage theory:

• It is invariant, universally experienced. You cannot skip a step

• How to account for individual differences? The speed of development

Domain general mechanism:

• All abilities are linked (eg: ability to do math and to understand others)

  • Contrasts with information processing theories

Children as active agents

• Children constantly seek out stimulation in their environment. They seek out experiences and aspects of the world around them. We have to rethink children not as a sponge, but as an active person that seeks out the experiences that interest them

• Children are curious, and guide their own development

Constructivist approach

• Children build their knowledge through their interactions with their environment

• Individual differences results from different interactions

Process of organization

• Piaget said we construct and reconstruct information. We assimilate: new experiences are incorporated into a child’s existing theories (eg: if the family owns a dog, easier for babies to understand other dogs)

• We also have accommodation: new experiences modify a child’s theories (eg: baby sees a cat, calls it “doggy”, and mom says “that’s a kitty!” understanding of dogs is updated to “not kitty”)

Building through experience:

• Specific instances —> general theory (developing ideas)

  • Dropping an empty cup resulted in a funny reaction from Dad —> learns to drop things to make parents react

• General theory to specific instances (updating ideas)

  • Baby next drops a bowl full of fruit —> Dad gets mad —> don’t drop food

Schemas/schemes

• The smallest unit of information that makes sense

• Allows for construction and organization of knowledge. Behavioural schemes characterize infancy while cognitive schemes characterize later childhood. An infant’s schemes are going to be relatively simple (sucking, looking, grasping) while older kids are going to have schemes associated with strategies and problemsolving. 

• Assimilation and accommodation occur continuously to build our understanding of the world

Stages of cognitive development:

1. Sensorimotor stage (0-2)

• Sensory experience that triggers a motor response 

• Initial limited to reflexes

• 8-12 months we see experience of goal-directed behaviour (if I want that ball I must go get it); understanding of cause-and-effect (if I roll the ball I expect it to go away); object permanence; A-not-B error

2. Preoperational (2-7)

• Defined by what children cannot do. Children cannot perform mental operations and must rely on operations conducted externally

• They struggle with conservation (understanding that the same amount remains, despite changes in appearance), reversibility (the ability to go through a series of steps in reverse direction to solve a problem) and egocentrism (understanding of the world that is limited to one’s own perspective due to a lack of cognitive flexibility)

3. Concrete operational (7-11)

• Defined by the ability to perform concrete mental operations to solve problems

• Capable of conservation and reversibility, and less influence by external appearances

4. Formal operations (11-adulthood)

• Ability to reason abstractly

• Ability to generate ideas without actually experiencing them (eg: can think of ways to save the planet, have increased ideologies)

• Heightened metacognition: the ability to evaluate one’s thoughts and actions from an outside, objective perspective 

Day 9: Vygotsky

• His was a constructivist theory

• He emphasized children as social beings

• Learning occurs through the social plane, meaning that social interaction drives cognitive development

There are four interrelated levels to Vygotsky’s theory

1. Ontogenetic: development of an individual over their lifetime

2. Microgenetic: changes that occur in relatively brief periods of time (eg: learning a new language)

3. Phylogenetic: changes over evolutionary time (understanding a species’ history is important to understanding development)

4. Sociohistorical influences: changes that have occurred across generations, in one’s culture, building norms, values and technologies

• A culture’s history shapes cognitive development

• Our brains evolved to survive in our environment, which influenced how we ate, defended against predators, reared our children and interacted with others (CULTURE)

• Culture is transmitted to children by adults; children’s cognitive development is driven by adult-child interactions and learning to complete assigned tasks

• This research was mostly done on WEIRD cultures

Role of language:

• Writing systems have consequences for how children read and write, but also for how they think

• In all languages, 1-10 must be remembered by rote memory. However, after 10 different languages become more systematic (eg: Chinese: ten-one (for eleven), ten-two (for twelve), etc.)

(there could be environmental factors that play a role as well, such as parents being more insistent on their children learning more numbers)

• In German, 47 is seven and forty, emphasizing the ones. German-speaking children often have trouble writing these numbers down because the ones go last, even though they are said first. German children also have more difficulty adding than Italian children when the calculation involves “carrying over” from the ones to the tens digit, again, likely because of the ways their numbers are spoken

Intersubjectivity:

• Mutual, shared understanding between participants in an activity

Guided participation:

• Cognitive growth results from a child’s experiences in structured activities with others who are more skilled at them then they (eg: parents reading to a child)

• It doesn’t have to be explicit instruction (eg: children helping with cooking, cleaning, gardening, etc. are examples of guided learning/participation)

Zone of proximal development

• Range of tasks too difficult for a child to handle/manage on their own, but can be accomplished with the help of parents/skilled peers

• The lower limit of the ZPD is the level of skill reached by the child working independently. The higher limit is what can be achieved when assisted by adults and peers. 

• The ZPD captures the child’s cognitive abilities that are in the process of maturing

• Skills in the zone should be the focus of education

Scaffolding

• A more knowledgeable other gives information to the child and adjusts their support as the child’s learning grows. 

• Start with small steps and more guidance, eventually providing bigger challenges and more independence. The more independent, the less guidance the child gets

• Experts who are sensitive to abilities of the child respond contingently to the child’s reaction of the learning situation

• Dialogue between the more knowledgeable other and the less informed child can lead to the child’s more spontaneous, disorganized, unsystematic thoughts becoming more logical, rational and structured. 

Ideal scaffolding:

1. Capture the child’s interest

2. Establish and maintain attention to task

3. Highlight critical features that child might overlook

4. Demonstrate how to achieve the goal

5. Help control frustration

Language and thought

• Private speech: children use self-directed speech to plan, monitor and guide their behaviour and self-regulation (eg: one might whisper to themselves while learning how to drive, or type). Vygotsky believed that children who used private speech were more socially competent than those who didn’t, because, to him, it represented an early transition into becoming more socially communicative. Researchers have found support for Vygotsky’s theory

  • Vygotsky viewed this as as important tool of thought for the childhood years, while Piaget thought it was egocentric

• Inner speech: the internalization of private speech that occurs between the ages of 3-7, requires practice, becomes their own thoughts

Lessons of Piaget:

• Children are curious and active learners

• Facilitate learning rather than completely direct it

• Consider the child’s stage in cognitive development

• Learning occurs naturally

• Foster a sense of exploration and discovery

Lessons of Vygotsky

• Use the zone of proximal development to develop curriculum and asses performance

• Treat each child as an individual

• Assess the child’s ZPD to promote development and learning

• Use the child’s ZPD in teaching

• Use more-skilled peers as mentors

• Monitor and encourage young children’s private speech

• Place instruction in a meaningful context

Flipped classroom:

• Traditional learning (listening to lecture) should be done outside the classroom (eg: watching a video of the lecture)

• During class time students are engaged in activities (eg: problem-solving, group discussions, sharing ideas)

• Vygotsky: learning occurs as a result of interactions with individuals who are more advanced; in-class activities allow for these interactions

Today’s sociocultural context

• Nearly 25% of children age 5-7 have their own smartphone (BBC)

• 65% of children 5-7 used messaging services, 38% used social media

• Over 50% used social media, despite most platforms requiring that the user be 13+

Developmental cognitive neuroscience

• Young children living in SES families have a positive correlation with higher hippocampal volume, while in adults there’s no positive correlation. This shows environmental influence on the biological/structural development of your brain. By adulthood there are environmental pressures that make you use your brain that flattens the effect. 

• In children larger hippocampal volume means better visual and auditory learning. 

• “Resting baseline” is used as a reference point against which cognitive activity can be measured (eg: areas that are active during a conservation task, after subtracting “resting” activity, could be inferred to be areas of mental reasoning)

• Basic assumption that baseline is the same equalizer across development, but what if resting requires more cognitive control for younger participants? 

• Irritability was not correlated with cognitive flexibility (eg: how well they performed on the Stroop task)

• Left DLPFC (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) activation was associated with cognitive flexibility and also positively correlated with irritability

• Measurements of neural activity may reveal and explain individual differences 

• lecture

Hippocampal volume, SES, and working memory:

• There could be adverse effects: stress impairs hippocampus; prenatal stress results in a smaller hippocampus. 

• Protective effects: increased parental support, enriched environment

• Hippocampal volume was correlated with performance on a visual-auditory learning task, but not SES directly once age was already account for

Brain rest

• What do baseline brain activities mean? Well, the task-based approach says that the resting rate means that not much is happening cognitively. 

• Activity during task (watching an emotional video) - resting rate activity (you doing nothing) = task-related activity (how you process the emotions the video elicits)

What happens in the brain during the A-not-B task? Working memory:

• Used EEG to measure brain activity and heart rate in infants at 5 and 10 months of age (longitudinal study)

• Compared baseline activation to looking of A-not-B task

• Changes in EEG and heart rate were correlated with working memory performance in 10-month-olds but not 5-month-olds

• In 10-month-olds, medial frontal and lateral frontal electrodes predicted performance. If they had high levels in those frontal areas they passed the A-not-B task. If they didn’t then they didn’t pass the task.

• This is evidence that the brain is becoming more specialized with age; individual differences can be revealed through neural activity (we know what babies will pass the task because some babies have the activation pattern that would support it, some don’t)

Different brain wave activations

• There was a study where a toddler wore an EEG and watched three different conditions.

1. To imitate the action of the person they saw on a screen. This is a working memory task, because not only do they have to remember what they saw, they have to replicate it. 

2. Kind of a control, still working memory. They had to name the colour of the object the person was holding. More concerned with visual memory, they don’t have to remember exactly what was happening, just the colour

3. Control where they just watch a harmless video of visual stimuli

• What happened during the study was this:

1. Prolonged cognitive engagement (whether they had to remember the action or the object’s colour) increases brain activation (theta waves; slower waves) gradually

2. Different tasks demands modulate brain activity in terms of what kind of waves

3. In 4-year-olds, left, front-temporal brain areas were most active and were modulated in response to task difficulty. They saw more brain activity when the child had to imitate (because that is more demanding) 

4. Differences in brain activity predicts individual differences in performance. 

Lateral occipital cortex

• Specific areas of the brain (LOC) are more active when individuals perceive whole objects, relative to similar visual stimulation

• By age 5, LOC responds similarly to the same object despite changes in size (some tasks are behaviourally and neurally mature)

• LOC responds differentially when viewpoint changes, revealing behavioural immaturities 

The network approach to brain rest: assumes that changes in resting rate with age reveals important neural development

• One major methodological concern is that when children—with their limited cognitive ability, limited inhibition, limited cognition, limited attention, limited self-regulation—are told to be still, what are they thinking? What if instead of actually lying still, they are actively trying to inhibit moving, talking, etc? What if this command is different for a 5 year old than it is for a 12 or 18 year old?

Default Mode Network:

• Regions of the association cortex that appear to be activated together when “at rest” (eg: not doing any particular task). They fire and rest together. This has interesting implications: is it possible that the same parts that work together when you supposedly aren’t thinking about anything are the same areas that are active when you’re envisioning the future, making social inferences, etc. Is this the most advanced part of the brain?

• These regions also appear suppressed during tasks that demand attention

• Includes frontal, posterior midline, and inferior parietal areas; areas that are late to develop and have expanded during the evolution of the hominid species. The theory goes that the DMN is the reason why we are more advanced than nonhuman species—it’s our ability to sync these parts of the brain even when they aren’t doing anything that gives us leverage over other animals

• Rest might mean something different for children than adults

DMN becomes more in sync with development

TEXTBOOK CHAPTER 4 Notes

Piaget emphasized that certain processes were especially important for cognitive development: schemes, assimilation, accommodation, and equilibration.

Equilibrium: cognitive balance, the new information has successfully incorporated itself with the existing information

Disequilibrium: when information cannot be understood using existing schemas, creating cognitive discomfort. In this state of discomfort the child tries to alleviate it by assimilating and accommodating the information

Equilibration: the act of reorganizing schemas to resolve the cognitive conflict in trying to understand the world. 

