PSYC101 Developmental Psychology PDF

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Piaget  Theory of mind  Attachment  Prosocial behaviour  Aggression  Genetics and Behaviour – Nature And Nurture   Genes, environment, parents and peers Adolescence Learning outcomes  Evaluate the core theories of cognitive development  · Descri...

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Piaget Theory of mind Attachment Prosocial behaviour Aggression Genetics and Behaviour – Nature And Nurture Genes, environment, parents and peers 

Adolescence  Learning outcomes Evaluate the core theories of cognitive development · Describe prosocial development · Discuss issues relating to aggression · Examine children's understanding of mind 

PIAGET'S THEORY Piaget's theory is based on the interactionist approach with the focus being on the interplay between nature and nurture. It is constructivist as it believes that the child plays an active role in constructing their own knowledge through interacting with the environment. Piaget created the clinical interview - open ended technique for eliciting children's thought processes. To understand how children think we must look at qualitative development of their ability to solve problems.

DEVELOPMENT OF SCHEMAS Piaget's theory of cognitive development is that even young infants possess simple skills that enable them to interact with the environment. He refers to these skills as schemas and they direct how infants explore and develop. Mental operations = schemas - reply to anything in child's world and how they grow and change. An example of this is the grab and thrust schema. Mum's reaction to thrusting e.g. an iPhone into mouth changes babies schema to thrusting. This theory states that children implicitly test hypotheses by performing experiments on objects and events. The resulting information modifies existing schemas and creates new ones - this develops the child's understanding of how the word works and how to act within it. E.g. infant directly manipulates objects or pouring liquids into different shaped glasses. His emphasis on activity was important in stimulating the child centeredness approach to education. Children develop schemas through assimilation and accommodation. Piaget's concepts of the unchanging aspects of thought - broad characteristics of intelligent activity that remain the same at all ages. These are the organisation of schemas and their adaptation through assimilation and accommodation. Organisation = refers to the inborn capacity to coordinate existing cognitive structures, or schemas, and combine them into more complex systems. Organisation also grows in complexity as the schemas become more elaborate. Adaptation = the striving of an organism for balance/equilibrium with the environment which is achieved through the complementary processes of assimilation and accommodation. Assimilation = the process of taking new information or a new experience and fitting it into an already existing schema. E.g. ability to perform a physical activity more accurately. Accommodation = the process where existing schemas are modified or new schemas are created to fit new information. E.g. dog and cat look similar but dogs bark and cats don't. Through these twin processes the child achieves a new state of equilibrium however this is not permanent. The balance will soon be upset as the child assimilates further new experiences or accommodates existing schemas. Assimilation helps the child to consolidate mental structures; accommodation results in growth and change. All adaptation contains components of both processes and striving for balance between assimilation and accommodation results in the child's intrinsic motivation to learn. Piaget considered intellectual development to be a continuous process of assimilation and accommodation. No defining line between the four stages of development - order is the same for everyone but the ages at which they are achieved may vary. Assimilation and accommodation are the two two sides of adaption (learning). Balance (equilibrium) is desired. If info doesn't fit with a schema then person feels a disequilibrium. Return to balance by adapting using assimilation or accommodation.

STAGES OF DEVELOPMENT The order is invariant though there is a possible variation in the rate of development. Under 7 = period of egocentrism but later with growth of logic make shift to distinguishing what they see from what they know.

Sensori-motor stage - 0-2 yrs. 0-1mths = reflex activity - reflex behaviour and spontaneous activities children born with. Behaviour largely assimilated. 1-4mths = primary circular reactions - Use senses and motor abilities to understand world. The schemas involve actions on real objects. They are egocentric - don't know that everyone has lives different to their own. Children repeat activities especially if pleasing e.g. thumb sucking - primary because the activities derive from reflexes of 1st period e.g. thumb sucking is assimilated into a schema based on innate sucking reflex.  4-10mths = secondary circular reactions. Not limited to repeat actions based on early reflexes but have initiated new actions. These new actions are repeated if satisfying. Actions aimed at influencing the environment e.g. hitting an object - Piaget 1936/1952 p182 - Jacqueline learns to make a doll hanging on cot swing by kicking it. 10-12mths=coordination of secondary circular reactions - combine different behaviours into one schema. 12-18mths = tertiary circular reactions - increased mobility = explore cause and effect. Behaviour more flexible - acts repeated with variation = different results - accommodation established schema into new contexts and needs. 18-24mths = internal representation - capacity for mental representation - can now act indirectly with world because has mental representation of world -allows them to think and plan - evidence of mental representation using object permanence - implies child has memory of the object -a mental representation of it. Also evidenced through planned behaviour- a child in earlier stages might succeed in their goals through a trial and error performance however in this later stage the child is able to plan ahead and act in a structured way to gain what they want - piaget 1936/1952 pg336-337 Jacqueline trying to open the door while carrying two blades of grass - puts the grass down to turn the knob. More evidence with deferred initiation - when a child carries out a behaviour that is copying the behaviour that they have seen some time before - piaget 1951 p63- watched boy have temper tantrum and replicated it the next day - since she was able to imitate the little boys behaviour a day later she must have retained an image of his behaviour - a mental representation of what she had seen the day before.

