Increasing age, by itself, contributes nothing to development. The maturation and changes resulting from experience that intervene between different ages and stages of childhood are important. Maturation aspects are aspects of development that are largely under genetic control and hence largely uninfluenced by environmental factors.

Folk theories of development are ideas held about development that is not based upon scientific investigation There are two main folk theories:

1. Praise
   Children are born inherently good and physical punishment is not necessary.
2. Punishment
   This theory bases itself on the idea that a child is born in sin and his soul should be saved and punishment is necessary for this. Punishment is necessary regularly in order to develop as pleasant, law-abiding citizens.

A paradigm is a world view or a world hypothesis. There are two main paradigms in many developmental theories:

1. Organismic world view
   This is the idea that people are inherently active and continually interacting with the environment and therefore helping shape their own development. An example of this world view is Piaget’s theory. There is no returning to former stages of development.
2. Mechanistic world view
   This is the idea that a person can be represented as being like a machine, which is inherently passive until stimulated by the environment. It is possible to return to former stages of development as the frequency of behaviour can increase and decrease due to various learning processes.

There are three main ways of studying age-related changes:

In precocial species, the young are physically mobile and able from the moment of birth and in altricial species the young are helpless. Nativism is the view that many skills or abilities are native or hard-wired into the brain at birth. Empiricism is the view that humans are a blank slate at birth. Cognition is mental activity.

Binet introduced the term mental age, which can be defined as an individual’s level of mental ability relative to others. Chronological age is a person’s actual age. The intelligence quotient is a measure of a person’s level of intelligence compared to a population of individuals of approximately the same age. There are four important things to note about IQ tests and IQ scores:

1. The purpose of the IQ test is always to compare people’s scores with those from people of the same population and same age.
2. The average IQ at a given time is always 100. Tests are standardised to ensure this.
3. People’s IQ scores tend to increase from one generation to the next (Flynn effect).
4. The items on IQ tests invariably proceed from the simple to the complex, so that an individual’s raw score is derived from the number of items passed before making mistakes.

Some people argue that a general intelligence underlies the scores of an intelligence test and some people argue that intelligence is made up of several individual components. Many intelligence tests divide intelligence into verbal and performance subscales.

Heritability is a statistical measure that describes how much of the variation of a trait in a population is due to genetic differences rather than environmental differences in a population. Heritability estimates refer to a population and tell us nothing about individuals. Genetic determinism is the hypothesis that people become who they are as a consequence of their genetic inheritance. Environmentalism is the hypothesis that people become who they are as a consequence of the learning and experiences they have had throughout life.

The familial resemblance is the resemblance between relatives whose genetic relationship to each other is known. The familial resemblance is a type of evidence concerning genetic influences to cognitive development. Missing heritability refers to the failure to find any of the genes associated with cognitive abilities. A gene and environment interaction are when different genotypes respond to similar environmental factors in different ways to create an individual’s phenotype. There are several environmental factors that create different phenotypes, depending on the individual, because the genotype of the person differs. An example of this is phenylketonuria, a disease which can cause severe mental retardation, unless on a phenylketonuria free diet, which shows that the same environmental factor (diet) can have different phenotypes as an outcome (mental retardation or not).

Studies on adoptees have shown that an early deprived upbringing can have serious detrimental effects on children’s development and that these detrimental effects can be partially reversed by placement into good quality adoptive homes. Environmental drift refers to changes in

Visual acuity is the ability to make fine discriminations between the elements in the visual array. Infants’ vision is poorer than that of an adult. Visual accommodation is the ability to focus on objects irrespective of their distance from the eye. Infants are not good at this either. There are several ways to test infants their vision:

1. Visual preference method
   Infants are shown two objects and the object they look the longest at is the one they have a preference for.
2. Habituation techniques
   Habituation shows the existence of visual memory and this tests whether infants can discriminate between two objects by presenting them sequentially and seeing whether dishabituation occurs.

Infants are able to discriminate between simple shapes. This even occurred in new-borns, showing that new-born infants perceive simple shapes as a whole and not just as a collection of parts.

