PSY 301 1st Edition Lecture 9 Outline of Last Lecture I Twin Studies II Adoption Studies III Effects of genes environment Outline of Current Lecture I Developmental Psychology II Language Development III Cognitive Development Current Lecture Developmental Psychology The study of continuity and change across the life span on different dimensions Child psychology looks at the children along every dimension at different ages o They develop along multiple dimensions Motor movement Social interaction among others Cognitive thinking Linguistic language Major issues o Nature vs nurture How do genetic inheritance and experience influence our behavior o Continuity stages Is development a gradual continuous process or a sequence of separate stages o Stability change Do early personality traits remain stable or change through life Language Development 1 Cooing 3 months 2 Babbling 4 months 3 1 word utterances 10 months 4 2 word sentences 24 months Development is orderly because it is based on maturation that sets the basic course of development while experience adjusts it Cognitive Development How the physical world works How our minds represent the world How other minds represent the world Piaget 1 cognitive development results from biological development shaped by experiences with the environment 2 children gain knowledge by constructing reality out of experience 3 children uses schemas to organize experience a schemas general concepts involving theories about or models of the way the world works b goal is equilibrium keeping schemas consistent with experiences Assimilation When the child first tries to integrate new information with existing schemas Accomodation if the schemas can t absorb the new information then existing schemas are altered to fit new information Mental growth involves major qualitative changes represented by stages of cognitive development 1 sensory motor intelligence 0 2 2 preoperational period 2 6 3 concrete operational period 6 11 4 formal operational period 11 up Sensory Motor Period 1 child experiences the world through senses and actions 2 child develops basic schemas 3 begins to act intentionally 4 shows the beginning of Object permanence understanding that objects continue to exist even if the child is not in sensory contact with them Preoperational Stage 1 child can represent things in words and images 2 uses intuitive rather than logical reasoning 3 common misconceptions of the world a inanimate objects are alive b everything is causal c fooled by appearances d can t tell real from imagined Children lack conservation the understanding that an object can retain a property under a variety of transformations To gain conservation must learn a focus on operations not results b transformations are reversible c focus on more than one dimension at a time Children are egocentric child can only see the world from his her point of view begins to develop a theory of mind the understanding that other people have different ideas and understanding Concrete Operations 1 can think logically about concrete objects and events 2 understands how actions can affect or transform concrete objects understands conservation 3 has reversibility transformation Formal Operations 1 reasoning ability expands from concrete thinking to abstract thinking 2 can now use symbols and imagined realities to systematically reason understands a formal logical properties b hypothetico deductive reasoning c difference between abstract and empirical truth d can think about possibilities
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