Reinterpretations of the sensori-motor stage. May have underestimated children's mental capacity to organise the sensory and motor information they taken. Bower 1982 examines Piaget's hypothesis that young children did not have an appreciation of objects if they were out of sight. Children a few months old were shown an object which was moved across in behind screen and then the screen was moved back to its original position. In one condition when the screen was moved back the objects was still in place but in the second condition the object was removed. The children's heart rate was monitored to measure changes which reflected surprise. According to Piaget, children's not show any reaction in the second condition. However, Bower found that children showed more surprise in the second condition compared to the first condition. Bower inferred that the children's reaction was because they had expected it to reappear. If so this will be evidence that young children retained an image or representation of the object in their head and this could be interpreted as children having a concept of object permanence at an earlier case than Piaget suggested. Meltzoff and Moore 1992 showed that six week old infant could imitate behaviour a day after they've seen the original behaviour. In the experiment children saw an adult make a facial gesture and others just saw the adults face was she maintained a neutral expression. The following day all the children saw the same person again but on this occasion she maintained a passive face. Compared to children who are not seen any gesture, the children who had seen the tongue protrusion gesture the day before were more likely to make the face to the adult the second time I saw her. They argue that to do this infants must have a memory representation of the gesture. If so this is evidence of mental representations much earlier than Piaget proposed.

Pre-operational stage - 2-7yrs The stage is divided into 2 into the pre-conceptual period (2 to 4 years) and the intuitive period at 4 - 7 years. 

The preconceptual period - 2 to 4 Builds on the capacity for internal thoughts. Rapid increase in children's language which in Paiget’s view results from the development of symbolic thought. He differs from other theorists who argue that thought grows out of linguistic competence. Piaget’s theory is supported by research into the cognitive abilities of deaf children who despite limitations in language are able to reason and solve problems. Symbolic thought is also expressed and is imaginative play. Piaget identified limitations in the children's abilities in this stage. For example, the child is still centred in her own perspective and finds it difficult to understand that other people can look at things differently this is called egocentrism and this occurs because of the child's view that the Universe is centred on herself and finds it hard to decentre.

The three mountains experiment. Paiget and Inhelder 1956 asked children between the ages of 4 and 12 years to say how a doll would view a array of three mountains. 4 and 5 year olds often chose the view that they themselves could see and it was not until 8 or 9 years of age that children could confidently work out the doll’s view. However there have been several criticisms made of this task. Donaldson 1978 pointed out that is a particularly unusual task to use with young children who might not have such familiarity with model mountains. Borke 1975 carried out a similar task to Piaget's but she used layouts of toys. She found that children as young as 3 or 4 years had some understanding of how another person could view the layouts. This shows that this type of procedures and materials that are used can have a marked effect and how will children perform the task.  There are also other kinds of perspective taking and these include the ability to empathize with other people's emotions, and the ability to know what other people are thinking. Research has found that by 4 or 5 years of age children do understand that different people can interpret the world in different way (Wimmer and Perner 1983). This basically shows that young children are less egocentric then Piaget presumed.

