Developmental psychology
Chapter 4
Prenatal development
Prenatal development: the development of human individuals before they are born.
Foetus: (by humans) the organism 12 weeks after conception until birth.
Embryo: the developing organism during the period when organs are forming. In human from first cell divisions until about 10 weeks.
Neonate: an infant less than a month old.
Postnatal development: the development of a human individual after he or she is born, particularly during early infancy.
Organogenesis: the process of organ formation in very early development. In humans this is from fist cell division until about 10 weeks.
Throughout life, normal development demands constant and complex interactions between genes, environment and the emerging organism.
The impact of prenatal experience occurs on multiple levels. From biochemical factors influencing gene expression, in the foetus’s neuronal circuitry to characteristics of the mother’s lifestyle affecting the foetal environment.
Exquisitely timed, complex interactions between the genes and environmental input affect acquisition of neuronal identity, guidance of axons to target, induction of connections between cells or synaptogenesis, and also programmed cell death or apoptosis.
Processes and sequencing of brain development
Ectoderm: the outermost of the three primary germ layers of an embryo. The central nervous system and skin, among other structures, develop from ectodrem.
The other two are endoderm and mesoderm.
During he embryonic period, the central nervous system brings as cells of ectoderm, one of three germ layers. The germ layers are the foundation for organ formation.
The endoderm thickens and becomes the neural plate by day 18 of gestation. By then it is already differentiated into cells that will become forebrain, midbrain and hindbrain.
The neural plate folds to become the neural tube, and by the end of the first month the embryonic body has the basic cranial-caudal (head to feed) organization.
Cells are born, and begin extensive migration to their eventual location where the will become their final forms.
Neurogenesis and migration continue right up to about the sixth month of pregnancy, and are followed by extensive changes in individual cells that program them for the myriad tasks awaiting the emerging brain.
Despite their ultimate high level of specialization, the 1010 nerve cells that will comprise the brain originate from one single layer of identical cells in the wall of the neural tube. There is a hierarchy of control systems within the nervous system that basically determines what the foetus is doing and when. The hierarchical structure becomes more complex as the unborn infant develops. The larger the behavioral repertoire is, the greater is the need for origination by the nervous system.
Development of the cerebral cortex
Cerebral cortex: the area of the brain that is associated with complex tasks such as memory, language, and thoughts and the control and integration of movement and senses.
It is the outer six-layer ‘crust’ of the left and right hemispheres that is about as thick as a credit card.
For the first two or three months of pregnancy there is relatively little development in this crust.
Behaviors emerging before this time are largely reflexive and probably controlled via simpler circuits that begin to arise in the midbrain.
The cerebral hemispheres begin to develop from the forebrain at about 9 weeks and rapidly increase in size, expanding to form different regions that will later become highly specialized. By mid-pregnancy, the cerebral hemispheres have expanded to cover the rest of the brain.
By the fourth month of pregnancy, the cells in the cerebral hemispheres begin to proliferate and migrate. Cell migration is quite unique in the cortex, cells migrate and find their ultimate destinations I the innermost of the six layers, first with successive migrating neurons passing them to their way to the outer layers nearer the skull.
By 6 months, the surface of the cortex is not longer smooth. Rapid cell proliferation has caused the infolding that is necessary for the large surface area of the cortex to be accommodated within the skull.
Sulci: the deep narrow grooves of the outer surface of the brain.
Gyri: the prominent ridges on the outer surface of the brain.
Sulci, gyri have appeared and the frontal, parietal and occipital lobes can be differentiated.
Additional sulci and gyri develop until birth, and continues in the months after birth as well.
As the higher centers of the brain develop, and more neural inputs become active, increasingly sophisticated messages can be sent from the brain.
The process of inhibition becomes functional. The foetus can modify movement. A by-product of this process is that at about 15 weeks there is a bit of a lull in activity. This is followed by a period of reorganization of behaviors. Reflexive neuronal circuits are still in place, but these circuits are now controlled by more sophisticated nerve cells in the new higher brain centers.
By 27 weeks the number of brain cells in the cerebral cortex are thought to be mature, but at birth the brain is only about 25 per cent of this adult volume.
Additional volume comes from increases in cell body size and proliferation of dendritic spines during synaptogenesis.
Most of the growth comes from the myelination of nerve fibres.
Myelination begins in the sixth month of foetal life, and is not entirely complete until the third decade of life.
By about 24 weeks foetuses do have limited capacity to learn. They respond to the environment and begin to show a very basic form of memory, habituation of responding to repeated auditory stimulation.
By birth, the cerebral cortex consists of a large number of well-defined primary motor and sensory zones.
Behavioral organization
Foetuses’ behavior becomes progressively more organizes as gestation proceeds.
At 34 weeks, they are no longer the continually moving creatures of 13 weeks, instead they have distinct patterns of rest and activity.
Two dominant patterns of behavior have now emerged:
foetuses spend about 20 to 30 per cent of their time in quiet, motionless sleep-like state with a steady heartbeat and breathing movements that are rhythmic when they occur.
For most of the rest of the time they are similarly not awake but are in a state like newborn active sleep with many different body movements and their eyes rapidly back and forth, periodically open. Heart rate and breathing patterns tend to be irregular, and they will respond to the sensory stimuli that they are naturally exposed to in their uterine environment.
During periods of active sleep foetuses may be more reactive to sounds and touch. Early neuronal networks are being stimulated both by external stimuli and also volleys of activity that the brain generates without external stimulation.
It is thought that this level op brain activity is probably necessary for adequate development and further maturation of the vital organs and the nervous system.
Foetuses make fewer general body movements now. They also make breathing movements fairly frequently, which are important for long development in readiness for birth.
