Developmental Psychology-Exam 2 Study Guide PDF

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This is a study guide for the major topics on exam 2 in Developmental Psychology with Professor Cheries....

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Review Sheet: Exam 2 Psych 350 This review sheet highlights some important concepts and terms from each of the chapters and associated lectures that will be covered in the upcoming exam. This list is not intended to be exhaustive. For instance, there are many key terms that appear in each of the topic areas, many of which are listed in the textbook at the end of each chapter. I have not reproduced those lists here, but they are important to understand nonetheless. The best use of this guide would be to prepare as you normally would (completing all the readings, reviewing lecture notes, memorizing bolded terms etc.) and then testing your understanding on the items listed below. I hope you find this useful! Please let me know if you have any questions.

Motor -name and describe examples of reflexes that are present at birth (particularly ones mentioned in lecture).  Survival (serves obvious physical needs) oBreathing oRooting (stroke corner of mouth and head moves toward finger) oSucking (finger in mouth or on lips  sucking) oSwallowing oEyeblink oPupillary  Primitive (serves no obvious physical needs; maybe needed earlier in human development; don’t disappear=sign something is wrong in brain) oMoro (lower baby rapidly  baby extends limbs) oGrasping oTonic neck (baby on back and rotate head 90 degrees  baby extends arm to other side) oBabinski (stroke bottom of foot  toes fan then curl) oStepping (disappears around 2 mo. because legs get too heavy) oswimming -know examples supporting the role of culture and experience in the achievement/delay of motor milestones  Mali mothers exercise their babies by hanging, etc.  babies sit up 5 weeks earlier and walk 3 weeks earlier  Large influence of biological timetable (nature), BUT some flexibility due to culture and environment (nurture) oTwo twins were tested on stairs (one had 8 weeks of training and the other had no training), but when tested they both performed the same  some tasks are biologically programmed to happen at a certain time -Describe the developmental progression of reaching and self-locomotion

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self-locomotion o8 mo.: begin to crawl o13 mo.: begin walking oVision provides valuable information about how we are moving helping us balance oMotor skills don’t transfer from one way of commuting to another

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Reaching o0-3 mo.: pre-reaching movements (clumsy swiping towards objects) o3 mo.: successful, but poorly controlled o7 mo.: reaching becomes stable with ability to sit independently o10 mo.: signs of anticipatory reaching and approach is affected by what they intend to do with the object -dynamic systems theory and supporting examples  Development of complex behaviors should be understood in terms of a complex interaction of physical, environmental, and perceptual factors  Importance of interaction across multiple developmental domains -main conclusion from studies with animals (e.g., baby chicks, cats)  Cats: only active kitten responded normally (avoided visual cliff, blinked in response to incoming stimuli, lowered feet toward approaching surface)  *motor activity needs to be paired with visual input in order for typical visual-motor integration to occur*  Baby chick pecking: motor activity impaired by visual input; could peck closer to X because their necks were maturing, not because of practice -how active vs. passive experience affects motor development  Active is always better than passive (learn things faster and able to do things on own sooner)  Active: child does things for themselves  Passive: waiting for desired things to come to them; react in ways that things will be done for them instead of them doing it themselves -visual ‘flow fields’ and how they support experience-based theories of motor development, and the important connection between vision and movement

Learning & Memory -definitions and examples for each type of learning ability (habituation, classical, operant, statistical, observational)  Habituation: psychological learning process wherein there is a decrease in response to a stimulus after being repeatedly exposed to it o Dishabituation: recovery of interest in response to something new  Classical conditioning: associative learning via repeated pairings of a stimulus and response o Example: give baby sweet food and touch forehead  they suck  repeat over and over  touch forehead  sucking o Unconditioned stimulus: sweet food