Evaluating Piaget’s Sensorimotor Stage

• An infant’s cognitive world is not as packaged as Piaget would have you think. There are multiple claims of his that have been refuted

1. Piaget’s claims that certain processes are crucial for the transition of one stage to another hasn’t been verified by science. A variety of factors affect if an infant will make the A-not-B error (eg: if only the hands and the arms of the experimenter is visible infants are less likely to make the error)

2. There is scientific evidence now that infants understand the world earlier than Piaget suggested. To understand how infants understand their surroundings, researchers use the violation of expectations method. By using this, we’ve been able to see that. Because they understand the world, these infants have certain expectations of behaviours that, when broken/violated, are surprising to them. This shows that infants even as young as 4-months old have some grasp on the world and what goes on 

3. Nature plays more of a role in cognitive development than Piaget suggested. The core knowledge approach says that infants are born with domain-specific innate knowledge systems, such as those involving space, number sense, object permanence, and language. These systems are influenced by evolution, and those who adhere to this approach say that Piaget greatly underestimated the cognitive abilities of infants. 

Preoperational stage:

1. The symbolic function stage: 2-4 years of old, the young child gains the ability to mentally represent objects that aren’t there

2. Egocentrism

3. Animism: the belief that inanimate objects have lifelike qualities and are capable of action. The young child fails to distinguish when to use human and nonhuman perspectives (eg: the tree pushed that lead away. The sidewalk made me angry)

4. The intuitive thought substage: 4-7 year old children begin to use primitive reasoning and want to know the answers to all questions (this is the reason why children ask “why?” for everything)

5. Centration: focusing on one aspect/characteristic to the exclusion of others. Most evident in conservation

Development of conservation:

1. Horizontal decalage: similar abilities don’t appear at the same time within a stage of development

Development of classification

1. Seriation

2. Transitivity: the ability to reason about and logically combine relationship

Development of abstract, idealistic, logical thinking:

1. Hypothetical-deductive reasoning: adolescents create hypotheses or best guesses, then decide how best to systematically deduce or conclude the best path for solving the problem

Adolescent egocentrism:

1. Adolescent egocentrism: heightened self-consciousness of adolescents. This can be dissected into two different types of things:

• Imaginary audience: involves feeling one is the centre of everybody’s attention and sensing that one is the stage

• Personal fable: involves an adolescent’s own personal feelings of uniqueness and invincibility. Nobody can understand how they feel. 

• Research studies show that adolescents feel especially vulnerable though. In a study, 12-18 year olds actually overestimated the likelihood of them dying in the next year or before the age of 20. Some researchers have questioned the view of invincibility as a single, uniform concept. They believe it consists of 2 dimensions

  • Danger invulnerability: adolescent’s sense of indestructibility and tendency to make physical risks (eg: driving at reckless speeds)

  • Psychological invulnerability: adolescent’s perceived invulnerability related to personal or psychological stress/damage (eg: they can’t get their feelings hurt)

Piaget and education:

1. Take a constructivist approach: children learn best when they are active and seeking answers for their own questions. They cannot be treated as passive. Students should learn by making discoveries, reflecting on them, and discussing them, rather than just listening and imitating the teacher

2. Facilitate rather than direct learning: Effective teachers facilitate situations that allow students to learn by doing things themselves, promoting thinking and discovery. Teachers listen, watch, and question students so that they gain a better understanding

3. Consider the child’s level of knowledge and thinking: students come with concepts of space, time, etc. These ideas differ from the ideas of adults though, so the teacher must understand and respond to the student in ways equal to their level. You must also take note of a child’s mistakes along with their successes so that you can better guide them to a higher level of knowledge

4. Promote the student’s intellectual health: children’s learning should learn naturally. They shouldn’t be pushed or pressured into achieving things too fast, before they are maturationally ready. You cannot speed up intellectual development by engaging in passive learning

5. Turn the classroom into a setting of exploration and discovery: The play-based learning approaches in preschool and kindergarten classrooms in Canada reflect Piaget’s teachings. In these learning environments, teachers emphasize students’ own discovery and exploration. The classrooms are less structured, workbooks are not used, and the teachers observe the students’ natural interest to determine what the course of learning will be

Evaluating Piaget’s theory:

1. Contributions:

• We owe our current view of children to him

• He generated a huge interest in children’s cognitive development

• Demonstrated new and interesting ways to discover how children adapt to their world

• Showed how children need to make their experiences fit their schemes, and yet they adapt their schemes to experience as well

• Cognitive change is likely to occur if the context is structured enough to allow children to grow to a higher level

2. criticisms:

• Most questions have been proposed about his theories on children’s competence

3. Estimates of children’s competence:

• Some cognitive abilities can emerge earlier than Piaget thought

• Some cognitive abilities also can emerge later than Piaget thought

4. stages:

• Some concrete operational concepts do not appear in synchrony

• Most developmental psychologists understand that development is not as stage-like as Piaget would have you think

5. Effects of training

• Research shows that children in one stage can be trained to think at a higher cognitive level

6. Culture and education:

• Culture and education can exert more influence on development than Piaget said

7. The neo-Piagetian approach

• Neo-Piagetians argue that he got some things right, but much of his theories have to be revised. They give more emphasis on how children use attention, memory and strategies to process information. To understand children requires attention to children’s strategies, the speed of information-processing, the particular task involved, and the division of the task into smaller, easier steps

Evaluating Vygotsky’s theory

• Vygotsky was a social constructivist, he emphasized the social contexts of learning and the construction of knowledge through social interaction

• Critics point out that Vygotsky never specified any ages either in his theories of child development

• Another criticism is that he overemphasized the role of language in thinking

• Another criticism is that he didn’t describe how changes in socioemotional development impact cognitive development

• His ideas of collaboration and guidance have some pitfalls (eg: what happens when a facilitator is too collaborative, like a controlling, overbearing parent? How does that affect development? Children may also become lazy and expect help when they might have learned more by doing something on their own)

Developmental cognitive neuroscience

• Helps frame cognitive development as a neurobiological process

• The neural bases for a child’s executive function skills (an umbrella term for higher-order processes like reasoning, working memory, cognitive flexibility, inhibitory control and attention) are in the prefrontal cortex region of the brain. This part of the brain can be trained to improve these skills in children and adults, which makes sense due to brain plasticity

• Stress impedes a child’s prefrontal cortex. Excessive cortisol impairs the prefrontal cortex’s functioning and certain abilities like visual and verbal memory. Learning and emotion are inextricably linked

• Interestingly, studies show that math anxiety impedes math performance as well, as stress impedes functioning in brain regions associated with working memory

DCN and education:

1. Training children in executive function skills

2. Recognize the connection between neurophysiological stress, emotions and learning

3. Include cognitive neuroscience in educator training programs

4. Use neuroscience to inform educational priorities

Day 10: sensation and perception

Dynamic systems view

• Emphasizes interaction on multiple levels, infants assemble motor skills by perceiving and acting (perception and action are coupled, they are interlinked). When creating a new behaviour, this happens as a result of many converging factors. This new behaviour then becomes tuned throughout their life through multiple repeated cycles

• Motor skills are our solution to goals and problems. We must perceive stimulus, be motivated to act, and use sensory feedback to adjust movements. Motor actions always depend on this sensory feedback, which is why perceptions are necessary for infants to fine-tune their movements

• This idea was first proposed by Esther Thelen, which is an extension on Gesell’s view that rolling over. We are motivated to get somewhere

Posture:

• Just sitting upright needs linked processes of sensory information in skin, joints, muscles; vestibular organs in inner ear for balance and equilibrium, vision and hearing

• 2 months: sit with support, hold head erect

• 6-7 months: sit independently

• 8-9 months: pull up to standing

• 10-12 months: stands up alone

Cultural influences:

• Mothers traditionally massage/encourage physical growth to varying degrees

  • African, Indian, Caribbean cultures engage in massages or stretching practices in baths

  • Sub-Saharan Africa: baby exercises

• Experience matters: Locomotor experience, rather than age, predicts infants’ attempts at walking/crawling down slopes of varied steepness. mom’s engagement and expectations result in more experience, and these infants reach motor milestones earlier; NAmericans standards may be inappropriate for pediatric care for a diverse population

Sports

• 77% of Canadian children (5-19 years) participated in sports (2014-2016); 65% of Indigenous children; less participation with less income

• Pros: physical activity, self-esteem, perseverance, goal-oriented behaviour, great reward when team wins

• Cons: pressure to win, injury, burnout, stress

• Most kids want parents to be proud of them 

• Keep it fun (learning happens best when fun)

• Keep in mind children are active in their development; parents should keep their own expectations in check

Covid-19 lockdowns

• Canadian movement guidelines per day: minimum 60 mins of moderate-vigorous physical activity, < 2 hours of recreational screen time, and 9-11 hours of sleep (age 5-13) or 8-10 hours (14-17)

• Only 18% of 5-7 met these guidelines. 

• What were the variables that predicted those who did meet the guideline?

  • Parents’ control over screen time 

  • Higher income

  • Families that increased physical activity because of the pandemic

  • Boys

  • Parents that were younger

• Interpretation: parents play a critical role in limiting screen time, encouraging physical activity and quality sleep 

Fine motor skills

• Fine-tuned movements requiring finger dexterity

• Starts with reaching and grasping (0-2 years)

• Perceptual-motor coupling supports grasping; experience matters (more exploration and trial-and-error with activities; leverage their curiosity)

• 18-24 months: tower building

• Children experiencing difficulty may seek occupational therapist

• Piaget said we construct by interacting with our world 

Sensation and perception

• Sensation: activation of sensory receptors in response to external stimuli

• Perception: interpretation of sensory activation

• Newborn perception: brain not yet specialized; minimal experience. Because their senses haven’t separated out, they might sense the world as one great, big, buzzing blob

• Piaget said that their senses were impoverished, but becomes structured during experience

Testing for testing infants

1. Preference paradigm: if there’s two things to look at, you look longer at the thing that interests you most

• Newborn vision: visual acuity is 30x worse than adults; contrast sensitivity is 20-25x worse

2. habituation/dishabituation

3. Violation of expectation

4. Operant conditioning

Newborn deficits:

1. Vision

2. Contrast sensitivity

3. Convergence: unable for eyes to converge on a single image

4. Coordination 

5. Colour perception (cannot differentiate between blue, green and yellow)

• At birth the baby’s gaze is focused entirely on contour, while at 2 months they’re focused more on motion

• Newborns are interested in facelike patterns. Are we born with a brain prepared to look for faces? Well not really. Researchers argue it’s not a face preference per se, but a bias towards top-heavy patterns (more energy at the top of a stimulus)

• Newborns, 2-month-olds and 5-months-old look longer at faces rated as attractive by adults. Average features are what people like, because it’s more symmetrical and even, so there may be an internal bias in babies for faces like that. 

  • Is there a genetic explanation? Evolutionary psychology says that when you have average features that means you have healthy genes, you may survive environmental changes

  • This bias is not limited to human faces. It also applies to animal faces

Bottom line:

• Infant brains are preferentially biased towards

  • Mom’s voice

  • Food and sounds experienced prenatally

  • Mom’s smell (prefer mom’s vs stranger’s breast pad)

  • Faces, especially familiar/attractive faces

Day 11

habituation/dishabituation

• We’ll show the same stimulus or slight modifications so that the baby gets bored, then we present a different stimulus. To the point that the baby can perceive the difference they will look more at the new stimuli which is interesting

Newborns: externality effect

• They can differentiate crosses and ohs. However if a cross or an oh was to be put in a box, the baby’s looking time does not change. The external contour is what they pay attention to the most, not really what’s inside

Own-race preference:

• By 3 months of age, infants look longer at a face of their own race relative to other races

  • Caucasian babies look longer at a adult caucasian faces

  • African babies look longer at adult african faces

  • Babies who experienced a mixed-race refugee camp did not show a preference for either race (experience matters more than own race)

Experience fine-tunes perception

• 192 caucasian infants aged 3, 6, 9 months of age

• Will they dishabituate to faces of different races?

• This makes sense because when you are born you don’t know what the people around you are going to look like, so you don’t want to be born with a particular preference. 3 months of age infants can discriminate between any two faces and don’t have any bias. However, with more experience to your own race, you become really good at processing your race while losing discriminative ability for other races

• What about different species?

