Developmental Psychology

• Nativist


  Innate endowments, we are 'pre-programmed'
• Empiricist


  Environmental influences, learning, observing, and culture
• Neuro-Constructivist


  Relative contributions of nature and nurture
• Innate development


  • Chomsky and language acquisition device, critical period, undeniable role of environment
• Neuroconstructivism


  • Reciprocal interaction between genes and environment, twin studies can't discount the role of the environment
• Critical period


  Time where you are more attuned to learning or growth ie language, Hess (1958) found imprinting depended on age and distance and found a 'golden window'
• Active vs passive experience

  Actively engaging in learning vs acquiring passively
• Looking paradigms


  Habituation, preferential looking, combined habituation trials
• Neuroimaging techniques


  • EEG (good temporal, poor spatial)
  • Structural MRI (brain growth and structure)
  • fMRI (activation, good spatial, requires stillness)
  • fNIRS (near-infrared spectroscopy, neural activation without fMRI, less precise)
• Twins Early Development Study - 15,000 pairs of twins from England and Wales born in between 1994 and 1996, info gathered at yearly intervals through studies and questionaires, DNA samples gathered from >5000 pairs
• Piaget's theory


  • Children are active in seeking and understanding the rules and governing forces of the world, Constructing understanding through schematas which could be patterns of behaviour, mental models, or mental operations
• Assimilation


  Application of an old schema to a new instance
• Accommodation


  Development of a new schema
• Piaget's stages of development

  • Sensorimotor stage (0-2)
  • Preoperational stage (2-7)
  • Concrete operational stage (7-11)
  • Formal operation stage (11+)
• Sensorimotor stage (0-2)


  • Initial building blocks, developing sensory, motor, and sensorimotor abilities, allows for the development of cognition and the understanding and representation of the surrounding world. Primary circular reaction (1-4m), Secondary circular reaction (4-8m), Tertiary Circular reaction (12-18m), A-not-B error
• Preoperational stage (2-7)


  • Symbolic thought displayed through advancing vocabulary, but a lack of use of cognitive operations. Egocentrism, Conservation, Class inclusion
• Concrete Operational Stage (7-11)

  • Development of organised and rational thinking, logical justification, decentration, passing conservation test, understanding reversibility and invariance, passing class inclusion test, seriation, and transitive inference
• Formal Operation Stage (11+)


  • Children can reason logically about not present objects and can conduct verbal reasoning, dealing with logical thought about hypothetical scenarios
• An argument is that Piaget's fundamental idea is that learning occurs through interaction with the environment, but what if learning occurs in a social context
• Vygotsky's theory


  • Children are taught, and they use tools provided by culture, real and symbolic tools, as well as being taught by other. Children have a Zone of Proximal Development which is what the learner can do with guidance, as the teacher provides 'scaffolding' for learning
• Kellman and Spelke (1983)


  • Opposed Piaget's theory that young infants do not have a mental representation. They habituated 4m infants to a rod with an occluder and found they perceived the object as being whole, even without seeing it being whole
• Spelke's Core Knowledge


  • Infants have innate, domain specific systems of knowledge, each system has its own set of core principles, and learning is an enrichment of the core principles
• Spelke's Core Knowledge - Actions


  • A core cognitive capacity surrounding actions and agents, ie infant see a hand moving to grab something then suddenly change direction, infants will look longer
• Spelke's Core Knowledge - Objects


  • Infants perceive the unity of a partially hidden object by analysing the movements and configuration of its visible surfaces
• Spelke's Core Knowledge - Number


  • Infants have an approximate number system for distinguishing between large sets
• Spelke's Core Knowledge - Space

  • Children have a geometric model for reorientation
• Gopnik's scientist in the crib


  • Infants observe the stats of the environment, forming and testing hypotheses, and revising theories
• Spelke's "Core Knowledge"


  • Knowledge is innate
  • Knowledge is domain specific
  • Learning as consolidation and enrichment of the starting position
  • Learning through language and symbol systems
• Gopnik "Infant Scientist"


  • Some innate knowledge
  • Knowledge is not domain specific
  • Learning can fundamentally alter the existing understanding
  • Learning through exploration and seeking out evidence
• EEG


  Tests electrical activity in the brain with high temporal resolution, but low spatial resolution. Can be used in early infancy and does not need high tolerance
• fMRI


  Measures changes associated with blood flow in response to a stimulus. Has high spatial resolution but requires stillness, is almost unusable in young children, and is not appropriate if there is metal in the body
• MEG


  Measures magnetic fields produced by the electric currents in the brain. Has high temporal resolution but requires some tolerance and there is only one machine in the world suitable for children to use
• NIRS


  Near infra-red light is shined on and picked up by optical fibres to measure light scattering and absorption, which can measure change in blood flow. Can be used very early, but is not high in either spatial or temporal resolution
• Executive function


  An umbrella term for the processes underlying conscious, goal-directed thought, often in novel circumstances
• Executive functions


  • Control deliberate action under new situations (inhibitory control, monitoring and updating working memory, planning, problem-solving, attention-switching, forward planning)
• Cloth pulling task


  • A test of mean-end behaviour, looking at if an infant understands their goal and the actions required to achieve it
• Towers of Hanoi


  • Measuring problem-solving and planning, an improvement in age as older children were able to persue long term goals whilst being able to manage subgoals
• Robbins (1996) found that executive function was strongly associated with the prefrontal cortex
• Central Executive


  Cognition can be thought of as the flow of info through a series of stores, like a CPU. There is a central executive to control what to attend to, how to encode it, and what to prioritise
• Prefrontal cortex in development

  • Changes throughout childhood into adolecence slower than other regions. Giedd (1999) changes like synaptic pruning, increased myelination and connectivity, and an increase and subsequent decrease in grey matter. Deoni (2011) huge increase in myelination in the 1st year of life, only in the back of the brain at ~3m and begins in the PFC at ~9m