Pscyh 350 EXAM 2 - Summary of the first half of the material on exam 2 PDF

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Summary of the first half of the material on exam 2 ...

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PSYCH 350 EXAM 2 I. Learning and thinking ● Children become different from one another because they have different histories of reinforcement of learning opportunities ● Learning theories ○ Behaviorism- the belief that development is determined by the child’s social environment, via learning through conditioning ■ Example (Little Albert) ● Little albert was conditioned to be afraid of a little mouse. He heard a loud nose only and that was seen as bad. When he was showed a mouse this was considered a neutral stimuli. When he heard a loud noise and saw a mouse this was bad. Then when he saw the mouse only it was bad. Because he was conditioned to associate the loud bad noise with seeing the mouse ● Systematic desensitization- positive responses are gradually conditioned to stimuli that initially elicited a negative response ○ Operant conditioning- Learning occurs through rewards and punishments for a given behavior. This is also called instrumental conditioning ○ The child learns what happens when they execute a particular behavior, for example “if id o X, then Y happens” ○ Behavior X can then be reinforced or punished ■ Reinforcement- repeating behaviors that produce favorable outcomes ■ Punishment- suppressing behaviors that lead to unfavorable outcomes ● B.F. Skinner believed that behavior is under environmental control ■ Intermittent reinforcement- intermittent reinforcement is when there is inconsistent response to the behavior of another person. ○ Social learning theory- Most human learning is inherently social in nature and is based on observation of the behavior in other people ■ Example (Bobo doll study)● Ways of learning ○ Habituation- the evidence for this is a bored baby. They look at things for less long and they seem less interested because they learned it already ○ Perceptual learning- learning that occurs in the process of simply paying attention to the objects and events going on around them ■ Differentiation- extracting the relationships that remain constant in a background that varies over time ■ Affordances- discovering the range of realistic possibilities by understanding the relations between their bodies and the world.

Statistical learning- learning that occurs by detecting statistically predictable patterns ■ ex) think with the sound- we tend to meet males with lower deeper pitched voices and so we pair lower voices with men and higher pitched voices with women. Babies are capable of doing this even before birth. ○ Classical conditioning- a form of learning that consists of associating an initially neutral stimulus with a stimulus that evokes a particular response ■ Example (The Office)- Jim conditions Dwight with his computer sound and altoids. The altoid acts as the unconditioned stimulus and the unconditioned response is Dwight says yes when Jim asks him if he wants an altoid. The reboot sound Jim’s computer makes is the conditioned stimulus and the conditioned response is Dwight reaches out his hand for an altoid when he hears the reboot sound. ○ Operant conditioning- Also known as instrumental conditioning. It’s learning the relation between one’s own behavior and the consequences that result from it. ■ ex) the baby with the ribbon tied to the mobile ○ Observational learning- This is learning by observing and then sometimes by imitating another. Baby monkeys imitate facial expressions. ■ ex) If a child sees a person pressing a button with their foot because they are carrying something, the baby will use its hand to press the button. But if the baby sees a person hit a button with their foot for no reason, they will the button with their foot as well. Proves they can make inferences ■ ex) Rhesus monkey experiment: researcher sits in front of monkey and repeatedly sticks their tongue out to see if the baby monkey will also stick their tongue out as well and imitate the behavior. The baby monkey imitates the facial expressions ○ Rational learning- the ability to use prior experiences to predict what will will occur in the future. ■ Example would be showing an infant a container full of balls and they show more of one color than the other, for example more red balls than white balls. If someone reaches into the container with a lot more red balls than white balls the baby can infer that the person is going to pick out a red ball---> shows that infants have reasoning and can apply this to the social world. ○ Active learning- choosing what to learn about rather than passively receiving information. And example is infants would rather learn about flying cars than regular ones because the flying ones violate their expectations. What infants know ○ Nativism and empiricism ○