• Infants can initially discriminate monkey faces, but by 9 months they can do so with only human faces

Phonemic discrimination

• Sonograph reveals that difference between /ba/ and /pa/ is short vs long voicing lag (100 msec)

• We measure the baseline sucking rate of the baby to the presentation of /ba/. When you start to play a different sound they suck more because everything is new, different, and interesting. The baby is now alert. 

• After habituation, there is a change in the auditory stimulus to /pa/. If they can discriminate between the two, they should suck more because they’re more excited

Conditioned head turn:

• If infants turn their head to the correct side, they are rewarded with a visual reward

Japanese and American children discriminate phonemes:

• In japanese, there’s no distinction between ra and la

• Use the conditioned head turn to play ra in the background, then once they’ve habituated play la 

• At 6 months of age, both american and japanese babies can discriminate between these two phonemes

• At 10 months of age Japanese babies couldn’t, but Americans had improved

Auditory development: language

• Preference for mid-frequency tones (eg: human speech frequency) over high or low frequencies

• Preference for Motherese or infant-directed speech over normal speech

• Preference for normal speech over backwards speech

• Categorical perception of phonemes in own language

Auditory development: music

• At 4-6 months prefer natural pauses in music as unnatural pauses in music. They prefer consonant over dissonant tones

• At 9-12 months they prefer musical scales and rhythms of own culture (eg: Indian music is an example of different scales)

Intersensory redundancy

• Infants’ perceptual system is attuned to amodal information (information that is not tied to a particular sensory modality) presented in multiple sensory modalities

Infant synesthesia

• Harsher, harder consonant sounds are more attributed with the left shape, while softer sounds are more attributed to the right. This happens in adults and babies too (babies look longer at the left when hearing “kiki”, and longer at the right when hearing “momo”). Again, the explanation is intersensory connections

Visual and tactile sensation redundancy

• Infants looked longer at pacifiers that matched the tactile sensation of the sucker they're sucking. What they’re sensing in the mouth is aligning with what they’re seeing. Experience is what leads to differentiation (Remember Piaget, experience is what helps us construct our information of the world). This is the theory behind synesthesia, that the differentiation that typically happens in infancy didn’t happen, so they’re maintaining some of these redundancies and experiencing a double-perception of these sensory modalities. 

Emotional expressions

• Facial expressions are multisensory. 

• Infants habituated to a female acting out various emotions, and then they were presented with a different emotion with various levels of information (minimal information to lots of information). Do the infants dishabituate? Can they discriminate between these emotions?

TEXTBOOK Chapter 5 Notes

Gross motor skills: skills (eg: walking or moving around) which involve the activity of large-muscle groups

Developmental changes in childhood

• 3 years of age: babies like to hop around, run, jump, and do various other things for the enjoyment of doing these activities

• 4 years of age: children do the same activities but are more adventurous and show more athletic prowess

• 5 years of age: more adventurous

Fine motor skills (infancy):

• During the first two years of life, infants refine their motor skills and finely coordinate their movements as they begin to interact with their surroundings 

  • Pincer grip: infant grips with thumb and forefinger

  • Palmer grip: infant grips with their entire hand

• The older the get the more perceptual-motor coupling is done

Fine motor skills (childhood):

• By 4 children’s fine motor coordination is very precise

• Increased myelination is the reason for this continual growth in fine motor coordination

The ecological view:

• Proposed by the Gibsons’, we directly perceive information in the world around us. Perception brings people in contact with the environment so that they can interact with and adapt to it

• In the eyes of the Gibsons’ objects have affordances, which are essentially opportunities for interaction offered by objects that are necessary to perform activities (eg: a pot may afford you something to cook with, or may afford a toddler something to bang a spoon on)

• The direct, accurate perception of these affordances is what guides our motor behaviour

Visual acuity and depth in infancy:

• A newborn has 20/240 vision. By 6 months though on average it’s 20/40.

• Although researchers are not sure when exactly infants gain depth perception, we do know that infants gain the ability to use binocular cues to discern depth at 3-4 months old

Hearing changes in infancy:

• Loudness: infants cannot hear soft sounds as well as adults can immediately after birth. 

• Pitch: the perception of the frequency of a sound, infants are less sensitive to this than adults are. They can differentiate between a high-pitched sound and a low-pitched sound. A study showed that infants can process simultaneous pitches at 7 months but are more likely to encode the high-pitched sound. 

• Localization: newborns can determine the general location of a sound, but by 7 months they are good at localizing sounds and specifying their origins

Smell and taste in infants:

• Newborns can differentiate smell, and obviously love sweet smells vs sour and bitter ones. 

• Same thing with taste, they prefer sweet tastes vs sour and bitter ones

Perceptual constancies in infancy

• Perceptual constancy: sensory stimulation is changing but the perception of the physical world remains constant

• Researchers have found that, at three months, infants have size and shape constancy. However, the shape constancy doesn’t extend to irregular shapes, and generally these abilities are not fully established and need further development

Perception of occluded objects

• They develop the ability to track briefly occluded objects at 3-5 months of age

• Infants are more likely to accurately follow the path of moving objects when they gradually disappeared vs when they abruptly disappeared or imploded

Intermodal perception: the ability to regulate/integrate two or more streams of sensory information (eg: vision and hearing)

• Even infants can coordinate visual-auditory information. In a study 3 month olds looked more at their mothers and fathers if they could hear their voices

Perceptual-motor coupling:

• Individuals perceive in order to move, and move in order to perceive. Thus, perception and movement are coupled

Day 12: information processing

Violation of expectation paradigm

• Infants watch an object sliding across a table surface. 

• At 3.5 months the infants look equally long at the possible and impossible event. Clearly they don’t have an expectation about gravity

• However, at 4.5 months the infants look longer at the impossible event than at the possible event, suggesting that infants understand objects must be supported or they fall 

What about object continuity and cohesion?

Object permanence at 3 months of age

• They have some expectations and cognitive ideas about how this object and the rotating screen should interact with one another. 

What explains the difference between Piaget’s and Baillargeon’s results?

• Explicit knowledge: external behaviour that shows or tells what you’ve learned, requires more experience and control over actions. Explicit tasks seem to show that true object permanence takes up to 3 years to develop

• Implicit knowledge: demonstrates rudimentary understanding. The idea that some understanding/this kind of understanding exists in infancy

Object permanence at 2 years old (hood et al, 2004)

• Drop a car to the bottom 3 times to familiarize the participant

• Then you draw the curtain down, and add a shelf. Participants see that the shelf has been added. Next, drop the car. Where should the child expect the car to land? If they understand what a shelf does they shouldn’t look/reach for the bottom, but that’s what they do. 

• Same thing vice versa

Information processing theory:

• Think of development as a computer. Children monitor and manipulate information, store this information, retrieve it when necessary, create strategies for solving tasks, etc.

• Children reveal improvements in executive function by the continual development of their prefrontal cortex

Computer analogy:

• Hardware: For a computer this is the operating software and memory, while for children this is their neurons, synapses, myelin, connectivity, electrical and chemical signals, etc.

• Software: computers are limited by the finite amount of data each app can handle (eg: Word can only do so much, isn’t made for numerical operations) while children are limited by their ability to acquire knowledge, and apply appropriate strategies to solve problems and tasks

What is developing?

• What’s improving in children the most is executive control (information processing would say that development is continuous, it’s just acquiring more power, updating)

• Better attention, inhibitory control and use of strategies

• Faster processing 

• More cognitive flexibility 

Strategy use:

• Strategies: deliberate, goal-directed mental operations to solve problems. These are more difficult for children because of their limited cognitive abilities (both biological and lack of experience)

Emergence of strategies:

• 3/4 year olds played a game in which a toy dog would be hidden under 3 cups, and then they had to remember what cup the dog was under during a delay period

• Even though the kids got the answer incorrect, they were seen using strategies (eg: looking at the right cup, nodding and pointing at the right cup, peeking, etc.) Using these strategies these kids performed better at the task

Example of a poor use of strategies

1. First graders:

• First graders were shown 7 pictures and were told to remember 3 items during a pause. Most of them didn’t rehearse

• Then children were taught rehearsal, and this improved their performance 

• Over the next few trials however children stopped rehearsing and went back to baseline performance 

2. 3-8 year olds:

• 3-8 year olds played a game in which they had to remember the location of the household items (hidden behind doors with a house) or animals (hidden behind doors with a circus train)

• Best strategy: only look behind the relevant doors, and yet the youngest children tended to look behind all the doors

How does speed increase?

1. Increased myelination: proves efficiency

2. Synaptic pruning

Improvement of attention

1. Sustained: how long can you attend

2. Selective attention: how can I tune out irrelevant information

3. Divided attention: concentrating on more than one activity at the time

4. Executive attention: broader control of attention

Screen-time and attention

• Canadian Health Infant Longitudinal Development (CHILD) study

• Parents completed a behavioural checklist when kids were 5 years old

• Children watching more than 2 hours a day wer 5.9 times more likely to have clinically significant inattention problems compared to less than 0.5 hours a day and 7.7x higher risk of ADHD

ADHD

• Neurodevelopmental disorder: brain-based weakness in attention and executive functions, there is a neurological, mechanistic explanation of the deficit

• Tend to have more daydreaming, difficulty concentrating, difficulty maintaining concentration, 

• impulsivity/hyperactivity: can’t sit still, high energy, interrupts

• You can have the attention deficit without the hyperactivity 

• Often medications help. Establishing routines, using age-appropriate strategies, limiting screen time, and celebrating positive behaviour 

Day 13

Joint attention:

• Ability to focus on the same object/event with another individual

• Requires the ability to track another person’s behaviour, and reciprocate the interaction

• Emerges around infancy but becomes frequent around age 1

• Fundamental to language development (labeling objects)

• Infants with better joint attention at 12 months and more joint attention episodes with parents at 18 months had better language outcomes at 24 months of age

Sustained attention is key

• A study used head-mounted eye tracking to record gaze data from parents and infants during free play

• They measured both joint (if the infants and parents looked at the same thing) and sustained attention (if the infants could maintain their eye contact) while the parents played and named objects

• Both longer joint and sustained attention were associated with larger vocab at 12 and 15 months, however, sustained attention in the context of joint attention (not joint attention itself; when the two types of attention overlapped) was the strongest predictor

Inhibitory control

• Inhibition: the ability to prevent a cognitive/behavioural response

• Inhibitory control: the extent to which you can actively prevent the response

• Inhibitory control increases with age

Cognitive flexibility:

• One step above inhibition, the ability to shift between a set of rules or tasks

  • Dimensional card sorting task (Wisconsin):

  • Children often perseverate on a single dimension (the action that was learned first)

Memory processes:

• Encoding

• Storage and retrieval

Types of memory

• Sensory memory: stores sensory information, rapid delays (less than 2 seconds) but has unlimited capacity; this allows for continuous perception of the world

• Working memory: information that is attended to while mental operations are conducted; limited by attentional resources, typically 7 +/-2 items

  • Baddeley’s model:

  • Support for working memory

    • If the phonological loop and rehearsal impact working and long-term memory, if words are shorter, can you remember more of them?

    • In almost all languages, the words that correspond to numbers 1-9 are arbitrary, however, in Chinese they are all single-syllable words (Why does English have 5, 7, 9?)

    • When counting 11-19, in English the words remain arbitrary (what does eleven even mean?) whereas in Chinese/Japanese the words directly translate to “ten-one”, “ten-two” etc. 

