Module 12: Infancy & Childhood (Thurs 09/25/25) Class 6
Area.
But we are going to spend a little bit more time on cognitive development.
Famous for cognitive development, understanding that one of the things that he tried to do is he tried to infer what their level of cognitive development was from the mistakes that they made.
So he gave them tasks.
He would infer where they were in their cognitive based on the mistakes that they made and then how long it took them to kind of get to the front, correct solving on a particular problem.
So we talked about cognitive developing, the transition to general activities associated with thinking, including knowing, remembrance.
So he thought that kids went through kind of four, not just kids really, but all the way through sort of classic adulthood, four certain stages of cognitive development.
And within each of these stages, there were certain developmental phenomenon that we saw that they start the stage with, but they don't necessarily have until sometimes the end of the stage.
So we have the first stage here we're going to deal with is the sensory motor stage.
And where, you know, infants and young children experience the world.
We're looking through senses and actions, including hearing, touching, mouthing, and grasping.
And one of the things that he said children have a hard time with is sort of coordinating kind of maybe like what they see and what they want to kind of outreach and touch.
And it makes it harder for us to know sometimes where they are, they're cognitive until they actually meet those coordinations.
But the major one we're going to talk about here is object permanence.
And they're developing that particular.
That particular skill or cognitive phenomenon, developmental phenomenon.
They also have what we call stranger anxiety.
At some point during the this particular stage, they actually develop a fear of strangers, which we're going to see come up later in our discussion of social development.
So object parents is awareness that things.
Change.
That things still exist, even though you can't see them when you're not perceiving them.
So we know that you see this exists.
If I do this, you can see anymore, you know, it's still there.
And you have a pretty good recollection of what it looks like, maybe what it does and so forth.
But children don't seem to have that ability until a little bit later in life.
So how we tested this, we look at this particular baby's failure to search for the stuffed animal.
Stuffed animal's right in front of it, having a fun time playing with it.
Then you hide the stuffed animal from the baby's view.
This baby doesn't search for it anymore.
This looks like an angry baby, actually, now that I look at it.
But she doesn't cry.
She doesn't tend to search for it.
It's almost like it doesn't exist anymore.
This baby has not developed object permanence.
She doesn't realize that this continues to exist even though we know it still exists.
Right.
She doesn't have apparently a mental representation of this object in her mind.
Even though it's not in front of her.
She doesn't seem to have the ability to actually have that objects still exist there.
It's not until they get a little bit older.
Piaget said it wasn't until around maybe nine months of age that infants are able to remember that something still exists.
Even if they don't see it a little bit later.
They have a little bit more complex understanding of things.
But early on, this looks like a baby that's maybe, I don't know, four months, five months or something, doesn't really recognize that this stuffed animal exists, has not acquired object permanence.
Does that make sense so far?
Okay, so this researcher, Renee Bergeon, kind of turned the timing of object properties on its head a little bit in some sort of really unique kind of creative studies that she devised.
So when you look at her description and you see this particular study in infants, I want you to think about how this particular study tests object permanence.
How is it that it tests object permanence?
How do we know that object permanence exists when a baby does one thing versus another thing, and then what does the study say about the outcome of the object permanence?
Based on Piaget's time frame?
Remember, Piaget said about nine months.
It didn't start.
Renee Bajohn's research shows that it might start a bit earlier than that.
Experiments to discover previously unsuspected abilities of newborns and young children.
Professor Rene Bayon studies how babies develop the concept of object permanence.
By object permanence we mean really a set of beliefs about objects.
The first and most fundamental belief is that objects continue to exist when hidden.
The first person to investigate the development of object permanence beliefs and aims infants was Jean Piaget, the famous Swiss psychologist.
And he claimed that it's not until approximately 8 to 9 months of age that infants understand that objects continue to exist when hidden and that it's not until approximately 12 months of age that babies begin to understand that objects not only exist, but retain their physical and spatial properties when hidden.
What we've done is to devise a series of tasks where the infant simply had to look at possible and impossible.
In this experiment, a six month old Baby watches a cart rolling down tracks, going behind a screen to coming out the other side.
The screen is lifted to show a block sitting behind the tracks.
Next, the baby sees the block placed on top of the tracks.
The screen comes down, the cart rolls exactly as before.
But in the real world of permanent objects, the block should have stopped the car.
The baby stares longer at this apparently impossible event.
When infants are surprised or puzzled by an event, they tend to look at it longer.
So our prediction is always that if infants perceive the events as we do, then they will look longer at the impossible or magical event than at the possible event.
What we found is that infants as young as three and a half months of age, and perhaps younger, but certainly as young as three and a half months of age, understand that objects continue to exist when hidden.
One contribution of this research is to say that we must really take a very close look at infants physical knowledge.
It's much richer, much more sophisticated than is to be thought.
Okay, so what do you think here?
How is this a test of object permanence?
It's more creative, a little bit more complex than just hiding a teddy bear, seeing if the infant searches for it.
So how is this a test of object permanence?
Think about it.
If the baby sees a block behind the track, a car going through, then the baby sees the block on the track, cork goes through.
It's only because the researcher, of course, pulled the block away.
But the baby doesn't know that.
Why would the baby stare longer at that than when it knows the block is not on the track?
Well, if the baby didn't have object permanence, it wouldn't matter how long.
Like it wouldn't surprise them.
Right, because they wouldn't remember the block being there or not.
Right.
But for them to know, remember that the block was there in one, one condition and not there in the other condition, they must remember where the location of the block was.
They must remember even though they can't see it.
So that means that must mean that they have some level of object permanence.
They remember the block being in different places.
But Piaget said, no, not three months, four months.
It's not until nine months that babies can remember something and they can't see it.
