Exam 2 Textbook Notes - Summary How Children Develop PDF

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Textbook notes for exam 2...

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Exam 2 Textbook Notes Chapter 5: perception, motor, learning, cognition Chapter 6: language development Chapter 7: theory of mind, conceptual thinking Chapter 8: intelligence (selected pages?) Chapter 5 Visual perception - Sensation: processing of basic information from external world by sensory receptors in sense organs and brain - Perception: process of organizing and interpreting sensory information - Preferential-looking technique: method to study visual attention in infants that involves showing infants 2 patterns/objects at a time to see if infants have preference for one o Used to assess visual acuity: sharpness of visual discrimination  Infants have 20/120 vision in their 1st month, and cannot perceive differences between white and color - Habituation: repeatedly presenting infant with particular stimulus until infant’s response to it habituates (declines); then a novel stimulus presented and if infant dis-habituates (response increases), baby can discriminate between old and new stimuli - Contrast sensitivity: ability to detect differences in light and dark areas in visual pattern o Poor in infants due to immaturity of cone cells in retinas, the light-sensitive neurons involved in seeing fine detail and color; cone cells are spaced 4 times farther apart than adults’ cones - Perceptual constancy: perception of objects as being of constant size, shape, color, etc., in spite of physical differences in retinal image of object o Empiricists: perceptual constancy develops as a function of spatially experiencing our environment o Nativists: perceptual constancy stems from inherent properties of nervous system  Supported by size constancy study where newborns shown large or small cube at varying distances; cube’s actual size stayed the same but size of the retinal image projected by the cube changed  infants looked longer at larger but farther-away cube, showing size constancy (and visual experience was not necessary for size constancy) - Object segregation: perception of boundaries between objects o Motion is important cue for indicating boundaries between objects (study with the rod moving behind the block and then being shown in two pieces – babies looked longer at two rods because they were dis-habituated since they did not expect to see two rods, but rather one) – without movement, these effects went away - Babies start out with top-heavy bias for faces, which disappears after ~3 months - Perceptual narrowing: younger infants are better at discriminating monkey faces, whereas older infants and adults are worse at discriminating monkey faces; this is

because as they gain more exposure to human faces, their knowledge hones in on human faces o Other-race effect Depth perception - Optical expansion: depth cue in which object occludes increasingly more of the background, indicating that the object is approaching o Babies blink in response (but pre-term infants show delayed developmental pattern of blink response, suggesting brain maturation – not just postnatal visual experience – is crucial for this development) - Binocular disparity: difference between retinal image of an object in each eye that results in two slightly different signals being sent to the brain - Stereopsis: process by which visual cortex combines differing neural signals caused by binocular disparity, resulting in perception of depth - Monocular depth (or pictorial) cues: perceptual cues of depth (e.g. relative size and interposition) that can be perceived by one eye alone Auditory perception - Auditory localization: perception of location in space of a sound source - Perceptual narrowing: developmental changes in which experiences fine-tunes the perceptual system o E.g. face perception, phonemic/speech perception, music perception - Intermodal perception: the combining of information from two or more sensory systems o E.g. uniting sounds and visual information; or linking oral and visual information (study about the pacifier matching the ball texture) o McGurk effect: auditory-visual blending illusion  “Ba” dubbed onto video of person speaking “Ga”; someone watching this will hear “Da”, the intermediate between “Ba” and “Ga” – to experience this illusion, must be able to integrate auditory and visual information; 4 month olds are able to do this Motor Development - Reflexes: innate, fixed patterns of action that occur in response to particular stimulation o Grasping, rooting, sucking, tonic neck reflex - Stepping reflex: neonatal reflex in which infant lifts legs in pattern like walking; disappears after 2 months, assumingly because of fat on baby legs - Self-locomotion: ability to move oneself around in the environment - Visual cliff: evidence for depth perception because infants are willing to cross over deep side o Social referencing: child’s use of other person’s emotional response to decide how to behave - Scale errors: attempt by infant to perform action on miniature object that is impossible due to large discrepancy in relative sizes of child and object o Failure in integration of perception and action