  • Superiority of Chinese children over US children

    • Although similar at age 2, by age 4 Chinese children could count up to 100 at a faster pace than US children

    • Chinese children stop finger counting and rely on verbal counting during preschool, whereas US children start this in the first grade; Chinese preschool children also solved 3x as many addition problems as US children

    • The idea behind this is that the words in Chinese are shorter, and so they can store more even in limited working memory 

    • Similar advantages reported in Korean and Japanese children

• Long-term memory: divided into procedural (habits and skills) and declarative (autobiographical and factual information)

Neural architecture of memory:

• Implicit memory: the cerebellum and the basal ganglia (those with parkinson’s disease have deficits in the cerebellum)

• Explicit memory: the hippocampus, the prefrontal cortex and the temporal lobes

  • Long-term memory improvements associated with developments/biological maturation of the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus, synaptic pruning in the prefrontal cortex, and increased connectivity between brain regions

  • The size of the dentate gyrus starts off bigger but throughout the lifespan decreases in volume then increases a bit. This volume decrease is associated with better memory

Infantile amnesia: 

• Inability to remember anything before 3-4 years of age

  • Lack of autobiographical memories (you don’t have a good sense of self, so you don’t have a first person perspective)

1. Memory as action patterns

• Infants are preverbal and thus memories would be stimulus-response action patterns

• Memories in adulthood are reconstructed and triggered via verbal representations

• A mismatch in the coding language

2. Sense of self

• Sense of self emerges around 18-24 months and continues to develop over next few years

• Without a solid sense of self experiences cannot be anchored to an autobiographical memory

3. Verbatim vs fuzzy-trace

• Young children tend to encode events through verbatim information (eg: reciting Shakespeare)

• Because of our aging, with increased capacity we encode the “gist” of events. We compress the file to make it concise. Rather to remember everything we compress everything to get the gist

• Mismatch between encoding and retrieval memory

How does verbatim vs fuzzy-trace develop? Rovee and Collier

• A mobile is attached to a baby’s foot

• Through trial and error infants discover that kicking moves the mobile 

• After several days/weeks, when babies returned to the lab, they had forgotten

• The next day, they seemingly forgot. However, when Rovee-Collier moved the mobile for the baby, the baby remembered, and started kicking. Rovee-Collier moving the mobile most likely served as a retrieval cue

Implications: infant memory

• Over time, infants forget

• A cue can serve as a dredge for the forgotten memory

• Context also aids in remembering (Rovee-Collier tried the experiment again, but this time put babies in a striped or not-striped crib to see if they would remember easier when put back in the striped crib. The theory proved correct)

• Infants can remember past events, even at ages 2-3 months

Preferential looking paradigm to test memory

• Look at the bunny for 2 minutes 

• Show bunny or owl (infants love novelty so they’ll look at the owl longer) then try two weeks later (if they have memory they would still look at the owl longer)

• 5 and 6 month olds will recognize the photo of a face shown 2 weeks ago (eg: look longer at familiar faces)

• Interestingly, novelty preference at 5-7 months of age correlated with better IQ at 36 months

Memory development:

• Encoding: the hippocampus

• Retrieval: prefrontal cortex

• Linear improvement in memory over the first 24 months of life

• After 24 months it’s dependent on executive functioning, knowledge base and use of strategies

TEXTBOOK Chapter 6 Notes

Children’s processing speed is linked with their competence in thinking, faster and more reliable reading skills, etc. (however, slower processing can be offset with the creation of more effective strategies for processing information in reading, learning, etc.) Tasks and their completion improves in efficiency and speed throughout childhood

Mechanisms of change:

1. Encoding

2. Automaticity

3. Strategy construction: the creation of new procedures for processing information. 

Siegler also says that children’s processing of information is influenced by self-modification. A part of self-modification is metacognition, which is knowing about knowing. 

Infancy: Orienting/investigative process

• Directing your attention to potentially important places in the environment (where) and analyzing/recognizing objects and their features (what)

Schema theory:

• People mold and modify their memories to fit the pre-existing information in their heads. This process is guided by schemas, which are mental frameworks that organize conceptual information. 

• Schemas are important for how we encode, store and retrieve information

Content knowledge and expertise

• Our ability to remember new information is based off of how much we already know about that thing (our expertise)

• Studies have shown that experts have better memory on material similar to their subject of expertise

Culture and memory

• Culture-specificity hypothesis: cultural experiences determine what is relevant in one’s life and what they’re more likely to remember

• Children in schooling are more likely to cluster items together in broader categories, which help them remember those categories. They may also have better information-processing because of their experience with specialized tasks. 

• Schooling doesn’t increase memory, but increases strategies for remembering

Infancy: first memories

• Babies don’t show explicit memory until the second half of first year, and then improve during the second year

Capacity and speed of processing information

• Developmental changes in information processing are influenced by capacity and speed of processing, which are called cognitive resources because of their effect on memory and problem-solving

Strategies for memory

• Organization: logical organization of information during encoding

• Elaboration: engaging in a more extensive processing of information (older children mostly use this but youngers can)

• Imagery: creating mental images to remember verbal information (works better for older children than younger)

Teaching strategies:

• To increase the number of associations in memory, repeat your instructional information with variation

• Embed memory-relevant language when teaching children.

Reconstructive memories for children/children as eyewitnesses

• There is age differences in children’s susceptibility in suggestion

• There are individual differences in the susceptibility in suggestion

• Interviewing techniques can produce distortions in children’s memory of highly salient events

Adolescent memory:

• Improvements in adolescent working memory (verbal and visuospatial working memory tasks) are due to the shifts in neural functioning in specific brain regions during this time in development. 

Thinking in infancy:

• Perceptual categorization: classifications based on similar perceptual features (eg: size, colour, movement, etc.)

• Conceptual categorizations: cognitive groupings of similar events, objects, people or ideas

Thinking in adolescence

• Dual-process model: decision-making is made of two systems, one analytical and one experiential, which are competing. This model posits that experiential system—monitoring and managing actual experiences—benefits adolescent decision making, not the analytical system. In high-risk contexts, always analyzing may bog down cognitive function

Metacognition

• Thinking about thinking, knowing about knowing. You understand when and where to use certain strategies for learning or solving problems. Involves planning (eg: deciding how much time you’re going to put on a task), evaluation (eg: monitoring progress toward task completion) and self-regulation.

• Helps children perform cognitive tasks more effectively

• Metamemory: an individuals’ knowledge about memory

Children’s theory of mind

• Theory of mind: awareness of one’s own mental processes and the processes of others

• Developmental changes:

  • Perceptions: by 2 children recognize that another person will see what’s in front of the person’s own eyes instead of what’s in front of the child’s own eyes

  • Emotions: can distinguish between good and bad emotions

  • desires: they understand their own desires, and realize that desires lead to actions and emotions

• False beliefs: a belief that is obviously untrue

Children with autism and theory of mind

• Children with autism have trouble developing a theory of mind, especially in understanding others’ emotions and perceptions

Metacognition in childhood

• Metamemory improves in middle and late childhood

• As they grow they understand the importance of memory cues, and make more realistic judgments about their memory

Metacognition in adolescence

• Though there is variation with metacognition in adolescence, most adolescents have an increased capacity to monitor and manage resources to effectively meet the demands of a learning task 

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20597991231213871

• Focused on IQ scores in the Netherlands, as there IQ scores dictate your access to special education and healthcare. Because of this it highlights a construct validity problem with multiple target groups

• Research has shown that test publishers fail to validate their tests for handicapped populations, even though they are obligated to do so. 

• Others researchers have indicated that IQ tests as well as standardized psychological assessments cannot be used validly with some patients, like those with developmental disorders, because their disabilities make it so they develop in a qualitatively different way. Young children, autistic children, people with frontal lobe damage etc.

• Conversely, those with normal development and abilities show large inter and intra-individual differences in regards to cognitive functioning. Participants with a mean IQ of 124 did other neurocognitive tests, and their scores didn’t match, showing that IQ might not be the best scoring of cognitive abilities even in normally functioning participants

• There are cultural and emotional factors that may factor into IQ scoring as well. Social classes and families can be their own cultural groups with impact on cognitive abilities. Parent-child and teacher-child interactions affect the acquisition of knowledge

• Test-anxiety, self-confidence, parental income and expectations, etc. impact the IQ scores of children. Because of these environmental factors that impact IQ scores, it must be important to understand and highlight the emphasis of situational and environmental factors on a child’s cognitive prowess

Day 14

Intelligence: the ability to think, learn from experience, adapt to situations, solve problems 

• Just because someone can think or solve problems doesn’t necessarily mean they’re smart

• Related to successful educational, occupational, and economic outcomes

• Assessments concern individual differences in the intellectual capacity of the brain

Stanford-binet test

• By definition, intelligence is a comparative measurement. It’s a concept to compare individual differences

• Later revisions made at stanford university so that the average child gets the typical child gets 100, with a stdev of 15 points

• Have verbal and nonverbal subscales to assess knowledge, quantitative reasoning, visual-spatial processing, working memory, fluid reasoning

Intelligence quotient 

• Child’s mental age/chronological age x 100 (eg: if a 6-year-old thinks like an 8-year-old, IQ = 8/6 x 100 = 133)

• Now it’s all based on stdev

Wechsler scales

• Wechsler Primary and Preschool Scale of Intelligence-4th ed (WPPSI-IV): 2.5-7.5 years

• Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-5th ed (WISC-V): 6-16 years

• Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-4th ed (WAIS-IV)

school/developmental psychologists

• Administer intelligence tests

• Observes child to determine ease with which rapport can be established, child’s enthusiasm and interest, extent to which anxiety impacts performance, child’s degree of tolerance for frustration

• Requires understanding of typical vs atypical answers

Multiple intelligence

• Sternberg’s triarchic theory of intelligence: analytical (academics), creative, and practical

• Gardener’s 8 sets of abilities better describes a person’s intelligence

  • Verbal, mathematical, spatial, music, interpersonal, intrapersonal, nature, kinesthetic

  • Implication: we should not prioritize only verbal and mathematical skills in education

Universal patterns

• Those who score high have better longevity, academic success, work success

• Those who score low have more chronic disease, illness and criminal behaviour

Not covered by intelligence tests

• Motivation to succeed

• Physical and mental health

• Interpersonal skills

• Temporary and chronic stressors

• Stereotype threat

• Additional cognitive resources to control thought/emotions triggered by the anxiety of being in a threatening environment

Historical misuse

• Many of early findings were culturally biased

  • Urban vs rural families

  • Upper and middle vs low SES

  • Non-english speaking homes

Day 15

Heritability of cognition

• Executive function is highly heritable. Twin studies and adoption studies have shown that genetic relatedness predicts more similar x, then we have say x is impacted by genetics.

  • Parents and offspring have similar executive function

  • Monozygotic twins have higher correlations than dizygotic twins

• Environment also influences the heritability of cognition

  • Physically fit children performed better at allocating attentional resources

  • Genetic influence is mostly indirect

    • Parents genes dictate how parents behave towards their children and the kind of environment they provide (passive effects)

    • Child’s own genes dictate how others respond to them (evocative effects) and the environments that they choose (active effects)  

Effect of environment 

• Higher SES homes associated with children with higher IQ and academic achievement

• SES correlated with home environment (value of education), friend selection, neighbourhood income, academic expectation, academic opportunities

• Greater negative effect of low SES in children who experiences perinatal stress

Familial studies of intelligence:

• Adoption studies: 

• Twin studies

• Collectively: although correlations increase as genetic similarity increases between individuals, best estimate of heritability of intelligence = 50%

• Prenatal environment may be more influential than what we previously believed

Paradoxical adoption study results

• Average IQ of African-American children adopted into white middle-class families was 20 points higher than comparable African-American children who were not adopted

• Correlation was higher between children and their biological mothers than with their adopted mothers

Hymovitch

• Raised rats in 3 different environments

  • A typical cage

  • A stovepipe

  • A cage with very enriching environment, lots of things to do

• 4 groups and varied the experience during days 30-75 vs days 75-120

  • Free environment into the stovepipe

  • Stovepipe into a free environment

  • Free environment the entire time

  • Normal cage the entire time

• Hymovitch is looking at how many mistakes these rats commit in a 12 point maze

• This showed that having the free environment early in development is just as good as having the free environment the entire time. 