But the baby in this case remembers the position of the block.
It stares longer when it thinks the block is on the track than when it's not on the track, even though it can't see it.
So it has a memory of where the block has been placed.
So it sort of turned this Piaget Timing thing on its head.
The baby certainly knows remembers where the block is because otherwise it wouldn't stare longer at the case where it thinks the block is on the track.
Right.
So that's really fascinating when you think about it.
And one of the problems there is the first fact that babies staring at something is different than reaching for it.
Remember I talked about the babies have to coordinate what they see and what they can touch.
Well, that has a lot to do with whether or not they search for a bear like they a stuffed animal.
And here it doesn't rely on them.
It relies on them staring at something and staring longer.
Does that make sense to folks?
And then what does the timing say here?
Piaget says nine months.
That does it really start?
When is she saying it starts?
Object from three and a half.
Yeah, three and a half.
Maybe younger than that.
Her research is so cool.
This is really old actually in this video, but it still stands the test of time.
But her research now she's actually looking at infants in the way they understand fairness and justice.
And when 1st animal gets like a toy and another stuffed animal gets two toys and the way that the baby reacts to that, the lack of fair, the lack of fairness with the other stuffed animal, it's like to me, it's just unbelievable that babies have an understanding of fairness at a really young age.
Makes sense to folks.
Textbook gives you this other example, right?
Oh, by the way, infants have a rudimentary understanding of physics.
They know that a car should not go through a block.
So that's amazing as well, right here.
Infants may have a rudimentary understanding of mathematics.
Right?
One plus one should equal two.
And when it doesn't, they stare longer at that situation than when it actually equals two.
So not only do they have an understanding of object permanence at a young age, but they also understand that simple mathematics, which again, I think is really, really fascinating.
Okay, so second stage of development, pre operational stage.
One of the things that kids sort of have a hard time doing is taking the perspective of another person.
So they're egocentric.
They have a hard time kind of putting themselves in another person's shoes.
They are better at this later in the stage than they are in the beginning of the stage.
This does not mean selfishness.
It can lead to selfishness.
If we're egocentric, we have a hard time putting ourselves in another person.
Choosing it can lead us to be selfish.
But egocentrism and selfishness are not the same thing.
So egocentrism is the difficulty taking another person's perspective.
And so we see, like, early research with kids.
Let's say, for example, here we have Dot.
We'll call her Dot.
And she has a box.
Well, get to the box of candy first.
So she's got some friends outside the door.
Friends can't see inside the door to see what Dot's doing.
Dot has a box of dots, right?
Candy.
She takes the box of dots, she throws them down her throat, and she then fills the box of dots with pencils, closes up the box.
She wants to play a trick on her friends.
We ask Dot, you know, she's an egocentric child.
She's three years old.
You know, what is her friend?
What are her friends going to say is in the box?
They didn't see her replace the dots with pencils.
What do you think that she's going to say?
Even though.
Because she's egocentric.
Trial.
Three years old, what is she gonna say?
Those friends are gonna say are in the box, pencils or candy?
That's what we would say.
That's our best guess, right?
Candy's gonna be in the box because it says candy.
That's our best guess.
She knows that she puts pencils in the box.
So what is she gonna say?
They're gonna say she has in the box pencils.
She can't take their perspective.
They didn't see.
She only has her own perspective.
My kids are really bad at practical jokes.
So she's gonna say that the kid that.
They're gonna say there's pencils in the box.
But no, it's not until she gets later that she's gonna understand.
Oh, wait a minute.
If I was out there, I wouldn't have seen me put pencils in the box.
My best guess would be candy.
So she had a hard time taking that kid's perspective.
Does that make sense to folks?
Okay, all right.
So in this third stage, the concrete operational stage, we're thinking logically.
Concrete.
We have a hard time understanding things at an abstract level.
It's just like, what's in front of us.
That makes a lot more sense to us.
And so one of the things that the task that kids have to learn in this time is something called conservation.
Conservation is the understanding that properties such as mass, spine, and number remain the same despite the fact that it might change in some sort of form.
So one of the simpler conservation tasks that Piaget did was he would showcase two beakers of liquid, saying that were the same amount in each liquid.
And in front of them, he would ask them, you know, which beakers you Know, have more liquid or less liquid, or are they the same?
The kid would say they're the same amount.
He would pour one of those beakers into a taller beaker and then ask which of these beakers has more liquid.
The same liquid, or is it the same shit?
This.
This beaker has more liquid than this one.
It's done right in front of her.
But she still thinks that the beaker has more liquid here.
If he does pours it back, they're the same.
He pours it back this way again.
This one has more.
Right.
Doesn't understand it's the same amount of liquid.
Even though it's transformed, it looks different.
Does that make sense?
Okay, so there's all sorts of conservation tasks.
Make this one larger figure.
It's not in our textbook.
It gives you a sense of the type of conservation and when kids actually tend to master it.
So conservation of number.
You just pull out the apples in a row.
Then we know that this row has the same number of apples as this row.
But kids who are younger than 6 will say that this row has more apples than this row.
Conservation of mass, Same thing.
Conservation of length, a little bit harder.
Conservation of area.
These are cubes.
If you see this, which area has more area taken up?
This area right here or this area here?
Turns out it's exactly the same amount of area.
It's just that the cubes are distributed.
In a different way.
It's the same amount of area is taken up.
And so it takes them a little bit longer between the ages of 8 to 9 to actually master this type.
Excuse me, of conservation.
But they can't do it at the beginning of this particular stage.
Pre operational stage.
That's concrete.
Operational size at the moment.
Does that make sense?
Okay.
Formal operational, the ability to understand things abstractly is one of the major kind of tasks of this particular stage.
