Ch.10 Developmental PsychologyDevelopmental Psych the study of how behavior changes over the life span.Post Hoc Fallacy The mistake of assuming that because A comes before B, A must cause B (i.e. Because nearly 100% of serial killers drank milk as children, milk drinking creates mass murderers)Bidirectional influences Children’s experiences influence their development, but their development also influences their experiences. (i.e. Children also change their environments by acting in ways that create changes in the behaviors of their parents, siblings, friends, and teachers)Unidirectional parents fight with each other their children reacting negatively. Children witness violence at school they become more aggressive.Cross sectional design a design in which researchers examine people of different ages at a single point in time (i.e. a “snapshot” of each person at a single age, assess some people when they’re 24, some when they’re 47, others when they’re 63, and so on.)Problem…Cohort effects effects due to the fact that sets of people who lived during one time period, called cohorts, can differ in some systematic way from sets of people who lived during a different time period. (i.e. Baby Boomers grew up in a very different technological age that did the members of the Millennial Generation.Solution…Longitudinal design psychologists track the development of the same group of subjects over time. (obtain the equivalent of a series of home movies, taken at different ages)Developmental effects: changes over time within individuals as a consequence of growing older.Externalizing behaviors: behaviors such as breaking rules, defying authority figures, and committing crimesPrenatal (prior to birth) the human body acquires its basic form and structure.Zygote when a sperm cell fertilizes an eggBlastocyst a ball of identical cells that haven’t yet begun to take on any specific function in a body partEmbryo different cells start to assume different functions. Limbs, facial features, and major organs begin to take shape.Fetus physical maturationBrain development human brain begins to develop 18 days after fertilization. Between 18th day and end of 6th month, neurons begin developing at an astronomical rate, called proliferation.Physical developmentRolling over- 2 to 5 monthsSitting up- 5 to 8 monthsStanding/pulling self up- 6 to 10 monthsStanding alone- 10 to 14 monthsWalking- 11 to 14 monthsCognitive development how we acquire the ability to learn, think, communicate, and remember over time.Jean Piaget- the first to present a comprehensive account of cognitive development. Attempted to identify the stages that children pass through on their way to adult like thinking. Children, he said, are motivated to match their thinking about the world with their observations.Schema her understanding of and expectations about how the world works. [Mental representations of the world]They organize and interpret incoming info and act as “Mental filters”Children form schemas naturally and change them over the course of development.Assimilation the process of absorbing new experience into current schemas. (If a child believes the earth is flat learns that the earth is round might assimilate this knowledge into her schema by picturing a flat disk, like a coin. During assimilation, the child’s cognitive skills and worldviews remain unchanged, so she interprets new experiences to fit into what she already knows.)Make experience fit the schemaAccommodation the altering of a schema to make it more compatible with experience. Make the schema fit the experiencePiaget’s Stages of Development. [Each stage is characterized by a different type of thinking, all children advance through the stages in the same order]1. Sensorimotor Stage: from birth to about 2 years. Children’s main sources of knowledge, thinking, and experience are their physical interactions with the world. Major milestone is mental representation the ability to think about things that are absent from immediate surroundings, such as remembering previously encountered objects. Children lack object permanence the understanding that objects continue to exist even when out of view.2. Preoperational stage from 2 until 7 years. Marked by an ability to construct mental representations of experience. Children can use symbols such as language, drawings, and objects as presentations of ideas. Limits: egocentric self-centered (inability to see the world from others’ point of view). Lack: Conservation the concept that physical properties of an object can remain the same despite superficial changes in appearance.3. Concrete operational stage between 7 and 11 years old. The ability to perform mental operations but only for actual physical events. They can perform organizational tasks that require mental operations on physical objects, like sorting coins by size or setting up a battle scene with toy soldiers.4. Formal operations stage adolescence. Become capable of abstract reasoning (i.e. hypothetical situations such as if-then statements and either-or statements) and logic.Piaget’s theory correct?Major criticism: cognitive development is much more continuous than suggested by Piaget’s “stage” theory. Also, children may show some cognitive abilities earlier than Piaget thought.Vygotsky Social & Cultural influences on Cognitive Develop.Noted: parents and other caretakers tend to structure the learning environment for children in ways that guide them to behave as if they’ve learned something before they have, known as scaffolding. (i.e. training wheels on a bicycle that eventually get taken off.)Zone of proximal development the phase when children are receptive to learning a new skill but aren’t yet successful at it. (For any skill, children move from a phase when they can’t learn it, even with assistance, to the zone of proximal development, during which they’re ready to make use of scaffolding)Social developmentAttachment: A deep emotional bond that we first develop with our primary caregivers. Secure base: solid attachments form a secure base from which an individual can explore the world and to which an individual can return to rest and restock depleted resources.“Contact comfort” warmth and comfort are important components of bonds between animals and humans. It is the positive emotions afforded by touch. (baby monkeys, wire w/ food mom vs. soft/warm mom)ParentingPermissive- lenient with their children, go
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