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Nativists- the idea that certain ideas or abilities are innate to the human mind and don’t need to be learned ■ Empiricists- a group of scientists and resources saying that all knowledge comes from sensory experiences. When we are born, the mind is a tabula rasa. ■ A good method to pull these ideas apart is studying newborns ○ Object knowledge ■ Object permanence- this is the belief that objects continue to exist even when hidden. Babies lack object permanence (when infants look longer when they are surprised) ● At three and a half months infants can tell an object will still continue to exist even when hidden. ● Individuals can form mental representation of things ○ Physical knowledge- infants know a lot about the physical world before they are capable of operating on it. ■ Before the age of one years old babies expect that objects do not float in mid air. They also know balls should roll down hill, not up (7 months , and that balls speed up when going down an incline (7 mos), solids and liquids have different properties (5 mos), and not all objects can support other objects. ■ Properties of objects ● Continuity: objects exist continuously in time and space ○ Example ● Solidity: for two objects that exist continuously, the two cannot exist at the same time in the same place. ○ Example ■ Properties of events ● Occlusion ● Containment ● Covering ● Contact ○ Social knowledge- infants are sensitive to social cues and groups from early development. ■ Intentionality- 6 month old infants expect humans to act in a goal directed manner. ● Show an infant a human reaching for a blue ball and the infant knows that the human wants the blue ball, even if it is in a different position. However, the infants had no inclination of where a ■

mechanical claw would reach, showing that they make inferences about humans more. ■ Animate agents versus inanimate objects- how do infants figure out what is an inanimate vs. animate object? Well, if you show a baby a blob and if it reacts to movement then at 12 months the babies knew it was animate. ■ Early sense of morality- infants are sensitive to social cues and groups from early development. ● Helpers and hinderers experiment- infants categorize agents as being hinderers or helpers (puppet that helps the other one) and prefer the helping one. In the experiment characters showed one helping the main character up a hill and another character knocking the main character down the hill. The infant always chose the character who was helpful. They also chose the puppet who gives the ball back to the main character ○ This shows that babies already have a sort of sense of morality and who is the bad guy vs the good guy. II. Theories of cognitive development ● Introduction ● Any act of cognition is any act of mental activity- so we are talking about the development of thinking. ○ 5 truths of cognitive development ■ 1): cognitive development results from a dynamic and reciprocal transactions of internal and external factors ● So basically it happens when a child interacts with the world. So a parent will give a child plates and see how they deal with it. Each child is also different and the way that they interact with the world is different. ■ 2): cognitive development is constructed with a social context- we are dependent on others for survival ■ 3): Cognitive development involves both stability and plasticity ● Mechanism by which we learn to pay attention ● By the end of the first year of life we have the abilities we need to pay attention and it remains stable. However over life the way we use this changes greatly (so like what we pay attention to changes) ■ 4): Cognitive development involves changes in how information is represented ■ 5): Over development children develop increasing control over their cognitions and thus their behaviors

● You have a lot of abilities and part of becoming an older member of a culture is learning how to harness these abilities and live in the way that you want to live. Themes ■ Empiricism versus nativism- nativism is innate knowledge and empiricism is the idea of the blank slate. ■ Continuous versus discontinuous development- continuous development is more quantitative in steps and development progresses is a linear fashion whereas discontinuous development is more qualitative in phases and happens in big changes ■ Active child- developing organisms have their own impact on their development. It is not passive ● Information processing theory ○ Identify relevant themes- tend to be on the side of continuous development ■ They are focused on specific mental processes that underlie children’s thinking ○ Tenets of theory ■ Precise specification of process involved in thinking ● ex) attention ■ Thinking as process that occurs over time ● ex) What develops and in what order ○ Two processes ■ Attention- the gatekeeper of learning because much of our attention is what we choose to focus on. ● Interaction between; ○ Sensation- there are so many different stimuli and things to pay attention to, and we have to choose which ones to pay attention to. ○ Perception- how do we make sense of stimulus we attend, as we get older our attention capacity gets better ○ Selection- what we attend to, what we decide to pay attention to, what is the context ■ ex) what does a baby decide what to pay attention to? They pay attention to movement, something new, their mom or dad or another human being ■ Humans can direct a baby’s attention to certain things ■ Memory ○