At the beginning of the stage, you have a hard time.
They sort of get it a little bit later.
Piaget did say that some adults don't actually master a formal operational stage.
A lot of it has to do with schooling.
If you're in school, you're more likely to be able to do this in a school.
To give you an example of some abstract logic, hypothetical thinking, you know, what would happen if.
It's like, you know, what would happen if everyone parked in front of the store who just had to go in for a few minutes, Right?
And, you know, a young child might say there'd be a lot of cars.
I mean, they would have a hard time understanding you.
And I know what happens if lots of people, everyone was wants to go to the store just a few minutes parked right in front of the store.
What could happen if everyone did that?
Want me to have laws against this?
What do you have in front of a store?
By all lines.
Please restore my faith in you.
Right?
What'll happen if everyone had just run into the store in a minute parked in front of the store?
If there was a fire emergency?
Right.
The emergency vehicles wouldn't be able to get to the the store.
You have all these cars parked there, Right.
So we think in the future we can think about things hypothetically.
Harder for young kids to do that.
I say this as a some advice to Home Depot that also includes equipment.
If you're putting your equipment in the fire lane in front of the store, emergency vehicles can't get in front of the store because your equipment's in the fire lane.
Depending on what works for Home Depot just isn't athletic.
Systematic problem solving.
We'll get that in a second.
Abstract concept, just like metaphors, right?
Okay, tell.
Let's, you know, let's, let's, you know, kill two birds with one stone.
Does.
Not work well with young kids.
They have a hard time with these kind of abstract concepts.
Right?
Let's kill.
Beat a dead horse.
Not a good thing to say to a six or seven year old.
They don't really get those things.
You have to be older to really understand that.
Peter, Peter.
People do the ethical treatment of animals.
I've said this for a long time.
We need to change our metaphors.
That along the abuse of animals.
Probably a good idea.
Their alternatives were terrible and I never remember to look them up again.
But they're not good alternatives.
But kids have a hard time actually understanding these ab concepts.
Systematic problem solving is another thing that comes forth the full operational stage.
So let's say, for example, I give you four beakers of, of clear liquid.
So you have a combination of only two of them leads to a colored liquid.
Here's a beaker you can do to kind of combine them in.
There's two ways to solve this problem.
Okay.
One is more formal systematic problem solving.
And another is really just trial and error.
So if you do trial and error, you're just kind of randomly assign, you know, combining these liquids.
What's the problem with just doing trial and errors?
This is an easy one, but even then it can be a pain.
But if you just do trial and error, you lose track of your combinations, right?
So the systematic way is to do what you combine a.
With B.
That doesn't work.
A with C, A with D. Right.
You do B and C. A do B and D, and then you do C and D. They have all the combination.
You keep track of trial and error just random by trying.
You don't keep track of them as well.
Right.
So it's my favorite character of Muppets.
All right, so let's see your test.
We're going to do a little test of your knowledge of these concepts that we just talked about.
So here we're going to look at Homer, okay?
And we're going to look at his behavior on the phone.
We're going to say whether or not he is displaying this concept or he's lacking his concept, he's still what you're saying, at least initially.
So in this particular scene.
Or is quitting a bunch of things.
I think he maybe is quitting the football team or something like that.
They're at dinner, and he wants to make a.
A point to his son Bart, that, you know, they don't come from a family of quitters.
And you'll see him actually call his boss on the phone.
We're going to look at his behavior while he's on the phone to see if he's lacking or displaying one of these concepts.
I didn't raise him to be a quitter, Marge.
It must have been you.
You quit every job you've ever had.
Cop, pretzel vendor, church counselor, professional gambler.
He's doing what he thinks is best.
Well, if quitting is the best, maybe I should just quit my job.
Mr. Burns, this is Homer J. Simpson, the father of the big quitter.
Well, I just wanted to tell you I'm a big quitter, too, and I win.
Homer, Mr. Burns can't see you winking.
So back.
Okay, so take a minute to discuss with a neighbor.
What do you think?
What.
What concept applies here?
The most and easy.
Do you explain the concept, or is he lacking.
And.
No, I think we're doing that.
Yeah.
So what do you think?
What concept kind of applies here?
Is he displaying it, or is he, like, he's displaying his entry?
Why does it look like he's displaying.
Playing egocentrism.
My hearing might be really bad, but I noticed a lot.
Does it mean that students are not speaking?
You can speak a little louder.
That just may be for my benefit, so I apologize.
He's disappointed because, like, he's not realizing that his boss can't see his prison.
Right?
At least initially.
He seems to be oblivious to the fact that his boss can't see him win, which is a really big misstep on him his part.
Right.
So he doesn't take this perspective.
His boss is on the phone or wink.
And you know, if you ever spend some time with a kid on the phone, like who's 2 or 3 years old, like, is school going well?
And they're just silent.
Do you like classes?
And they're not responding.
You could think, well, boy, that gets stuck up.
They don't even want to respond to me.
What's the alternative?
What are they doing on the other end of the phone?
They're nodding.
Right.
They don't know that you can't see that.
Right.
So the their e little kids, they don't know any better.
Right.
That's just a little.
Okay.
Does that make sense to folks?
Okay.
All right, here we have Homer again.
He's not the sharpest tool in this chat, as we know from.
I'll tell you that maybe why that is in a second, if you know the show.
But he has somehow been elected by his co workers to engage in conversation with his boss about a year of contract.
So again, we're going to look at his behavior here, whether or not he seems to be, which concept applies and whether he's blocking it.
The sound.
I don't understand.
Why is Mr. Burns being so nice to me?
If you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours.
Wait a minute.
Is he coming on to me?
If I should slip something into your pocket that's to harm.