Naturalistic observations: humans

• Many studies conducted where researchers visit the infants/children at home, then correlated their observed variables with IQ

• Lower IQ is associated with low SES, lack of stimulating play materials, and unresponsive parenting (eg: doesn’t behave appropriately to the individual’s behaviorus)

Romanian orphanages:

• There was a policy to increase Romania’s population, making abortion and contraceptives illegal/forbidden

• Children were abandoned to orphanages and turned over to state care

• Averse conditions in the orphanages because of insufficient funding, overcrowding, inadequate care, and sometimes abuse

Effects of institutionalization

• These children had decreased height, weight, IQ, and reduced cortical activity in prefrontal cortex (executive function), temporal lobe (thinking and language), hippocampus (memory), and amygdala (emotion)

• Less white matter/myelination in the pathways between the limbic system and the frontal lobe

• Some effects of deprivation may be reversible. Children who were taken from those adverse conditions within 2 years of life were able to gain normal developmental abilities 

Neural correlates to intelligence

• Early research suggested a more prefrontal cortex as being more important in intelligence. More recent research suggests that efficiency of processing in neural pathways may be more indicative of intelligence 

Khundrakpam

• 586 anatomical/structural MRI scans (longitudinal) of participants aged 6-18 years examine for cortical thickness and correlates (eg: degree to which thickness in one part of the cortex is correlated with the rest of the cortex—81,000 vertices) with verbal and nonverbal IQ

• No difference between low and high performative IQ individuals and cortical thickness

• Differences revealed when comparing low and high verbal IQ individuals

• This shows that it’s not necessarily the thickness of your cortex, or which area is the thickest, but if your cerebral cortex is changing alot during development we predict that child has high IQ/intelligence

Day 16

Why do I need to understand the structures of language?

• How do infants and children master the different pieces

• Do non-human species have similar pieces

• Can non-human species acquire all aspects of language

Phonology: the sounds 

• Phonemes: smallest units of sounds that are important in language (eg: ba and pa are meaningfully different sounds because bark and park are different words)

• Phonemic awareness is the number one predictor of reading ability

• Morphology: rules for meaning

• Morphemes: smallest units that convey meaning

• Words can be single morphemes (eg: car is a single morpheme)

• Even a letter can be a single morpheme (eg: “s” indicates plural)

• Prefixes and suffixes are examples of morphemes, even though they are not words

• Semantics: the meaning of words

• Also represents conventions and societal norms (eg: “mental retardation” = mentally delayed or slowed development)

• Beginning in 2022, international switch to “intellectual disability” 

• Syntax: rules for combining words

• English: subject-verb-object

  • 42% of the world’s languages

• Subject-object-verb

  • 45% of the world’s languages

• Verb-subject-object

  • 9% of the world’s language

• Pragmatics: communicative functions of language; rules that lead to effective communication (eg: nodding to indicate agreement or encouragement, use of air quotes, shrugging, head tilting, eye rolling)

What can babies do?

• Crying is their first communicative tool

• Cooing: 1-2 months, gurgling sounds. Real babbling occurs at 6 months

Infants recognize words before they  learn to speak or walk

• Sensitivity to exposure: after hearing a repeated word like “bike”, 7.5 month-olds listen longer to sentences that contain the word “bike” than sentences without “bike”

Statistical inference:

• 8 month olds are sensitive to statistical regularities in speech sounds

• Method: expose infants to nonsense words for 3 minutes

  • Created fake words that contained 3 phonemes (bamuna, pokita, comida)

  • Sound stream didn’t have natural pauses between words

  • Made sure each syllable was enunciated with the same cadence

  • After 3 minutes, infants presented with a random combination (eg: ki-ta-co) or a nonsense words (eg: ba-mu-na)

  • Infants dishabituated to random combinations, but not to “words”, thereby indicating they had learned the “words”

  • Infant brains can extract statistical regularities in the speech sounds they hear; infants are parsing sounds from speech into words

Statistical inference: natural

• “St” is a sound combination that can be found at the beginning, middle, and end of words, and also between words (eg: stop, mistake, list, this top is cute, bus takes forever)

• “Sd” is a sound combination that occurs more frequently between words (eg: this does, pass directly, difficult to find words that contain “sd”)

• 9 month olds can learn to identify a new word more easily if it starts with “d” than “t” when the preceding sound is “s”

  • This dag is blue >>> this tag is blue

  • “This diagram” = no ambiguity. “This top” vs “the stop” = ambiguous

Symbolic communication: gestures

• 8-12 months we see emergence of gestures

• Wave “bye-bye”

• Nodding

• Turning head sideways to signal dislike

• Pointing

Joint attention

• Ability for adult and infant to pay attention to the same tertiary object/person

• Parents encourage learning of words by often pointing to the object and naming it

• Although it emerges around the same time in which first words are spoken and it facilitates communication, it is not necessary for language

Vocab development

• 1-word utterances (6-15 months; mean 13 months)

• About 50 words at 18 months

• 2 word utterances appears 18-24 months

• 3-word utterances reveal grammar for the first time: 2-3 years (eg: He hit me)

• By 3-4 years, children can create novel word combinations correctly

Vocab splurt

• Stage in which infants learn new words (names of objects) much more rapidly than before

• 10 words per week

• Occurs around 18-20 months

• Fast-mapping: connects new words to objects without considering all possible meanings; more a description of reference, not necessarily learning

Word learning

• One-to-one mapping: one word per object

• Name refers to whole object

• If a second name is presented for an object already learning, it is understood as a subcategory

  • If dog has already been learned labradoodle must be a more specific category

• Given many similar category members, a word applied consistently to only one of them is a proper noun (eg: “Lala” is my cat)

Cross-cultural differences

• Infants learning Mandarin Chinese, Korean, and Japanese acquire more verbs earlier than infants learning English

  • Primacy and recency effect

  • Cultural context, English SVO, Asian languages SOV

  • In Japanese often just the verb is used (eg: Are you coming? -> Coming?)

Symbolic representation

• Words are symbols that represent the actual object/person

• Development of dual representation (pictures are being objects themselves as well as representing the actual object)

• Scale models can only be understood when infants master 

Day 17

Early errors:

• Underextension: defining a word too narrowly (eg: “daddy” is not just your daddy, but others can have “daddys”)

• Overextension: defining a word too broadly (eg: “doggie” for all animals). More likely to occur when talking

• Common during ages 1-3, stops when children master language

Mastery morphology

• Children in preschool and grade 1 reveal an understanding of morphology

• Children understand the rules enough that they can apply them to new instances and new words

Bilingualism: reading

• Matthew effect, reference used by sociologists describing the phenomenon of “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer”

• Good readers will enjoy reading and therefore read more, becoming better and better, while poor readers will dislike reading, hence become worse than the better readers, and this gap will continue to widen throughout school years

Phonemic awareness

• Knowledge that words consist of separable sounds

• English: deep orthography (system for converting letters into sounds is irregular)

  • 40 phonemes, 1120 letter combinations

• Italian: 25 phonemes, 33 letter combinations

• Phonemic awareness is the number one predictor of reading ability

Dyslexia

• Reading ability is significantly worse than what would be predicted based on intellectual ability

• Phonological processing is best predictor

• Neurological basis is likely genetic

• Manifestation depends on grapheme-phoneme correspondence in language

Girls vs boys

• Girls tend to score higher on reading tests on boys

  • Consistent across studies, across countries

• Although the sex difference is statistically significant, absolute difference is minor

• Dyslexia is more prevalent in boys

• Boys’ learning is more affected by interest than girls

Learning 2nd language

• General rule: best if acquired before puberty

  • Especially native fluency and accents

  • Early acquisition individuals have the same brain areas active when processing either language. Opposite for late acquisition individuals 

• Children and adults learn languages differently 

• The older you are the more expert you are with your first language. That interferes with the processing of a second language. 

Critical period

• Specific experience is necessary during a developmental period for a behaviour to develop (eg: imprinting: geese will follow first animate object they see after hatching as mother, this happens only immediately after birth)(eg: Hubel and Wiesel’s experiments with cats and vision in special environments)

• For bilingualism the critical period seems to be puberty

Critical period: first language

• Wild boy of aveyron: lived alone in woods (ages of 5-11 years); never learned to communicate effectively

• Genie

• Deaf children of hearing parents: better mastery of sign language if taught earlier

What is critical? Is it a really neurobiological window of time in which the brain must receive relevant input?

• Most recent studies suggest that inference from first language is what hinders learning more than a biological clock 

• Even deaf children develop communicative features with their hearing parents before learning sign language–these gestures could interfere with later sign language acquisition if there is too much expertise 

Sensitive period: flexible time window in which experience has optimal effect on behaviour

• Behaviours can still be modified outside this window

• Time frame will expand or contract depending on individual experience (eg: infrequent exposure may expand sensitive period compared to no exposure, even if the child is not really learning the second language)

Bilingual benefits

Children who are fluent in two languages are better at 

• Attentional control

• Concept formation

• Analytic reasoning

• Inhibition

• Cognitive flexibility, complexity, monitoring

Developmental myth buster

Previously believed the exposing infants and young children to two languages simultaneously would harm development

• Anecdotal evidence from teachers when children have immigrated to Canada or US from a non-English country

• No way to differentiate between no understanding English vs low comprehension

• Some studies show that bilingual children start speaking a few months later than monolingual children

• No empirical evidence that bilingual children have cognitive deficits as adults

Students from non-english homes

• Recent evidence shows that using the students’ native language and English is a more successful teaching strategy than teaching exclusively in English 

• Takes 4-7 years for most students to become proficient in English

• When children feel like they cannot be understood, school is not fun. It’s hard to learn when school is not fun

Is language specific to humans?

Behaviourist perspective

• Skills are acquired through classical and operant conditioning principles

• Infants and children imitate what they hear -> rewarded for using words correctly (with attention, smiles, conversation, help accomplish goals)

• Infants and children do not receive an award if they do not speak

Limitations of behaviourist perspective

• Cannot explain novel combinations and uses of words 

• Cannot explain underextension and overextension

• Parents rarely correct grammar of their children

Nativist perspective

• Noam Chomsky said that humans are born with neural circuits that allow for the acquisition of grammar, the Language Acquisition Device (LAD)

  • Semantic bootstrapping theory: brain is ready to categorize the world into nouns (people/things) and verbs (actions). Every language has nouns and verbs, so there must be something primitive about the brain that must be ready to understand the world.

  • When learning a new language you start with things or actions

Support for universal grammar

• Individual neurons come together to give this understanding of grammar

1. Specific brain regions for processing language, including grammar

• Broca’s aphasia: difficulty with speech production. You know what you want to say but the words don’t come out

• Wernicke’s aphasia: difficulty with meaningful speech or fluent aphasia. Somewhere around production and comprehension there’s mixed signals

• In healthy brains, both regions work together

2. Only humans learn grammar readily

• Yes animals have communicative gestures

• Vervet monkeys have different alarm calls to signal approach of leopards, eagles or snakes

• Many efforts (1970s) to teach apes language (Dr. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh)

  • Sign language or the use of lexicons (symbols) because of their vocal apparatus does not provide fine control over voice

  • “Smartest” bonobo Kanzi learned hundreds of lexicons/symbols and could understand and produce English words

  • Bonobos use 2-word sentences

Is language unique to humans? Yes

• Nonhuman animals can learn words, as in associations between symbols and actual things/actions (one-to-one mapping)

• No animal has shown mastery of syntax

• By 4 years, children use syntax correctly without explicit instruction

  • Kanzi’s mastery of language is said to be about a 3-year-old’s level

  • Kanzi couldn’t master SVO

3. Children learn grammar: soundless environment

• Sign language has a morphology and syntax (not just symbols)

• Babies learn sign language from their deaf parents in the same way as hearing children who learn spoken language

  • Begins with babbling (waving around of hands/fingers), then 1-word signs, and eventually 2 and 3-word utterances (3-word utterance has proper syntax)

• If modality doesn’t matter, seems to support innate LAD

Children learn grammar: lack of vision

• Blind children go through same developmental steps of acquiring language as sighted children, despite visual cues

• Interesting differences in interpretation

  • For example, “Look up!” Blindfolded typical infants will look up. Blind children will raise their hands, because that’s how they explore

• Blind individuals racing Braille with their fingers show activation in the visual cortex. Tactile discrimination activates visual cortex because fine discriminations of letters and holistic interpretation of letters into words is best served by visual cortex