38 week old term (the end of pregnancy) foetuses no longer spend quite as much time in state of active sleep.
More inhibitory pathways have developed, further reducing the amount of movement they make.
Foetuses will have longer periods when they are resting quietly in deep sleep.
Foetuses activity and rest periods alternate cyclically throughout the day.
Superimposed on this cyclical rhythm are maternnal physiological factors such as hormone levels, breathing, heart rate and uterine activity. Variations in some or all of these factors are thought to affect foetuses’ behavior over the course of the day.
In general there is a peak in activity occurring when the mother is asleep, in the late evening, and a relative lull in activity in the early hours of the morning.
Touch
The emerge of the senses follows a set mammalian pattern of development.
Emerge is further organized in a cranial-caudal direction.
The first system to function of touch. By about 8 weeks, if the area around the lips is stroked by a hairlike wire, foetuses will respond by moving.
Within two weeks foetuses will curl their fingers in a reflexive grasp when their palm is touched.
Initially foetuses move their head and neck away from the source of facial touch, often with their mouth open. Later, they will move towards the touch.
Rooting reflex: the reflex that causes newborn babies to respond to one of their cheeks being touched by turning their head in that direction.
Once foetuses move around they will be touching the uterine wall, the umbilical cord, and also themselves. Foetuses will touch their own face more frequently than any other body part.
The foetus is provided with a wide breadth of physical sensations, which probably helps them promote further development of the physical sensation of touch.
Chemosensory system
Chemosensory system: encompasses both the gustatory (taste) ad olfactory (smell) senses.
The sensory receptors respond to molecules of the substances that contact them.
It is difficult to say exactly what foetuses taste and smell.
Molecules form the mother’s diet, and form heavy concentrations of airborne substances, can pass into her bloodstream and then into both the amniotic fluid and foetal blood.
Foetal blood is a third pathway, in addition to the mouth and nose, for the effect of experience with chemosensory stimulants.
Foetuses swallow amnoitic fluid regularly throughout the day. This fluid passes into the stomach where it will then be broken down further and sent to other organs, before it is expelled from the bladder back into the amnoitic fluid again.
During the fourth month, the plugs of tissue that were previously blocking the nostrils have gone, and the foetuses ‘inhale’, amnoitic fluid begins passing through the nose. Foetuses inhale twice as much fluid as they swallow.
During the second half of pregnancy, the constitution of amnoitic fluid becomes increasingly dependent on foetal urination. This may be particularly important for stimulation of the chemosensory system since it contains large amounts of ammonia-smelling urea in addition to molecules that have passes through the foetal digestive system.
Taste and odor molecules also travel via the placenta into the foetal circulation system.
Those within the blood have not been broken down or metabolised and are relatively undilute and consequently more intense.
Foetal blood will flow in tiny capillaries through the nose and mouth and therefore have ample opportunity to bind with olfactory and gustatory receptors.
Nearly all babies, before or after birth, show a preference for sweet substances over bitter. If the amniotic fluid tastes sweet then the foetus will swallow more regularly than if it contains bitter substances.
While some of the foetus’s ability to detect and prefer certain flavors to others may be genetically determined, other preferences may be learned in utero.
Newborn infants turn their heads in the direction of odeorants that have been present in their mother’s diet.
Colostrum: the breast fluid that precedes true milk. It is rich in minerals and antibodies, and it helps populate the newborn’s gut with ‘good’ bacteria.
The vestibular system
Vestibular system: the sensory system that contributes to balance and spatial orientation.
Foetuses move a lot around in utero.
Since mothers are moving about for much of the day, foetusese are also subject to constant passive motion and will experience positional changes relative to gravity, depending on whether the mother is standing up, sitting or lying down.
This information is sensed by the vestibular apparatus consisting of three semi-circular canals, set at right angles to each other within the foetus’s inner ear.
These canals are fluid filled and when the foetus moves, the fluid within at least one of the canals will also move, stimulating tiny hears within the canal lining.
By 25 weeks, foetuses will show a righting reflex, an it is possible that the verstbular system is in some way responsible for most babies lying head down prior to delivery.
Vestibular stimulation plays an important role in changing arousal states and this will become more apparent as time goes on.
Initially, during pregnancy, foetuses are often quiet when the mother is moving about a lot and causing a lot of vestibular stimulation. When the mother is lying down the foetuses are receiving minimal vestibular stimulation and are often at their most active.
Once foetuses are born, the parents will probably rock the baby when they are fussy or put to sleep. Vestibular stimulation!
Preterm: born prematurely.
Studies of preterm infants show lags in neurobehavioral development that may be part be due to a lack of vestibular stimulation.
Circadian rhythms: bodily cycles withing the body that occur on a 24-hour cycle such as patterns of sleeping/waking.
The visual system
Pregnancy is a time for structural formatoin of the basic components of the visual system.
There is little visual stimulation in the developing baby’s prenatal world.
The eyelids are fused shut shortly after their formation and do not open until 5-7 months of gestation, further reducing the amount of light reaching the developing retina.
This period of darkness may be necessary for proper development. After birth, visual development can proceed normally only when the system is adequately stimulated.
Development of the eyes
At about 5 weeks of postconception, two balloon like structures form on either side at the front of the brain. As they develop they become separated from the brain by a small stalk. This is where the nerve fibres will travel between the eye and the brain.
A few days later, the balloons infold to form a two-layered cup, and the retina develops from this cup.
The rods and cones develop from the inner wall of the optic cup.
The outer wall forms a pigment-containing layer that actually absorbs the light. This outer wall also goes on to develop the nutritive network of blood vessels needed by the rods and cones.
The lens of they eye begins to form at about 2 months of pregnancy.
The eyelids and muscles that move the eyes are also beginning to form around this time. The iris begins to develop.
