Introductory Psychology

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Introductory Psychology

• Growth of the Mind and Person

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Questions

• At which age do children begin to hear sound?
• At which age can we teach children to swim?
• After which age do children become less likely to
  develop a close bond with the adoptive parents?
• At which do children begin to understand 112 or
  2-11?

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Could you tell me how to grow, or is it
unconveyed, like melody or witchcraft? --- Emily
Dickinson (1862)
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Part I. Developmental Psychology
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Developmental Psychology

• A scientific study of the development of behavior
  and mind from conception to death
• Prenatal development
• Infancy (0 - 2 years)
• Childhood (2 - 12 years)
• Adolescence (12 - 20 years)
• Adulthood (20 -65 years)
• Aged aging (65 year )

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Major Areas of Developmental Psychology

• Physical development
• bodily structures
• motor development
• Cognitive development
• Sensation, perception, memory, thinking
  (reasoning), language
• Chapter 11
• Social development
• Emotion, social knowledge, morality, personality
• Chapter 12

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Methodology of Developmental Psychology

• Observation
• Naturalistic observation
• Controlled observation (experiments)

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Example of Naturalistic Observation

• Craig Pepler (1992)
• Bullying victimization in the playground
• Bullying occurred every 7.5 min.
• Average length 38 sec.
• Adults intervened in 3 of the time
• 36 involved objects, 24 racially motivated

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Example of Experimental Study

• Bandura (1965)
• Observational learning
• Whether children would imitate aggressive
  behaviors
• Conditions
• no consequence
• model rewarded
• model punished

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Patterns of Development
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Patterns of Development
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Pattern of Development
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Developmental functions Reversed U-shaped pattern
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Developmental functions Stage-like pattern
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Implications of Developmental Psychology

• Theoretical
• Adult mind behavior
• Human evolution
• Philosophy
• Curiosity

• Practical
• Clinical
• Educational
• Parenting
• Legal

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Part 2. Physical Development
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Genetic Inheritance
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Genetic Inheritance
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Dominant Recessive Genes
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Conception
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Prenatal Development

• Conception
• Zygote stage (lt2 weeks)
• Embryo stage (2 - 8 weeks)
• Fetal stage (2 - 9 months)

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Onset of Key Body Parts

• Central nervous system 2 weeks
• Heart 4 weeks
• Eye, arm, leg 4 weeks
• Teeth, ear 6 weeks
• External genitalia 8 weeks

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Teratogens

• Cocaine and Heroin
• Miscarriage, premature birth, birth defects
• Alcohol
• Fetal alcohol syndrome, motor development problems

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Teratogens

• Smoking
• Reduces oxygen flow, increases CO2, increases
  odds of premature birth, low birth weight, and
  miscarriage
• Medicine
• Thalidomide

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Maternal Age Downs Syndrome
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Body Growth

• Physical growth
• Weight
• Height
• Growth
• spurt

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Brain growth

• Brain weight
• 25 of an adults at birth, 60-70 at 1 year, 90
  at 5 years, 100 at 6 years
• Neurons
• 50 die during prenatal period
• Connections
• 50 more connections than an adults

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Motor Development Reflexes

• Rooting (birth to around 1 year)
• Sucking (present at birth)
• Swallowing (present at birth)
• Crying (present at birth)
• Breathing (starts at full-term birth)

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Motor Development Reflexes

• Grasping reflex disappears around 3-4 months
• Tonic neck reflex 28 weeks gestation age
  disappears around 3-4 months

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Motor Development Reflexes

• Stepping reflex 6 weeks optimal disappears
  around 3 months
• Swimming reflex (birth onset) disappears around
  4-6 months if not used

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Motor Milestones
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Motor Milestones
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Principles of Motor Development

• Proximal-distal direction
• the tendency of body movement development in a
  trunk to extremities direction (near to far)
• Cephalocaudal direction
• tendency of body movement development in a head
  to foot direction (head to tail)

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Part 3. Cognitive Development
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Sensation

• Hearing
• 28 weeks gestation age (100-110 db Dr.
  Kisilevsky)
• localizes sound at birth, disappears at 2 months,
  reappears at 4 months (Dr. Muir)
• Taste
• Smell

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Sensation

• Vision
• visual acuity
• 20/300 at birth, 20/150 at 1 month, 20/70 at 4
  months, 20/35 at 8 months, 20/20 at school ages

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Sensation

• Vision
• Imprinting (Lorenz)
• Critical period
• period during which the organism is most
  sensitive to certain external stimuli
• Visual input is critical as early as the infant
  is born

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Long-term consequence of early visual deprivation
(Le Grand et al., 2001)

• Congenital cataracts
• configural processing deficit

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Sensation

• Vision
• color vision
• yellow, red, green at birth
• blue, gray at 1 month
• categorical perception at 4 months
• peripheral vision

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Infant Research Methods

• Habituation method
• Habituating stimulus until infant loses interest
• Dishabituating stimulus to see whether infant
  regains interest

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Infant Research Methods

• Preferential looking method
• Presenting a pair of stimuli to see whether
  infant looks longer at one of them

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Perception
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Perception

• Depth perception
• crawling study
• heart rate study

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Perception

• Depth perception

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Perception

• Size constancy
• Shape constancy

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Perception

• Inter-sensory integration
• Meltzoff Borton (1979)
• 1-month-olds
• sucking on one of the pacifiers and then seeing
  the pair
• 72 looked longer at the previously sucked
  pacifier

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Perception

• Sensory-motor integration
• Imitation (Meltzoff Moore, 1977)

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Memory

• Short-term memory
• Capacity

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Memory

• Short-term memory
• Processing speed

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Memory

• Long-term memory
• Reinforced kicking paradigm
• mobile with or without string
• 2-, 3-, 6-month-olds

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Memory

• Memory Strategies
• rehearsal

• Metamemory
• memory monitoring

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Thinking Reasoning

• Piagets theory
• Schema the mode in which thinking is carried out
• behavioral schema
• symbolic schema
• operational schema
• Assimilation
• children change new experience to fit the
  existing schema
• Accommodation
• children change the existing schema to fit new
  experience

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Piagets Stages of Cognitive Development
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Object Permanence

• Object permanence
• the notion that an object continues to exist even
  out of sight (out of sight is not out of mind)

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Egocentrism

• Three mountain task
• Piagets results
• 4-6-year-olds choose their own view
• 6-9-year-olds randomly choose other views
• 9-10-year-olds choose a correct view

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Conservation

• Liquid conservation task
• pre-operational child fails the task
• concrete operation child succeeds in the task

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Formal operational thinking

• Balance Beam Task
• Concrete operational children fail the task
• Formal operational children succeed in the task
  because they are able to consider more than two
  factors simultaneously and use hypothesis testing

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Counter evidence

• Object permanence
• impossible event studies

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Count evidence

• Object permanence
• Infant addition and subtraction

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Count evidence

• Egocentrism
• theory of mind studies
• Displacement Task

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Count Evidence

• Egocentrism
• Representational Change Task (theory of mind
  task)
• Gopnik Astington (1988)

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Counter evidence

• Balance beam task
• Siegler
• Rule 1 weight only
• Rule 2 weight distance when weights are the
  same on both sides
• Rule 3 weight versus distance
• Rule 4 weight X distance

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Counter evidence

• Balance beam task
• Rules 1-2 lt9 years, Rules 2-3 9-17 years, Rule
  4 gt17 years