• Comparison of congenitally blind individuals reading blind vs late-blind individuals. Both show activations in the visual cortex, as well as frontal parietal cortex. More activity in congenitally blind participants in occipital-temporal…

4. Critical/sensitive periods

• Recall the stories of wild boy of Aveyron and Genie

• Isabelle, a 6-year-old was also rescued from deprivation, but one year later, was speaking as well as her peers

• Inability to learn language after 13-14 years of deprivation suggests innate LAD, that there is something biological in the brain that supports language acquisition

5. Vocabulary/grammar

• Children not only learn new words, but learn the “position” of words simultaneously

  • “You do it” not “do it you”

• Bilingual children’s vocabulary and grammar are correlated within each language, but not across languages

• Bilingual children do not confuse the grammar of two languages

Cognitive perspective:

• Cognitive development allows infants/children to extract statistical regularities from their perceptual environment

• Statistical inference is a manifestation of powerful cognitive abilities, not a “universal grammar”

• Evidence: infants’ vocabulary improves as memory improves

• Limitation: cannot explain Williams syndrome (low intelligence but high expressive verbal ability)

Social perspective

• Children master language in the content of social interactions

• Can incorporate behaviourist, nativist, and cognitive perspectives

Day 18:

Day 19:

Rothbart (2011): 3 Dimensions

• extraversion/surgency: happy, active, seeks interesting stimulation

• Negative affect: tendency to be angry, fearful, frustrated, shy, not easily soothed

• Effortful control: focus attention, not readily distracted, can inhibit responses

• Argument that this better captures who these babies will become

Support for Rothbart (2011)

• Cross-cultural evidence in Belgium, China, Japan, the Netherlands, US

• Supports biologically based differences in determining temperament. Not by socialization, probably genetic

• Parenting application: respond to your baby’s temperament

  • Shy baby: needs more encouragement than what it typical, may need more modeling

  • Active baby: provides more opportunities for exploration so they can burn off that extra energy

Heredity and biology

• Monozygotic twins more similar in temperament than dizygotic twins

• Slightly difference depending on dimension and age

  • Inhibited temperament may be associated with heart rate, cortisol and frontal lobe activity, also role of amygdala and serotonin

  • Negative affect more influenced by heredity

  • Temperament in childhood shows higher heritability than in infancy

• DRD4 gene: implicated in regulating attention, motivation and reward, novelty-seeking adults, all likely involved with temperament

Goodness of fit

• How well does a child’s temperament meet the environmental demands

• Training can be helpful for parents of distress-prone infants (eg: more likely to cry and be irritable)

• Note that new parents may not realize that their infants were born with a specific temperament (over-belief in parenting strategies)

Cultural differences

• Americans drew themselves bigger than others

  • Interdependence is a virtue

• Europeans drew themselves slightly bigger than others

• Japanese drew themselves slightly smaller than others

  • Interdependence is a virtue

Gene x culture

• How does culture and genes (eg: DRD4) interact to shape independent vs interdependent social orientations?

• Independent: “I feel it is important for me to act as an independent person”

• Interdependent: “I will sacrifice my self-interest for the benefit of the group that I’m in”

• They didn’t have strong tendencies on either end of the spectrum if they were a non-carrier of the DRD4 genes, while the Asian-born Asian carriers were more interdependent, and the European American carriers were more independent

Temperament: gene x environment

• Temperament makes some children more sensitive to environmental influences (think of evocative genetic effects on the environment)

• Genes mediate how we think, which changes the interactions we have with others, which changes gene expression, which changes our behaviour

Attachment: 

• Socio-emotional relationship between baby and caretaker

• Evolutionarily, it’s critical to have this attachment to survive

• Lack of attachment has detrimental effects

  • Infants raised in institutions after WW2 showed impaired mental development; were often withdrawn and listless, despite receiving adequate nutrition and healthcare

• Touch seems to be the foundation for socio-emotional development

Remember Harlow’s infant monkeys. Even Harlow didn’t expect the monkeys would spend 18x more time with the cloth mother than the wire mother

John Bowlby (1969, 1991):

• Pre-attachment (0-2 months): recognizes mother’s smell, sound; smiles and cries to engage caregiver (reflexes that improve survival)

• Attachment in the making (2-7 months): infants behave differently to familiar vs unfamiliar adults; recognition of adults

• True attachment (7-24 months): specific attachments with regular caregivers

• Reciprocal relations (>18 months): growing cognitive and language skills allows for true social relationship

Attachment development

• Quality of attachment to caregiver = internal working model of social relationship

• Influences later responses to other people, emotion understanding, conscience development, and self-concept

• Attachment is not an instinct or a reflex; it is a complex, dynamic process by which the relationship evolves, depending on social-cognitive abilities of both caregiver and infant

Strange situation

• Developed by Canadian Mary Ainsworth

• Observe the infant-caregiver relationship through a series of lab settings

  • Free play

  • Introduction of a stranger

  • Caregiver leaves infant with stranger

  • Caregiver returns

Quality of attachment:

• Secure attachment: baby may cry when mom leaves, but when mom returns, baby is relieved (60-65% of North American babies)

• Avoidant attachment: baby not upset when mom leaves, and when mom returns, may ignore her by looking/turning away (20%)

• Resistant attachment: baby upset when mom leaves, but remains upset or shows anger when mom returns; difficult to console (10-15%)

• Disorganized: baby seems confused and/or disoriented when mom leaves and when they return (5-10%)

Cultural differences

• Universally majority of babies have secure attachment

• Prevalence of insecure attachments may differ by culture

  • Secure attachment is still the majority!

  • German parents value independent: maybe manifests in having more avoidant babies as opposed to more resistant

  • Japanese parents value interdependence and rarely leave infants alone with strangers: more resistant than avoidant

Developmental outcomes

• Many studies reveal a correlation between infant attachment style and the quality of interpersonal skills later in life

• Secure infants have better friendships, romantic partners, positive emotional health, high self-esteem

• Insecure attachment is associated with behavioural difficulties

  • Disorganized associated with externalizing problems (aggression)

Neural mechanisms for attachment

• Oxytocin: hormone that supports maternal behaviours (eg: released during birth, breastfeeding, also by contact and warmth)

• Dopamine: neurotransmitter released in nucleus accumbens in response to rewarding stimuli 

Day 20:

What about fathers?

• On average, mothers are more likely to engage in “parenting” and spend more time with infants

• Global measures of attachment do not differ between mothers and fathers

  • Eg: if an infant is securely attached to mom, likely that they are also securely to dad

• A meta-analysis revealed that insecure attachment with fathers was associated with the likelihood of externalizing behaviours, similar to insecure attachment with mothers

• Individual, cultural familial views impact family dynamics, however there’s no evidence that fathers are inherently different from mothers (but may engage in more physical play)

Trust

• To develop secure attachment, infants must develop an expectation that when distressed, the caregiver will respond to their issues

  • Learned helplessness: if infants learn that caregivers are unreliable, then that is their internal working model of people, and impacts later social relationships

• Not just in infancy; people respond better to teachers, psychologists, therapists, etc. when they trust them

Parents and infants

• Maternal sensitivity involved with attachment

• Secure infants tend to have caregivers that are responsible and available

• Insecure infants tend to have caregivers that are unavailable and rejecting, or interact in an irritated way; responsiveness is inconsistent

• think of passive and evocative environments. Less sensitive and responsive parents share genes with infants who may also be less sensitive and responsive than a typical infant

Adult attachment:

• Secure adults: describe childhood experiences objectively; value impact of their caregiver-child relationships

• Dismissive adults: sometimes deny the value of or cannot recall childhood experiences, yet often idealize their caregivers

• Preoccupied adults: describe experiences emotionally and often express anger/confusion regarding caregiver-child relationships

Avoid attachment and self-esteem

• More avoidant attachment is linked to lower self-esteem

• If you have low self-esteem you’re more likely to have high smartphone addiction

• Lower self-esteem is linked with anxiety

• Those high in anxiety are linked with smartphone addiction

Attachment theory and smartphone use?

• Proximity maintenance: tend to remain in close contact with attachment targets: 66% of UK youth 16-19 years check their phones in the middle of the night, and 74% use it while walking. 

• Safe haven: the attachment target is used as a safe space during times of threat; young adults use smartphones to help relax and lift moods

• Secure base for exploration: you’re more likely to explore if you’re close to mom. Do young adults use smartphones for exploration?

• Separation anxiety: anxiety upon separation from the target; broad discussion of youth’s fear, anxiety, discomfort when separated from their phones

What is the alternative? Play

• Unstructured, unsupervised play allows children to experiment, make low-stakes mistakes, and learn to regulate their emotions and problem-solve through discussion

• Synchronous, dynamic interactions, including non-verbal cues, allows children to learn important skills like emotional regulation and interpersonal communication; but also the inherent trust that parents reveal by letting children play freely (secure attachment)

Day 21:

• William James (1980): two sides to “self”, the awareness of one’s own existence

• “I-self” = ability to think about ourselves, metacognition; can be independent of others

  • Emerges around 3 months (recall mobile-kicking, understanding of actions and consequences)

• “Me-self” = sum total of what a person knows/believes about themselves; can include other’s opinions; self concept

  • Emerges around 15 months

Origins of self-concept

• Unclear whether newborns have it, however, unlikely as newborns do not seem to react to mirror images of themselves

• By 18-24 months infants recognize their own image in a mirror

• Cultural differences: infants pass the mirror test faster in cultures that value independent

  • Develops without experience with mirrors per se

Preschool self-concept

• Understanding that “I” exist continuously in time

• Descriptions of self anchored in tangible activities, preferences, competencies, and physical characteristics (EG: I dance, I like pizza, I can count to 10, I have brown hair)

• Cultural differences: Asian children are more likely to describe relationships that North American children (I pay with Xiaoqing in my school)

Evolving self-concept

• Middle and late childhood: introduction of emotions, competencies relative to others, more realistic (eg: Sometimes I get mad, I’m the fastest in my class)

• Adolescence: more complex, abstract, differentiated, integrated, and possible self (eg: I’m cheerful except when I’m stressed about exams; my friends say I’m friendly although there are days when I don’t want to hang out with others; I’m good at biology so I hope to become a doctor)

Cognitive development and self-concept

• Increased ability to think logically and abstractly allows for a description of self that is more realistic, evidence-based, yet also idealistic

• Need to understand multiple points of views to synthesize a single concept

Social development and self-concept

• Self-concept is powerfully influenced by others

• Looking-glass self: we learn to know ourselves by interacting with others and observing (experiencing) how they respond to us

  • Not necessarily what others think, but how we perceive others are thinking about us (based on their reactions)

  • You are seeing yourselves in others

  • To the extent that you see the good in people, you are also seeing the good in yourself

Generalized Other

• A summary of the ways in which others have responded to us

• We extract (from our experiences) a “general” sense of others and what they think of us

  • Can be actual things like report cards, or playground gossip, or peer feedback

Adolescent egocentrism

• Egocentrism: failure to make a distinction between one’s own viewpoint and someone else’s viewpoint

• During formal operations: adolescents think about their own thinking, consider that others may also be thinking about them, ability to consider all possible outcomes, self-absorption and self-consciousness, egocentric thinking

Key features of adolescent self-concept

• Imaginary audience

• Personal fable

• Illusion of invulnerability

Identity crisis:

• Erikson (1960s): adolescent’s response to the tension between need to explore what is unique lecture

Day 22:

James Marcia (Canadian!): Identity

• Exploration: finding out and examining alternatives

• Commitment: choose a belief or course of action, and make a personal investment in it

• Occupation, beliefs and values, interpersonal relations

  • Status may be achieved differently and at different times

Ethnocultural identity

• Ethnicity: cultural background and customs, values, attitudes that go along with that culture

• People from similar cultural backgrounds show similar patterns of attitudes and behaviours that distinguish them from other ethnicities, which contribute to self-concept

Minority culture adolescents

• Understand social relationships in terms of who belongs to higher-status groups

• Those in positions of influence and authority (principals, doctors, lawyers, etc.) tend to be members of dominant group; lack of role models limits views of possible self

• Achieving solid sense of ethnocultural identity has many positive results; lecture

lecture

Childhood sources for self-esteem/self-worth

• Academic skills

• Athletic skills

• Social skills

• Physical appearance

Adolescent sources for self-esteem/self-worth

• Academic skills

• Athletic skills

• Social skills

  • Parents

  • Peers

  • Dates

  • Friends

  • Coworkers

• Physical appearance (biggest influence)

Levels of self-esteem

• Preschool: highest (preoperational thinking & egocentrism)

• Elementary school: initial drop but then stabilizes (realization that most kids are, by definition, average)

• High school: drops again with transition and change in environment, but then stabilizes

• Pattern studied predominantly in white children

Day 23:

• Lecture notes

Source of self-esteem

• Actual competence: children lecture

Type of praise

• Grade 5 students complete a math test. They got praise, they were told that they did very well even if they didn’t.