Oh my God, he is coming on to me.
After all, negotiations make strange gunfiddles.
Sorry, Mr. Burns, but I don't going for these backdoor shenanigans.
Sure, I'm flattered, maybe even a little curious, but the answer is no.
So what do you think?
So take a second to talk on Amber and see what you think in terms of which concept best applies and whether you're studying it.
So what do you think?
What concept is he displaying or lacking in.
The abstract reasoning.
Very good.
Abstract reasoning.
And does he seem to be displaying it or does he seem to be lacking abstract reasoning.
It that he's not understanding them.
Well, he's not understanding it, so he's lacking abstract.
Right.
He thinks that what his boss is saying to him is literal, like it's a come on kind of.
He's taking it more in a concrete way than he is in an abstract way.
So he seems to be lacking abstract reasoning over here.
Now, like kids, you know?
Are we saying that kids are are dumb because they lack some qualities?
I always think of Karen, Grace.
Like, kids are dumb, right?
It's like.
But no, kids, they're not dumb.
They're just.
They don't have this rudimentary kind of stuff kind of solved yet.
They don't have that developmental problem, you know, yet.
When they get older, they have the ability.
They're a lot smarter than you when they get older, so please don't make fun of them.
Right.
Kind of thing.
Same thing kind of with Homer.
They do make a little bit of fun of him on the show, you know, Lisa's not so happy with the fact that her father's not all that bright, apparently.
But it turns out he's a genius.
The reason why he's not a genius is because when he was a kid, he had crayon shoved up his nose.
Like, you think his brain.
You ever see this?
And so he goes to a surgeon to have them taken out.
All of a sudden, they find out he's actually a genius.
But it turns out they.
He alienates all his friends now that he's a genius.
Lisa loves it, but his friends all hate it.
So he pleads with them to put the crayons back in his nose.
And so they put him up, and he's like, sure, I'll take the extended warranty.
And they're like, no, he's not there yet.
They shove him further up.
He comes crashing the window.
Who wants lottery tickets?
And he has fistfuls of lottery tickets.
Anyway, so they're saying basically is he's doing some things that aren't exactly very smart.
And they realize they hit it with the lottery tickets.
Okay, this person, or actually, we're looking at the dog telling someone, oh, if you break the treat in half, they think it's two treats.
And later that night.
So we're looking at the dog's behavior here.
What concept applies?
And are they locking it or just playing it?
No, I don't think so.
That would be weird, wouldn't it?
The dog has lost its eye on the bedpost.
That'd be kind of scary.
It's bothering so hard that his eye pops out.
Now it's stuck on the bedpost.
I have not noticed that before.
So what do you think?
What?
Wait.
Why is his eye just hovering in space there?
I've shown this to so many classes, no one's ever commented on that before.
That is really quite bizarre.
Okay.
Anyway, it's not some psychological trick that.
I'm playing on you.
I'd never noticed that before.
It's just the way the cartoon was drawn, I suppose.
Anyway, so what are we looking at in terms of the concept that applies?
Conservation.
Does the dog seem to have conservation or is it lacking conservation?
Yeah, it seems like it has it.
Like he knows that.
No, you split it in two.
It's still the same amount of tree.
I'm going to kill you.
At least at the moment he seems to now recognize.
Does that make sense to folks?
Okay, last one here you have baby has a balloon.
It starts to float away.
And as it starts to float away, he starts to cry.
But after, you know, not that many seconds, all of a sudden it's further away than he can see it.
He just kind of stops crying.
Doesn't even realize it exists anymore.
Take a second to think about what concept applies here.
And he's.
Is he displaying it or locking it?
Yes.
What do you think he's lacking?
Object permanence.
Yeah, lacking object permanence.
He doesn't seem to realize it still exists.
Initially, when he can see it flying away, he starts to cry.
But as it kind of gets away to a point where he can't see anymore, it's like it doesn't exist anymore.
Doesn't realize it exists.
He doesn't miss it anymore because he can't see it.
So he lacks object permanence.
Does that make sense?
All of these, by the way, don't happen all of a sudden in someone.
They don't occur, they don't start to.
Don't start to develop object permanence.
When you have it fully fleshed out at that moment, it's happened sort of in a gradual way.
Okay.
So it's not like you have it or you don't have it.
There are elements of you having some of it at some point, and then you gradually get sort of more complex.
You're gaining that particular type of cognitive milestone.
Okay.
All right.
So another important concept that Piaget talks about is the difference between sort of assimilation and accommodation.
Talks about schemas.
It's a concept conceptual framework that organizes or interprets information.
And so the textbook gives this example, and I'll give another example that's not from the textbook.
But you have a little girl who has a pre existing scheme of her dogs, what dogs will look like, four legs, a tail, furry and so forth.
Then sees a picture of a cat for the first time or sees a cat for the first time.
She can either assimilate, which is basically calling the kind of dog which is interpreting our experience in terms of our existing schema.
So we keep our, we keep our schema.
We just say the cat is a dog, or we can accommodate by creating a new schema for cats.
So we adapt our current schemas to.
Incorporate new information.
And so we can do the same thing with different types of vehicles.
I'll show this was a project for some class somewhere on YouTube and we'll see how they look at it.
In terms of schemas, a similar combination.
Our categories are the basic structures we use to organize information.
They're almost like folders.
In this case, the categories are about vehicles, cars and trucks.
Information is sorted into these schemas or concepts.
Each new piece of information has to have somewhere to go, a folder to fit into.
When new information can fit into one of the schemas that has already been created, like cars or trucks, it is placed there.
This is called assimilation.
Sometimes we come across new information that does not fit into any of the already existing schemas.
An Escalade isn't a car or a truck.