Size constancy is the understanding that an object remains the same size despite its retinal image size changing as it moves closer to or away from us. Shape constancy is the understanding that an object remains the same shape even though the retinal image shape changes when it is viewed from different angles. New-borns already understand the principle of size constancy and shape constancy. Object unity is the understanding that an object is whole or complete even though part of it may be hidden. 4-month-olds perceive object unity already. It is likely that infants use common motion to perceive object unity. New-borns do not perceive object unity. 6-month-olds perceive trajectory-continuity, whereas 4-month-olds only do so when the occlude is narrow. Subjective contour is when only parts of an object are presented, the remaining contours are filled in, in order that the complete shape can be perceived. 4-month-olds perceive subjective contour, especially when the object is in motion. They also perceive this as an occlude.

Face perception emerges at around 2 months, although evidence suggests that a form of facial perception is present at birth. The two-process account of newborn face perception states that new-born preference for faces stems from an innate subcortical mechanism that leads new-borns to attend preferentially to faces of the same species. After the second month of life, this is replaced or supplemented by an experientially based mechanism that involves a diffuse network of cortical areas and allows for continues cortical specialisation and tuning to specific faces. An alternative view is that new-borns prefer certain properties of stimuli that are not face specific.

Infants have a preference for the face of their mother and can discriminate between their mother and other faces. 2-month-old infants and even new-borns will look longer at a face rated attractive by adults than non-attractive faces. The preference for attractiveness may stem from the preference for prototype faces. General abilities become more narrowly tuned as a result of experience. Infants are able to imitate already and this might play an important role in language development.

Very young infants

Piaget proposed that the basic unit of understanding was a scheme, which is a mental representation of actions and knowledge. Infants start out with three basic schemes, sucking, looking and grasping. Operations are internal mental representations. Mental representations not based on physical activity.

Children modify their schemes using two processes: organisation and adaptation. Organisation is organising several schemes into a bigger scheme. Adaptation consists of assimilation and accommodation. Assimilation is incorporating new information into a pre-existing scheme. Accommodation is modifying the pre-existing schemes (or generating a new one) in order to fit new information.

Equilibration is the state in which children’s schemes are in balance and are undisturbed by conflict. When there are too many conflicts that cannot be solved by either assimilation or accommodation, a change of thinking is required and this is a stage shift. A stage shift is a qualitative shift in a child’s way of thinking.

The sensorimotor stage is characterised by thinking is doing and it lasts from birth to approximately two years. It consists of several substages:

1. Reflexive schemes (birth to 1 month)
   In this phase, infants use their reflexes to explore their world.
2. Primary circular reactions (1 month to 4 months)
   The infant starts to show a degree of coordination between the senses and their motor behaviour through the primary circular reactions. The infant keeps repeating actions and it is almost always focused around the infant’s body and not on the external world.
3. Secondary circular reactions (4 months to 10 months)
   The infant starts to direct behaviour towards the external world. The actions are still circular. The infant has begun to intentionally act on his environment.
4. Coordination of secondary schemes (10 months to 12 months)
   The infant begins to deliberately combine schemes to achieve specific goals. Goal-directed behaviour arises. Object permanence is solved in this stage.
5. Tertiary circular reactions (12 months to 18 months)
   The infant begins to search for novelty and uses trial and error to explore the characteristics and properties of objects and develops new ways of solving problems.
6. Beginning of thought (18 months to 24 months)
   The infant becomes able to form enduring mental representations. This is shown by deferred imitation, imitation some while after seeing the action.

The main criticism for these stages is that object permanence and deferred imitation occur much earlier in the development than Piaget suggested. The preoperational stage is a stage that is characterised by an increase in mental representations and it subdivides into two different substages:

1. Symbolic function substage (2 years to 4 years)
   In this substage, children acquire the ability to mentally represent an object that is not physically present. Symbols can be used. Children start participating in pretend play. Young children can’t use objects that do not look alike the original object to pretend it is something, while older children can (e.g: using a banana as

Intuitive psychology refers to the awareness some people have regarding others’ motives and beliefs. The unexpected transfer test is the classic false-belief test. The false belief test helps us differentiate between those who do and those who do not understand that minds hold beliefs.

Children below the age of 7 are egocentric, according to Piaget. A conceptual shift is a large qualitative change in an individual’s cognitive processes. Representational ability is the ability to form a mental representation of an event or an object. Metacognition refers to knowledge of one’s state of mind, reflective access to one’s cognitive abilities, thinking about how one is feeling or thinking. The deceptive box task shows false beliefs in young children, as well as difficulties with accessing one’s own beliefs. Children who were unable to acknowledge another person’s false belief were not even attuned to their own prior beliefs. If children do not know their own mind, they cannot know anything about another mind. Children around the age of 4 sometimes answer correctly on the false belief test.

