Psychology
Chapter 11
The development of body, thought and language
Prenatal development
Zygotic, embryonic and fetal phases
The prenatal period is conventionally divided into three phases:
By the end of the 12th week after conception, all the organs are formed, though not functioning well, and are in same proportion to each other as in a full-term newborn, just smaller.
The external genitalia begin to differentiate between males and females between the 9th weeks but are not fully formed until about the 12th week.
In the 8th week, the embryo begins to move and activity increases by 12 weeks.
Fetuses ‘behave’ and are able to perceive some stimuli.
By 6 months fetuses respond to their mothers’ heartbeat and sounds from outside the womb, including language.
The effects of experience during the prenatal period
Although embryos and fetuses are sheltered from the outside world they are nonetheless subject to the effects of experience.
Teratogens: environmental agents that cause harm during prenatal development.
Most teratogens are in the form of substances that get into the embryo’s or fetus’s system from the mother through the umbilical cord.
A teratogen’s potential effect on prenatal development depends on how early or late in pregnancy the exposure occurs. If an organ has been developed, exposure to a potential teratogen will have little or no effect on future development.
It is not just teratogens that embryos and fetuses respond to, but other aspects of experience, such as nutrition and maternal stress.
The developing fetus can use this information as a ‘forecast’ of the environmental conditions it will eventually face after birth, and start adjusting its physiological and behavioral profile to match the requirements of the world it will probably encounter.
Infancy: roughly the first 18 to 24 months after birth. It is the time of most rapid developmental change, change that lays the foundation for further development.
If the prenatal period lasted much longer, a newborns brain would be too large to fit through the birth canal. This means that much of brain development occurs after birth in humans.
Physical development: puberty and adolescence
The head and brain grow rapidly over the first 5 or 6 years and approach adult levels by age 10.
The lymphoid system develops rapidly early in life, greatly exceeding adult dimensions by about age 12, and just as rapidly decreases over adolescence.
The reproductive system shows little until adolescence.
Puberty: the developmental stage leading up to adolescence when glands associated with the reproductive system begin to enlarge, bringing about changes in physical appearance and behavior.
Increases in hormones in both males and females contribute to changes in physical stature reproductive ability and emotions and behavior related to sexual attraction.
Puberty does not happen all at once, but is a series of related events, typically spanning over 4 to 5 years.
Other pubertal events continue to change over time.
The infant as explorer
Infants’ sensory systems all function at birth (although vision is still quite immature).
Within a short time after birth, they do not only respond to stimuli but do so selectively, in ways that seem well designed for learning.
Infants look selectively at novel objects
Babies gaze longer at new stimuli than at familiar ones.
Habituation and (with new stimuli) dishabituation.
This preference for novelty makes sense if we assume that infants are actively trying to learn about their world.
Infants’ bias for looking at novel stimuli is so reliable that developmental psychologist use it to assess infants’ abilities to perceive and remember.
Infants seek to control their environments
Within a few weeks after birth, infants begin to show a special interest in aspects of the environment that they can control.
The desire to control our environments seems to be a facet of human nature that exists in every phase of development. We survive by controlling our environment.
Infants explore increasingly with hands and eyes together
During their first 3 or 4 months of life, babies put practically anything that they can reach into their mouths.
They mouth objects in ways that seem designed to test the objects’ properties. With time, the explore increasingly in the more uniquely human way, with hands and eyes together, rather than with mouths.
By 5 to 6 months, babies regularly manipulate and explore objects in the sophisticated manner that is labeled examining.
They hold an object in front of their eyes, turn it from side to side, pass it from one hand to the other rub it, squeeze it, and in various other ways act as if they are deliberately testing its properties.
Such actions decline dramatically as the infant becomes familiar with a given object but return in full force when a new object is substituted for the old one.
Infants vary their examining in ways consistent with an object’s properties.
Infants do learn about object’s properties through such examination. Examination is universal and doesn’t need to be taught.
Infants use cues to guide their behavior
Infants often use cues from adults to guide exploration.
Beginning in their first year of life, babies regularly exhibit gaze following.
Gaze following: follow the eyes. This ensures that infants will attend to those objects and events that are of greatest interest to their elders, which may be the most important things to attend to and learn about for survival within their culture. It also helps to promote language development.
Another achievement during the latter part of the first year is the infants’ ability to view other people as intentional agents. Individuals who cause things to happen and whose behavior is designed to achieve some goal.
This is clearly seen around 9 months of age when infants engage in shared attention with another person. It involves a three-way interaction between the infant, another person and an object.
By 12 months of age infants will point to alert others to objects they are not attending to.
Between 12 and 18 months of age they will point to direct and adult’s attention to an object the adult is searching for.
Humans may be the only species to be able to share a perceptual experience.
By the time that infants can craw or walk on their own infants engage in social referencing.
They look at their caregivers’ emotional expressions for clues about the possible danger of their own actions.
Infants’ knowledge of core physical principles
Infants possess core knowledge about the physical world, needing relatively little experience with their physical environment to arrive at these insights.
Infants are born with a small set of skeletal competencies specialized to make sense of the physical world.
So infants are prepared by evolution to make sense of the physical world so that some things are more easily learned than others.
Infants reveal core knowledge in selective-looking experiments
Babies look longer at unexpected events than at expected ones.
Experiments have demonstrated infants’ knowledge of core principles.
Core principles may be present early on, but nuances related to them are acquired with age and experience.
Infants reveal less knowledge in search tasks than in selective-looking tasks
Infants under about 5 months of age lack even the most basic understanding of object permanence (the principle that objects continue to exist when out of view).
In order to retrieve a hidden object, the baby not only must know where the object is, bus also must be able to use that knowledge to guide his or her reaching movements. Babies under five months have no difficulty reaching for objects that are in full view, but may be unable to use mental images of hidden objects to guide their reaching.
Dramatic improvements in infants’ search abilities occurs shortly after they learn to crawl or other ways to move about on their own.
For infants to move about on their own, they need to coordinate their vision with their muscular movements in new ways to avoid bumping into objects. As they move, they also see objects from new and varied perspectives. Such experiences may well help them learn to plan all sorts of effective movements, including those involved in retrieving hidden objects.