That means a new folder or schema has to be created.
So this information has a place like SUVs.
This process is called accommodation.
The Escalade now has a folder to fit into a schema it belongs to.
Now new information can continue to be sorted into schemas using assimilation.
And the process continues.
So right here we have our pre existing team which composed trucks.
We get something new that's really neither a truck, it's a suv.
And so we can do one of two things.
We can, you know, put it into one of our existing simulated by calling the SUV a truck, where we can accommodate and we can actually create a new folder for this and call it an suv.
I often misspell it as svu, but it's actually suv.
Right?
So I'm very stubborn here.
I do not have a schema, at least in this case, for SUVs that fits an Escalade.
An Escalade.
I'm very stubborn.
An Escalade is a truck.
Like a very young child, very stubborn.
Escalade is not, as I think of an Escue, as a truck.
You see, you see an Escalade, that's a honking huge vehicle.
I think of that as a truck.
But technically, because of the chassis that it has and so forth, is actually not a truck.
It's actually an suv.
So I'm very stubborn.
Does that make sense to books?
But most people have a folder for an suv.
So this is again, when you think about what is the signal when you see this possible bonus question.
So TJ was very, very astute, very interested, a very curious kind of person.
Even from being a young child.
And his first work was not in the cognitive development of folks or children.
It was actually something different.
He wrote his.
Published his first scientific papers while in high school.
His first scientific papers were not about cognitive development, not about humans at all.
They were about mollusks, just as an FYI.
All right.
Big question about cognitive development is he did a very bound face kind of shift in his interest in science from squid to Chinese.
Not exactly the same thing.
Okay.
All right.
Attachment, social development.
Okay.
This is another area of development.
Attachment, an emotional tie with another person.
Some of the early work that went on in this area is from someone named Ainsworth, Mary Ainsworth.
But the predominant theory until the 1950s was that infants become attached to those who provide nourishment.
So the reason why our infants who are attached to us seem to love us is because we feed them.
Right.
So that was a predominant idea until sometime in the 1950s.
And some of our early research, before we doing research with humans, was done with monkeys.
So the harlot had worked with monkeys.
It became world famous at this time, even outside of science.
So he had what we call surrogate monkey mothers.
He wanted to test this idea, you know, is attachment about nourishment or an attachment about something different, like what we call contact, comfort, like touch?
So he had two surrogate monkeys, one who had provided nourishment but was like a wire, like a wire cage, essentially.
And one that didn't provide nourishment, but was like terry cloth, was, like very soft.
So we had the wire mesh monkey with milk and a soft cloth one with no milk.
And so the hypothesis is that young monkeys would prefer 1 over 2 because of the fact that one provided nourishment, the other one did not.
Because that was our theory about attachment.
We found that that was not the case.
But monkeys actually prefer 2 over 1.
They also prefer things like warmth and rocking over nourishment.
And so what they did oftentimes was that they would hang on to the terry cloth mother and they would lean over and get the milk and then come right back to the terry cloth mother.
They strongly prefer the terry cloth mother that had no milk.
They needed milk for nourishment, but that's not where they stayed.
They didn't feel comfortable being the one that provide nourishment.
They felt comfortable for the one that actually was soft.
Does that make sense to folks?
This, believe it or not, was revolutionary.
At the time, people really didn't think this way.
They made the COVID of Life magazine, which was A big magazine at the time.
This is really, really big science that came now into our everyday world understood this.
As you know, it wasn't just about nourishment.
So mentioned Mary Ingsworth.
We're now looking at research with infants and young children up until the age usually around one or so years old.
And so she wanted to see if there were differences in the attachment that children had to their mothers.
We weren't really studying mothers at this time.
And so the first step that she had in her research was to see.
She wanted to look at mother responsiveness to infants between the ages of 06 months.
Was able to classify mothers as either responsive, more responsive, cold, rejecting, or ambivalent, inconsistent.
So warm responsive would be mothers who always were attending to their babies, were always kind of loving to them and so forth, whether they were crying or not.
Hold rejecting meant that the mothers really were not, you know, they didn't pick their babies up, they didn't try and comfort them and so forth.
They were ambivalent and inconsistent where sometimes they were warm and responsive and other times they seemed to ignore their.
That was step one in her research.
Step two was to observe infants at year one in a strange situation.
Now, the strange situation did a couple of things.
Stranger anxiety, by the way, doesn't happen until about the year of about 12 months or so.
Kids don't get really upset when they're left with a stranger alone or introduced to a stranger until this time.
They also don't get separation anxiety dying till around this time starts to peak around this time.
Okay, so you leave an infant alone when they're one month old.
They don't cry because you left it alone.
But it's not until we see around the year of 12 months or around 1 years of age that they actually are really like, you know, one to two years old is where they really start to have a lot of separation anxiety.
So this is a strange situation, pairs those two things together.
So you let a mother leave while there's a stranger there.
Now, you would expect the kid to be really, really upset.
Those two things are paired together.
Okay, so this is what the strange situation looks like.
I had the stranger anxiety there.
And the separation anxiety, strange situation, which is simplified, would look something like this.
You have the mother present with the infant.
Then a stranger enters, the mother's still in the room.
The mother leaves and the stranger remains there.
Then the mother returns and the stranger leaves.
What Ainsworth wanted to know, of course, she didn't use these people at the time.
This was the 1870s.
She wants to know, did all infants respond similarly to the strange situation?
Did they all respond the same way to this situation?
It turns out no.
The were differences.
The differences she thought were differences in the way that they were attached to the mother.
Right?
So there was some infants that what she called secure attached.
They were securely attached.
They were upset when the mother left.
They're now with a stranger, Right.
They.
