Jaclyn Spielsinger Chapter 10 Development and Personality How do we know that a fetus can hear and recognize its mother s voice while in the womb Researchers who have inserted a hydrophone into the uterus of a pregnant woman have picked up a noise level akin to the background noise in an apartment according to DiPietro Sounds include the whooshing of blood in the mother s vessels the gurgling and rumbling of her stomach and intestines as well as the tones of her voice filtered through tissues bones and fluid and the voices of other people coming through the amniotic wall Fifer has found that fetal heart rate slows when the mother is speaking suggesting that the fetus not only hears and recognizes the sound but also is calmed by it How did DeCasper and others measure preference in newborns and how do they use that measurement to demonstrate fetal learning He devised a feeding contraption that allows a baby to suck faster to hear one set of sounds through headphones and to suck slower to hear a different set With this technique DeCasper discovered that within hours of birth a baby already prefers its mother s voice to a stranger s suggesting it must have learned and remembered the voice albeit not necessarily consciously from its last months in the womb More recently he s found that a newborn prefers a story read to it repeatedly in the womb in this case The Cat in the Hat over a new story introduced soon after birth Describe a solid piece of research evidence that demonstrates babies can learn while still in the mother s womb Be clear and accurate about exactly what was done and found Baby Plus Prenatal Education variations of the mother s human heart beat helps baby differentiate and discriminate mother s heartbeat from others and learning abilities are strengthened How do we know that animals and humans learn to be afraid of heights How does a parent s non verbal behavior influence infants in the visual cliff procedure The visual cliff experiment One side of the Plexiglas is painted and the other side is clear demonstrating a drop in the glass Baby is not fearful of the supposed heights More than 300 babies crossed unafraid Fear of heights is not innate But after the child has been crawling for a month but she is too scared Biological switch occurs when the child is crawling which causes fear If mother makes a fear face baby won t cross If the mother poses a smile then the baby will cross How does looking time help us understand what infants are thinking Baby sees pepper for the first time and she stares at it for about 32 seconds and she is been habituated and gets bored Then after 15 seconds of rest the baby sees the jar and again and stares at it for about 14 seconds Then again after 15 seconds of rest the baby sees the jar and stares for only 6 seconds There is a clear trend Once again the fourth and fifth presentations lasted for 3 and 2 seconds She is clearly habituated to the pepper She can see control where her eyes are aimed and most importantly recognizes the repeated object and therefore has a functioning memory After seeing celery salt for the first time she looked for about 6 seconds Then again for looked for about 4 seconds then the pepper 5 seconds then 2 seconds She looked longer because she noticed the difference That is called dishabituation Differentiate between a longitudinal and cross sectional research design Give an example of what you might study and explain the strengths and weaknesses of each design including cohort effects confounding variables and attrition Cohort group of individuals that share a common demographic experience or exposure over a particular time span Longitudinal Researchers periodically collect data from the same participants over a long period of time Adv Researchers can gather participants of different ages and look for differences between the groups Dis Studies take a long time to conduct Attrition Not all participants who begin the study will complete it some my drop out die or may be hard to find Cross sectional Researchers can gather participants of different ages and look for differences between the groups separate groups design young and old ages and then comparing them Adv Researchers can study the effect of time or experience in much less time than a longitudinal study would take Attrition is not an issue Dis Cohort Effects The 4th graders may as a generation have experiences that were different from those that the current 6th graders had two years ago e g national events a particular movie parenting norms Describe what the research has to say about infant determinism In fact to the extent that the past matters it is usually the recent past and the cumulative effects of varied historical influences that matter not early childhood People who grow up and remain in poverty risk dying sooner than those who grow up poor and then become middle class But the increased risk is caused not by bouts of disease in early childhood shared by both groups but by the aggregated effects of lifelong malnutrition on the impoverished The role early experience may play in shaping adult outcome is heavily dependent on subsequent experiences and conditions many of which cannot be predicted from or controlled by early experience How a baby is treated cannot predict or control subsequent events such as parental divorce depression unemployment war or the child s chance accidents and encounters all of which may exert profound influence on what this baby grows up to be Describe Piaget s theory of cognitive development including the age range and cognitive characteristics of each stage Be sure to define and include conservation egocentrism and object permanence in your discussion Conservation The realization that objects or sets of objects stay the same even when they are changed about or made to look different Egocentrism The belief that you are the centre of the universe and everything revolves around you the corresponding inability to see the world as someone else does and adapt to it Not moral selfishness just an early stage of psychological development Object Permanence Realizes that things continue to exist even when no longer present to the sense Explain Kohlberg s theory of moral development in terms of the specific stages and the kind of moral reasoning that takes place in each Preconventional Level up to age nine Self Focused Morality 1 Morality is defined as obeying rules and avoiding negative consequences Children in this stage see rules
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