By 3 months the eyelids have fused together. The cornea (the clear, curved part of the eye) is forming different layers, they organization of the cells and fibres in these layers is crucial in providing a strong but transparent window to the eye.
By 6 months all the muscles that move the eyeball are in place. Eye movements usually begin weeks 16-23, even though not all the muscles may be fully formed.
Even premature babies, as immature as 26 weeks gestation, are able to distinguish light from dark and are soon able to make tracking eye movement to follow an attractive moving object.
Development of the visual pathway
There is simultaneous development of the visual pathway connecting the light-sensitive cells in the eye to the brain.
By 9 weeks of pregnancy, shortly after the period of the embryo, the optic nerve has already penetrated the neural tube from its stalk, and there is partial crossing over of the fibres of the optic nerve. This allows for information from both eyes to be integrated. The crossing is complete by 15 weeks of pregnancy.
By the end of the first three months, the nerve fibres interconnect with cells in the LGN.
At about 5 months, the cells in this structure take on a very particular arrangement, six stripes appear. The cells within the stripes are highly specialized to deal with particular types of visual information and will be part of the ‘what’ and ‘where’ visual pathways for object perception. Two of the stripes respond maximally to moving stimuli and the other four cells are concerned with the what.
Development of the visual cortex
As the nerve fibres pass form the LGN they go to the visual cortex.
The visual cortex is organized like a map to the two retinas. Each point on the retinal represents a point in space within the field of vision.
The visual cortex turns the image right way up.
The striate cortex in the occipital lobe is the part of the brain concerned with many aspects of basic visual information. The surrounding brain areas are involved with perceptual processes. This is the interpretation of sensory information. Their development is less well known, but thought of to begin formation somewhat later in the last three months.
The development of the cerebral cortex is characterized by the formation of layers of varying cell densities and by about 7 months, the striate cortex attains the definitive laminar structure.
At this time, foetuses will spend some time with their eyes open and will now be making blinking movements.
Externally, foetuses’ eyes will look fully formed. There are still some minor immaturities in the gross structures of the eyes, but the major source of immaturity in foetuses visual system is within the neural structures of the eye, the retina and the pathways to the brain.
Babies of 28 weeks can easily distinguish between light and dark and have the ability to discriminate from to some extent .
By 30 weeks premature newborns are able to see patterns of fairly large size, provided that they are of sufficiently high contrast and fairly close to their eyes.
At birth babies are relatively near-sighted. The ability to focus on object across the room will develop in the first months of life.
The auditory system
The development of the auditory system begins at about 6 weeks of pregnancy. At this time, two small, inward-facing bubbles appear on either side of the back of the brain. These become the inner ear and will later contain the auditory and balance organs. The middle ear tube has also begun to develop from the pharynx or oral cavity area above the trachea.
Responses to sound
The auditory system becomes mature enough between 23 and 25 weeks to detect vibroacoustic stimulation. At this point, a major immaturity is in the system’s sensors. Another immaturity is apparent within the nerve fibres that carry these messages.
However, almost all frequencies can be heard.
The sounds available to the foetus have to pass through various maternal tissues that effectively cut out the higher frequencies.
Very loud sounds result in a very vast heartrate. As foetuses get older, their response will change based on the sound intensity, how deeply they are sleeping and how familiar they are with sounds.
Foetuses will also respond to some sounds by moving their limbs, or sometimes stopping their movement.
Sounds are thought to shape permanent changes in the auditory system, and these are probably required for normal brain development.
Transnatal learning: learning that occurs during the prenatal period which is remembered during the postnatal period.
35 weeks marks an important advance in learning ability.
Learning about mother’s voice and language
Newborns prefer a low-pass filtered recording of the maternal voice compared to an unfiltered recording of his or her mothers voice.
Newborns have shown that they respond differentially to languages.
Within the first four days after birth, infants discriminate the language that their mother speaks compared to a foreign language. And 2 days old have demonstrated a preference for the maternal language compared to a foreign language.
Foetuses learn about vowels from the natural speech in their language community.
Infants respond differentially for as long as four months after birth to specific sounds that they experienced prenatally.
Perinatal: the period just before and after birth.
Effects of exposure to psychoactive substances
Heavy maternal alcohol consumption profoundly influences foetal and child development.
Alcohol has detrimental effects on development and function of the placenta.
Cigarette smoking is bad.
Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI): a class of drugs typically used to treat depression or anxiety.
Nutrition and foetal development
Specific nutritional requirements must be met for healthy foetal development.
Women’s food intake and/or weight gain during pregnancy may subtly affect foetal development in ways that have implications for the child’s future medical and mental health, with some effect appearing only in adulthood.
Developmental programming: the hypothesis that prenatal conditions have detrimental effects on health into adulthood.
Effects of maternal stress
Maternal psychological stress during pregnancy has long been linked to negative birth outcomes.
Most of the reflex behaviors that babies demonstrate after they are born are part of the foetal repertoire.
Developmental psychology - summary of chapter 1 of an Introduction to Developmental psychology by A. Slater and G. Bremner (third edition)
Developmental psychology
Chapter 1
The scope and Methods of Developmental psychology
Introduction
Developmental psychology: the discipline that attempts to describe and explain the changes that occur over time in the thought, behavior, reasoning and functioning of a person due biological, individual and environmental influences.
Maturation: aspects of development that are largely under genetic control, and hence largely uninfluenced by environmental factors.
Developmental psychologist study age-related changes in behavior and development.
Age itself causes nothing. So we need to look for the many factors that cause development to take place.
The assumptions and ideas we have about human nature will affect how we rear our own children and how we interpret the findings from studies of children.
‘Folk’ theories of development: ideas held about development that are not based upon scientific investigation.