Piaget’s theory: role of the child’s own actions in mental growth
Mental development derives from the child’s own actions in the physical environment.
Children are constantly striving to figure out what they can do with the various objects that exist in their world.
By acting on objects, children develop mental representations (called schemes) with are mental blueprints for actions.
Schemes are a mental representation of a bodily movement or of something that a person can do with an object or category of objects.
The earliest schemes are closely tied to specific object and are called forth by an object’s immediate presence. As children grow older, they develop new, more sophisticated, more abstract schemes that are less closely tied to the immediate environment or to actual physical actions. They become schemes for mental actions.
Schemes develop through assimilation and accommodation
The growth of schemes involves two complementary processes
Children behave like little scientists
Infants and children behave like scientists.
Their exploration play can be thought of as experimentation. They are most strongly motivated to explore those objects and situations that they partly bot do not fully understand. These experiences can be assimilated into existing schemes, but not too easily, so that accommodation is required. This natural tendency leads children to direct their playful activities in ways that maximize their mental growth.
Children’s play is oriented toward discovery, not toward repetition of already known effects.
Reversible actions (operations) promote development
As children grow beyond infancy, the types of actions most conductive to their mental development are those called operations. Those actions whose effects can be undone by other actions.
Operational schemes: mental blueprints that allow them to think about the reversibility of their actions.
Understanding reversibility of actions provides a foundation for understanding basic physical principles.
Conservation of substance.
Four types of schemes: Four stages of development
Criticism of Piaget’s theory of stages
Piaget underestimated the mental abilities of infants and young children and overestimated those of adolescents and adults.
Vygotsky’s theory: role of the sociocultural environment in mental growth
Children develop in a sociocultural milieu in which they interact constantly with other people and with products of their cultural history.
Cognitive development is largely a matter of internalizing the symbols, knowledge, ideas and modes of reasoning that have evolved over the course of history and constitute the culture into which the child is born.
Tools of intellectual adaptation
Children learn to think as a function of the tools of intellectual adaptation that their culture provides. (Like number words, alphabets and books or pencils)
Children may discover concepts through their active manipulation of objects, but they do so with the tools that their culture provides them, and usually with the implicit assistance of significant others in their local environment.
The role of collaboration and dialogue in mental development
Development occurs first at the social level and then at the individual level.
People learn to converse with words before they learn to think with words.
People also learn how to solve problems in collaboration with more competent others before they can solve the same kinds of problems alone.
Zone of proximal development: the realm of activities that a child can do in collaboration with more competent others but cannot yet do alone.
Children’s development is promoted most efficiently through their behavior within their zones of proximal development.
Critical thinking derives largely from the social, collaboration activity of dialogue.
The child as apprentice
Children are attracted to activities and seek practice.
The goal of development is to function effectively as an adult in one’s society.
An information-processing perspective on mental development
Information-processing perspective attempt to explain children’s mental development in terms of operational changes in basic components of their mental machinery.
As children grow, their brains continue to mature in various ways, resulting in changes in their abilities to attend to, remember and use information gleaned through their senses.
Development of long-term memory systems: episodic memory comes last
The reason of infantile amnesia is that children before age 3 or 4 do not have well-developed explicit or declarative memory. (Which requires a degree of self-awareness and abstract encoding that develop gradually over childhood.
Implicit memories are available even to young infants. Young infants develop the ability to encode their experiences into words before they can form episodic memories of those experiences.
At about age 3 children begin, with some reliability to talk about their experiences as they experience them. Such talk seems to help them make sense of what they are doing, and may be essential to the formation of episodic memories.
At first such talk depends on the existence of an older conversation partner who can help the child organize the experience in a coherent way and find the appropriate words for it.
The ability to form detailed, long-lasting memories increases gradually throughout the years of childhood and reaches a plateau in late adolescence or young adulthood.
This improvement is accompanied by continued maturation of the brain, particularly the prefrontal lobes.
The development of basic-level processes: Executive function
Executive functions are mental processes involved in the regulation of thought and behavior.
Each of these is related to the speed with which we can process information.
These basic-level cognitive abilities play a critical role in most higher-level cognitive abilities.
Changes in executive functions also occur at the other end of the life-span continuum.
Closely correlated with each of these measures of executive function is speed of processing. (The speed at which elementary information-processing tasks can be carried out.
Faster processing may result at least partly form the physical maturation of the brain that occurs throughout childhood, independent of specific experiences.
The prefrontal cortex plays a major role in executive functions and is one of the last brain areas to fully develop.
To develop as fully functional humans, we must learn not just about the physical world but also about the social world around us.
Theory of mind: a person’s concept of mental activity; the ability to understand one’s thought, feelings and behaviors and those of others.
This implies having some causal-explanatory framework to attribute intention to and predict the behavior of others.
Even very young children explain behavior in mental terms
By the time children have learned language sufficiently to offer verbal explanations, they already explain people’s behavior in terms of mental constructs, especially in terms of perceptions, emotions, and desires.
They expect others to respond to objects that they (the others) can see but not to objects that they cannot see.
2 year olds have an understanding that another person’s desires can be different from their own. (14 month olds not).
Even one year olds can display a remarkable understanding of what is in another person’s mind.
Delay in understanding beliefs, especially false beliefs
Three-year-olds rarely offer explanations in terms of beliefs. They do not clearly understand that beliefs can differ from reality.
Three-year-olds denials of false belief apply even to their own false beliefs.
Perhaps the concept of false belief is particularly difficult to grasp because of its inherent contradiction. They are both false and true at the same time. They are false in reality but true in the minds of the believers. In this way they differ from the products of make-believe.
Make-believe as a precursor to the belief-reality distinction
Three-year-olds may have difficulty understanding false beliefs, but they have no difficulty understanding pretense.
Children’s understanding of false beliefs emerges from their earlier understanding of pretense.
Children everywhere engage in pretend play, whether or not they are encouraged to do so.
The brain mechanisms that enable and motivate pretend play may came about in evolution because such play provides a foundation for understanding nonliteral mental states, including false beliefs.
