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:
The sensorimotor stage: birth to 2 years
All that infants know is derived from information that comes in through the senses and the motoric actions that they can perform.
For most of this stage young children are pre-verbal and have no symbol use.
Young children must live in the present dependent upon sensorimotor input and the overt actions they can perform.
Divided into six substages.
1. Reflexive schemes substage (birth- 1 month)
2. Primary circular reactions (1-4 months)
3. Secondary circular reactions (4- 10 months)
4. Coordination of secondary schemes (10 -12 months).
5 Teriary circular reactions (12- 18 months)
6. Beginning of thought (18- 24 months)
Criticisms of Piaget’s account
The preoperational stage: 2 to 7 years
Characterized by an impressive increase in mental representation and accompanied by equally impressive limitations.
Two substages:
1. Symbolic function substage: 2 to 4 years
Children acquire the ability to mentally represent an object that is not physically present.
This ability to engage in symbolic thought expands the child’s mental world as they are no longer tied to the here and now and they no longer require sensory input to think of things.
Early on the child requires a high level of similarity between external prop and referent in order to symbolize the referent. Over time, children can use external props that are dissimilar to the referent. Eventually, children can just imagine the referent and event.
Other examples of children engaging in symbolic thought can be seen in their use of language and their production of drawings.
At 16 months, the average child comprehends over 150 words, but in their early language they are restricted to producing one word at a time.
Between 18 and 24 months, their productions are typically restricted to two-word utterances.
From 2 years this word-lenght restriction becomes lifted and children learn an impressive nine words a day on average.
Children understand the symbolic nature of drawings.
Tree mountains task: a task used by Piaget where the child is shown a model of three mountains and asked to choose the view that would be seen by someone in a different location from themselves.
14 month-olds engage in rational imitation (where infants produce an action that they think the adult intended to do, rather than what the adult actually did).
This demonstrates that 14-month-olds can infer other’s intentions and perspectives!
This is not confined to humans!
Children of 18 months of age can sympathize with a stranger who is in a hurtful situation but showing no emotion.
The belief that inanimate objects have lifelike qualities and are capable of independent action.
Piaget suggested that young children’s egocentric thinking prevents them form accommodating.
Recently researchers have shown that, for familiar objects, 6-12 month olds can sort pictures of objects into categories and distinguish between animate and inanimate objects.
By the age of 2,5 years, children attribute wishes and likes to people and animals but hardly ever to objects.
Intuitive thought substage: 4 to 7 years
Characterized by a shift in children’s reasoning.
Children begin to classify, order and quantify in a more systematic manner.
Although a child can carry out such mental operations, they remain largely unaware of the underlying principles and what they know. A child’s reasoning is largely based on perception and intuition, rather than rational thinking.
Seration task: putting items in a coherent or logical order.
Transitive inferences
the relation between two (or more) premises that lead to an inference that is logically necessary.
The ability to seriate mentally between entities that can be organized into an ordinal series.
4 year olds could make transitive inferences as long as they were trained to remember the premises. But his may had false positives.
Hierarchical classification tasks
Class inclusion: the ability to coordinate and reason about parts and wholes simultaneous in recognizing relations between classes and subclasses.
Piaget proposed that children have difficulty in focusing on a part of the set and, simultaneously, on the whole set. This idea is similar to Piaget’s account of young children’s failure to conserve.
More recently, researchers using simpler questions have found that children as young as 4 years of age were able to solve part-whole relations problems.
There is plenty of evidence that young children have formed a variety of global categories based on common natural kind, function and behavior. They can make categorization judgments based on non-observable properties.
Children’s skill at categorizing object across the pre-school years is supported by gains in general knowledge and a rapid expansion in vocabulary.
By 2-3 years of age, children can categorize and object according to a superordinate (higher level, like animal) category.
Conservation tasks
Certain characteristics of an object remain the same even when their appearance changes.
Processes involve in failure to conserve
Piaget proposed that the preoperational child’s inability to conserve is characterized by three main limitations:
The age at which children attain conservation varies across culture, and depends on the substances and concepts they are asked to conserve.
Horizontal décalage: the non-synchornous development of children on Piagetian tasks.
Different types of conservation require differing degrees of abstraction, with conservation of liquid, number, length and mass requiring the fewest abstract operations, ad volume the most.
Children attain conservation of mass prior to attaining conservation of volume. The order of progression is constant, because knowledge of the simpler concept is essential in order for the child to attain the more abstract concept.
But, children have some knowledge of conservation far earlier than Piaget suggested.
There is even a type of conservation of weight that can be found in infants.
Vertical décalage: within Piagetian terminology, the child has a level of understanding at one level that has to be reconstructed at a later age at a different stage or level of understanding.
Other researchers have found children conserving at an earlier age than Piaget’s theory suggests.
But, children do not seem to fully understand conservation until the school years.
The appearance-reality distinction
Appearance-reality tasks in which appearance and reality diverge.
3 year olds make two kinds of error:
This might be because 3-year olds are not proficient at dual encoding.
DeLoache suggests that 3 year olds, but not 2,5 year olds do possess the ability to represent an object in more than one way at the same time.
Researchers suggested that young children’s failure on these tasks may, in part, result from a difficulty in formulating the appearance-reality distinction into words.
The concrete operations stage: 7 to 11 years
During this stage, children’s thought processes change yet again.
Children’s thought is more logical and flexible, but their reasoning is tied to concrete situations.
They have attained the processes of decentration, compensation and reversibility. They can solve conservation tasks.
They also seriate mentally, an ability named transitive inference. But in abstract is difficult.
The child can seriate mentally, but the object necessary for problem solution need to be physically present.
