Physical and Cognitive Development – Flashcards
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When cells in an embryo begin to form specific functions. This starts to occur in early embryonic development and happens when certain cells come into contact with other cells.
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differentiation
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"The infant's neurons begin to mature in the later stages of prenatal growth, and their axons and dendrites form increasingly complex interconnections with other nerve cells." At the time of birth, there is a lack of neural interconnections due to infantile amnesia.
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neural connections
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Grasp reflex is when an infant closes their fist tightly around an object that touches their palm. This reflex is considered a primitive heritage and is believed to have once helped infants cling to their mothers' body.
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grasp reflex
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Rooting reflex is an infantile response related to feeding where babies' heads turn towards an object when his or her cheek is lightly touched. They continue searching for the source of stimulation until it is in their mouth. Many infantile responses disappear after a short period of time, typically a few months.
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rooting reflex
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The sucking reflex is another infantile response that makes infants suck when an area around their mouth is touched, which aids in breastfeeding.
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sucking reflex
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Jean Piaget is a Swiss psychologist whose work has shaped the study of cognitive development during the 20th century. At the beginning, Piaget was trained as a biologist but then he became interested in the growth of intelligence in children so he started observing children's performance on many different tasks carefully and proposed a theory on how intelligence was developed in children. Piaget believes that intelligence grows as the child attempts to make sense of the world.
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Jean Piaget
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Cognitive development focuses on the development of a child and describes the stages children go through as they mentally mature. Psychologist Piaget was very important in this field, believing there were "profound differences between a child's thinking and an adult's" (474). Piaget believed that there were four main stages of cognitive development: sensorimotor intelligence (birth to two years), preoperational period (two to seven years), concrete operations (seven to eleven years) and formal operations (eleven years on).
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cognitive development
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The level and activity of a child's mind during the first few months of their life consists of transient, unrelated sensory impressions and physical reactions. and the inability to distinguish between stable and fleeting objects and events, and between themselves and others. The sensorimotor stage is the first two years of their life following this where they start to be able to make these distinctions.
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sensorimotor stage
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This is Piaget's development stage from 2-7 years. In this stage, children fail to conserve quantities, for example, when children see the same amount water poured in two different shaped glasses and think one has more than the other, or when they fail to grasp the idea of the conservation of mass, or the conservation of a number. Piaget says children are also extremely egocentric in this stage, and do not understand thoughts, opinions, or wants outside of their own.
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pre-opertational stage
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As children at ages three or four have learned how to represent the world mentally, they can now transform mental representations of changes made in the world around them. However, Piaget believes that although they may face some intellectual limitations, "they have gained skill in a variety of mental operations, but they apply these operations only to relations between concrete events...Thus, children are able to think about a wide range of concrete cases, but lack skill in thinking abstractly"(478).
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concrete operational stage
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The stage of learning entered by a child at age eleven or twelve. After this point, children are capable of abstract thinking and operations of a higher order. They are better able to problem solve and reason.
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formal operational stage
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Object permanence is the understanding that objects exist independent of our momentary sensory or motoric interaction with them
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object permanence
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The schema is used to organize the sensory information in the brain as well as the relationships among those pieces of information. Schemas are "mental categories" that infants use to organize their thoughts on the outside world. Infants will use information in the schema to better understand the environment around them. Schemas will change as one gains more experience therefore, "schemas accommodate to the environment."
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schema
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When "children use the mental schemas they have already formed to interpret (and act on) the environment; in other words, objects in the environment are assimilated into the schema"(475). According to Piaget, assimilation allows children to integrate schemas into more complex ways of dealing with their environment.
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assimilation
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Accommodation is a process where the child uses a schema towards a new object and thus must adjust an old schema to also fit to the new object. This allows the schemas to broaden and the child can find a more flexible way to approach new objects.