By pretending children develop a capacity to generate and reason with novel suppositions and imaginary scenarios, and in so doing may get to practice the creative process that underpins innovation in adulthood.
Play promotes false-belief understanding and pretending correlates close.
Children who have engaged in lots of pretend role-play with other children pass false-belief tests at a higher rate than do children who have engaged in less. The same for children who have older siblings.
In social role-play children get used to the idea that other people can hold concepts in their heads that do not reflect reality.
Autism: a disorder in understanding minds
Autism, autism spectrum disorder is a disorder which is characterized by serve deficits in social interaction, serve deficits in acquiring language, a tendency toward repetitive actions, and a narrow focus of interest.
Among the earliest signs of autism in infants are failure to engage in prolonged eye contact, failure to synchronize emotional expressions with those of another person, and failure to follow another person’s gaze.
The deficit in language seems to be secondary to the lack of interest in communication. Children with autism rarely use gestures as an alternative form of communication, when they do, it is almost always for instrumental purposes. Those who learn language learn it late, almost invariably with the help of deliberate teaching, and their language always contains peculiarities that seem to reflect a lack of sensitivity to other people’s minds and perspectives.
People with autism perform poorly on false-belief tests and on test of ability to either deceive or detect deception.
The primary deficit is mindblindness (the inability to read minds)
The human capacity to understand mental representations (beliefs) is distinct from the capacity to understand physical representations (pictures).
Children with autisms lack of pretending play.
Children with Down syndrome do, and they develop a better understanding or false beliefs and deception than do children with autism.
Do Chimpanzees have a theory of mind?
Chimpanzees aren’t able to pass false-beliefs tasks.
In some circumstances, they seem to realize that if another chimpanzee or person is looking at something, that individual is aware of the objects. In other situations they don’t.
Chimpanzees seem to have the rudiments of theory of mind, but not much more.
Mindreading is unique to humans.
Language learning requires innate mechanisms that predispose children to it, coupled with an environment that provides adequate models and opportunity to practice.
Universal characteristics of human language
All languages use symbols (morphemes) that are arbitrary and discrete
Every language has a vocabulary consisting of a set of symbols, entities that represent other entities.
Morphemes: the symbols in language. This are the smallest meaningful units of a language.
In all languages (except sign) morphemes take the form of pronounceable sounds.
Most morphemes are words, but others are prefixes or suffixes used in consistent ways to modify words. (Like dog is a morpheme, s is a morpheme and dogs is a word consisting of two morphemes).
Morphemes in any language are both arbitrary and discrete
All languages are hierarchically structured in a similar way
All languages share a particular hierarchical structure of units.
The power of this four-level organization is that the relatively few phonemes can be arranged in different ways to produce an enormous number of possible words, which themselves can be arranged in different ways to produce a limitless number of possible phrases and sentences.
Every language has a grammar.
This specifies permissible ways to arrange units at one level to produce the next higher level in the hierarchy.
It includes rules of:
Grammatical rules are usually learned implicitly, not explicitly
Grammar is learned implicitly, without conscious effort, long before formal schooling.
People’s implicit knowledge of grammar is demonstrated in their ability to distinguish acceptation from unacceptable sentences. This is not based simply on meaning.
The course of language development
Early perception of speech sounds
Infants seem to treat speech as something special as soon as they are born, and maybe even before.
Very young infants hear the differences among speech phonemes. Babies younger than 6 months old hear the difference between any two sounds that are classed as different phonemes in any of the worlds’ languages.
At about 6 months of age, two kinds of changes begin to occur in their ability to discriminate between similar speech sounds:
Cooing and babbling
Beginning at birth, infants can cry and produce various other vocal signs of distress.
At about 2 months they begin to produce a new, more speech like category of sounds. Cooing. (Consist of repeated drawn-out vowels)
At about 6 months cooing changes gradually to babbling. (Consist of consonant-and-vowel sounds)
Cooing and babbling occur most often when the infant is happy.
They seem to be forms of vocal play that have evolved to help the infant exercise an refine the complex muscle movements needed to produce coherent speech.
Coos and the earliest babbles do not depend on the infant’s hearing spoken sounds. (Deaf infants coo and begin to babble at about the same age. And early babbles are as likely to contain foreign-language sounds as native-language sounds).
At 8 months of age, hearing infants begin to babble in ways that mimic the rhythm and pitch patterns of the language they hear around them.
At about 10 months of age, hearing infants begin to produce babbled sounds that increasingly resemble syllables and words of their native language. At this age, deaf babies who are exposed to a sign language begin to babble with their hands.
Eventually, recognizable words appear in the hearing infant’s vocal babbling and the deaf infant’s manual babbling.
Word comprehension precedes word production
During the babbling phase of life, before the first production of recognizable words, infants begin to show evidence that they understand some words and phrases that they hear regularly.
9 month olds can respond to a number of common words by looking at the appropriate object when it is named and can follow simple verbal commands. By the time that they say their first word, infants may already know the meaning of dozens of words.
Naming and rapid vocabulary development
Babies’ first words are most often produced in a playful spirit.
New words come slowly at first, but then, typically at about 15 to 20 months of age, the rate begins to accelerate.
Relatively few words are explicitly taught, most often, the child must infer the meaning of a new word from the context in which others use it.
Most of the words learned, are nouns that refer to categories of objects in the child’s environment.
Children’s tendency to look at whatever an older person is looking at helps the identify objects that the older person is referring to when speaking. Infants are especially likely to follow an adult’s gaze when the adult is labeling an object in the environment.
Young children seem to have a number of cognitive biases, or built-in assumptions, that help them narrow down the likely referent to a new word they hear.
By the time they can understand multiword sentences, young children are able to use their tacit knowledge of grammar to help them infer the meaning of new words, including verbs and other parts of speech as well as nouns.
Extending words to fit appropriate categories
In addition to linking a new word to its immediate referent, children must learn to extend it to new referents.
Young children (including one year olds) behave as though they assume that a newly heard label applies not just to the specific object that has been labeled, but also to other objects that are perceptually like the original one.