There is evidence for a gradual change between not passing the false belief test and passing the test. The false belief test is incapable of detecting degrees of performance that fall between passing and failing the test. This test makes it appear as if the theory of mind development occurred in stages. There are instances of children passing one false belief test and failing another. The number of false belief tests a child is likely to pass increases gradually with age. There is a difference between performance limitations and competence. Performance refers to limitations that are associated with the challenges presented by the task being asked. Competence refers to the child’s underlying ability which is often not reflected in their performance on tasks. The time it took children to reply to the question of false beliefs compared to the time it took them to answer questions about the current state of reality shows the processing required to answer these questions and that the task not always reflects competence. The wording of a question is of influence with the performance on the false belief task.

Research has shown that children as young as 15 months showed signs of understanding false belief in a preferential looking procedure involving a violation of expectation. A child’s competence can often be underestimated by measures of their performance.

The hindsight bias refers to the inclination to see events that have already happened as being more predictable than they were before they took place. Adults have difficulties with false belief tests as well. They are heavily influenced by the information provided, even if this information is only available to them. Adults sometimes have difficulties with perspective-taking and there is a possibility that people do not automatically attune to other people’s beliefs.

Age is a major influence, as well as a social experience, although age is more important. There are subtle differences in how people understand others’ minds between cultures.

Moral dilemmas are situations in which people must choose and justify a course of action or reasoning with respect to a moral issue. Piaget concluded that younger children’s moral judgement was governed by unilateral respect for adults and adults’ rules, with little understanding of reciprocity or the intentions of others. Kohlberg defined five stages of moral development:

1. Heteronomous morality (punishment orientation)
   Moral reasoning in which children believe that right and wrong are determined by powerful adult figures.
2. Instrumental morality (personal gain)
   Children in this stage reason from their personal gain.
3. Interpersonal normative morality (social evaluation)
   Children in this stage seek to be viewed as good and feel guilt when it is likely that others condemn their behaviour. Individuals are concerned with how the self is evaluated by others.
4. Social system morality (social order)
   Children in this stage argue that rules and laws are necessary in order to preserve social order.
5. Human rights and social welfare morality (morality of conscience)
   Individuals int his stage make use of ethical principles to guide moral judgements. The rightness of an action depends upon whether the action is consistent with the rules that individuals would accept for an ideal world.

Kohlberg claimed that development across childhood and adolescence is characterised by sequential passage through stages. Stage 1 and 2 are most common in children with stage 3 emerging in adolescents. Stage 5 appears in adulthood, even though it remains fairly rare. Individuals generally move up one stage at a time. Regression over time Is rare. There is a strong positive linear relationship between educational attainment and moral stage.

A very common criticism of Kohlberg is that the sorts of justifications offered for moral dilemmas are not associated with action. Those who reason at higher stages are more likely to act pro-socially than those who reason at lower stages. Moral stages represent ways of thinking about moral issues, not specific behavioural tendencies. Individuals at different stages can choose the same action, but for different reasons.

There is some sort of moral cognition, a set of heuristics, which is shown by the fact that most moral judgements are made fairly quick with essentially no conscious deliberation of using certain rules.

Children make sharp distinctions between moral and non-moral domains. Moral domains are unlikely to be used in reasoning about all social issues. Aggression can perhaps be understood in terms of the attributions children make rather than moral stages. Attributions refer to the belief one holds as to why people carry out a particular action or behaviour.

There is evidence for the existence of the moral stages 2, 3 and 4 in non-western cultures, although stage 5 is not present in non-western cultures.

Pedagogy refers to any aspect of theory or practice related to teaching. In the 1960s, there was a shift toward a child-centred education. Piaget emphasised the role of the teacher for providing the best physical environment for children to overcome their egocentrism and start to understand conservation. Discovery learning is encouraging children to learn by discovering information for themselves. Based on constructivism, many learning activities involve discovery learning. The most efficient way of learning is guided discovery, where children are the centre of their learning, but a teacher provides feedback as they develop their understanding.

