Psych Notes for March 4th Pages 363 364 Clarifying the Nature Nurture Debate Nature Our genetic endowment Nurture The environments we encounter Genes and environment are confounded Nature and nurture sometimes interact over the course of development meaning the effect of one depends on the contribution of the other Gene Environment Interaction In many cases the effects of genes depend on the environment and vice versa Nature via Nurture Children with certain genetic predispositions often seek out and create their own environments Gene Expression Environmental experiences actually turn genes on and off throughout development Pages 371 381 The Developing Mind Cognitive Development Cognitive Development How we acquire the ability to learn think communicate and remember over time Theories of Cognitive Development Differ in three core ways o Some propose stagelike changes in understanding others more continuous changes in understanding o Some adopt a domain general account of development others a domain specific account pg 372 o Cognitive developmental models differ in their views of he principle source of learning Piaget Children aren t miniature adults o Stage Theorist Believed that children s development is marked by radical reorganizations of thinking at specific transition points followed by periods during which their understanding of the world stabilizes o Proposed that cognitive change is marked by equilibration maintaining a alance etween our experience of the world and our thoughts about it o Proposed that children use two proceses to keep their thinking about the world in tune with their experiences Assimilation The process of absorbing new experience into current schemas Accommodation The altering of a schema to make it more compatible with experiences o Stages of development Sensorimotor Stage Marked by a focus on the here and now Major milestone Mental representation the ability to think about things that are absent from immediate surroundings such as remembering previously encountered objects Lack object permanence The understanding that objects continue to exist even when out of view Deferred Imitation The abiliy to perform an action observed earlier also absent Preoperational Stage Marked by an ability to construct mental representations of experience Egocentrism An inability to see the world from another s point of view Can t perform mental operations Conservation Pagetian task requiring children to understand that despite a transformation in the physical presentation of an amount the amount still remains the same Concrete Operational Stage Characterized by the ability to perform mental operations but only for actual physical events Formal Operations Stage Children can perform hypothetical reasoning beyond the here and how Horizontal Decalage Cases in which a child is more advanced in one cognitive domain than another Vygotsky Social and cultural influences on learning o Scaffolding Vygoskian learning mechanism in which parens provide initial assistance in children s learnig but gradually remove structure as children become more competent o Zone of Proximal Development Phase of learning during which children can benefit from instruction Contemporary theories of cognitive development o General cognitive accounts Share Piaget s commitment to general cognitive processes and experience based learning but believe learning is gradual rather than stage like o Sociocultural Accounts Emphasize the social context and the ways in which ineractions with caretakers and other children guide children s understanding of the world o Modular Accounts Emphasizes the idea of domain specific learning separate spheres of learning in different domains Cognitive Landmarks of Early Development To understand their physical worlds children must learn to reason about them Na ve Physics Infants possess a basic understanding of some other aspects of how physical objects behave Learning to categorize objects by kind Developing a sense of self as different from others Theory of Mind Children s ability to understand that others perspectives can differ from theirs Page 383
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