By the time they are 2 years old, children can use the grammatical context of a sentence to discern whether a name for an object is a proper noun or a common noun.
Children sometimes overextend common nouns, using the more broadly than adult usage would allow. - Is results when a child implicit defines a new word in terms of just one of a few of the prominent features of the original referent object.
Using grammatical rules
All children go through a relatively prolonged period during which each of their utterances is only one word long.
At about 18 to 24 months of age, they begin to put words together. At first they use content words almost exclusively, especially nouns and verbs, and usually arrange them in the grammatically correct sequence for simple, active sentences.
When children acquire a new grammatical rule, they almost invariably overgeneralize it at first. This is over regularization.
Over regularization confirms that children really know the rule. Otherwise it would be simple imitation. Children also use the rule with made-up words.
Through their own devices, children actively (and mostly unconsciously) infer grammatical rules from examples of rule-based language spoken around them and to them.
Humans enter the world equipped in many ways for language.
We are born with
We are also born into a social world that provides rich opportunities for learning language.
The idea of special inborn mechanisms for language learning
Chomsky’s concept of an innate language-learning device
Grammatical rules are fundamental properties of the human mind.
A person must have some meaningful representation of the whole sentence in mind before uttering it and they must apply grammatical rules to that representation in order to fill out the lower levels of the hierarchy to produce utterance.
Grammatical rules are aspects of the human mind that link spoken sentences ultimately to the mind’s system for representing meanings.
All grammatical rules are based on fundamental principles (universal grammar) that are innate properties of the human mind.
Language-acquisition device (or LAD) ware the entire set of innate mental mechanisms that enable a child to acquire language quickly and efficiently.
The LAD includes the inborn foundations for universal grammar plus the entire set of inborn mechanisms that guide children’s learning of the unique rules of their language.
Children’s invention of grammar
Young children invent grammar when it is lacking in the speech around them.
Pidgin language: a primitive, grammarless collection of words taken from various native languages.
Creole language: the pidgin develops in a true language, with full range of grammatical rules.
When the first Nicaraguan school for deaf was founded, the school did not teach sign language. But despite this, students began to communicate using hand signs. In a few years, signs became increasingly regularized and efficient, and a system of grammar emerged. The youngest children contributed most to the grammatical structure of the language.
Children tacitly assume that language has grammar, so they unconsciously read grammar into language even where it doesn’t exist.
Critical period for learning the grammar of one’s first language
The LAD functions much more efficiently during the first 10 years of childhood than later in life.
Children who are deprived of the opportunity to hear and interact with a language during their first 10 years have great difficulty learning language later on and never master the grammar of the language they learn.
Learning within the critical period is much less important for second-language learning.
The language-acquisition support system
Normal language development requires not just the LAD but also the LASS.
Language-acquisition support system (LASS) is provided by the social words into which the baby is born.
In Western culture, and most others, adults regularly simplify their speech to infants and young children in ways that might help the children learn words and some aspects of grammar.
They enunciate more clearly,
This is infant-directed speech.
It helps infants to distinguish individual words and to make connections between words and their referents.
Adults also frequently treat infants’ early vocalizations as if they were verbal statements.
Such responsiveness can lead to back-and-forth, conversation-like exchanges between infant and adult.
Parent’s speech to infants affects language acquisition
There is a positive correlation between the degree to which mothers speak to their infants, using appropriately simplified language, and the rate at which the infants develop language.
Problem: the correlation might derive more from genetic similarities than from language environments.
Adopted infants’ rates of language development correlates more strongly with their biological mother’s verbal abilities than with their adoptive mother’s verbal abilities. But the linguistic environments provided by the adoptive mothers also plays a significant role.
Parents’ verbal responsiveness to infants’ vocalizations plays a significant role in the rate of language acquisition.
Cross-cultural differences in the LASS
Children all over the world acquire language at roughly similar rates, despite wide variations in the degree and manner adults’ verbal interactions with infants.
Large variations can occur in the LASS without impairing infants’ abilities to learn language.
Bilingualism
The earlier children are exposed to a second language, the greater the chances they will become proficient in it.
The more similar two languages are to one another, the easier it is learn the second language.
Simultaneous and sequential bilinguals
Simultaneous bilinguals: people who are exposed from birth to two languages and are typically equally fluent in both languages.
Sequential bilinguals: learn a second language after mastering their first. Although they can gain proficiency in a second language, they rarely attain the level of linguistic mastery as in their first language. (Like an accent).
People who master a second language relatively late in life do so in a different way, neurologically speaking, tan people who acquire two languages in childhood.
For early bilinguals, the same area of the brain becomes active when speaking sentences in both languages. This is not the case for late bilinguals.
Costs and benefits of bilingualism
Disadvantages:
Advantages;
Language learning by nonhuman apes
Apes are much better at acquiring vocabulary than grammar.
Foundations for the study of psychology - a summary of chapter 1 of Psychology by Gray and Bjorklund (7th edition)
Psychology
Chapter 1
Foundations of the study of psychology
Psychology is the science of behaviour of the mind.
Behaviour is the observable action of a person or animal
Mind refers to an individual’s subjective experiences.
Dualism
René Descartes (1596-1650)
Important about him: the body is like a complicated machine, a machinal control of movements. Quite complex behaviours can occur trough purely machinal means.
Nonhuman animals have no souls.
Thought (Descartes defined as conscious deliberation and judgment) is ascribed to the soul.
Body and soul communicate through the pineal body.
Increased understanding of reflexes
The basic arrangement of the nervous system.
Some suggest that all human behaviour occurs through reflexes. → reflexology by I. M Sechenov (1863-1935) This inspired Pavlov.
The concept of localization of function in the brain
The idea that specific parts of the brain serve specific functions in the production of mental experience and behaviour.
Johannes Müller (1838-1965)
Different qualities of sensory experience come about because the nerves from different sense organs excite different parts of the brain. (We experience vison if this part of the brain is active).
Pierre Flourens (1824-1965)
Experiences on animals. Brain damage on different parts of the brain causes different deficits on animals abilities to move.