Piaget argued that egocentrism could be overcome via interaction with peers because this shows the child different perspectives. Peers are more important than adults because they are more proximate and credible than adult helper. Peers provide the ideal source of socio-cognitive conflict, where two opposing egocentric views result in a cognitive conflict. Through these conflicts, children question their own understanding, leading to a resolution of the conflict and cognitive advance. Peers are an important influence on the child’s own construction of knowledge and their cognitive development.

There are strong peer facilitation effects. The pairing of two children can have a positive impact on children’s later individual performance. Children perform better on classic Piagetian tasks in pairs than alone. The social interaction required to reach a common understanding forces the child to examine their own understanding and compare it to that of the other child, helping the child overcome their own egocentrism. Peer effects are relatively long-lasting. The benefits of peer interaction are sometimes only observed after a delay. This could happen because the changes in thinking promoted by sociocognitive conflicts help children benefit from subsequent learning experiences. Besides these cognitive effects of peer interaction, there is also an increase in cooperation and social skills, which could also benefit the child later in life.

Positive peer interaction effects are not restricted to very young children on Piagetian-based tasks. It also occurs on more complex problem solving and positive peer interaction-effects are not bound to the physical environment, but can also occur while working together on a computer.

There is strong evidence for the efficacy of peer collaboration, but the positive effects are not certain to arise. Conflict resolution will take place in peer collaboration, but this is not necessarily in the direction of cognitive advancement. There is an effect of children’s popularity on the outcomes of peer collaboration. The pairing of two peers is important. Social skills are important and superior social skills can be useful in resolving the cognitive conflict. Same-sex peer pairings are also more efficient at a younger age than mixed-sex pairings because there is more tension and antagonism in mixed-sex pairings. Mixed-sex pairings can work out well if positive collaboration is actively promoted and encouraged. Cognitive advancement is more likely to occur if the more developed peer is the girl.

According to Vygotsky, knowledge exists intermentally between individuals before it can exist intramentally,

Bullying is the term used to define an individual’s repeated exposure to negative actions by one or more other people. There is a lot of social pressure in the classroom. A key factor is the process of social comparison, where the child compares his performance with his classmates. This comparison is mostly upward and can raise the child’s level of academic performance, but can also result in negative self-perception. Self-worth protection is the tendency of some students to reduce their levels of effort so that any subsequent poor academic performance will be attributed to low motivation rather than a lack of ability.

There is also peer pressure to either work hard or to not work hard. The visible demonstration of a student’s attempt to excel academically has social risks. These social risks can result in reduced striving. Stress levels in relation to academic performance can often be high.

Bullying is a subset of aggressive behaviour characterised by repetition and an imbalance of power. It is systematic abuse of power. The following methods can be used in order to find out about bullying: teacher and parent reports, self-reports, peer nominations, direct observations, interviews.

There are different types of bullying. The traditional forms of bullying include physical, verbal and indirect aggression. Indirect aggression includes spreading rumours and systematic social exclusion. Bias bullying is bullying in which the victim is a member of a particular group. Cyberbullying is a type of bullying which uses electronic devices. Cyberbullying is more difficult to escape from. The bullies also have more anonymity when cyberbullying. Traditional bullying appears to be on the decline while cyberbullying is stable or increasing.

There are four roles in bullying: bully, victim, non-involved, bully-victim. There are passive victims and provocative victims. There are also six participant roles: ringleader bullies, follower bullies, reinforcers, defenders and bystanders.

Many victims of bullying refuse to tell someone that they’re being bullied. The proportion that doesn’t tell anyone increases with age. Boy victims are less likely to tell it anyone than girl victims.

Victims of bullying often experience anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, physical and psychosomatic complaints, greater risk of self-harm and suicidal ideation and some might even commit suicide. It is not sure whether victimisation causes depression and low self-esteem, or that depression and low self-esteem make people more susceptible to bullying.

There are several causes of bullying. Society factors (tolerance of violence), school climate and quality of teacher and pupil relationships are potential causes of bullying, although there are many more. Some children bully others in order to be more popular and show their dominance. School bullying may be an early stage in the development of later antisocial behaviour. A harsh physical discipline at home and an insecure attachment can be predictors for involvement in bullying. Parental-maltreatment and abuse is a likely risk factor in the bully-victim or aggressive victim group. Having poor social skills and little friendship support is a risk factor for

The most notable cognitive declines as a result of aging are: difficulty paying attention to relevant information and ignoring irrelevant information, word-finding difficulties, problems remembering the context in which information was learned.