Often reflect the issues that psychologists investigate, with aim of putting our understanding on a firmer, more scientific footing.
Defining development according to world views
The manner in which development is defined, and the areas of development that are of interest to individual researchers, will lead them to use different methods of studying development.
Two paradigms:
Organismic world view
The idea that people are inherently active and continually interacting with the environment, and therefore helping to shape their own development.
Emphasizes the interaction between maturation and experience that leads to the development of new internal, psychological structures for processing environmental input.
Each new stage in development represents an advance on the preceding stage and the individual does not regress to former stages.
Each new stage presents new characteristics not present in the previous stage.
Mechanistic world view
The idea that a person can be represented as being like a machine, which is inherently passive until stimulated by the environment.
Ultimately, human behavior is reducible to the operation of fundamental behavioral units that are acquired in a gradual, cumulative manner.
The frequency of behaviors can increase with age due to various learning processes and they can decrease with age when they no longer have any functional consequence, or lead to negative consequences.
Development is reflected by a more continuous growth function, rather than occurring in qualitatively different stages, and the child is passive rather than active in shaping its own development.
Behaviorists represent this world view.
Designs for studying age-related changes
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Developmental psychology
Chapter 2
Theories and issues in child development
Introduction
Theory of development: a scheme or system of ideas that is based on evidence and attempts to explain, describe and predict behavior and development.
Two types of theory:
Motor milestones: the basic motor skills acquired in infancy and early childhood, such as sitting unaided, standing, crawling and walking.
The development of motor skills has very important implications for other aspects of development.
The ability to act on the world affects all other aspects of development, and each accomplishment brings with it an increasing degree of independence.
Maturational theories
Motor development proceeded from the global to the specific in two directions.
Development is controlled by a maturational timetable linked particularly to the central nervous system and also to muscular development.
Dynamic systems theory
A theoretical approach applied to many areas of development which views the individual as interacting dynamically in a complex system in which all parts interact.
Not all infants go through the same motor developmental stages.
Infants’ acquisition of a new motor skill is much the same as that of adults learning a new motor skill. The beginnings are usually fumbling and poor. There is trial and error learning and great concentration, all gradually leading to the accomplished skillful activity, which then is usually used in the development of yet new motor skills.
All new motor development is the result of a dynamic and continual interaction of three factors:
Piaget’s theory of development
Developmental psychology before Piaget
Behaviorism and psychoanalysis.
The child is seen as the passive recipient of their upbringing. Development results from such things as the rewards and punishments.
Fundamental aspects of human development according to Piaget
Children are active agents in shaping their own development, they are not simply blank slates who passively and unthinkingly respond to whatever the environment offers them.
Children’s development and behavior is motivated largely intrinsically.
Children learn to adapt to their environments and as
Developmental psychology - summary of chapter 3 of an Introduction to Developmental psychology by A. Slater and G. Bremner (third edition)
Developmental psychology
Chapter 3
The nature-nurture debate
Precocial and altricial species
Precocial species: they young are physically mobile and able from the moment of birth or hatching.
Altricial species: are helpless and do not have this capacity at birth.
Nativism and empiricism
Nativism: the view that many skills or abilities are ‘native’ or hard wired into the brain at birth, the result of genetic inheritance.
Empiricism: the view that humans are not born with built-in ‘core-knowledge’ or mental content and that all knowledge results form learning and experience.
Cognition: mental activity.
Mental age and intelligence quotient (IQ)
Chronological age (CA): a person’s actual age
Mental age (MA): an individual’s level of mental ability relative to others.
Intelligence quotient (IQ): a measure of a person’s level of intelligence compared to a population of individuals of approximately the same age.
Originally (MA/CA)*100
Intelligence tests
Four important notes about IQ:
What is intelligence, on ability or several?
To a large extent how intelligence is defined determiners how it is measured.
There are those who argue that a general intelligence ability underlies performance on all intelligence tests.
Others suggest that intelligence is made up of a number of specific abilities or subskills.
Still others have argued that performance on intelligence tests is unrelated to our ability to ‘live our lives intelligently’.
Intelligence test items
Many test divide intelligence into two broad abilities.
Verbal subscales
Similarities: the child is asked in what way things might be similar.
Comprehension: measures the child’s common sense and understanding.
Recall of digits
Performance subscales
Block design: This child is given a set of blocks with colored patterns on them, and asked to use them to make patterns that the tester knows.
Copying: the child is shown a drawing and asked to copy it on a sheet of paper. The drawings are initially simple and become progressively more complex geometric shapes.
Controversies and issues in intelligence
Heriability: a statistical measure that describes how much of the variation of a trait in a population is due to genetic differences in that population.
.....read more Developmental psychology - summary of chapter 4 of an Introduction to Developmental psychology by A. Slater and G. Bremner (third edition)
Developmental psychology
Chapter 4
Prenatal development
Prenatal development: the development of human individuals before they are born.
Foetus: (by humans) the organism 12 weeks after conception until birth.
Embryo: the developing organism during the period when organs are forming. In human from first cell divisions until about 10 weeks.
Neonate: an infant less than a month old.
Postnatal development: the development of a human individual after he or she is born, particularly during early infancy.
Organogenesis: the process of organ formation in very early development. In humans this is from fist cell division until about 10 weeks.
Throughout life, normal development demands constant and complex interactions between genes, environment and the emerging organism.
The impact of prenatal experience occurs on multiple levels. From biochemical factors influencing gene expression, in the foetus’s neuronal circuitry to characteristics of the mother’s lifestyle affecting the foetal environment.
Exquisitely timed, complex interactions between the genes and environmental input affect acquisition of neuronal identity, guidance of axons to target, induction of connections between cells or synaptogenesis, and also programmed cell death or apoptosis.