Paul Broca (1861-1965)
Publics effidence that people who suffer brain damage on specific parts of the brain lose the ability to speak, but do not lose other mental abilities
.....read more
Methods of psychology - a summary of chapter 2 of Psychology by Gray and Bjorklund (7th edition)Psychology
Chapter 2
Methods of psychology
In psychology, the data are usually measures or descriptions of some form of behaviour produces by humans or other animals.
A fact (or observation) is an objective statement, usually based on direct observation, that reasonable observers agree is true. In psychology, facts are usually particular behaviours, or reliable patterns of behaviours, for persons or animals.
A theory is an idea, or conceptual model, that is designed to explain existing facts and make predictions about new facts that might be discovered.
Any prediction about new facts that is made from a theory is called a hypothesis.
Facts lead to theories, which leads to hypothesis, which are tested by experiments, which leads to new fact. It is a cycle of science.
Each of this dimensions can vary form the others, resulting in any possible combination.
Research design
Researches design a study to test a hypothesis, choosing the design that best fits the conditions the researcher wants to control.
Also in three basic types.
Genetics and evolutionary foundations of behaviour - a summary of chapter 3 of Psychology by Gray and Bjorklund (7th edition)Psychology
Chapter 3
Genetics and evolutionary foundations of behaviour
Adaption refers to modifications as a result of changed life circumstances.
Evolution is a long-term adaptive process.
How genes affect behavior
Genes are associated with behavior (they never produce or control behavior directly).
All the effects that genes have on behavior occur through their role in building and modifying the physical structures of the body. Those structures, interacting with the environment, produce behavior.
All genes that contribute to the body’s development are “for” behavior. Since all parts of the body are involved in behavior.
Genes provide the codes for proteins
Genes affect the body’s development (only) through their influence on the production of protein molecules.
Structural proteins; forms the structure of every cell of the body.
Enzymes; controls the rate of every chemical reaction in every cell.
Genes are components of extremely long molecules of a substance called DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid).
These molecules exist in the egg and sperm cells that join to from a new individual. And they replicate themselves during each cell division in the course of the body’s growth and development.
A replica of your whole DNA molecules exists in the nucleus of each of your body’s cells, where it serves to code for and regulate the production of protein molecules.
Each protein molecule consists of a long chain of smaller molecules. Those are amino acids.
A single protein molecule may contain from several hundred to many thousand amino acids in its chain.
There are a total of 20 distinct amino acids in every from of life on earth (and they can be arranged in countless sequences to from different protein molecules).
Some DNA serve as templates (as molds or patterns) for producing RNA. RNA severs as a template for producing protein molecules.
A gene is segment of a DNA molecule that contains the code that dictates the particular sequence of amino acids for a single type of protein.
A human being has between 20.000 and 25.000 genes.
Most of the DNA in human cells does not code for proteins.
Genes work only through interaction with the environment
The effects of genes are entwined with the effects of the environment.
Environment; every
Basic processes of learning - a summary of chapter 4 of Psychology by Gray and Bjorklund (7th edition)Psychology
Chapter 4
Basic processes of learning
To survive, animals must adapt to their environments.
Evolution by natural selection, is the slow long-term adaptive process that equips each species for life within a certain range of environmental conditions.
Environments changes and individuals must adapt to these changes over their lifetimes. Animals must learn.
Learning: any process through which experience at one time can alter an individual’s behavior at a future time.
Experience refers to any effects of the environment that are mediated by the individual’s sensory systems.
Behavior at a future time refers to any subsequent behavior that is not part of the individual’s immediate response to the sensory stimulation during the learning experience.
Classical conditioning
Classical conditioning is a learning processes that creates new reflexes.
A reflex is a simple, relatively automatic stimulus-response sequence mediated by the nervous system.
A stimulus results in a response.
To be considered a reflex, the response to a stimulus must be mediated by the nervous system. Because reflexes are mediated by the nervous system, they can be modified by experience.
Habituation: a decline in the magnitude of a reflexive response when the stimulus is repeated several times in succession. Not all reflexes undergo habituation.
Habituation is one of the simplest forms of learning. It does not produce a new stimulus-response sequence, but only weakens an already existing one.
Classical conditioning is a form of reflex learning that does produce a new stimulus-response sequence.
(First described by Ivan Pavlov)
Fundamentals of classical conditioning
The procedure and generality of classical conditioning
The stimulus (the bell sound by Pavlov) is a conditioned stimulus.
The response to the (condtionised stimulus, the bell) stimulus is a conditioned response.
The original stimulus (natural, before doing anything) is an unconditioned stimulus with an unconditioned response.
The procedure is called classical conditioning or Pavlovian conditioning
Pavlov concluded that, any environmental event that the animal could detect could become a conditioned stimulus of salivation. Of course classical conditioning is not limited to salivary responses.
Extinction of conditioned responses and recovery from extinction
Pavlov found that, without food, the bell elicited less and less salvation on each trial, and eventually none at all. This phenomenon is called extinction.
Extinction does not return the animal to the unconditioned state.
The mere passage of time following extinction can partially renew the conditioned response. This is called spontaneous recovery.
A single pairing of the conditioned stimulus with the unconditioned stimulus can fully renew the conditioned response (with can be extinguished with a new trial
The neural control of behavior - a summary of chapter 5 of Psychology by Gray and Bjorklund (7th edition)Psychology
Chapter 5
The neural control of behavior
Behavior is a product of the body’s machinery, especially the nervous system.
Neurons, the building blocks of the brain
The brain contains roughly 80 to 100 billion nerve cells, or neurons, and roughly 100 trillion synapses between neurons.
These are all more-or-less active, and their collective activity monitors our internal and external environments, creates all of our mental experiences, and controls all of our behavior.
The magic of this nervous system, lies in the organization of their multitudes.
Each neuron is itself a complex decision-making machine.
Each neuron receives information from multiple sources, integrates that information, and sends its response out to many other neurons or, in some cases, muscle cells or glands.
Three basic varieties of neurons, and structures common to them
The brain and spinal cord make up the central nervous system.
Extensions from the central nervous system, called nerves, make up the peripheral nervous system.