Aging affects a range of cognitive functions, but there is one core deficit, according to domain-general theories of aging. There are three possible core deficits:

1. Sensory deficits
   This theory proposes that cognitive changes with aging may be attributed to changes in sensation. Older adults’ performance on cognitive tasks correlates strongly with sensory ability. In young adults, cognitive impairment can arise when to-be processed stimuli are degraded. It is possible that older adults score worse on cognitive tasks requiring auditory information if their auditory sensations are degraded.
2. Inhibition abilities
   This theory proposes that cognitive deficits may relate to their inability to ignore irrelevant information while focusing on the goal-related information. Older adults have a difficult time inhibiting the strong association present in ‘garden-path-sentences’. As a possible result of a decrease in inhibition abilities, older adults have difficulties with task-switching. Difficulty ignoring irrelevant information may explain the reduced (working) memory capacity, because more irrelevant information is stored.
3. Speed of processing
   This theory proposes that cognitive changes with aging relate to the slower processing time of older adults. The slower processing time shows in motor skills and in cognitive skills. Cognitive performance can suffer because the slowed mental operations cannot be carried out within the necessary time frame. The increased time between mental operations can make it more difficult to access previously processed information. A slower processing speed may lead to a poorer encoding of information and a reduced ability to store information.

It is possible to explain the effects of cognitive aging by changes that have a larger impact on one area of cognition than another, according to the domain-general theories of aging. There are two main domain-general theories of cognitive aging:

1. Word-finding difficulties and transmission deficits
   This theory proposes that word-finding difficulties become more common in older adults, because the links connecting one unit to another within the memory system become weaker with age. More links must be active in order to find a word for something in older adults than in younger adults, according to this theory. Words that have a lot of semantic connections, such as everyday objects, are easier for older adults to use than names, which have fewer connections.
2. Contextual memory and associative binding deficits
   Episodic memory includes both item (object) memory and memory for contextual details. Older adults have a difficulty with remembering contextual details. This theory proposes that an associative binding deficit underlies this difficulty. There are to broad memory deficits that underly this, a difficulty with initiating effective coding strategies and a difficulty forming a long-lasting bond between an item and its context.

There are two cognitive functions that remain stable or improve with age:

1. Crystallized intelligence
   This refers to

Until recently, it was thought that drug-abusers keep using drugs because they like the benefits more than the disadvantages, but most drug-abusers are well aware of the disadvantages of abusing drugs. The problem is that most drug-abusers cannot resist the automatically triggered impulses. If there is little room for conscious control in a situation, the action tendency (using drugs or substances) might be stronger than the conscious control.

There are two semi-independent systems:

1. A fast associative impulsive system
   This includes the automatic appraisal of stimuli in terms of their emotional and motivational significance.
2. A slower reflective system
   This includes controlled processes related to conscious deliberation, emotion regulation and expected outcomes.

The brain changes as a result of continued substance abuse. Some of these changes involve neural substrates related to emotion and motivation. The impulsive system becomes sensitised to the drug and other cues that predict use following prolonged drug abuse. The result is that drug-related cues automatically capture their attention. This may result in automatic action tendencies (use the substance or drug). This action tendency can still be inhibited if the person has enough motivation or ability to do so. Impulsive people are more likely to develop addictions.

Implicit cognition is measured by testing the attention bias and memory associations. The best attentional-bias task is the drug Stroop task. The visual probe test is also used for testing attentional bias. Memory associations can be tested by providing participants with cues and to see which they associate with and another way is presenting participants with affective phrases that can be alcohol or drug-related. Spontaneous associations reflect impulsive, automatic processes in addictive behaviours, assess unique information beyond more explicit expected outcomes.

Cognitive interventions are better suited to change explicit cognitive processes than to change implicit ones. New interventions are being developed focussed on the two semi-independent systems and substance abuse is being predicted by the results on the attentional bias and memory association tasks. This focusses on changing implicit associations and attention towards more neutral stimuli, rather than drug-related stimuli. The newly developed interventions are proper supplements to already existing interventions, rather than a good alternative.

Implicit measures may better reflect deeper affective mechanisms that operate outside awareness than may explicit measures and thus may provide a unique window on these processes in the development of human addiction. Long-term effects of alcohol and drugs on systems of emotion and motivation are particularly pronounced during adolescence.