Processes and sequencing of brain development
Ectoderm: the outermost of the three primary germ layers of an embryo. The central nervous system and skin, among other structures, develop from ectodrem.
The other two are endoderm and mesoderm.
During he embryonic period, the central nervous system brings as cells of ectoderm, one of three germ layers. The germ layers are the foundation for organ formation.
The endoderm thickens and becomes the neural plate by day 18 of gestation. By then it is already differentiated into cells that will become forebrain, midbrain and hindbrain.
The neural plate folds to become the neural tube, and by the end of the first month the embryonic body has the basic cranial-caudal (head to feed) organization.
Cells are born, and begin extensive migration to their eventual location where the will become their final forms.
Neurogenesis and migration continue right up to about the sixth month of pregnancy, and are followed by extensive changes in individual cells that program them for the myriad tasks awaiting the emerging brain.
Despite their ultimate high level of specialization, the 1010 nerve cells that will comprise the brain originate from one single
Developmental psychology - summary of chapter 5 of an Introduction to Developmental psychology by A. Slater and G. Bremner (third edition)
Developmental psychology
Chapter 5
Perception, knowledge and action in infancy
Cognitive development: the development of behaviors that relate to perception, attention, thinking, remembering and problem-solving.
Mental representation: an internal description of aspects of reality that persists in the absence of these aspects of reality.
Traditionally a key aspect of the distinction between perception and cognition.
But, its applicatoin to infancy has not been so productive as once seemed likely.
Right from birth, infants perceive the world in a sophisticated way, and in the early months they develop perceptual abilities that ‘fill in the gasp’ in perception so that invisible parts of objects are perceived, and that are temporarily hidden are treated as continuing in existence.
Early limitations in vision; are they really a problem?
Visual acuity: the ability to make fine discrimination between the elements in the visual array.
Newborns’ vision is significantly poorer than that of older individuals.
Visual acuity is probably around 1/30th the level of perfect adult acuity.
Young infants have poor control over focusing the eyes (visual accommodation).
These limitations are short lived, both acuity and accommodation improve rapidly during the first 6 months.
Although much of the detail of the visual world may be not available to young infants, these limitations should not affect perception of the larger scale structure of objects.
How can we investigate infant perception?
The visual preference method
Visual preference method to determine whether infants have preferences for certain stimuli. They are shown two objects side by side, and the amount of time they spend looking at each one is then compared.
Such looking time difference is defined as a visual preference. Such a preference implies discrimination, otherwise there would be no basis for preference.
The two stimuli are presented over a series of trials in which left-right associations are systematically varied.
Habituation techniques
If the infant looks for shorter periods over trials, this implies that progressively more of the stimulus has been committed to memory. This if infants habituate they must have form of visual memory.
To investigate visual discrimination.
Shape perception in newborns
Even newborns are capable of
.....read more Developmental psychology - summary of chapter 6 of an Introduction to Developmental psychology by A. Slater and G. Bremner (third edition)
Developmental psychology
Chapter 6
Emotional development and attachment relationships
Introduction
Emotional development underlies many other aspects of development, and has serious implications for how we conduct research with children.
Children’s emotional development can broadly be divided into three areas.
Expressing and recognizing emotional expressions
Are expressions of emotions innate?
Cross-cultural evidence
There is good evidence for the universality of human facial expressions of emotion.
Understanding of how emotions are conveyed through facial expressions is universal, but does not necessarily mean that understanding emotional expressions is innate.
Expressions of emotion in infancy
Infants from birth spontaneously display a wide repertoire of emotions though their facial expressions.
Basic emotions: happiness, interest, surprise, disgust, sadness, distress, anger, fear.
Complex emotions: pride, shyness, jealousy, guilt, shame, embarrassment.
Adults are skillful in accurately reading infants’ expressions.
However, adults are less accurate in discriminating infant’s negative facial expressions indicative of fear, anger, sadness or disgust. This appears not to be due to a lack of subtlety in young infants’ expression, but to the fact that the facial expressions arising from these different emotions are quite similar.
There is a biological basis for infant’s emotional facial expressions.
Multiple facial cues are used to signal emotion and the ability to convey and accurately interpret emotional expressions is impressively robust.
Infants indisputably display basic emotions very early in life. But there is considerable debate about when complex emotions emerge.
Infant discrimination of facial expressions
3-month-olds can distinguish between photographs of people smiling and frowning.
4- to 7-month-olds can distinguish between expressions of happiness and surprise.
Can young infants empathize with others’ emotions?
Very young infants may be emphasizing with the emotion they see portrayed.
But we cannot be sure.
Social referencing
Social referencing: infants and young children look at their caregiver for ‘advice’ when faced with an difficult or uncertain situation and seek social cures to guide their actions.
This provides and excellent way to assess infants’ understanding of other people’s emotional expressions.
Emotion understanding
Children begin to talk about emotions at a surprisingly young age, and parents readily give anecdotal accounts of their children using emotion words in the second year of life.
There are differences between emotional responses of infants and young children and those of older children and adults.
Emotional ambiguity: the realization that a person’s feelings may not be clear-cut or match your own emotional response.
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Developmental psychology - summary of chapter 9 of an Introduction to Developmental psychology by A. Slater and G. Bremner (third edition)
Developmental psychology
Chapter 9
Cognitive development
Epistemology: the study of the origins of knowledge and how we know what we know.
Two important findings of Piaget:
According to Piaget, everything that we know and understand is filtered through our current frame of reference. We construct new understandings of the world based on what we already know.
Constructivist.
Underlying structures and processes
Schemes
The basic unit of understanding is a scheme.
This is a cognitive structure that forms the basis of organizing actions and mental representations so that we can understand and act upon the environment.