And they fairly rarely calmed when the mother came down, came back, Right.
So the mother left while the stranger was in the room.
They got really upset when the mother returned and the stranger left.
They were still upset, but they sort of calmed down fairly readily.
Yay, mommy's back kind of thing.
Right.
It was one type of reaction to the strange situation.
She called that a secure attachment.
There are two types of insecure attachments, right?
Someone's very proud.
There were two types of insecure attachments.
They were upset when the mother left.
They were almost more upset when she came back.
Paints.
So they just didn't seem to really calm down very easily when she came back.
They almost were more upset.
In some cases.
She called this anxious ambivalent attachment.
And then there was the avoidant attachment where they weren't really upset when the mother left and they weren't.
They don't really care when she came back.
So they're kind of just, you know, whatever, you know.
So they called this avoidant attachment.
Right.
So these two were insecure attachments, according to Ainsworth.
And these, this was a secure attachment.
It's more complicated than this in reality, but to kind of the basics are one type of secure attachment and another.
Two types of insecure attachments make sense so far.
Okay, so Ainsworth also wanted to know, was there an association between the attachment we saw in the strange situation and what we saw from mother's responsiveness when the child was an infant between 0 and 6 months of age?
And she did find an association.
She found that warm, responsive mothers tended to have babies that were securely attached and ambivalent, inconsistent, had mothers who were anxious and the anxious, ambivalent kids had mothers who were ambivalent or inconsistent in their mouth and responsiveness.
And the avoidantly attached kids had mothers who were cold and rejected.
So we saw an association between this and.
So the idea here was that according to Ainsworth, that warm response as mothers creates securely attached children.
Right?
Ambivalent, inconsistent mothers.
Great.
Anxious, ambivalent children and cold and rejecting mothers create avoidant children.
This sounds very causal.
We should be very careful because this we could not, we can't do causal from this.
And we'll talk about why that is in a second.
But certainly that's what she was sort of implying here, that there were causal reasons.
That was the way the mother treated the infant when I was young led to these kinds of attachments.
So just keep that in mind.
Right.
That she's saying it's causal.
There's some questions about whether this really, we can say something causal about this.
We go later in life, though.
We started research that said your attachment style as a child doesn't then go on to influence the way you are in romantic relationships, not just romantic friendships.
But so we do find that your attachment style style seems to be stable from childhood.
Right.
It does seem like it's a basis for later relationships.
So if you're securely attached as a child in your adult relationships, you generally have trust of others.
You have more secure relationships.
Okay.
If you are insecurely attached as a child, as an adulthood, if you were anxious or built as a child in adulthood, you might have relationships that are more.
You feel confident rejection.
Your.
You're more likely to be jealous.
You have more unstable relationships if you're avoidantly attached to the child.
You're more likely to kind of maintain distance in relationships if you're getting close.
And you're often regarded as cold in those relationships.
Okay.
So we see some stability going from your early childhood attachment to your later adult relationships.
Again, saying something causal about this, even though the researchers are early on saying that somewhat problematic.
The question is then, do we go all the way back to our parents, particularly our mothers, to explain or perhaps accuse them of why we might have insecure relationships later in our life, which could be what we do.
Right.
When you think about it, based on this research, which I'm shooting up there, saying that's a mess to scold us from doing that.
There's a lot of reasons for that.
We'll see why that is.
Okay.
There's something called temperament.
Temperament is thought to be an inborn trait.
It's our characteristic emotional reactivity and intensity.
So you can have kids who, as they come out right out of the womb, they are really easy babies.
Right?
You can.
You feed them and they calm down.
You put them to bed, they're tired because they're cranky and they're crying.
You put them to bed, they calm down, they readily.
They sleep through the night.
Once you get them to be, you know, a year old, six months old, a year old, they're actually sleeping through the night.
Right.
Very easy babies.
Parents are very happy when they have Those kind of babies, we think that's a temperament thing.
Not.
That doesn't have to do necessarily with the way that the mother is treating the babies.
They come out that way.
Right.
You have very difficult babies, babies who will not stop crying.
No matter what you do, they won't stop crying.
Right.
It's just.
And you have mothers who are like trying so hard to get them to stop crying.
Sometimes they look warm and responsive, other times they just have to leave them there because there's nothing you can do.
There's nothing you do to get them to stop crying.
So they look ambivalent, inconsistent.
Right.
They look like sometimes they're warm and loving and sometimes they're cold and rejected.
Can they do anything?
They have slow to warm up babies, babies that like, you can play with them and smile on them as much as you want.
And they don't seem to really kind of respond back to them.
That's just the way some babies seem to come out.
So there's an inch warm.
There's a, a trait that's there at birth.
It interacts with the way the mothers are.
And even the best mothers who are warm, responsive after a while are going to look avoided if the baby doesn't respond to them.
Right.
Even the best mothers.
I have a friend whose mother called me.
She came out, my friend came out within a few months that she was sleeping through the night.
A few months she was sleeping through the night.
She would sleep 10 hours, 12 hours through the night.
You know what a gift that is, right?
To have a baby that sleeps through the night that easily.
Her sister, on the other hand, two years, never slept more than two hours straight.
It wasn't one night where that sister went two hours straight.
Do you know how hard that is for this woman who is the most loving woman?
She was such a great mother.
Now she has a baby that will not sleep more than two hours in the night.
You know how difficult that is for someone.
That mother's after six months is not going to look like the warm loving mother that she was to her sister.
You know, it's.
She's going to just have.
That baby's just going to be down, crying.
She's going to look like she doesn't care, but she really does.
So there's an interaction between the mother's responsiveness and the inborn distemperment that the baby is born with.
Does that make sense to folks?
Just very.