  • Ability praise: 8lecture8

Why?

• Ability praise *lecture(

Low self-esteem 

• lecture

Depression

• Pervasive feelings of sadness, irritability, difficulty concentrating, poor sleep, and low self-esteem

• Prevalence: 5% boys, 12% girls (aged 12-19 years)

• Longitudinal studies reveal that individuals with low self-esteem are more likely to develop depression

• Young children with depression do not necessarily develop low self-esteem with age (mood disorder, separate from self-esteem)

• Risk factor: difficulty regulating emotions and tendency to attribute failures to internal traits

Self-esteem and peers

• Low self-esteem may cause children to withdraw from social activities. This results in more time spent alone, less practice, and more isolation.

• Children internalize lowo social self-worth when they encounter problems with peer relations

• Both factors impact each other, creating a bad cycle

Narcissistic youth

• Grandiose view of themselves, believe they are better than others, relish attention and compliments

• Prone to aggression: cannot allow others to undervalue them

• Prone to depression: when they realize that their view is not realistic

• Treatment: cbt

  • Learn to assess their performance objectively, relative to others

Selman’s stages

1. Undifferentiated (3-6 years): confusion between own thoughts/feelings and those of others

2. Social-informational (4-9 years): understanding that different people can have different thoughts and knowledge; pass false-belief tasks

3. Self-reflective (7-12 years): ability to “step into” other people’s shoes; knowledge that others can also take your perspective

4. Third person (10-15 years): ability to step outside immediate situation to evaluate the situation from a 3rd-party perspective (eg: argument)

5. Societal (14-adulthood): recognition that even a 3rd-person perspective is influenced by broader personal, social and cultural factors

Development of perspective taking

• Children with greater cognitive abilities will be more advanced at perspective-taking

• Children with better language skills will be more advanced at perspective-taking

  • Thinking abstractly requires words; effort to use words will take away mental resources available for the actual perspective-taking

• Controversy about whether advancement through stages is better described as quantitative or qualitative

Self to others

• As children’s self-concept becomes more complex and integrated, so does their description of others

1. Concrete descriptions

2. Psychological traits (but still observable)

3. Abstract traits

• Verbal descriptions likely underestimate children's understanding

Terminology

• Sex: biological differences

  • Anatomy, puberty, XX vs XY chromosomes

• Gender: all other characteristics related to the different sexes

  • Social role, identities

  • Recently, consideration for fluid gender identities. 0.3% of individuals over 15 years of age identify as non-binary

Society’s views

• Gender stereotype: beliefs about how women and men differ cognitively, socially, emotionally, behaviourally

• Little change in gender stereotypes from 60s to 00s

Cultural differences

• 300 personality traits examined in 30 countries

  • Participants answers “yes” or “no” to whether men and women demonstrate these traits

• Results revealed that there are cultural differences in the extent to which gender stereotypes are endorsed

• Implication: gender stereotypes reflect cultural expectations more than biological differences lecture

Student stereotypes

• Research question: do undergraduate students evaluate male vs female instructors differently

• Method: same course delivered online via recorded lectures and identical assignments

  • Only difference: Dr. Mitchell (female) vs Dr. Martin (male) listed as instructor of record for various political science courses; both self-reported that based on previous course evaluations lecture

Day 24:

Stereotype development:

• 12 month olds look equally long at gender-stereotyped toys

• 18 month olds look longer at stereotypical toys for their gender

  • Girls: dolls > trucks

  • Boys: trucks > dolls

• By age 2 they look longer at unexpected gender roles

• Men putting on lipstick > women putting on lipstick

Inherent gender bias:

• Mothers and 11-month-olds recruited in a study about infants’ crawling abilities

• Babies crawl down a slope; mom can change the slant of the slope

• Ability question: “What’s the steepest your baby can crawl down?”

• Attempt question: “what’s the steepest your baby will try to crawl down?”

Interpreting results

• Physical differences exist between men and women

• At 12 months, no evidence of difference in physical abilities (eg: muscle and motor development)

• Parents’ (society’s) biases will impact how boys and girls develop (recall passive and evocative genetic effects)... consider physical, cognitive, social, emotional, self development

Link to self development

• By age 4-6 years, most children have a stable schema of “boys” and “girls”

• School-age children tend to engage in gender-stereotyped activities and engage socially with children from their own gender

• Adolescents demonstrate gender intensification

  • Sexual maturation leads to embracing a new role, which leads to engaging more in gender-stereotyped behaviours (recall imaginary audience and looking glass self). This causes greater struggles for individuals who are not cisgender

cognitive/psychological differences

• Girls are better at language, boys are better at math, this is myth

  • No clear evidence that girls are better at language (results inconsistent)

• Girls’ behaviours may be better-suited for school environment (recall lecture on dyslexia)

• Only consistent finding: boys/men likely have better spatial abilities (eg: mental rotation, orientation in space without landmarks)

Evolutionary explanations:

• Men were hunters, women were gatherers. Men maybe needed better navigation skills to hunt and get back to their home.

• However, modern evolutionary theorists say this idea is unsatisfactory: women as gatherers needed good navigation skills to find trees with good fruit and come back. Also we were nomadic, so everybody needed good navigation skills

Why the stereotype?

• Self-fulfilling prophecy: female teachers with high math anxiety had more female students who endorsed the stereotype that boys are better at math

  • These girls who endorsed the stereotype did more poorly at end of year than girls who didn’t endorse the stereotype

• Even at university female students who endorse the stereotype have lower math scores than female students without the stereotype

• Confirmation bias

• Stereotypical roles and practice

Who is “really, really smart?”

• Asked kids who in the picture were really, really smart. They often chose their own gender at the age of 5. They are slightly more likely to choose their own gender. However it changes and diverges at 6 and 7. Boys continue choosing men, while girls start choosing men at 6 and 7.

Who is “really, really nice”?

• Asked kids who in the picture were really, really nice. lecture

Bottom line

• Children assimilate society’s expectations about gender roles lecture

Social cognitive theory on gender development

• Rewards and punishments shape children’s concepts of gender

  • Parents will buy certain toys, enrol kids in certain programs, smile and offer encouragement when their child engages in expected behaviour (a natural and spontaneous reactions, does not have to be intentional)

• Children learn from society what it means to be a boy or a girl

Kohlberg’s stage theory

• Gender identity: by age 2, children categorize themselves as boy or girl; by age 3, can discriminate anatomical differences

• Gender stability: age 4-5 years, children recognize that gender is a lifetime trait

• Gender constancy: age 5-7 years, children recognize that gender does not change even if appearances do

Gender schema theory

• You must develop these schemas on gender in order to understand how you’re supposed to behave. 

• Predicts that if a boy sees several girls playing in a sandbox, the boy will assume the sandbox is for girls

• Word use recorded in infants 10-21 months counted how often the referred to themselves as “boy” or “girl”

• At 17-21 months, children were observed playing

  • Both gender stereotypic toys (trucks and dolls) and gender-neutral toys (phones, figurines) were available

• Word use correlated with preference for gender-stereotypical toys

• Implication: development of identity not inherently different for gender than for any other in-group vs out-group distinction (eg: ethnicity, race, gender)

Biological perspective

• Evolutionary pressures may have selected different traits for males vs females

• Estrogens primarily influence development of female physical sex characteristics, help regulate menstrual cycle, involved in pregnancy and birth (breast-feeding); androgens primarily influence development of male genitals and sex characteristics

• Y chromosome triggers creation of testes and testosterone secretion, for girls the tissue turns into ovaries

  • 0.02-0.05% of children born with ambiguous external genitalia, up to 1.7% of population classified as intersex

Prenatal exposure to sex hormones

• Congenital adrenal hyperplasia: genetic disorder, adrenal glands of girls secrete large amounts of androgens creating male-like genitals (extent varies across individuals); tend to prefer “boy-like” activities and show higher levels of aggression

• Androgen-insensitivity syndrome: genetic disorder, XY males without androgen cells, making them look and act like females

• Pelvic field defect: abnormal development of sex organs; XY boys lack testosterone

• Individual differences in whether gender identity is predominantly driven by XX vs XY chromosomes, prenatal exposure to sex hormones, or exposure to sex hormones at puberty

Bottom line

• False dichotomy: why ask if men and women are different? 

  • Important to understand differences only to the extent that they are meaningful (eg: possible that many women enjoy breastfeeding, but each couple is different)

• Entire field of psychology describes typical development while ignoring individual differences

• Important to be aware of possible gender differences, and the developing gender identity of children and adolescents

Trans youth

• Most individuals realize that they do not identify with their biological sex around puberty

  • Attraction to same-sex individuals aids in realization of sexual orientation, gender identity

• Absence of safe environments, access to health services, resources for mental health concerns, lack of continuity of care, parents’ biases and misconceptions

Day 25:

New vocabulary

• New words are being used so that each person can choose their identity expression that best suits them

• Non-binary: individuals who identify with neither traditional definition of male and female

• Genderqueer: playing with the idea of “gender” in a political sense to highlight stereotypes; or an oscillation of genders

  • Originated in activist circles, reclaiming the original use of “queer” to mean strange or odd, which was then used to describe homosexual men (in an age when discrimination is openly accepted)

• Cisgender: denoting or relating to a person whose gender identity corresponds to their biological sex

• Gender nonconforming: a gender expression that does not conform to traditional views

  • Umbrella term for anyone who wants to defy expectations about how a woman/man should behave

Gender today:

• Baby storm born in toronto on new year's day in 2011

• Parents did not announce the sex of their baby to anyone, as a tribute to freedom and choice

• Storm in 2016 self-identified as a girl and was reported to prefer playing with stuffed animals

• Dad allowed his 5 year old son to wear red nail polish to school. Friends made fun of him. Child was devastated and wanted to take them off, but then his dad and older brother also painted their nails red because it should only matter what you think about your own looks. 

Aggression

• Behaviour meant to harm others

• Damage, injury, disregard for rights of others

• Not to be confused with being assertive, which is goal-directed actions to further legitimate interests of individuals they represent while respecting the rights of other persons

Development of aggression

• Instrumental aggression: children use aggression to achieve an explicit goal. Observed by 1 year of age (eg: taking a toy that they want, grabbing it from your hands)

• Hostile aggression: unprovoked aggression to intimidate, harass, humiliate each other. Beginning in elementary school years. 

• Reactive aggression: in response to another child’s behaviour

• Relational aggression: hurting others by undermining social relationships

Cyberbullying and pain

• Speaking of relational aggression, when you are socially excluded, what part of the brain is activated? 