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2 developmental components that influence retention- retention is basically how does something initially get in the memory ○ Language- important mediator and transformer of encoding - how do you form a memory before you can even use language ○ Speed of processing- this affects how quickly things get into memory ■ Sensory memory- fleeting sensations we can choose to attend to or not Working memory- the information processing system that processes new information and of incoming visual and auditory information. Conscious active processing of incoming visual and auditory information and of information retrieved from the long term memory ○ The way that working memory is related to long term memory is that the more capacity we have to get things in, the more likely things are to reach long memory. Long term memory- when we rehearse things in our working memory we have a good chance of maintaining it into our long term memory LTM is the knowledge that people accumulate over their lifetime ○ Explicit memory- things we can consciously recall like the date it is ■ Episodic- things like events that happened (autobiographical memories ) ■ Semantic memories ○ Implicit memory- no conscious, this is things like learning how to ride a bike. Things we don’t consciously recall. ○ Implicit memories are less affected over time compared to explicit memory which gets better over time ○ It’s really hard to get things into long term memory but once they are in there the capacity is infinite ○ Infantile amnesia- we remember very little before the ages of 3 and 4 years old. ■ Theories ● Freudian- repression and retrieval theory ● Encoding Fidelity- states that poor information processing as a result of

myelination of neural tissue, development of hippocampus, and maturation if the cortex→ so we don’t form memories because we are not fully myelinated. ● Encoding specification- the way that the information is put in is not compatible with the system that is supposed to retrieve it. So if we learned things before we learned language, how do we then pull those memories out and talk about them or how do we remember things before we have language (language and state dependent memory) ● Sociocultural theory- the mechanism of cognitIve development is through the world around us. We are more malleable when we are young and we narrow with experience. ○ Identify relevant themes ■ Children seek out and influence their own cognitive development based on their experiences ■ Started with the work of Bell- we shape our own social context of ourselves ■ More empiricist theory ○ Sociocultural perspective- basically how we develop and how we learn to think is basically a function on which we are raised. ■ How does information from the world become personal knowledge? ● Information→ Culture→ Personal knowledge: basically shows that culture acts on the information in which we absorb and shapes the way we know things. ● Culture- system of meaning, behaviors, and symbols in which members of a group participate to some degree ○ Tools of intellectual adaptation- culturally specific methods of thinking and problem solving that are internalized ■ Examples ● Pencil, brain. Your laptop has changed the way we think and the way we store memories ○ Lev Vygotsky ■ Major biographical highlights ● He died very young of typhus ■ Beliefs

● He believed that children’s minds grow through the interaction with the social world ● Children are apprentices- he saw children as apprentices that are learning through older members of their culture how to be a member of the culture. ■ Zone of proximal development- One of his big contributions . ● Defined as the distance between what we know now and what we have the potential to know. ● The distance between the learners actual and potential developmental level. ● Piagetian theory ○ Identify relevant theme ■ Empiricist, active child, discontinuous development ■ Jean Piaget- swiss psychologist, did some of the first studies that actually tested kids cognitive abilities ■ Major biographical highlights ● Published first paper at age 10 ● Gets doctorate in zoology, studies psychoanalysis ● Studies children intelligence in paris ● First of 70 scholarly books published in 1923 ● Appointed director of International Bureau of Education ■ Beliefs ● Children are little scientists- Children learn mostly through their interactions with the physical world. They are all little scientists who want to know how their world works. ● Focused not as much on what children were doing right, but more of what they are doing wrong and the mistakes that they were making ● Heavily influenced by darwinism in terms of logic and philosphy ○ Ways to error ■ Random ● Like throwing a bunch of dart and they land in all random places ■ Systematic use of alternative ● Systematic error- darts all hitting the same wrong area ● Which type of error caught attention of Piaget? ○ Piaget was more interested in the systemic nature of children’s error and thought this showed how their thinking develops ○ Thought that children's’ errors were systemic