It's important to understand that we didn't used to understand that back in the 70s.
We understand that now.
Okay.
Does it mean that though responsiveness means nothing and temperament is everything?
No, that's not the case at all.
Right.
So we know that temperament interacts with mother responsiveness and this can alter attachment.
We're going to see some examples of that.
The environment does matter.
So it's not like, you know, mothering doesn't mean anything responsive.
This, though, is only one type of parenting skill.
There's lots of other skills that we can have to interact with the temperament of the child.
Our temperament is actually only one aspect of our personality.
So our temperament that we have when we're born doesn't mean it's our whole 10 personalities as we grow up.
And then how can we never talk about fathers?
Right.
None of this early research ever talked about fathers, just about fathers.
Right.
So we're going to kind of delve into this at least a little bit, go through it a little bit quickly.
But the Harlows actually wanted to do something a little more experimentally here, which is a little bit tragic in some ways.
Some other variations here that they actually placed surrogates, monkeys with, you know, surrogates that really.
They didn't give them the opportunity to be able to secure cigarette that had.
That had the terry cloth.
They only placed them with the ones with some of the monkeys with the ones that just gave nourishment.
They didn't give the opportunity to be placed with ones that had the terry cloth.
The ones that were placed with the ones with forced to only interact with number one.
They were horrible.
They came out like they were terrified of new situations when they had their own children, they were neglecting of them.
Sometimes they killed their new.
Their offspring.
So the outcome for not having this body contact, this comfort was.
Was devastating to these young monkeys.
Right.
So we know that you have to have some emotional kind of contact.
So what we call contact comfort as a child, not just nourishment, in order to develop a healthy sort of social attachment and overall sort of life.
Vanden Moon was a researcher in the 90s who worked with parents.
And what she did was she actually looked at temporarily difficult infants.
So these are really infants that had either usually avoidant or anxious ambivalent kind of attachments early on.
And what she did was she took the parents of these infants, she assigned some of the parents to a training in sensitive responding and another parent group who got no training at all.
She wanted to see if there was a difference in the outcome.
Did these infants become sort of more securely attached in group one versus group two over time?
And it Turns out that the ones who had been in the securely the training and responsive group, the parents had been in that group.
That 68% of those remember previously, really temporarily difficult infants went on to be securely attached.
They almost like changed in their temperament in some respects.
And then only 28% of the control group went on to be securely attached.
And so really difficult infants at the outset, half of the mothers would be trained them in sensitive responding.
Mothers we didn't train at all.
The ones who were trained in sensitive responding, their kids became more securely attached.
Right.
Than the ones who were not put into that group.
And so mothering.
Right.
Responding does make a difference.
It's not the whole thing, but it's not that it's not.
It's not that it's uncool.
Does that make sense to folks?
So attachment can change when the environment changes to go to fathering.
Right.
International research on fathering.
So things like responsiveness, love and acceptance, involvement in child's life, similar as the results for mothers.
So we see better outcomes for children or we see that there's father responsiveness in mom and child's life and so forth.
Now what we see that comes out of a lot of this research and what people will term this research as, that single parents result in unhealthy children.
That's not what this research says, by the way.
It's not the conclusion.
They did a reboot.
Reboot.
That's not Canadian.
The reboot of Murphy Brown very recently didn't last very long.
But Murphy Brown was a single mother who was fairly well off, very wealthy.
But she decided to.
She got pregnant.
She decided to keep the child, even though there was the father wasn't that involved in life.
And then Vice President Dan Quayle went on to say some not so nice things about her, saying that this was bad for the child and so forth, and use this research to say that that would be the case.
That the outcome in reality, if it had been a real child, which it wasn't, that the outcome would be abysmal for this child.
That's not what this research says either.
People used it to say that.
They would also say that this research automatically says that gay couples resulted healthy, unhealthy children.
For example, lesbian couples.
You go, father absence, fat father absence equal poor outcome.
Therefore lesbian couples equal poor outcomes.
That's not what this research does either.
But people have been using it to say that.
But that's not what the results of this research is actually saying environmental things in the environment of the child, like emotional sort of Deprivation because of overcrowding.
So in Romania, we had a situation where, where the government did not want to take seriously HIV aids.
Right?
They didn't want to educate people about this in the 80s.
And it led to a lot of orphan children.
We had parents who died of HIV and AIDS.
And you had these 15 to 1, you know, child to caregiver ratios in these orphanages.
So think about that.
You have infants, there's 15 infants to one caregiver.
Can you imagine that?
That's like against the law in this country, by the way.
But in Romania, that was a common thing.
They didn't have enough resources.
And we saw that these offerings did not particularly, you know, fare very well because they didn't have.
How can you possibly respond to 15 infants?
Right?
You'd have enough people to pick you up, to hold you when you were crying, to respond to you.
It was kind of a disaster.
You saw a lot of decrease in intelligence, increase in anxiety.
I can't say it's causal, but we can say that we did see in a certain association between that limited caregiving and these kind of variables.
When we look at studies, neglect, physical abuse and sexual abuse, we definitely see increase in health, health problems, psychological disorders, substance abuse problems, aggression, you know, criminality, poor self confidence.
These are not experimental.
We could not do an experimental study in this area, as you might imagine, right?
It would be horrible to do experimental studies, study.
Let's, let's abuse some children, let's not abuse other children.
We'll randomly assign them into the abuse or no abuses, and let's see what happens.
Right?
That would be horrible.
We could never do that.
We have to take this kind of research and look at it very closely.
Control for certain variables can also look at things like the severity, right?
So if we see the severity of the abuse, neglect increases, we also see the severity of problem increases.
So that's one sort of, you know, marked for the idea that this is actually not helpful for children.