o Unconditioned response: sucking o Conditioned stimulus: forehead touch o Conditioned response: sucking  Instrumental (operant) conditioning: learning relationship between one’s own behavior and resulting consequences o Example: tie string attached to mobile to baby’s foot  see how long It takes before baby learns connection (move foot  pleasurable experience) o Observed by at least 2 mo.  Statistical (implicit) learning: infants are sensitive to statistically predictive patterns o Example: show baby @ # $ % over and over  show $ after @ and they’ll look longer  Observational learning: infants predisposed to mimic without reward o Example: imitating faces; turning light on with forehead -know examples of how our nature makes some things easier/harder to learn  Prepared learning: some evidence for biological predisposition that determine strength/ease of learning certain things o Fixed, but flexible o Specific purpose learning o Usually survival benefits o Example: imprinting in animals; food aversions; being afraid of spiders/snakes without having a bad interaction with either  Infants match negative sounds with spiders/snakes; infants stare at spiders faster than equally complex pictures - “infantile amnesia” and possible explanations  We remember very little before 3-4 years of age  Possible reasons why o Freudian theory: some memories are so traumatic that you don’t want to remember them, so they are repressed o Encoding fidelity: poor information processing (myelination of neural tissues; development of hippocampus; maturation of the cortex) o Encoding specificity: encoding format incompatible with retrieval format (MP3 doesn’t play on a FlacFile) (memories are written in baby journal in baby language and then we cannot remember memories because we don’t speak baby language anymore)

Cognition -object permanance tasks (including the ‘A not B’ task): general results at different ages with different methods (e.g., reaching vs looking time)  No object permanence until around 9 mo. (Piaget is actually wrong, it’s 2 mo.)  A not B error: tendency to reach to where objects have been found repeatedly before rather than to where they were obviously previously last hidden (9-12 mo.) (successful 18-24 mo.) -Piagetian learning mechanisms: accomodation/assimilation/equilibration

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Assimilation: translate incoming information into a previously uderstood form (integrating reality into one’s own view) oKnown action pattern to new object (knows how to suck on bottle  introduced to new toy  toy goes into the mouth)  Accomodation: adapt current knowledge structures in response to new experiences (changing one’s view to better match reality)  Equilibration: balancing the two to create stable understanding -logic and main findings of studies testing infants’ sensitivity to physical principles (e.g., solidity etc.)  Violation of expectancy: show infant two outcomes (one is possible/expected and the other is impossible/unexpected) and if infant has prior experience/knowledge then they respond differently and look longer at impossible/unexpected stimulus  Solidity study: put a cylinder inside an empty container and then put the cylinder inside a seemingly full container and they will look longer at the “violation of solidity” -infants’ understanding of object support relationships (know the developmental progression)  Violation detected at each age o3 mo: no contact between objects is impossible o5 mo.: object staying on side of other object without being on the ground is impossible o6.5 mo.: extremely little contact between objects without top object falling is impossible o12.5 mo.: large box with weight on one side not tipping off of smaller box is impossible -infants’ numerical abilities  Can do simple arithmetic (add/subtract toys from a stage) and estimation (can differentiate 8 dots from 16 dots) oInfants will crawl to cup with more food/toys in it  Numerical understanding oImplicit (newborns on…): represent precise numbers of small objects and possess an approximate sense of larger numbers oExplicit (3-4 years on…): integer list is a cultural construction and language is required to represent precise sets larger than 3 -development of counting abilities in children, performance on object/liquid conservation tasks  Most kids can learn to count by age 3, but this is just a list  Learning what numbers mean comes 1-1.5 years after learning how to count -what cross-cultural studies of number understanding tell us -different theories of cognitive devlopment, e.g., Piaget’s stage theory, core-knowledge, others in text  Piaget’s stage theory

oSensorimotor stage: 0-2; infants only know their world through their direct senses and actions  Deferred imitation: ability to imitate a model that’s no longer present (hours, days, weeks, etc. after seeing it done) oPre-operational: 2-6 oConcrete operational: 7-10 

oFormal operational: 10-13 Core knowledge oContinuity over development (as opposed to Piaget’s discontinuous, step-like development) oQuantitative change oEvolutionarily ancient oDomain-specific learning

Social Cognition & Symbols -methods and basic results of tasks measuring infants’ sensitivity to other’s goals, intentions, preferences, rational action  Identifying social partners: faces; contingent behavior (even without a face)  Understanding goals o6 mo. olds respond to people’s intentions/goals 

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Example: reach for same object in same place over and over and then baby will look longer when the objects switch places and you reach for the new object in the same location Understanding intentions o18 mo. olds imitate intentions 

Example: babies will pull the ends off a toy doing the action the person intended to do and not what they actually did, BUT will not pull ends off if a robot does it oInfants presume people act rationally 