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accommodation
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Piaget believed that before the concrete operational phase of life children could not understand the conservation of numbers . Meaning that if a child were to see a row of 5 pennies touching each other then see them when they are spread out into a larger line, they would not realize they held the same amount of pennies.
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failure of conservation
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a characteristic preoperational children, an inability to see another person's point of view
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egocentrism
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Every child has a "set of interrelated concepts and beliefs" that we use to make sense of the world. This also includes the ability to attribute mental states to others and oneself, and allows us to understand that others may have beliefs different from our own.
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theory of mind
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Occlusion is when something is hidden from view. Habituation procedures are done in order to test if infants can recognize occluding objects and it was found that infants recognized that "an object's parts stay connected regardless of whether the object is entirely visible or not" just like adults do (479).
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occlusion
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Refers to beliefs and concepts that we have. We are aware that other people have beliefs and that they may differ from our own. We also know that these beliefs may be true or false. (In general, our Theory of Mind allows us to make necessary judgements and actions)
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components of theory of mind
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Metacognition describes ones thinking about their own mental functioning. Metacognition can manifest itself in many ways such as memory and perception. For example, with memory, adults have a realistic idea of what they can and cannot recall. An adult who is shown a list with 3 items can predict that they will easily recall the list shortly afterwards. They can also predict that if shown a list of 20 items they will not be able to recall them afterwards because this task will exceed their mental capabilities. This ability to predict how their minds will function when given a certain task is called metacognition. Conversely, children have less well developed metacognitive skills and will thus either over or underestimate their mental capabilities.
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metacognition
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In the A-not-B task, children in the sensorimotor stage (as described by Piaget) attempt to find an object. Hiding spots A and B are the same, and both within reach of the child. The object, usually an appealing toy, is first hidden (in plain view of the child) in spot A. The infant then searches for the object in spot A. After some repetitions of this where the child continues to look in spot A, the object is hidden again, but this time in spot B. Although the child just saw the object being hidden in spot B, they continue to search in spot A looking for the object. This demonstrates an incomplete schema of object permanence.
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A-not-B phenomenon
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growth
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In a word, developmental psychology deals with ____.
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At the beginning, infants do not have a lot of control over their motor apparatus. Their body motions consist mostly of thrashing around awkwardly and they are unable to hold up their own heads. They do have a number of reflexes though, like the grasp reflex. Although at first the motor capabilities of infants are limited, they have nicely functioning sensory channels. "They can discriminate between tones of different pitch and loudness," and they can also see(468). However, they are "quite near sighted and unable to focus on objects more than about four feet away, but they can readily discriminate brightness and color"(468). In addition to their sensory abilities, they can also touch, smell and taste.
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In a few words, compare the efficiency of infants' motor (response) capacities with its sensory capabilities.
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Vision
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At birth, which of the 5 main sense is LEAST developed?
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Babies are born legally blind, at birth they have 20/500 vision. At birth they can tell the difference between colors and track moving objects but are sensitive to light and quick movement. By 3 months of age they can distinguish contrasts and patterns that can help them perceive facial expressions. They can also tell the difference between colors shapes and certain objects. Between 6 and 14 months they begin to develop depth perception (as tested in the visual cliff).
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What are the characteristics of an infant's visual capabilities? When do the various capabilities develop?
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Although Piaget organizes the four main stages of childhood development by age, the timing and rate in which these changes take place typically vary from one child to and other. Therefore a parent should not worry if her infant is not developing at the exact same age as another.
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Should a parent worry if the physical growth, motor development, language growth, and intellectual growth vary in timing from one infant to another? Explain your answer.
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Does a child who begins to speak at an early age usually develop superior verbal skills?
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He is the father of developmental psychology. All his findings, despite the criticisms, have laid the foundations for all developmental psychology seem today
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Why is Jean Piaget considered such an eminent figure in the history of developmental psychology?