The intuitive period - 4 to 7 There is a further shift in thinking about the age of 4 years that the child begins to develop the mental operations of ordering, classifying and quantifying in a more systematic way. Even though a child can carry out such operations, she's largely unaware of the principles that underlie the operations and cannot explain why she's done them, nor can she cover them out in a fully satisfactory way. If a preoperational child is asked to arrange sticks in a certain order, for example put them in order of length, some free operational children cannot do this at all. Some arrange a few sticks correctly but not all and some put all the small ones in a group and all the larger ones in another. A more advanced response was to arrange the sticks so the tops of the sticks were in the correct order even though the bottoms were not. In short, the child at this stage is not capable of ordering more than very few objects. Piaget found that pre-operational children also have difficulty with class inclusion tasks. Suppose a child is given a box that contains 18 round beads and 2 white beads and all beads are wooden. The child is asked “are there more brown beads than wooden beads?” The preoperational child will typically reply that there were more brown beads. According to Piaget the child finds it hard to consider the class of all beads at the same time as considering the subset of beads,the class of brown beads. Such findings tend to be to true of all children in the pre-operational stage irrespective of their cultural background. Ginsberg and Opper 1989 found that Thai and Malaysian children give responses very similar to Swiss children.

Another aspect is conservation and this refers to a person's understanding that superficial changes in the appearance of quantity do not mean that there has been any fundamental change in that quantity. Piaget discovered that pre-operational children find it hard to understand that if an object is changed in shape of appearance it's qualities remain the same. Children under 7 fail conservation tasks because they lack the ability to perform mental operations (cognitive processes for transforming, separating and combining information). They lack the understanding of logical principles. Piaget suggested that a child has difficulty in a test like this because they can only focus on one attribute at a time. For a child to appreciate that the sausage of clay has the same amount of clear as a ball means understanding that the greater length of the sausage is compensated for by the smaller cross-section of the sausage. Piaget said that pre-operational children are unable to apply principles like compensation. Another process is reversibility. This means that children could think of reversing the change they have seen. According to Piaget preoperational children lack the thought processes needed to apply principles like compensation and reversibility, and therefore have difficulty in conservation tasks.

Reinterpretations of the preoperational stage Other researchers have pointed out that children's lack of success in some tasks may be due to other factors other than ones associated with logical processes. The preoperational child seems unable to understand the relationship between the whole and the part in a class inclusion task. However, some researchers have pointed out that out questions that children are asked during this task are unusual. Even slight variations in the wording of the questions that help clarify the meaning of the question can have positive effects on the child's performance. McGarrigle - quoted in donaldson 1978 - found that in a group of children aged 6 25% answered the standard piagetian question correctly. When it was rephrased 48% of the children were correct. Donaldson 1978 put forward a different reason from piaget for why young children performed poorly in conservation tasks. He stated that children build up a model of the world by formulating hypotheses that help them anticipate future events on the basis of past experience. The child, therefore , has expectations about any situation, and the child's interpretation of the words she hears will be influenced by the expectations she brings to a situation. In a conservation task, for example, Donaldson suggested that it is reasonable for a child to think that there must be a link between that action - changing the display - and the following question. Mcgarrigle and Donaldson 1974 explore this idea in the experiment that includes as a character called naughty teddy. It was the naughty teddy rather than the experimenter who muddled up the display and the changes are explained to the children as an accident. The child might have less expectation and there was no reason to believe that real change had taken place. They found that children were more likely to give the correct answer in this context rather than the classical education context. Piaget has also found that pre-operational children have difficulty with transitive influence influences. You should children two rods together. First A and B. A was longer than B. Then B and C. B was longer than C. Asked the children which was longer, A or C. Young children find such questions difficult and Piaget suggested that they cannot make logical inferences such as: if A is longer than b and b is longer than C then A must be longer than C. Bryant and Trabasso 1971 wondered if children's difficulties were less to do with making the influence and more to do with remembering all the information in the task. For children to make a correct response they not know they not only have to make an inference they also have to remember the length of all the rods they've seen. They thought it was possible that young children who have limited working memory capacity but unable to retain in memory all the information they needed for the task. They use a test similar to Piaget’s original task but before asking the children to carry out the task itself they train them to remember the lengths of the rods. Did not train them using rods A and C together but the children were trained on the other comparisons and you just remember that A was longer than B and that B was longer than C. They were asked the test question and they found that the children can now answer correctly.

Concrete operational stage - 7-11yrs. Children can use symbols representationally and manipulate them logically. Progressive decentring - by 6 or 7yrs a child can pass conservation tasks and their thinking is operational. The child can reason logically about changes made to objects and apply realistic principles and coordinate different perspectives. Can understand mass and length. However, they are reliant on the presence of concrete objects - they still lack abstract thinking - still tied to immediate experience. From about the age of 7 years children's thinking processes develop a new set of strategies that Piaget calls concrete operations. They're called concrete because children can apply them to immediately present objects. Thinking becomes...