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Example: baby will turn light on with head if person with arms free turns light on with head, BUT if person doesn’t have arms free and turns light on with their head the baby will turn it on with their hand (14 mo.) Understanding preferences/desires oOlder infants will give you what you seem to like even if that is not what they prefer while younger infants will give you what they like despite you hating it Understanding beliefs o2 year olds: little understanding o3 year olds: understand that desires and beliefs affect behavior (relationship between beliefs and actions) oExample

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sally/anne task: sally puts toy in box and leaves  anne puts toy in basket  sally comes back and looks for her toy where?; difficult before 4.5 years  smarties task: put pencils in smarties box and ask child what’s in it  “smarties  open box to reveal pencils  what will your mom think is in the box?; 3 year olds fail (but can succeed if story is elaborated), 4-5 year olds pass -cues infants use to detect other living things (including task) -logic and various versions of the false-belief task. General ages of success/failure. -theory of mind and the relationship to autism  theory of mind (develop around 4-5 years and sooner if you have a sibling) oexperience interacting with other people is crucial ogeneral information-processing skills are necessary for kids to understand people’s minds oa hypothesized brain mechanism devoted to understanding other human beings 

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autism oimpaired social interaction/communication orestricted, repetitive, and stereotyped patterns of behavior, interests, and activities oimpaired ToM abilities (difficult with false belief task) oearly detection?: kids with autism track moving things with their eyes while kids without autism focus more on people’s eyes relationship oautistic people still find false belief tasks hard to solve as teens

omaybe impaired “mind reading mechanism” interferes with many aspects of social functioning  trouble establishing joint attention with other people and show less distress than other children when other people appear distressed  poor language skills further limit their opportunities to learn about other people’s thoughts and feelings  impaired understanding that beliefs affect behavior even in comparison to children with mental retardation and to deaf children who acquire sign language late in development -perspective taking/egocentrism  3 mountains task -picture-, scale-, and 3D model errors (general ages and main results)  8 mo. old babies in Kenya had never seen pictures before, so they tried to grab at the objects in the pictures  Little boy trying to get in the miniature play car -problem of Dual Representation

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dual representation: a symbol can be constructed in two ways at the same time (real object and then mini model, picture, etc.) and kids can’t tell the difference  kids up to three years usually fail at scale model task unless dual representation is removed by making the kids believe that the model and large room are one in the same through shrinking (successful around 3.5 years of age) -children’s drawings and understanding of intentions  kids remember what they intended to draw oexample: ask kid to draw a lollipop and a balloon  drawings come out very similar  kid will know which was supposed to be a lollipop and which was supposed to be a balloon despite what others say - imaginary companions and pretend play (types and benefits)  imaginary companions omore kids with these are first borns or only children ocorrelated with lack of television, verbal skill, and advanced theories of the mind oused for company, deflecting blame, and indirect communication 

pretend play (make-believe activities in which kids create new symbolic relations) emerges around 18 mo. oobject substitution: an object is used as something other than itself

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advanced pretense: sociodramatic play (activities in which kids enact minidramas with other kids or adults) emerges around 30 mo. -Vygotsky’s theory of social development  “through others we become ourselves”  Kids construct their knowledge  Development cannot be separated from its social context  Pretense boosts kids within their “zone of proximal development” oWhat I can do, what I can’t do, what I can do with help oConstruct knowledge through interactions with people

Ages 30 mo.: sociodramatic play 18 mo.: pretend play 3.5 years: scale model task 8 mo.: 3-D errors 4-5 yrs: theory of mind 4-5 years: smarties task 4.5 years: sally/anne task 3 years: understand that desires and beliefs affect behavior 14 mo.: light with head 18 mo.: imitate (pull ends off toy)

6 mo.: intentions (reach for a diff. toy  baby stares longer) 3 years: know numbers 4-4.5: know what numbers represent 3 mo: no contact between objects is impossible 5 mo.: object staying on side of other object without being on the ground is impossible 6.5 mo.: extremely little contact between objects without top object falling is impossible 12.5 mo.: large box with weight on one side not tipping off of smaller box is impossible 18-24 mo.: solve A not B error 0-3 mo.: pre-reaching movements (clumsy swiping towards objects) 3 mo.: successful, but poorly controlled 7 mo.: reaching becomes stable with ability to sit independently 10 mo.: signs of anticipatory reaching and approach is affected by what they intend to do with the object 8 mo.: begin to crawl 13 mo.: begin walking 2 mo.: operant learning observed...