Ch 8 Development Across the Lifespan 10 28 2015 Human development The sequence of age related changes that occur in people as they progress from conception to death Influences on development look at chart in textbook o Biological Influences individual genetic variations shared human genome prenatal environment o Psychological Influences Our environment interacts with our genes o Social cultural influences Developmental research designs Longitudinal o Take a group starting with babies young children and test them o Test them again a few years later o And a few years later test them again o Main idea testing the same group of participants at different times throughout their lifespan See the changes that happen in those people over time o Longer than 6 years o Problems Very expensive and complicated to carry out Cohort effect The impact on development when a group of people share common time period or life experiences Get good data from one group of people from one time Will it be the same with another group of people during another time Get babies from the 30 s grow up during WWII Can this be applied to babies born today Cross sectional time Cross sequential o Different participants of various ages studied at one point in Get a young group and an old group and look for differences between those groups o Combination of both of the above designs start cross sectional with at least two groups and have longitudinal follow up o Less than 6 years 3 major issues in developmental psychology o How do genetic inheritance and experience influence our Nature vs nurture development Continuity stages Stability change o Is development a gradual continuous process or a sequence of separate stages o Not looking at specific stages but more of a continuity o Who you are as a person develops early in life how stable is that personality or do you change o Do our personality traits persist through life or do we become different persons as we age Research designs Behavioral genetics Behavioral genetics o Focuses on nature vs nurture Babies Exploring the world baby s physical development o Motor development A lot of this research involves twins identical have exact same DNA Monozygotic twins share 100 of their genes Dizogotic fraternal twins share only 50 of their genes the same percentage as non twin siblings In some cases twins are separated at birth and grow up in entirely different environments Shows nature vs nurture Up to about 50 of our behavior can come from genetics Reflexes a set of innate involuntary behavior patterns Provide information about health of NS Grasp startle rooting stepping sucking Newborn senses touch smell Senses well developed at birth include taste Hearing functional but not fully developed Vision is least functional sense at birth Visual cliff experiment o To study whether depth perception is learned behavior or a baby is born with it111 o After a baby has crawled for a while the baby will be able to notice the drop o Conclusions We re not borni with the ability to perceive depth but this ability manifests as soon as we are able to crawl and develops during infancy Milestones 2 4 months Ability to lift head and neck up 2 5 Learn to roll over 4 6 Learn to sit up with support 6 7 Pro at sitting up 7 8 Crawl everywhere 8 18 Start walking Evidence and theories that crawling is tied to our language and development Studying infant cognition o Preferential looking and habituation used to study baby s thinking Preferential looking Habituation Until it gets bored o Synaptic pruning When you introduce a new stimuli to an infant the infant will look at it Unused synaptic connections and nerve cells are cleared away to make way for functioning connection and cells Language development Learning to Communicate o Language allows us to think in abstract terms o Language acquisition is rapid and starts early o The ability to understand words develops before the ability to produce words o Stages of Language Development Cooing Stage vowel like sounds Ex oooo and aaaa Babbling Stage At about 2 months the infant begins to make Beginning at 4 6 months The infant spontaneously utters various sounds adding consonant sounds to the vowel like sounds to form phonemes Ex ah goo ba ba ba ma ma ma da da da One word Stage months Beginning at or around the first birthday 12 A child starts to speak one word and makes family adults understand him her Holophrases Whole phrases will be communicated in one word o Ex The word doggy may mean look at the dog out there Two Word Stage Before the 2nd year at around 1 A child starts to speak in two word sentences Called telegraphic speech The child speaks like a telegram only nouns and verbs contains only essential content to carry meaning There is no 3 word stage Once out of 2 word stage children move to longer phrases After telegraphic speech children start filling in missing words to form short phrases sentences that have syntactical sense Mommy get ball By age 6 children are nearly as fluent as adults but just with more limited vocabulary o Jean Piaget developmental psychologist Pushed that Children are not like adults but instead think much differently about the world Believed that our cognitive development results from individual discovery and a child s interactions with objects in the environment Schemas Assimilation and Accommodation We make sense of our experience by forming schemas concepts or frameworks in which we organize and interpret information Assimilation o Involves incorporating new experiences into our current schema understanding Accommodation o The process of adjusting our schemas and modifying them Piaget s Theory of Cognitive Development Four Stages look at table in textbook 1st Stage Sensorimotor Stage birth to 2 years Senses and motor abilities o How they interact with their environment Object permanence o Knowing that an object exists even when it s out of site o At 8 months of age what is out of sight is not out of mind 2nd Stage Preoperational Stage 2 7 years Egocentricism they cannot view the world through someone else s perspective and conservation issues centration and irreversibility Egocentricism o Children believe that if they cover their eyes you can t see them o Unable to understand someone else s perspective Conservation Issues The inability to use a mental operation and understanding conservation of liquid amounts is lacking at this stage o Centration the ability to focus on only one feature of an object o Irreversibility the
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