This makes up our frames of reference through which we filter new information. Everything we know starts with the schemes we are born with.
Three of the basic schemes we are born with are reflexive actions that can be performed on objects: sucking, looking and grasping.
As children grow older they begin to use schemes based on internal mental representations rather than using schemes based on physical activity.
These schemes are operations.
Processes: organization and adaptation
Two innate processes to explain how children modify their schemes:
Through the processes of accommodation and assimilation we adjust to reality.
Piaget’s stages of cognitive development
Equilibration: in Piagetian theory, a state in which children’s schemes are in balance and undisturbed by conflict.
The processes of assimilation and accommodation comprise the equilibration process.
We are, by nature, constantly motivated to be able to fully assimilate and accommodate to objects and situations in our environment, to reach the state of cognitive equilibration.
At times, so many new levels of understanding converge that we reach a major reorganization in the structure of thinking.
These new levels of thinking are states. Qualitative shifts in a child’s way of thinking.
The ages at which they are achieved vary from one child to another. But, the order of progressing through stages is invariant.
Piaget believed his stages were universal:
Developmental psychology - summary of chapter 10 of an Introduction to Developmental psychology by A. Slater and G. Bremner (third edition)
Developmental psychology
Chapter 10
The development of language
A communication system
Human language is primarily a communication system, a means for speakers of a language to communicate with one another.
This ability is not unique to the human species.
But non of the communication systems of other species have been found to possess all of he characteristics found in human communication.
Human language is a symbolic, rule-governed system that is both abstract and productive, characteristics that enable its speakers to produce and comprehend a wide range of utterances.
It evolved from multiple abilities.
A symbolic system
Words and parts of words represent meanings.
These symbols refer to things other than themselves. They are conventional because speakers of a language use the same word to express the same meanings. This makes communication possible.
Language symbols are arbitrary, there is no necessary relation between sound and meaning.
A rule-governed system
Each human language is constrained by a set of rules that reflects the regularities of the language.
The rule system is abstract, it goes beyond the simple association of individual words and instead involves the manipulation of abstract classes of words.
Articles precede nouns.
The abstract classes and rules enable a languages productivity.
Language is productive
A finite number of linguistic units and a finite number of rules are capable of yielding an infinite number of grammatical utterances.
Speakers may produce and comprehend novel utterances.
Language also makes it possible to discuss fantasies and hypothetical situations and events.
Turn-taking
Conversations take place when participants take turns responding to each other’s queries or statements.
Mother-infant interactions
Turn-taking behavior makes its first appearance in the earliest interaction between mothers and infants.
Nursing sometimes involves an early non-verbal type of turn-taking.
Touching and vocalizations are two modalities in which exchanges between mothers and their infants takes turns.
Proto-conversations: interactions between adults and infants in which the adults tend to vocalize when the infants are not vocalizing, or after the infant has finished vocalizing.
Between 8 and 12 months, infants begin to take a more active role in turn-taking.
The dyadic proto-conversations evolve into triadic interactions
Developmental psychology - summary of chapter 11 of an Introduction to Developmental psychology by A. Slater and G. Bremner (third edition)
Developmental psychology
Chapter 11
Acquiring a theory of mind
Unlike other creatures, humans are able to marshal vast intellectual resources in an effort to connect with other people.
In non-humans, social behavior might have a great deal to do with instinct.
Early attunement to others’ minds
The ability to connect with other minds is present early in development.
Before long, the relationship is cemented when the baby shows a range of social responses.
Intuitive psychology: the awareness some people have regarding other’s desires, motives and beliefs, they appear able to anticipate others’ reactions and behavior.
Focusing on false beliefs: the unexpected transfer test
If we ask a participant to make judgments about another person’s true beliefs, they would respond correctly even in the absence of knowing anything about other minds.
Unexpected transfer test: a measure of theory of mind in which a child sees an object put in one place and it is later moved to another location without the child being aware of it. The theory-of-mind question is ‘where will the child look for the object when they want to find it?’
A reason for focusing on false beliefs is because it is important for children to be attuned to false as opposed to true beliefs.
Piaget characterized children below 7 years as egocentric.
But,
Wimmer found that from about 4 or 5 years, children set aside their own knowledge in making correct attributions of other people’s false beliefs.
Children negotiate a radical conceptual shift around the time of their fourth birthday, which equips them with a representational theory of mind that allows them to acknowledge false belief.
Children rapidly develop in their understanding of the mind at about 4 years of age.
The deceptive box test
According to Gopnik, understanding other minds by a process of simulation is implausible.
Being able to find out what someone else thinks by working out what you yourself would think in that situation depends
Developmental psychology - summary of chapter 12 of an Introduction to Developmental psychology by A. Slater and G. Bremner (third edition)
Developmental psychology
Chapter 12
Reading and mathematics in developmental psychology
Introduction
Cultural tools: any tools that help us to calculate, produce models, make predictions and understand the word more fully.
One characteristic of cultural tools is that they can vary from culture to culture.
Orthography: a writing system. Orthography is used to describe any aspect of print, or, the spelling
Alphabetic script: a writing system in which written symbols (letters) correspond to spoken sounds. Individual phonemes represent the individual letters of an alphabetic script.
There are several different alphabetic scrips, and there are radical differences among orthographies that use exactly the same script.
Morpheme: a unit of meaning.
In some scripts, each character signals a morpheme.
Syllabary: the name given to a language that relies heavily on syllables for meaning.
Mora: a rhythmic unit in languages like Japanese that can be either a syllable or part of a syllable.
Syllable: the smallest unit of a word whose pronunciation forms a rhythmic break when spoken.
The difficulty of alphabetic scripts
Represents speech at the level of phonemes.
No language has many phonemes in it and thus one does not need many letters to represent them.