A neuron is a single cell of the nervous system
A nerve is a bundle of many neurons (or a bundle consisting of the axons of many neurons) within the peripheral nervous system.
Nerves connect the central nervous system to the body’s sensory organs, muscles and glands.
The central nervous system and peripheral nervous system are parts of an integrated whole.
Neurons come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes and serve countless specific functions.
They can be grouped into three categories according to their functions and their locations in the overall layout of the nervous system.
All neurons contain the same basic parts.
Mechanisms of motivation and emotion - a summary of chapter 6 of Psychology by Gray and Bjorklund (7th edition)Introduction to psychology
Chapter 6
Mechanisms of motivation and emotion
Motivation: the entire constellation of factors, some inside the organism and some outside, that cause an individual to behave in a particular way at a particular time.
Motivational state, or drive.
An internal condition that orients an individual toward a specific category of goals that can change over time in a reversible way. (The drive an increase and decrease).
Different drives direct a person toward different goals.
Those are hypothetical constructs! We infer the existence from the animal’s behavior.
Motivated behavior is directed toward incentives, the sought-after objects or ends that exist in the external environment.
Incentives are also called reinforces.
Drives and incentives complement one another in the control of behavior. If one is weak, the other must be strong to motivate the goal-directed action.
They also influence each other’s strength. A strong drive can enhance the attractiveness of a particular object.
A strong incentive can strengthen a drive.
Varieties of drives
In general, drives motivate us toward goals that promote our survival and reproduction. Some drives promote survival by helping us maintain the internal bodily conditions that are essential for life.
Drives that help preserve homeostasis.
Homeostasis: the constancy of internal conditions that the body must actively maintain.
Maintaining homeostasis involves the organism’s outward behavior as well as its internal processes.
The basic physiological underpinning for some drives is a loss of homeostasis, which acts on the nervous system to induce behavior designed to correct the imbalance.
Limitations of homeostasis: regulatory and nonregulatory drives
Homeostasis is not enough for understanding many drives.
Two general classes of drives:
A functional classification of mammalian drives
Five categories of mammalian drives:
Human drives that
.....read more The psychology of vision - a summary of chapter 8 of Psychology by Gray and Bjorklund (7th edition)Psychology
Chapter 8 (in part)
The psychology of vision
The purpose of human vision is to identify meaningful objects and actions.
Your visual system has sorted all the points and graduations that are present in the reflected light into useful renditions of the objects. It has provided you’re with all the information you need to reach out and touch, or pick up, whichever object you want to use next.
Vision researchers generally conceive of object perception as a type of unconscious problem solving, in which sensory information provides clues that are analyzed using information that is already stored in the person’s head.
The detection and integration of stimulus features
Any object that we see can be thought of as consisting of a set of elementary stimulus features, including the various straight and curved lines that form the object’s contours, the brightness and color of the light that the object reflects and the object’s movement or lack of movements with respect to the background.
Feature detection in the visual cortex
Ganglion cells of the optic nerve run to the thalamus and form synapses with other neurons that carry their output to the primary visual area of the cerebral cortex.
Within the primary visual area, millions of neurons are involved in analyzing the sensory input.
Different neurons respond to different patterns.
Edge detectors: neurons that respond best to stimuli that contains a straight contour separating a black patch from a white patch.
Bar detectors: respond best to a narrow white bar against a black background, or a narrow black bar against a
white background.
Any edge detector or bar detector responds best to a particular orientation of the edge or bar.
Neurons in the primary visual cortex are sensitive not just to the orientation of visual stimuli, but also to other visual features, including color and rate of movement. (One neuron might respond best to a yellow bar on a blue background, tilted 15 degrees clockwise and moving slowly from left to right).
Taken as a whole, the neurons of the primary visual cortex and nearby areas seem to keep track of all the bits and pieces of visual information that would be available in a scene.
Because of their sensitivity to the elementary features of a scene, these neurons are referred to as feature detectors.
Treisman’s two-stage feature-integration theory of perception
The feature-integration theory.
Any perceived stimulus (even a simple one such as an X) consist of a number of distinct primitive sensory features, like color and the slant of its individual lines.
To perceive the stimulus as a unified entity, the perceptual system must detect these individual
Memory and attention - a summary of chapter 9 of Psychology by Gray and Bjorklund (7th edition)Psychology
Chapter 9
Memory and attention
Information-processing theories are built on a set of assumptions concerning how humans acquire, store and retrieve information.
Key assumptions:
The model we use to portray the mind as containing three types of memory stores.
Each store is characterized by its function, its capacity and its duration.
In addition to the stores, the model specifies a set of control processes.
Those govern the processing of information within stores and the movement of information from one store to another.
Sensory memory: the brief prolongation of sensory experience
This trace is called sensory memory.
A separate sensory-memory store is believed to exist for each sensory system (like vision, hearing, touch, smell and taste), but only those for vision and hearing have been studied extensively.
Each sensory store is presumed to hold, very briefly, all the sensory input that enters that sensory system, whether or not the person is paying attention to that input.
The function of the store, presumably, is to hold on to sensory information, in its original sensory form, long enough for it to be analyzed by unconscious mental processes and for a decision to be made about whether or not to bring that information into the short-term store.
Most of the information in our sensory store does not enter into our consciousness.
We become conscious only of those items that are transformed, by the selective process of attention, into working memory.
The short-term store: conscious perception and thought
Information in the sensory store that is attended to moves into the short-term store.
Each item fades quickly and is lost within seconds when it is no longer actively attended to or thought about.
This is conceived of as the major workplace of the mind (working memory).
Working memory has been used to refer to the process of storing and transforming information being held in the short-term store. It is the seat of conscious thought.
Information can enter the short-term store form both the sensory-memory store and the long-term-memory store.
Both the sensory store and long-term
.....read more Reasoning and intelligence - a summary of chapter 10 of Psychology by Gray and Bjorklund (7th edition)Psychology
Chapter 10
Reasoning and intelligence
Reasoning: The process by which we use our memories in adaptive ways
Intelligence: our general capacity to reason
We reason by using our memories of previous experiences to make sense of present experiences or to plan the future.
To do so, we must perceive the similarities among various events we have experienced.