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Stage 1: Sensorimotor stage- the first two years after birth, the infants' thinking is limited to the sensations being experienced and the objects being acted upon so their behavior is organized around its sensory or motor effects Stage 2: Preoperational stage - the preschool years (2-6), child is able to make remarkable gains in memory, language development, and the ability to think symbolically but can not yet think from another person's viewpoint Stage 3: Concrete Operational stage- school-age child (6-12), child begin to think more logically with mental operations of adult logic but these operations could only be applied to concrete objects so they tend to struggle with abstract concept Stage 4: Formal Operational stage - 12 and up, adolescents are now able to apply mental operations to more abstract or hypothetical situations and can now reason systematically about ideas that are not present, there is an increase in the ability to use deductive reasoning and the understanding of abstract ideas
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List Piaget's 4 stages of cognitive development and the corresponding ages.
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the main cognitive lessons learned during the sensory motor stage are object permanence, assimilation, accommodation, and representational thought. Object permanence is the ability to understand that objects still exist when we are not in direct contact with them, which is demonstrated by the A-Not-B effect where infants look to A, the place where the object was first hidden, even though they have just seen it be hidden in spot B. Assimilation is where children add new information to and adapt their previously formed schemas based on new interactions with the environment. Accommodation is when the child adjusts their behavior to better match the new schema. Representational thought is when people are able to think about events and objects that are not immediately present, eventually leading to symbolic and abstract thought.
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What are the main cognitive lessons learned during the Sensory Motor Stage? (look for 4)
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From ages 2-7 pre-operational children are working on being able to take the world that they have been able to conceptualize in theirs heads and and interrelate these things they have learned in a coherent way. Piaget calls these connections a new set of schemas called operations.
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What big intellectual achievement characterizes the Pre-Operational Stage?
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Concrete and formal operations are the last two stages in Piaget's theory of four stages of intellectual growth. Concrete operations occurs between seven and eleven years while formal operations occur starting and eleven years and continue on throughout life. Operations are " new and more sophisticated set[s] of schemas...these allow the internal manipulation of ideas according to a stable set of rules" (476). Concrete operations, as defined by Piaget, are when children have the skills of mental operation but can only apply these operations in relation to concrete events. Formal operations are when children are able to think abstractly across many fields. "Their thought can now embrace the possible as well as the real; they can now entertain hypothetical possibilities and can deal with what might be no less than what is" (478).
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Distinguish between concrete and formal operations.
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Critics found that Piaget's theories are too generalized. His age restrictions for each stage of development are too strict. Some argue we never truly outgrow many of the development stages. Additionally, Piaget made his discoveries by observing his own children, which results in certain bias.
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As you proceed through the chapter from page 497 to the end, list the specific ideas of Piaget that have been questioned or overturned through more recent studies. In other words, where might he have been wrong? What reasons do the critics of Piaget provide?
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The most significant criticism of his work is that the boundaries between Piaget's four stages are not as well defined as he believed, and some children may exhibit forms of thinking seen in older or younger children. Additionally, recent studies have shown that young children may be more advanced cognitively than Piaget believed.
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Overall, what is the biggest (most significant) modern criticism of Piaget's work?
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Some of the studies that are cited to refute Piaget's work may be weak in their own design or conclusions. See if you can find any that are questionable.
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Tabula rasa means "blank slate". Locke believed that individuals are born without predisposed emotions or mental capability. Therefore, all knowledge comes from experience and perception. Piaget disputes Locke's "tabula rasa" idea because he believes that all children (if raised in some civilized manner) develop certain skills around the same time. This means that these babies are predisposed to learning such traits at specific ages, and that they are not born with a "blank slate" to build off of.
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How would Piaget dispute Locke's (and the Behaviorists') "tabula rasa" idea?
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many of his claims were based on the observations he made of the behaviors of his own three children.
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What research method(s) did Piaget rely upon for most of his conclusions?
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Maturation is biological, and will happen over time naturally.This is what puts us in the position to learn, or, as Piaget would say, gives us the "readiness" to learn. Learning on the other hand is imperical, and based on experience, not biological development.