The problem
Phonemic awareness and learning to read
Children get better with phonemes as they grow older.
This has to do with instruction.
Experience of learning to read an alphabetic script does make people aware of phonemes. Children need this form of awareness to become successful readers.
Rhymes and rimes
Some research suggests that children’s awareness of other phonological units, beside phoneme, plays a part in learning to read.
Between the levels of the syllable and the phoneme lies a set of phonological units which is called intrasyllabic. These are usually smaller in size than the syllable and larger than the phoneme. (like onset and rime).
Onset: of a syllable is the consonant, cluster of consonants, or vowel at the beginning of a syllable.
Rime: the vowel sound of a syllable plus any consonants that follow.
Monosyllabic words rhyme because they have a rime in common. (cat and hat).
Most children are aware of rimes from an early age and often actively and spontaneously create, and play with,
Developmental psychology - summary of chapter 15 of an Introduction to Developmental psychology by A. Slater and G. Bremner (third edition)
Developmental psychology
Chapter 15
Moral reasoning
Every discussion of the development of prosocial and antisocial behavior must cover the work of Piagent and Kohlberg.
Piaget
The first to study in a systematic way the moral judgments of children.
Piaget presented them with hypothetical moral dilemmas and then asked the children to make judgments.
From responses to dilemmas and to queries concerning the rules of games, Piaget concluded that younger children’s moral judgment was governed by unilateral respect for adult and adults’ rules, with little understanding of reciprocity or the intentions of others.
Young children children judge that the greater damage constitutes a larger moral violation, because the intentions will not be salient.
With age children develop a morality of cooperation and social exchange.
Children come to understand that intentions matter, that roles can be reversed, and that moral conflicts must be resolved through discussion and compromise with peers.
Age 10.
Kohlberg
Moral dilemmas to elicit moral reasoning.
Five stages of judgment
1. Heteronomous morality
2. Instrumental morality
3. Interpersonal normative morality
4. Social system morality
5. Human rights and social welfare morality
Age and stage
Kohlberg claimed that development across childhood and adolescence is characterized by sequential passage through the stages.
Stages 1 and 2 are most characteristic of children
Stage 3 emerging among adolescents.
Stage 4 increases in salience across adolescence
Stage 5 appears in adulthood
Developmental psychology - summary of chapter 16 of an Introduction to Developmental psychology by A. Slater and G. Bremner (third edition)
Developmental psychology
Chapter 16
Cognitive development in adolescence
Perception
Perception is one of the cognitive abilities that develop earliest in life.
Children’s perception becomes increasingly flexible.
Ambiguous figures.
Increased flexibility of thought in adolescence allows alternations between the different perspecitves to be easily accomplished in ambiguous figures.
Adolescents can identify both components and wholes.
Selective attention
Development is evident in the adolescent’s superior ability to allocate attentional resources.
Selective attention.
the time it takes for the brain to either receive or output information.
It develops rapidly during childhood and continues to develop during the adolescent years so that older adolescents show faster speed of processing compared to younger adolescents.
This development is at least partially driven by the maturation of white matter in the brain.
By early adulthood memory can be quite remarkable.
There is a rapid development in face processing abilities during childhood and adolescence, with adult-level recognition reached by about 16 years of age.
Is there a qualitative change in face processing between childhood and adolescence?
Proposal
Encoding switch hypothesis: different information abut faces is represented in memory by children at different ages. Young children rely on information about individual features, whereas older children and adults use information bout the configuration of the features.
Face processing emphasizing features is referred to as featural processing.
Face processing emphasizing configuration is configural processing.
Children younger than 10 years of age make identifications largely on the basis of parahernalia items such as hat or glasses.
Younger children’s failure in recognizing the right person may be because they encoded non-essential information for determining identity.
Even face-processing abilities during adolescence are still developing considering their less than adult like levels in face recognition memory.
There is a drop in performance on face recognition tasks occuring at about 11 years of age.
This appears to be influenced by factors such as children’s level of familiarity with the type of face stimuli used and the difficulty of the recognition task.
Hormonal influence?
Short-term memory
Short-term memory increases steadily throughout childhood and into adolescence.
Possible explanations:
Developmental psychology - summary of chapter 18 of an Introduction to Developmental psychology by A. Slater and G. Bremner (third edition)
Developmental psychology
Chapter 18
Educational implications
Pedagogy: an aspect of theory or practice related to learning.
Curriculum: the set of courses, and their content, offered at a school or university.
The effects of peer interaction
Piaget’s interest in interaction was predominantly in the importance of interaction with the physical rather than interpersonal environment.
In his earlier work, Piaget outlined a case for the importance of social interaction not only as a means to encourage learning, but also as a direct cause of development itself.
The primary intellectual deficit of the preoperational child, is the child’s inability to decentre or take account of alternative perspectives on the world to their own. However, this egocentrism could be overcome by peer interaction.
Through interaction with peers the child questions their own understanding, leading to a resolution of the conflict and a cognitive advantage.
Working in pairs can promote performance on Piagetian tasks
Peer facilitation effects: pairing of two children can have a positive impact on children’s later individual performance.
Bad performing children benefit from interaction.
Peer effects are persistent
The effects of paired interaction improve children’s performance are relatively long-lasting.
The changes in thinking promoted by sociocognitive conflict help children to benefit from subsequent learning experiences.
The positive and persistent effects of peer interaction extend beyond advances in cognitive development to advances in social development.
There is also concomitant development in social skills, communication, self-esteem, perspective-taking and social-emotional competence.
These positive effects on social skills are themselves a separate product of peer collaboration.
Peer effects in older children: Computer-based tasks
Much of the experimental work on the effects of peer interaction on children’s learning in middle school has centered on computer-based tasks.