We look at identical twins, identical twins who suffers abuse, but the other twin doesn't.
We see the twin that did suffer the abuse has the increase in problems.
So genetically they're the same.
This one aspect of their environment differs.
We see an increase in the problems for the twins who suffered.
Right.
That makes sense to find folks, right?
So we can't do experimental studies here, but we can look at twin studies.
We can look at severity, abuse and so forth.
Okay.
All right.
So again, looking at other types of parenting styles, this is sort of level of control in terms of parenting styles, right?
We see authoritative, permissive and sorry, authoritarian.
Permissive and authoritative.
Okay, so in authoritarian parenting stuff, someone who's very coercive doesn't give kids any kind of control whatsoever.
The association here again we can't say causal, right, because it's not an experiment.
But we see decrease in social confidence, decrease in self esteem.
We see permissive parents.
These are parents who almost get too much control to their kids, right?
They don't have a lot of high expectations, they don't set very few limits and so forth.
They set few limits.
We see more, more aggressiveness and less maturity than an authoritative, not authoritarian, authoritative, which is thought to be more of a better balance here.
They're confrontive, they give some power, but they still retain some power.
But they set, you know, consistent rules, consistent discipline.
They give reasonable but high expectations.
They're in response, but they're described sometimes as firmly caring.
And we see an increase in self esteem, increase in an increase in social competency.
So again, not necessarily experiment here, but we do see some resulting kind of traits.
But again, right again not correlation with correlation.
We look at temperament again, right?
You have temperament interacting with parenting styles.
You have a really, really, really difficult child and then you put them in a situation that's permissive, permissive parenting, that's not a good kind of combination.
So we see temperament interacting with the parenting styles.
The parenting styles may have something to do with the parents own temperament.
So again we have to look at this as a little bit more closely than necessarily saying that type of parenting style leads to a certain type of person as a child because we're not looking at experimental research.
Could you just once again go over the difference between the principle of possibility.
And then the confirmation bias?
Yes.
Okay.
When we're talking about the confirmation bias, we're talking about someone who ignores.
They have a belief, they ignore information.
Ignore is the real primary word here.
They ignore information that, that contradicts their belief and they focus on information that confirms their belief.
So usually this is something that's out of their awareness.
Sometimes it's like if you think if you're doing a position paper on let's say gun control and say you have a certain position also you start to come up with articles that seem to contradict your position.
It's like you pretend they don't exist.
Right.
So like I'm not going to deal with up as to what we look at principle as well as survivability would do something like they would take that contradictory information.
They don't ignore it.
They take the contradictory information.
They kind of twist it around.
They kind of, they do it in a way so no matter what contradictory information comes at them, it still supports their belief.
Right?
They twist it.
They kind of pretend that someone did, you know, this wall so they did the research wrong.
It really means this when they say so no matter what happens, it still supports their belief.
And the confirmation bias, they just ignore it to complete to begin with.
So it's sort of like someone, a student said this to me recently.
Sort of like confirmation bias is sort of like a maybe a normal sense of sort of stubbornness about our beliefs about something.
But the principle of false ability is like certifiably crazy or at least I don't know, when she said that I was like, you know, actually that might help me kind of give track with as well.
It's sort of like there's nothing you can do to tell someone that their belief is contradicted.
When you violate the false false at its most extreme level, violating principle of falsifiability.
Just no one you're not going to accept anything as evidence against and the confirmation Bias.
You just pretend it doesn't exist.
I think easier to just ignore it.
It's full of falsifiability.
You're just twisting things in a way.
You're always going to be right no matter what.
You don't allow yourself to be disproven and in any way, shape or form violating principal falsifiability.
Can you kind of give us like a brief summary of each type of study?
Like the experimental and naturalistic.
Well, experimental studies always manipulate a variable.
So there's actually someone who's doing something that's making one group experience something on purpose and another group experience something else on purpose.
So experiments always manipulate a variable.
All the other experiments are just looking at what is.
In some ways they're measuring what is.
They're not intervening in any way to make sure that something changes with one group or something like that.
So in some respects, on that basic level, there's experimental studies and then there's non experimental studies, which are descriptive studies, correlational studies, descriptive being case studies, naturalistic observation and surveys and correlational studies.
1. Cognitive Development (Piaget)
Approach: Inferred cognitive development from children's mistakes on tasks.
Stages: Kids progress through four stages with distinct developmental phenomena.
1.1 Sensorimotor Stage (Birth to ~2 years)
Characteristics: Infants experience the world through senses and actions (hearing, touching, mouthing, grasping).
Key Phenomenon: Object Permanence:
Awareness that things continue to exist even when not perceived.
Piaget's View: Develops around 9 months; tested by hiding an object and observing if the baby searches for it.
Renée Baillargeon's Research: Challenged Piaget; infants as young as 3.5 months show object permanence by staring longer at impossible events (e.g., a cart passing through a solid block), indicating they remember the block's existence and location.
Other Rudimentary Understandings: Infants may have early understanding of physics (objects cannot pass through each other) and mathematics (1+1=2).
1.2 Preoperational Stage (~2 to 7 years)
Key Phenomenon: Egocentrism:
Difficulty taking another person's perspective; not the same as selfishness but can lead to it.
Example: A child (Dot) who knows she replaced candy with pencils in a box will incorrectly think her friends, who didn't see her, will expect pencils.
1.3 Concrete Operational Stage (~7 to 11 years)
Characteristics: Thinking logically about concrete events; difficulty with abstract concepts.
Key Phenomenon: Conservation:
Understanding that properties (mass, volume, number) remain the same despite changes in form or appearance.
Tasks:
Liquid: Equal liquid poured into a taller, thinner glass is still perceived as