  • Used fMRI to examine activation while playing video games

  • Scan 1: baseline activation while watching others. There’s a “malfunction” with their game so they can’t play

  • Scan 2: play normally

  • Scan 3: others pass to you 7 times, then exclude you for the next 45 throws

  • Dependent variable: how much was your brain activated in Scan 3 - Scans 1 + 2

  • Samr areas activated as physical injury (right ventral prefrontal cortex, where you modulate and regulate pain, and the anterior cingulate, where you experience pain)

Stability of aggression

• 6 month olds who bite/hit others are more likely to kick/hit peers to obtain toys at age 3

• 6 year olds with disruptive classroom behaviour 4-5x more likely to have conduct disorder in adolescence

• Children judged most aggressive by teachers were 12x more likely than least aggressive children to have a criminal charge against them as young adults

• High aggression is more stable than lower aggression. If there’s few instances then perhaps it’s just a development phase. But if there’s high aggression there’s evidence that they’ll continue

Risk factors of aggression

• Parenting: use of physical punishment, neglect in infancy, unresponsive, coercive, overly possessive, poor monitoring, family conflict

• Tv-watching: longitudinal daraa show that preschoolers who watch violent shows are more aggressive as teens

• Peers: aggressive peers

• Academic failure: frustration, peer conflicts

• Poverty: violence, family conflict

• Culture of violence: neighbourhood guns/gangs/violence

Gender differences in social media use

• 14 year olds using social media

  • 3 hours/day: ⅖ girls, ⅕ boys

• Do not use social media: 4% girls, 10% boys

Early sex differences in play

• Age 2-3: both girls and boys engage in solitary and parallel play

• Age 3-4: boys tend to engage in more solitary play than girls; girls in more associative play (sustained social exchanges but no organization) than boys

• Age 4-5: boys engage more in associative play; girls engage in more cooperative play (organized play)

• Age 5-6: boys engage in more cooperative play than girls

Differences in social elements

• Theory of mind predicted peer-related social competence

• Boys with higher theory-of-mind scores were more likely to display aggressive/disruptive behaviour and less likely to be shy

• Girls with higher theory-of-mind scores were more likely to engage in prosocial behaviour with no correlation to aggression or shyness

• Improved cognitive development allows for better mastery of social relationships, but boys and girls differ on how they utilize their skills

Differences in social anxiety disorder

• Women more likely to have social anxiety disorder than men; difference more pronounced during adolescence

  • Fear of social situations, performing in front of others

  • German adolescents 14-25 years: 9.5% of girls, 4.9% of boys

• Oxytocin is involved in social interactions but also has anxiolytic effects (approach/avoidance tendencies) and may lecture

What explains gender differences?

• Social role theory: observed psychological differences between men and women emerge mainly through societal expectations about gender-specific roles (eg: home-makers vs wage-earners)

  • Young children observe these gender-typical roles and engage in skills that would be expected (eg: girls play “house” and boys compete)

  • But why would so many lecture

Day 26: Morality

Piaget’s stages

• Premoral stage (2-4 years): moral sensibility is not yet developed

• Moral realism (5-7 years)

  • Rules must be followed, cannot be changed

  • Imminent justice: breaking a rule always leads to punishment (does not need to be direct punishment)

  • Severity of punishment = importance of rule

  • Heteronomous morality: others have determined rules and punishments (eg: parents, police, teachers, etc.)

• Moral relativism (8-10 years and beyond)

  • Rules are arbitrary guidelines created by people, to help people get along

  • Autonomous morality: morality is based on free will. Everyone is capable of saying what is morally good and bad, it depends only on you, nobody else

  • Consider the intentions behind the rules (eg: seatbelts are there to increase safety. If you have a situation in which the seatbelt harms your safety, ok not to wear)

  • Cognitive development drives advancement through stages. It’s what people agree is bad or good. 

Piaget’s views today

• Piaget underestimated young children’s ability. 

• Even preschoolers don’t believe that adults have absolute authority (eg: pushing someone would be wrong, even if an adult tells you it’s ok)

• Moral reasoning progressing through stages concurrent with cognitive development, which is still valid today

Development of kohlberg’s theory:

• Moral dilemmas: situations in which any action leads to a negative consequence

• Asked children, adolescents, and adults to explain their thoughts

• Developed a theory describing how moral reasoning changes with age

  • Whether something is considered “good” or “bad” less important; focus on the rationale given

Level 1: preconventional

• Most children, some adolescents/adults

• Stage 1: obedience orientation

  • Rules must be obeyed, if you break them you will be punished.

  • Good: Heinz did try to pay for it, and did have the $200 that the drug was worth

  • Bad: you can’t just take a drug without paying, you may go to jail for it

• Stage 2: instrumental orientation

  • Act in a way that satisfies a need; egocentric

  • Good: heinz’s wife really needs the drug; he can pay him back

  • Bad:  if heinz goes to jail, his wife will be even more desperate

Level 2: conventional

• Most adolescents/adults

• Stage 3: interpersonal norms

  • Refer to what is expected of a good person, it’s about others expectation, your reasoning is tied to the social relations around you

  • Good: stealing is a crime, but heinz should save his wife if he is a good husband

  • Bad: stealing is a crime, so heinz’s family would be dishonoured if he acted illegally

• Stage 4: social system morality

  • Law and order exists for the good of everyone

  • Good: heinz has a duty to save his wife

  • Bad: if we all took the law into our own hands, civilization would degenerate into chaos

Level 3: Postconventional

• Some adults; typically > 25 years of age

• Stage 5: social contract orientation

  • Balancing individual’s needs with society’s needs

  • Good: it’s complicated because laws must be obeyed but he must save his wife’s life

  • Bad: while i can empathize with heinz, we must abide by and uphold our laws

• Stage 6: universal ethical principles orientation

  • Personal morality based on justice, compassion, equality

  • Good: the law conflicts with the sanctity of human life, so heinz’s actions are justified

  • Bad: we must make sacrifices to do what is right

Do people actually reason this way?

Empirical evidence: support

• Longitudinal studies reveal that stages are invariant

• Children develop through these stages without skipping any

• Individual differences in how long they stay at a stage, but they don’t seem to regress to earlier stages with development

• Adolescents that partake in social protests tend to be in more advanced stages

Empirical evidence: not supported

• Variability within individuals, depending on context

• Can show conventional reasoning for some dilemmas but post conventional for others

• Culture-specific

  • bias for Judeo-Christian theology

  • Some cultures value duty and responsibility to others over individual rights and justice. “Conventional” stage considered most advanced, and “postconventional” considered less advanced

Cultural differences in “social” lies

• Sometimes we lie to help others

• What should you do if your f lecture

Day 27: prosocial behaviour

Prosocial behaviour: voluntary behaviour intended to benefit others

Prosocial behaviour: infancy

• Recall emotional development: newborns cry in response to hearing other babies crying. This brain setup that’s already there as newborns is probably a precursor to empathy and prosocial behaviour

• By 3 months of age, infants prefer prosocial characters over antisocial characters

• By 6 months, infants like prosocial characters and dislike antisocial characters

• By 18 months, infants help others to achieve their goals

Prosocial behaviour: children

• Gradually, more understanding lecture

Social influences

• Recall vygotsky: learning occurs in the social plane

• Modelling: observe adults (parents) behaving altruistically (prosocial behaviour without concern for own welfare or expectation of reciprocity)

• Disciplinary practices: responsive parents

• Opportunities: are children asked to help around the help? Hel siblings? Volunteering at school?

Cultural differences

• 18 month olds retrieve objects out of reach

• Delhi, India > Munster, Germany

• Mom encourage autonomy in infants in Germany

• Delhi moms endorsed obedience, used more rewards and punishments, and provided more opportunities to help than Munster moms

Implications:

• As children mature cognitively and socially, they incorporate more conventional rules

What about other lies?

• Temptation resistance paradigm

  • Guessing game where they have to guess what toy: “what do you think it is?” 

Lecture

Adult cannot detect liars in mock testimonies because of their truth bias: they are more likely to believe the child is telling the truth

Implications:

• Children’s competence to act as witnesses in trials

• Adults are poor at detecting lies; have truth bias

• Having a conversation with children about importance of truth-telling, and building rapport will help

Prosocial behaviour: animals?

• 36-lecture

Chimps can help in very easy situations, but more ambiguous, complex situations (where you need to understand the intention of the human) don’t help.

Chimps also never gave food back. They always ate it

Implications:

• Non-human animals demonstrate prosocial behaviour

• Toddlers help more readily

• Toddler’s behaviour influenced by context

  • Familiarity with objects, actions, goals and situations

Evolutionary explanations

• Prosocial behaviours (cooperation) provide a survival advantage

• Egingeitnc mechanisms: the members with the genes that create prosocial behaviour have a higher likelihood to survive, meaning that they will spread their genes more

Biological factors

• Genetic influence: MZ twins are more similar in prosocial behaviours than DZ twins

  • Indirect: temperament, imitation

• Biological mechanism: oxytocin associated with empathy, nurtance, affiliation, cooperation

How do we increase oxytocin?

• Intranasal oxytocin spray

  • Increased empathy, trust,

  • Decreased symptoms in individuals with anxiety, depression, and ASD

• Listening to music following surgery increases oxytocin and speeds up recover

• Interacting with animals/pets

• Social interactions: breastfeeding in moms, touch and warm temperatures

Promoting prosocial behaviour in children

• More understanding of others intentions and complex ways to help

  • Empathy

  • Perspective-taking

  • Moral reasoning

• Bullies show immaturities in all three skills

Traditional consequences of antisocial behaviour

• Sent to the principal’s office

• Detention

• A call to parents

• Worst case: suspension or expulsion

• lecture

Day 28: social influences

• Ability to acquire information from others (eg: observational learning)

• Humans are unique in that we can pass on information from one generation to the next

• Cultural transmission of knowledge, writing, transportation, laundry 

Do animals pass down knowledge

• 18 month old Imo washes her potatoes in a nearby stream

• 3 months later, Imo’s mom and two playmates (and their mothers) observed to be washing potatoes

• lecture

Tomasello says no, this is not passing down knowledge

• Monkeys can pick up the behaviour easily on their own, without observing others (washing in water observed in other clans spontaneously). F it’s a behaviour that you see spontaneously through the species is not social learning

• Speed of behaviour was slow and the speed with which it spread didn’t increase as more members learned the behaviour

• The spread is initially slow because few people know about it. Once people catch on and it explodes, that’s social learning

Lyons et al (2007)

• Present a puzzle box where there are two moves that are necessary to get the prize. Move 1 is lifting a rod, move 2 is tapping the rod in the box, mov 3 is opening the lid and sliding out the lecture

Humans are unique

• Genetic predisposition to pay attention to others

• Biological bias towards social interactions

• Recall: lecture

Parenting styles

• Evidence shows that parenting styles can be differentiated in two dimensions (warm and responsiveness and control)

  • High: openly warm and affectionate, involved with children, responds to emotional needs

  • Low: focused on own needs; sometimes hostile

Day 29: sensation and perception

• Infant brains are prepared to learn (social learning, learning language, etc.)

What happens after months of visual deprivation?

• remember that newborn have a preference for facelike stimuli

Patients after surgery preference:

• More like a newborn. They still act like newborns when they can first see. 

• Patients after surgery showed preferences like newborns, which shows that experience matters

What happens after 1 hour vs 1 month of experience

• Acuity improved after 1 hour of experience

• Acuity improved a lot more after a month of experience

• However, with age-matched controls (babies who always had good vision from birth) didn’t show improvement after an hour or a month. 

• It’s almost like the brain is trying to catch up. Almost like the infant brain was waiting for visual experience, then fast-tracked development once they did get visual experience

Gene x environment

• Experience-expectant processes: brain appears to wait for visual input to set up the neural architecture for visual perception

• lecture

• Infant monkeys are raised in visually rich environments, yet no exposure to faces (raised individually by humans wearing masks)

• Face-deprivation lasted 6, 12, or 24 months on 6 monkeys

• After deprivation, monkeys selectively exposed to only human faces or only monkey faces for one month

Visual preference task

• Human face vs objects

• Monkey face vs objects

• Monkey fae vs human face lecture

Fuzzy trace theory

• Not the exact memory, but more of a gist

• Skill that develops

• The older participants remembered more words but incorrectly circled the critical word alot more

• Older children and adults learn to remember a fuzzy trace, which is more efficient, but occasionally results in false recall

Fuzzy trace theory: prediction

• Who do you trust?

  • Older sibling: “I took out the garbage last night like I always do”

  • Younger sibling: “No last night you said you were busy so I did”

• Older child more likely to be biased by the fuzzy trace from all past experiences (always taking out the trash) whereas young child is more likely to remember precisely last night’s event

• Limitation: must be a recent event