Learning - Habituation: decrease response to familiar stimuli and increased response to novel stimuli; evidence of learning o Faster habituation tends to reflect faster cognitive processing and higher IQ Perceptual learning - Differentiation: extracting relationships that remain constant from ever-changing environment o Involved in intermodal perception development; e.g. learning association between tone of voice and facial expression Statistical learning - Picking up information from environment and detecting statistically predictable patterns o E.g. regularity with which sound of Mom’s voice is followed by appearance of her face o “Goldilocks effect” – avoiding patterns that are either too easy or too hard Classical conditioning - Associating an initially neutral stimulus with a stimulus that always evokes a particular reflexive response o E.g. infant’s sucking motions begin to occur at mere sight of bottle or breast, because they are conditioned to experience of receiving food at those sights o UCS (nipple in infant’s mouth) o UCR (sucking reflex o CS (breast or bottle, initially neutral stimulus) o CR (sucking reflex anticipating the bottle) Instrumental/operant conditioning - Learning the relation between one’s own behavior and the consequences that result from it - Positive reinforcement: reward that follows behavior and increases likelihood that behavior will be repeated - E.g. study on infants learning that their kicking would cause the mobile above their bed to move - Emphasizes active child theme – infants work hard at learning to predict and control their experience Observational learning/imitation - Infants learn through observation of other people’s behaviors o Imitation is based on analysis of person’s intentions - Meltzoff and Moore: after newborns watch adult stick out tongue, they stick out own tongue Rational learning - Ability to use prior experiences to predict what will occur in the future - E.g. study about expectations of box with mainly red colored balls, some white colored balls – would expect person to mainly pick out red balls from the box Active learning

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Learning by acting on the world, rather than passively observing objects and events E.g. infants learn more about the toy they choose versus the one they don’t choose; active engagement

Cognition - Object permanence: ability to represent object that has vanished from sight - Violation-of-expectancy: procedure in which infants are shown event that should evoke surprise if it violates something infant knows/assumes to be true Chapter 6: Development of Language - Symbols: systems for representing thoughts, feelings, and knowledge and for communicating them to other people - Language requires comprehension (understanding what others say) and production (speaking to others) - Generativity: using finite set of words and morphemes in vocabulary, we can put together infinite number of sentences and ideas - Phonemes: units of sound in speech - Phonological development: acquisition of knowledge about sound system of language - Morphemes: smallest units of meaning in a language, composed of 1+ phonemes - Semantic development: learning the system for expressing meaning in a language - Syntax: rules in a language that specify how words from different categories can be combined - Syntactic development: learning of syntax of a language - Pragmatic development: acquisition of knowledge about how language is used - Remarkably similar development factors involved in learning a sign language Brain-language relations - Left-hemisphere specialization; main area for processing speech and language - Critical period for language: time during which language develops readily and after which (between age 5 and puberty) language acquisition is much more difficult - Infant-directed speech (IDS): “motherese”; distinctive mode of speech adults adopt when talking to babies Speech perception - Prosody: characteristic rhythm, tempo, cadence, melody, etc. with which a language is spoken Categorical perception of speech sounds - Categorical perception: perceiving speech sounds as belonging to discrete categories - Voice onset time (VOT): length of time between when air passes through lips and when vocal cords start vibrating (e.g. shorter for “ba” than “pa”) - Infants perceive difference between two sounds the same way adults do o Experience-independent; infants can discriminate between speech sounds they have never heard before Developmental changes in speech perception - Linguistic perceptual narrowing; infants’ ability to discriminate between speech sounds not in native language declines between 6-12 months of age