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What is the difference between maturation and learning?
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Vygotsky argued that each person is born within a bubble and in this bubble, there are certain skills we master without help. Once the height of these skill is accomplished, we proceed to the higher bubbles. However, to get to these bubbles, we need teachers. Vygotsky says that teachers aren't necessary and that in an allotted amount of time, the upper bubbles will be reached. Additionally, similar to Piaget, Vygotsky created very strict age limits as to when people achieve certain things and also had no actual scientific experimentation to back his theories
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Why does Mr. Getz hate Vygotsky?
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Bowbly discovered that children need some form of adult attachment in order to develop properly, also refuting Freud's claims (mothers only for food).
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John Bowlby
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Safe Haven - when a child feels threatened, they can run to a caregiver for comfort and soothing Secure Base - caregiver provides a secure base for the child for the child to explore the world Proximity Maintenance - Child strives to stay near to the caregiver, thus giving the child safety Separation Distress - when separated from the caregiver, the child becomes distressed and upset
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Bowlby's four components of attachment
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The idea that a child's attachment to his mother grows directly out of the fact that she satisfies the child's basic biological needs, namely, food. Sigmund Freud stated that the terror of infants at their mother's absence is based on the prospect of going unfed. Freud's view became known as the cupboard theory of mother love because mother's were seen as the primary food sources (ie. breast milk).
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cupboard theory
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Harlow experimented on baby rheus monkeys by raising them with two mother: a wire mother with the ability to feed them and a cloth mother which had no food. After frighting the young monkey, Harlow found that the baby preferred the cloth mother over the wire mother, despite the presence of food. This led him to conclude that mothers are not just food supplies (like Freud said), but they also offer an additional comfort sense that the babies need to feel safe.
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Harry Harlow
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This is Harlow's theory that infants need contact comfort from its mother in order to develop properly as an adult.
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contact comfort theory
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Lorenz experimented with the notion of imprinting with a flock of geese. When the goslings hatched, they imprinted on his boots and followed him around.
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Konrad Lorenz
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Ainsworth designed and experimented with the "strange situation". This is where a mother and her child are in a strange room filled with toys. After a few minutes, a stranger is introduced and the mother leaves. Based on the child's reaction to the mother's absence (usually crying), then her return, Ainsworth categorized these children as "securely attached" or "insecurely attached" to their mothers. Securely attached child easily calmed themselves once the mother returned and picked them up. Insecurely attached children were split into subgroups: anxious/ambiguous, anxious/resistant, or anxious/avoidant. These children would all start off similarly--crying because the mother was gone. It was their reaction to her returned presence that determined which category they fell into. A child that would not return to the mother would be labeled 'avoidant'. A child would could not calm down and became almost violent was labeled 'resistant' and a child that calmed down with the mother's touch but did not know how to react the mother's return was labeled 'ambiguous'.
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Mary Ainsworth
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a theoretical approach to socialization and personality that is midway between radical behaviorism and cognitive approaches to learning. it stresses learning by observing others who serve as models and who show the child whether a response he already knows should or should not be performed.
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social learning theory
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Baumrind theorized that there are three different styles of parenting: authoritarian, authoritative, and permissive. Authoritarians parents were described as controlling, with strict rules, rigid expectations. On Baumrind's scale of continuum, authoritarian parents had low warmth and support, but high behavioral control. Authoritative parents were described as supporting, flexible, with less strict rules. They score high in both behavior control and warmth. Permissive parents were non-direct, lenient, over-involved, and gave no guidelines. They scored high in warmth and support, but low in behavior control. A fourth category, outside of Baumrind's research was added--uninvolved. These parents are distant, negligent, and passive. They score low in both spectrums of the continuum.
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parenting styles (baumrind)
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when individuals begin to differentiate between good and bad based on experiences and observation.