Piagetian methodology ■ Observation- careful observation, he studied his own children ■ Interview- the “clinical interview”. He asked careful questions and observed ■ He described children’s actions as if they were scientists studying the world→ very interested in children’s relationship with their physical world, which is something that they have a very active role in ○ Stage theory- the child progresses through four distinct stages ■ Evidence ● Mechanism of cognitive development ● Assimilation: translate incoming information in to a previously understood form ○ ex) baby knows how to hold and suck on a bottle… tries to do the same with a book ● Accommodation: adapt current knowledge structures in response to new experiences ○ Modifying your action pattern to deal with new object ○ Realized not to treat a dog like a bottle and pets dog instead of eating dog ● Equilibration: balancing both assimilation and accommodation to reach equilibrium- when babies balance these it creates a stable understanding ○ Sensorimotor development (Stage 1)- ages 0-2 ■ Reflexive behavior , more control over movements, child activity constructs, motor reflexes (discovering parts of their bodies), foundations from which new knowledge is constructed ■ Object permanence- the ability to think about things we cannot see ● No object permanence until 9 months ● With babies if you put a screen in front of an object, the baby will act like the object does not exist ■ A not B error ● 2-12 months- tendency to reach where objects have been found before rather than where they were last hidden ● Infants that can successfully pass an object permanence test before cannot if the object is moved to a different place when it is hidden ○ Pre-operational development (Stage 2)- ages 2-6 ■ Toddlers can use imagery and symbolic thought ■ It is hard for them to realize something is tall AND wide they can only see one trait ○

Conservation- asking children if things have the same amount of juice, then pour them into another glass that’s different shape and they will say they are not the same ○ Alternative explanations (are babies smarter than we think?) ■ Examples ● Core knowledge theory○ Identify relevant themes ■ Continuous development ■ Nativist ○ Object knowledge ■ Object permanence ● Fairer way to test infant knowledge (?)- you test which thing that babies look longer at, shows evidence that infants must have some memory for the object. ○ Show infants events with outcomes that are possible/expected vs. impossible/unexpected and if infants look longer at the unexpected outcome then it shows they had some prior knowledge or expectation that was violated. III. Language ● Foundations ○ Symbols and icons ■ Iconic- signs that directly reflect the thing it depicts ● Pictures that get a message across ● Visual representation of its message ● Example is manner stamp in Japan Subways ■ Symbolic- system for representing and communicating thoughts, feelings and knowledge ● This image can be interpreted in many ways ● Thus usually uses language to explain symbol ● Example: “Don’t you realize the sound is leaking from your headphones” ○ Nonhuman animal communication ■ Examples ● Video Chaser the Dog ● He learned the name of hundred of animals and can fetch the right toy by name ● He was able to pick out a new toy named “Darwin” by process of elimination ■

○ He knew all the other toys names so he knew darwin was the one he didn’t know ● Mutual exclusivity: finding Darwin without knowing the name or the toy ● Fast mapping: tested a month later to find Darwin again and he was able to remember what the toy looked like- he was able to grab onto the memory and hold on to it ● Monkeys ○ They were given two main classes of alarm calls ○ Call A: predators by hair ○ Call B: Predator by land snake ○ Not good for communicating besides alarm calls ○ Uniqueness of human language ■ Symbols are systems for representing thoughts, feelings and knowledge and communicating them to others ● No other species has demonstrated creative and flexible use of symbols ● The most powerful symbol system is language ■ Innateness ● We have innate linguistic abilities which fill in inadequacies which fill in the inadequacies of the environment ○ Children acquire language in a range of environments ○ When input is chaotic they can organize it and when language is absent they create it ■ Generativity- using the finite set of words in our vocabulary we can pout together an infinite number of sentences and express an infinite number of ideas ■ Combinatorial system- allows distinct concepts ot be juxtaposed and conjoined ● Tested if a rat in an all white room could find a toy that was in a corner. Then then painted one wall blue to see if the rate knows its to the left of the blue wall ● Thy spun the rat around and could not find the toy on the left of the blue wall ● Elizabeth Spelke experiment- they wanted to test the rate thing on babies to see if they could use context clues ○ Can human babies connect t...