Fast and slow thinking
Cognitive processes could be placed on a continuum from automatic to effortful.
It is useful to think of any cognitive process as falling somewhere along this continuum.
When solving problems, people have two general ways of processing. (Dual-processing theories).
In many cases, when presented with a problem, you cannot shut of the ‘fast’ system, even if it may interfere with your arriving at the correct solution to a problem via the ‘slow’ system. (Like the stroop interference effect).
The ‘fast’ implicit system effortlessly produces impressions, feelings and intuitions that the ‘slow’ explicit system considers.
The effortful ‘slow’ system has potential control over the ‘fast’ system. (But when making routine decisions, the ‘fast’ system is in control. Like reading and making sense of language). The fast system even makes simple decisions, some of which are in contradiction to the correct solution that can only be derived by using the slow system.
Fast processing is not unique to humans. But no other species comes close to the effortful, explicit cognition displayed in Homo sapiens.
Analogies as foundation for reasoning
Two kinds of reasoning that depend quite explicitly on identifying similarities are:
Success
.....read more The development of body, thought and language - a summary of chapter 11 of Psychology by Gray and Bjorklund (7th edition)Psychology
Chapter 11
The development of body, thought and language
Prenatal development
Zygotic, embryonic and fetal phases
The prenatal period is conventionally divided into three phases:
By the end of the 12th week after conception, all the organs are formed, though not functioning well, and are in same proportion to each other as in a full-term newborn, just smaller.
The external genitalia begin to differentiate between males and females between the 9th weeks but are not fully formed until about the 12th week.
In the 8th week, the embryo begins to move and activity increases by 12 weeks.
Fetuses ‘behave’ and are able to perceive some stimuli.
By 6 months fetuses respond to their mothers’ heartbeat and sounds from outside the womb, including language.
The effects of experience during the prenatal period
Although embryos and fetuses are sheltered from the outside world they are nonetheless subject to the effects of experience.
Teratogens: environmental agents that cause harm during prenatal development.
Most teratogens are in the form of substances that get into the embryo’s or fetus’s system from the mother through the umbilical cord.
A teratogen’s potential effect on prenatal development depends on how early or late in pregnancy the exposure occurs. If an organ has been developed, exposure to a potential teratogen
Social development - a summary of chapter 12 of Psychology by Gray and Bjorklund (7th edition)Psychology
Chapter 12
Social development
The natural human environment is a social environment.
Social development: the changing nature of our relationships with others over the course of life.
Human infants are completely dependent on caregivers for survival. But they are not passively dependent.
They enter the world biologically prepared to learn who their caregivers are and to elicit from them the help they need. By the time they are born, babies already prefer the voices of their own mother over other voices (and the smell of their own mother). Newborns signal distress through fussing and crying.
By the time they are three months old, they express clearly and effectively their emotions through their facial expressions. And they respond differentially to such expressions in others.
Though such actions, infants help build emotional bonds between themselves and those on whom they most directly depend, and then they use those caregivers as a base from which to explore the world.
Attachment: such emotional bonds.
Attachment to caregivers
Harlow’s monkeys raised with surrogate mothers
Providing adequate nutrition and other physical necessities is not enough. Infants also need close contact with comforting caregivers.
The form and functions of human infants’ attachment
Bowlby observed attachment behaviors in young humans, from 8 months to 3 years of age.
Children show distress when their mothers left them. Especially in an unfamiliar environment. They showed pleasure when reunited with their mothers, showed distress when approached by a stranger unless reassured or comforted by their mothers and where likely to explore an unfamiliar environment when in the presence of their mothers than when alone.
Bowlby contended that attachment is a universal human phenomenon with a biological foundation that derives from natural selection. Infants are potentially in danger when out of sight of caregivers, especially in a novel environment.
Attachment is strengthen at about the age 6 to 8 months, when infants begin to move around on their own.
The strange-situation measure of attachment quality
Mary Ainsworth developed the strange-situation test.
Infants in this test are:
Social psychology - a summary of chapter 13 of Psychology by Gray and Bjorklund (7th edition)Psychology
Chapter 13
Social psychology
Humans are naturally interested in assessing the personality characteristics and attitudes of other humans they encounter.
This drive has clear adaptive functions. Other people can help us or hurt us in our life endeavors. Understanding others helps us predict their behavior and decide how to interact with them.
The accuracy of judgments of others sometimes suffers from certain consistent mistakes, or biases.
These biases occur most often when we are not using our full mental recourses, or have only limited information with which to reason, or have unconscious motives for reaching particular conclusions.
Making attributions from observed behavior
Actions are directly observable, and thoughts are not. Judgments about the personalities of people we encounter are based largely on what we observe of their actions.
Any judgment about another person is, in essence, a claim about causation. It is an implicit claim that the person is caused in part by some more or less permanent characteristic of the person.
Any claim about causation is an attribution. A claim about the cause of someone’s behavior.
The logic of attributing behavior to the person or the situation.
To build a useful picture of a person on the basis of his or her actions, you must decide which actions imply something unique about the person and which actions would be expected of anyone under similar situations.
When behavior is clearly appropriate to the environmental situation, people commonly attribute the behavior to the situation.
Three questions in making an attribution
Given the answer to questions 1 and 2, question
.....read more Social influences on behavior - a summary of chapter 14 of Psychology by Gray and Bjorklund (7th edition)Psychology
Chapter 14
Social influences on behavior
Human behavior is influenced powerful by the social environment in which it occurs.
We behave as we do not just because of who we are, but also because of the social situations in which we find ourselves.
Social pressure: the entire set of psychological forces that are exerted on us by others whether real or imagined.
We are most strongly influenced by those people who are physically or psychologically closed to us.
Social pressure arises from the ways we interpret and respond emotionally to the social situations around us.
It promotes our social acceptability and helps create order and predictability in social interactions.
Facilitating and interfering effects of an audience
Social facilitation: the enhancing effect of an audience on task performance.
Social interference: a decline in performance when observers are present.
Facilitation of ‘easy’ tasks, interference with ‘hard’ ones
The presence of others facilitates performance of dominant actions and interferes with performance of nondominant actions.