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moral development
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children will internalize a certain way of acting if they feel just enough pressure that they feel forced to do so
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principal of minimal sufficiency
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the direct emotional response to another person's circumstances
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empathy
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the guidelines by which we decide between right and wrong--Kohlberg is the father of moral reasoning and Gilligan is the mother of feminine psychology
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moral reasoning
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Kohlberg theorized that morality was gained through stages. The initial stage is when someone learns to discriminate between right and wrong. The second stage is when morality is primarily driven by fear of punishment or desire for gain based on the premature notions of good and bad. The last stage is when moral development culminates with the internalization of personal moral principals.
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Lawrence Kohlberg
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Gilligan argued that Kohlberg's theory, when applied to the notion that men and women see morality differently, was incorrect. She found that men see morality as justice and women see it as compassion.
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Carol Gilligan
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performed an experiment where children were presented with two mice, and after hiding the two mice behind a screen, the experimenter took one mouse away, then removed the screen. the finding was that the infant stared at the one mouse, as though wondering why the second mouse wasn't there. This demonstrated that children understood the concept of number and subtraction because they noticed there was a difference in what they were being shown.
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Karen Wynn
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How, genetically, you identify which gender you are. Is determined through chromosomes (XX or XY)
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genetic sex
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Morphological sex is the physical genatalia that you possess that determine what gender you are
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morphological sex
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Contemporary scientist prefer the term sensitive period because it helps to highlight the fact that imprinting is still possible (though not as likely) even once this period has ended.
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Why do contemporary scientists prefer "sensitive period" over "critical period"?
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Attachment for infants are formed early for both parents however there is a different attachment with the father than the mother. The main difference between the two is comforting versus playing. There are many explanations for this difference. One explanation is that in most places the father is the breadwinner and therefore rather than being the primary caregiver the father has a shorter amount of time and uses this time for condensed, intensive play. Another explanation is the fact that males are generally stronger than females and have the better ability to play with growing children. Cultural embedded gender roles also play a big part in the explanation as males are most likely play rough and more than females.
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How and why does attachment differ with fathers?
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Children who attend daycare are not doomed! It is widely believed that separation from the mother can cause psychological damage in children and cause them to be less secure later in their lives. Through the Situation Test it was also found that children (particularly those less than 1 years old) who spent more than 20 hours a week exhibited signs of aggression towards their parents and were less compliant. However, these behaviors were misinterpreted! Noncompliance and disobedience may also indicate that these children have simply become more independent and self reliant, these traits are generally seen as positive. In reality, what may indicate whether a child will benefit or suffer from daycare largely depends on the daycare itself. Children enrolled in higher-quality daycares exhibit better social and emotional development compared to children enrolled in lower-quality daycares. However, not even the children who go to lower-quality daycares are "doomed". It was found that 4 years after leaving the daycare, the negative traits that these children picked up dissipated.
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Are children who go to daycare doomed?
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Through the "Strange Situation", Harlow's findings were confirmed to apply to young children. In this apparatus, child were in a strange room with their mothers. A stranger then entered the room and the mother left. The infants would, immediately following the mother's exit, would start to cry and shout for her. As soon as the mother came back and picked up her child, depending on their attachment to her, they would be able to calm themselves immediately because her touch was comforting to them.
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How do Harlow's finding apply to human children?
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What do Main and Solomon contribute to the world of attachment theory?
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Are the effects of early social deprivation reversible?
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How do socialization and constitutional factors affect sexuality?
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Compare and contrast social learning and cognitive developmental theory
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Gender roles refer to the behavior patterns that a certain culture implies is appropriate for each sex. For example, a gender role for a male could be the expectation that males will be strong, whereas a gender role for a female could be the expectation that females will be more delicate. These "roles" set the standard for how a male or female should act in society. Gender identity refers to ones inner sense of being either male or female. Sexual orientation refers to ones "inclination toward a sexual partner of the same or opposite sex" (528).
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What is the difference between gender identity, gender role and sexual orientation?