7- 9 year olds benefit from interacting with other child when working on the Tower of Hanoi problem-solving task.
Peer interaction not only improved how quickly children arrived at the correct solution, but also positively affects the kind of strategies these children use.
Positive peer interaction effects are not restricted to very young children.
Constructing effective peer pairings
Positive effects of the efficacy of peer collaboration are not certain to arise.
Whilst a more developmentally advanced peer can likely benefit form collaboration in the form crystallizing and
Developmental psychology - summary of chapter 19 of an Introduction to Developmental psychology by A. Slater and G. Bremner (third edition)
Developmental psychology
Chapter 19
Risk and resilience in development
Resilience: occurs when children experience positive outcomes despite experiencing significant risk.
The historical roots of resilience can be traced to research on individuals with psychopathology.
Many of the children with mental illness were doing well.
Risk factors includes:
Protective factor: anything that prevents or reduces vulnerability for the development of a disorder.
Vulnerability factors: those attributes of the individual that contribute to maladjustment under conditions of adversity.
Children’s exposure to risk varies according to age.
Children in the first few years of live are highly dependent on their families.
Adolescents have larger and more varied social communities and therefore may have access to supportive environments other than family. But they are more influenced by the loss and devastation involved with war and natural disasters.
Parental bereavement
One of the most immediately traumatizing events for children and adolescents is the death of a parent.
Parental bereavement represents a permanent loss and separation from a primary caregiver.
Can be aggraveted by additional stressors.
There is evidence that parental death typically has a smaller effect on children than the effect of parental divorce.
Parental separation/divorce and inter-parental conflict
Family dissolution from parental divorce increases children’s risk for psychological, behavioral, social and academic problems.
Children who grow up in single-parent homes are less successful on average.
These differences have been found to relate to a broad range of outcomes.
Risk is the greatest for children of divorced parents who experience:
Although the intensity diminishes over time, offspring of divorced and remarried families experience difficulties that extend into adolescence and young adulthood.
Children of divorced parents are more likely to have problems with family members, in intimate relations, in marriage, and in the workplace.
The divorce rate is higher and reports of general well-being and life satisfaction are
Developmental psychology - summary of chapter 20 of an Introduction to Developmental psychology by A. Slater and G. Bremner (third edition)
Developmental psychology
Chapter 20
Social problems in schools
Social pressures in the classroom
One key factor is he process of social comparison whereby the child compares his or her performance with classmates.
Comparison is usually upward, with students who perform better than themselves but who seem similar to them on a rage of related and unrelated attributes.
Such comparison can raise the child’s level of academic performance but can also result in negative self-perceptions.
Self-worth protection: 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.
Peer pressure to work, or not!
An important social factor in school concerns pressure to work, or not to work, hard in class and on homework.
There is a very different nature of peer pressure in Eastern and Western cultures.
In eastern cultures, striving is typically seen as praiseworthy.
Children in US and UK often discourage any overt display of academic engagement by their classmates. Academic success in itself is not necessarily problematic for acceptance. Effortless success is generally admired.
As high stakes testing in many countries increasingly lead teachers, parents and students focus upon success on a variety of externally regulated tests and examinations, it is not surprising that student stress levels on relation to academic performance can often be high.
Bullying is usually taken to be a subset of aggressive behavior, characterized by repetition and an imbalance of power.
The behavior is repetitive and the victim cannot defend him/herself easily, for one or more reasons.
Bullying is likely to have particular characteristics and particular outcomes.
The relative defenselessness of the victim implies an obligation on others to intervene.
How do we find out about bullying?
The main methods are:
Incidence figures for bullying
Incidence figures for bullying vary greatly depending on measurement criteria.
Broadly speaking, in Western industrialized countries, some 5 per cent of children might
Developmental psychology - summary of chapter 21 of an Introduction to Developmental psychology by A. Slater and G. Bremner (third edition)
Developmental psychology
Chapter 21
Atypical development
Two ways in which development can be atypical
Williams syndrome: a rare neurodevelopmental disorder caused by deletion of about 26 genes from the long arm of chromosome 7.
Considering whether a child development is
Quantifying delay
Types of delay
Assessment of delay is not confined exclusively to norms for atypical development. Standardized assessment scales have been designed for use with specific exceptional populations.
The study of atypically developing children provides a profile of the main behaviors associated with a condition withing the context of development across the human lifespan.
This profile has the potential to generate a new knowledge base from which to design and deliver interventions.
Unfortunately, in the context of a relatively young field, there remains insufficient description of the atypical trajectories associated with particular disorders to warrant a sufficiently robust evidence base to inform the design and delivery of interventions fit-for-purpose.
Studying development that is considered atypical can inform us about development that is typical and vice versa.
Developmental Psychology: UvA Practice Questions
Which of the following statements about development in puberty is true?
A developmental psychologist carries out research into the development of aggression in children. She registers the same group of children at several moments and has chosen a research design in which she can both identify possible cohort effects and correct them in her analyzes. What is the design of this researcher?
Berk typifies developmental psychological theories as theories that view development as discontinuous or continuous. In which following combination of two developmental psychological theories is first called a discontinuous development theory and then a continuous development theory?
Jorrin is 3 years old and is asked to arrange a group of 7 blocks from small to large. Completing this task requires __________ and Jorrin will probably _________ be able to complete the task.
In developmental psychology, a "sensitive period" refers to:
The neo-Piagetan approach combines:
Camille says to her father on the other side of the room: "Look, Daddy, an elephant!" Camille keeps the book up without turning it over so that her father can also see the picture. The behavior of Camille is characteristic of _________ thinking.
Introduction to developmental psychologyIn this magazine you can find everything you need in the course developmental psychology at the first year of psychology at the Uva.
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