o Also happens in sign language; not limited to speech Word segmentation - Process of discovering where words begin and end in speech - Distributional properties: in any language, certain sounds are more likely to appear together than others – infants are sensitive to this Babbling - Repetitive consonant-vowel sequences produced during early phases of language development Early interactions - Turn-taking - Joint attention First words and word learning - Reference: associating of words and meaning - Holophrastic period: when children begin using words in small productive vocabulary one word at a time (expressing a whole phrase with a single word, e.g. “cookie!”) - Overextension: using a word in a broader context than is appropriate; e.g. dog for any four-legged animal, or daddy for any man - Fast mapping: rapidly learning a new word simply from hearing contrastive use of a familiar and unfamiliar word o E.g. “Get the chromium tray, not the red tray”; child provided with contrast between familiar term (red) and unfamiliar (chromium) - Pragmatic cues: aspects of social context used for word learning o Children use intentionality and emotion of others to infer a word’s meaning - Syntactic bootstrapping: strategy of using grammatical structure of whole sentences to figure out meaning o E.g. “the duck is kradding the rabbit”; used syntactic structure of sentence to infer that kradding is what the duck is doing to the rabbit First sentences - Telegraphic speech: two-word utterances e.g. “eat cookie” “more juice” - Over-regularization: speech errors in which children treat irregular forms of words as if they were regular (indicates some sort of early/prior knowledge of grammar rules, even if they haven’t explicitly learned these); e.g. “womans”, “goed”, etc. Chomsky and the Nativist View - Contradicted Skinner’s behaviorist theory of language development o We can understand and produce sentences we have never heard before (generativity), which contradicts the idea of learning language from experience - Proposed that humans are born with universal grammar: set of hard-wired rules that are common to all languages - Modularity hypothesis: human brain contains innate, self-contained language module separate from other aspects of cognitive functioning

o Alternative view suggests that learning mechanisms underlying language development are actually quite general (e.g. perceptual narrowing, fast-mapping, etc.) Connectionism - Type of information-processing approach the emphasizes simultaneous activity of numerous interconnected processing units; neural network for language Nonlinguistic symbols and development - Dual representation: symbolic artifact must be represented mentally in 2 ways at the same time; both as a real object and as a symbol for something other than itself o Young children have difficulty with this, e.g. scale-model task Chapter 7 Conceptual Development - Concepts: general ideas that can be used to group objects, events, or qualities that are similar in some way - Category hierarchy: category that is organized by set-subset relations, such as animal/dog/poodle (super-ordinate, basic, subordinate) - Perceptual categorization: grouping together of objects that have similar appearance - Naïve psychology: commonsense level of understanding of other people and oneself o Desires, beliefs, and actions Theory of Mind - Organized understanding of how mental processes such as intentions, desires, beliefs, and emotions influence behavior - False-belief problems: understanding that other people will act according to their own beliefs even when child knows those beliefs are incorrect o E.g. Smarties test; believe that other kids would predict there are pencils in that box Theories for how TOM develops: 1) Theory of mind module (TOMM): hypothesized brain mechanism devoted to understanding other humans o Evidence for TOMM in Autistic children; they have great difficulty with falsebelief problems and with generally understanding people – one reason for these difficulties according to TOMM is that Autism causes atypical sizes and activity of certain brain areas that are crucial for understanding people 2) Social interaction empiricist perspective – psychological understanding arises from interactions with other people o Evidence: preschoolers who have siblings outperform peers who do not in falsebelief tasks 3) Growth of general information-processing skills empiricist perspective o Children’s understanding of false-belief problems is substantially correlated with ability to reason about complex counterfactual statement and ability to inhibit own behavioral propensities when necessary

o Young children lack the information-processing skills needed to understand others’ minds Causal reasoning - Develops in early years - Egocentric spatial representations: coding of spatial locations relative to one’s own body, without regard to surroundings o Self-locomotion helps overcome this and develop spatial reasoning - Numerical equality: realization that all sets of N objects have something in common (e.g. two balls, two dogs, two shoes share property of “two-ness”) - Number discrimination is ratio-dependent (2:1 ratio more easily discriminated than 3:2) Preschoolers and development of counting – five principles: 1. One-one correspondence: each object must be labeled by a single number word 2. Stable order: numbers should always be recited in same order 3. Cardinality: number of objects in set corresponds to last number stated 4. Order irrelevance 5. Abstraction: any set of discrete objects/events can be counted Intelligence: - G (general intelligence): cognitive processes that influence ability to think and learn on all intellectual tasks - Fluid: ability to think on the spot to solve novel problems - Crystallized intelligence: factual knowledge about the world...