Between the ages 7 and 10, children gain in their ability to classify objects. They can attend to relations between a general and two specific categories at the same time.
But performance on tasks may be influenced by the context of the tasks. It has been demonstrated that culture and schooling affects children’s performance on a number of Piagetian tasks.
Overall evaluation of Piaget’s theory
Scaffolding: the process whereby adults structure and simplify a child’s environment in order to facilitate their learning.
Like Piaget, Case interpret cognitive change occurring as a series of four stages or structural levels:
Unlike Piaget, Case adopted an information processing perspective to cognitive development in that he attributes changes within each stage and across stages to increases in central processing speed and working memory capacity.
Case attributed increases in working memory capacity to three factors:
When children form a new conceptual structure they move to the next stage of development.
Once all schemes (for example, for conservation task) have become sufficiently automatic, they are integrated into a central conceptual structure (network of concepts) that enables them to efficiently process information about a range of conservation tasks.
An evolutionary perspective to account for child development.
Siegler suggests that when attempting to solve tasks, children may generate a variety of strategies.
Sielger argues that children are most likely to use multiple strategies which compete with each other when they are still learning about how to solve the task.
Overlapping waves: at any given time the child has a number of strategies that can be use to solve problems. Over time less efficient strategies are replaced by more effective ones.
Vygotsky viewed the child as an active seeker of knowledge.
Vygotsky emphasized that children’s thinking is influenced by social and cultural contexts.
We share lower mental functions such as attention and memory with other animals and these functions develop during the first two years of life.
Physiological tools are acquired through social and cultural interactions.
Language is the most important psychological tool in cognitive development. Children engage in private speech as a form of self-guidance.
As children master the use of language, they do not only use language as a means of communicating with others, but also for guiding thinking and behavior.
At first, children talk to themselves out loud. As they gain more experience with tasks, they internalize their self-directed speech. This is private speech.
Eventually private speech becomes the mediating tool for the child’s thinking and the child uses private speech to think and plan.
Children’s learning takes place within a fuzzy range along the course of development. Within the zone of proximal development (ZPD).
The zone covers three developmental levels
Whether a child can successfully solve a problem or pass a task depends on many environmental factors.
While some tasks are not very challenging and the child can pass these unassisted. Other tasks are more challenging and can only be passed with assistance.
For guidance to be of benefit to the learner it must fit the child’s current level of performance. This is scaffolding.
The child internalizes the language and behaviors used in these social interactions and it becomes part of their private speech, which in turn mediates their thinking and planning.
With the development of new skills at a higher level of mastery both the actual level and the potential level increases. The entire ZPD is dynamic and moves with development. Each domain has its own dynamic zone.
Scaffolding may not be appropriate in all contexts.
Guided participation: children’s ability to learn from interaction wit others.
Play is an area in which children advance themselves as they try out new skills. When children engage in pretend play, imaginary situations are created from internal ideas, rather than outside stimuli eliciting responses from the individual. Gradually, they come to realize that a symbol can be differentiated from the referent to which it refers.
Pretend play is also rule-based. Such play helps children internalize social and cultural norms that govern people’s behavior.
Proposes that humans are endowed with a small number of domain-specific systems of core knowledge at birth and that this core knowledge becomes elaborated with experience.
Specific modules are responsible for a particular kind of core knowledge.
Principles governing reasoning in each domain are distinct because infants only apply them to entities within a specific domain. Each set of principles forms a specific system that is characterized by a set of signature limits: there is some debate over the number of core knowledge systems.
Five systems for core knowledge:
Knowledge of:
These systems are at the core of mature reasoning in these domains and it is these systems that support knowledge acquisition in children.
There is cross-cultural evidence.
The system of object representation centres on the spatio-temporal principles of cohesion (objects move as connected and bounded wholes), continuity, and contact.
These principles enable infants, and adults, to perceive object boundaries, to represent the entire shape of objects that are partly out of view, and to make predictions about how an object will behave.
In the first few months of life, infants have some awareness of these basic object properties.
The system of object representation has a number of signature limits.
Spatio-temporal principles do not govern infant’s representation of agents. Rather intentional actions of agents are directed to goals, and these goal representations guide infants’ imitations of others, and their social interactions.
Infant’s are more likely to understand other people’s intentions in reaching for objects after they themselves have learned to intentionally reach for objects. This suggests that infants have to first learn from their own intentional actions before being able to interpret the intentional actions of others.
Key principles that provide the signatures of agent representation:
Infants can discriminate between visual arrays on the basis of number.
This ability persists across the lifespan and is also common in non-human species.
Infants can discriminate between a large number of object and infants even add and subtract.
But infants’ numerical discrimination shows a ration limit.
Core knowledge theory differs from other theories.
They say: Some aspects of knowledge are innate.
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
Two general developmental designs
Cross-sectional designs
A study where children of different
.....read more Developmental psychology - summary of chapter 2 of an Introduction to Developmental psychology by A. Slater and G. Bremner (third edition)
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 a result of their cognitive adaptations they become better able to
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.
Heritability estimates
.....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 layer of identical cells in the wall of the neural tube.
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 perceiving differences between simple shapes such as crosses, triangles, squares and circles.
.....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.
Emotion understanding tasks
There are links between young children’s task-based
.....read more 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
Proto-imperatives: when infants point to an object and then alternate
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 on having reflective access to your own states of mind.
Meta-cognition:
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, rhymes.
Children’s scores in rhyme oddity tasks predicted their success
.....read more 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 although even then it remains fairly rare.
Longitudinal research indicates
.....read more 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 communicating their own thinking, it is not always the case that the
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 lower.
Resilience is the normative outcome for children who are faced
.....read more 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 be seen as regular or severe bullies, and some 10 per cent
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.
Siegler's
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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