Dominant actions: actions that are so simple, speciestypical, or well learned that they can be produced automatically, with little consciously thought
Nondominant actins: actions that require considerable conscious thought or attention
The presence of an audience increases a person’s level of drive or arousal.
The arousal increases the person’s effort, which facilitates dominant tasks where the amount of effort determines the degree of success.
The arousal interferes with controlled, calm, conscious thought and attention and thereby worsens performance of nondominant actions.
Evaluation anxiety as a basis for social interference
The primary cause of social interference is evaluation anxiety.
Social interference increases when the observer are high in status or expertise and are present explicitly to evaluate. It also increases when subjects are made to feel unconfident and more anxious about their ability.
It decreases when subjects feel confident about their ability.
Choking under pressure: the working-memory explanation
‘Choking’ is especially likely to occur with tasks that make strong demands on working memory.
The worry takes space out of the memory span.
Choking on academic tests
Distracting and disturbing thoughts flood their minds and interfere with performance on tests.
With sufficient pressure, choking can even occur in students who normally do not suffer from tests anxiety. It occurs specifically with tests items that make the highest demands on working memory.
Stereotype threat as a special cause of choking
Stereotype threat: threat that test-takers experience when they are reminded of the stereotypical belief that the group to
.....read more Personality - a summary of chapter 15 of Psychology by Gray and Bjorklund (7th edition)Psychology
Chapter 15
Personality
Personality refers to a person’s general style of interacting with the world, especially with other people.
The development during childhood of chronic patterns of behavior that differ from one individual to another.
The most central concept in personality psychology is the trait. This is a relatively stable predisposition to behave in a certain way.
This is considered to be part of the person, not the environment.
States (other than traits) of motivation and emotion are, defined as inner entities than can be inferred from observed behavior. Traits are enduring, but states are temporary.
A trait might be defined as an enduring attribute that describes one’s likelihood of entering temporarily into a particular state.
Traits are dimensions along which people differ by degree.
Trait theories: efficient systems for describing personalities
The goal of any trait theory of personality is to specify a manageable set of distinct personality dimensions that can be used to summarize the fundamental psychological differences among individuals.
Factor analyses as a tool for identifying an efficient set of traits
Factor analyses: a method of analyzing patterns of correlations in order to extract mathematically defined factors, which underlie and help make sense of those patterns.
Steps:
Factor analyses tells us that two dimensions of personality are relatively independent of each other.
Cattell’s pioneering use of factor analysis to develop trait theory
Cattell:
An infinite number of different personalities can be formed from a finite number of traits.
He identified 16 basic trait dimensions and made a questionnaire called the 16 PF questionnaire to measure them.
The five-factor model of personality
The five-factor model (or big five theory)
A person’s personality is most efficiently described in terms of his or her score on each of five relatively independent global trait dimensions:
Mental Disorders - a summary of chapter 16 of Psychology by Gray and Bjorklund (7th edition)Psychology
Chapter 16
Mental Disorders
Before clinicians can diagnose a psychological disorder, the must evaluate the behavior in terms of four themes, the four D’s.
The diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (DSM)
Specifies criteria for deciding what is officially a ‘disorder’ and what is not.
It is a work in process.
What is a mental disorder?
Mental disorder has no really satisfying definition.
Categorizing and diagnosing metal disorders
Diagnosis: the process of assigning a label to a person’s mental disorder.
To be of value, any system of diagnosis must be reliable and valid.
The quest for reliability
The reliability of a diagnostic system: the extent to which different diagnosticians, all trained in the use of the system, reach the same conclusion when they independently diagnose the same individual.
To test alternative ways of diagnosing each disorder, they conducted field studies in which people who might have a particular disorder were diagnosed independently by a number of clinicians or researchers using each of several alternative diagnostic systems.
The systems that produced the greatest reliability were retained.
All the criteria are based on observable characteristics or self-descriptions by the person being diagnosed.
The Question of validity
The validity of a diagnostic system is an index of the extent to which the categories it identifies are clinically meaningful.
This is based on extensive research. To conduct the research needed to determine whether or not a diagnosis is valid, one must fists form a tentative, reliable diagnostic system.
The results of such studies may lead to new means of defining and diagnosing the disorder or to new subcategories of the disorder, leading to increased diagnostic validity.
Systems for classifying mental disorders:
The DSM
The Word Health Organization (WHO) has developed the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10)
Possible dangers in Labeling
Diagnosing and labeling may be essential for the scientific study of metal disorders, but labels can be harmful.
To reduce the likelihood of such
Treatment - a summary of chapter 17 of Psychology by Gray and Bjorklund (7th edition)Psychology
Chapter 17
Treatment
What to do with individuals with severe mental disorders? A brief history
A major chance in the treatment of people with severe mental disorders occurred in the 1950s, inspired by several factors;
A positive development: assertive community treatment
Since the 1970s, an increasing number of communities have developed outreach programs, often referred to as assertive community treatment (ACT) programs, and aimed at helping individuals with severe mental illness wherever they are in the community.
Each person with mental illness in need is assigned to a multidisciplinary treatment team. Someone on the team is available at any time of the day to respond to crises.
Each patient is visited at least twice a week by a team member, who checks on his or her health, sees if any services are needed, and offers counseling when that seems appropriate.
The team meets frequently with family members who are involved with the patient, to support them in their care for the patient.
Structure of the mental health system
Mental health professionals
Mental health professionals are those who have received special training and certification to work with people who have psychological problems or mental disorders.
The primary categories;
Relieve the disorder by directly altering bodily processes.
Drugs
Drugs for mental disorders are far from unmixed blessings.
They nearly always produce undesirable side effects.
Antipsychotic drugs
Used to treat schizophrenia and other disorders in which psychotic symptoms predominate.
Such drug reduce and in some cases abolish the hallucinations, delusions, and bizarre actions that characterize the active phase of schizophrenia and they reduce the need for hospitalization.
All antipsychotic drugs in use today decrease the activity of the neurotransmitter dopamine at certain synapses in the brain, which is believed to be responsible for the reduction in psychotic symptoms.
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