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Questions and Answers
What is the primary goal of developmental scientists?
What distinguishes a between-subjects design from a within-subjects design?
Which design combines both cross-sectional and longitudinal approaches?
What role does inferential statistics play in developmental research?
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According to Freud, what is the primary function of the ego?
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What concept did Erikson emphasize as central to development?
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What is a characteristic of longitudinal design?
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What is the main focus of observational methods in developmental research?
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What is the primary focus of identity development during adolescence?
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What can happen if a child fails to develop initiative during the 4-5 year stage?
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In which stage do children learn whether their work is competent compared to peers?
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What is the developmental impact of having responsive parents during the Trust vs. Mistrust stage?
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What is the result of failing to reach the Intimacy vs. Isolation stage?
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What characterizes the stage of Generativity vs. Stagnation?
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During which stage do individuals assess whether they accept their life's achievements and mistakes?
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What does Social Learning Theory emphasize in the context of learning?
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At what age does a child's memory reach near-adult capability?
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Which of the following is a characteristic of implicit memory?
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What is Metamemory primarily concerned with?
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Which part of the brain is primarily responsible for the development of explicit memory?
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What is one reason why young children may have difficulty in recalling unique events?
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What phenomenon explains the inability to remember autobiographical memories from early childhood?
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What is the earliest known evidence of fetal learning?
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Children are more likely to form which type of memory compared to adults?
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What does Chomsky propose is a key component of language development?
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What occurs during the critical period of language development according to Lenneberg?
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Which concept refers to a pidgin language that becomes the native language for children?
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What is one of Chomsky's supports for the Nativist Theory of language development?
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What is one characteristic associated with the Language Acquisition Device (LAD)?
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What happens to children who experience significant language deprivation during the critical period?
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Which example supports Lenneberg's proposition of a critical period for language development?
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Which statement about Infant Directed Speech is accurate?
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What is a recessive allele?
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Which mechanism contributes to genetic diversity by increasing variability during cell division?
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What is the primary consequence of males having one X and one Y chromosome?
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How do environmental factors interact with genetic material according to epigenetics?
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Which of the following describes individuals who inherit two different alleles for a trait?
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What genetic condition is caused by a dominant allele?
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What is the role of the Y chromosome in male development?
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What syndrome is linked to sex-linked inheritance?
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Study Notes
Goals of Developmental Scientists
- Describe development
- Explain development
- Optimize development
Experimental Study
- Isolates the effect of independent variables on dependent variables
- Can be within-subjects or between-subjects designs
- Between-subjects designs view changes in different groups
Developmental Designs
- Cross-Sectional Design: Giving the same task at the same time to participants in different age groups
- Longitudinal Design: Participants are observed repeatedly over time; could take 6 months, some last decades
- Microgenetic Design: longitudinal studies that happen at a microscopical scale
- Sequential Design: a combination of cross-sectional and longitudinal; participants of different ages (cross-sectional) were observed repeatedly for a period of time (longitudinal)
Collecting Data
- Observational Methods: Observational Testing (stimulating for response) or Naturalistic Observation
- Self-report: Verbal (interview) or Written (questionnaire)
Statistical Inferences
- Scientific theories are tested with new data to determine the odds that the theory still holds true
- A theory that is 95% likely to be true has "passed" the test of falsifiability
- The more passes, the more true the theory is
- Inferential Statistics used to determine how likely a hypothesis is to be true
- In any data, there is a possibility that the observed results were due to chance, not a distinct difference
Sigmund Freud – Three Components of Personality
- Id: the basic urges
- Ego: the rational component of thoughts
- Superego: conscience, using moral reasoning
Freud’s Stages
- Believed that development happened in a particular order of different stages universal in existence
- It's not required to ‘succeed’ in a stage before passing on to a later stage
- Stage progression is led by changes in one’s environment and maturity.
Freud’s Contributions
- The importance of childhood development in shaping who we become
- The importance of unconscious and internal conflicts shaping our feelings and actions
Erik Erikson – General Theory
- Erikson believed in psychosocial forces, with epigenesis as the core of development
- Epigenesis: the idea that development happens step-by-step, with new abilities building over time
- Emphasized on identity development, rather than personality, as an ongoing process in developing
Erikson's Stages
-
Trust / Mistrust (0-1 year): Infant learns who they can rely on, typically the mother
- Trust: the child has a responsive mother
- Mistrust: the mother is unresponsive
-
Autonomy / Shame (2-3 years): Firm / Supportive Parents - the child learns initiative to act independently
- Autonomy: if parents are supportive
- Shame: if parents are too strict or lenient
- The child can’t initiate behavior or it doesn’t matter to them
-
Initiative / Guilt (4-5 years): Children who develop initiative (good or bad) learn their capabilities independently
- Initiative: A child succeeds (role models)
- Guilt: A child fails
-
Industry / Inferiority (6 - 13 years): Child learns whether their work is competent compared to other children.
- Industry: work paying off in school etc.
- Inferiority: failing relative to peers
-
Identity / Diffusion (Adolescents): Adolescents successfully develop an identity or fail by settling for the wrong identity
- Success: 1. explore identities, 2. commit to an identity
-
Intimacy / Isolation (Young Adults): learns whether they want to share their life with another or prefer to be alone
- Success: open themselves up to others
- Fail: If they can’t, this stage is failed
- Generativity / Stagnation (Adult): Adult learns if their contributions to the world are meaningful, or if their life lacks meaning and worth
- Integrity / Despair (Old Age): Whether or not they can accept their life as being positive and meaningful, accepting mistakes, or if they feel as if they missed out or wasted life
Behavioural Theories
- Social Learning Theory (SLT): broadens the scope of types of learning, revealing how context influences learning
- Ex - learning what’s cool from Grandma vs. Influence of the child’s phenotype on his or her environment
Chromosomes
- Passed on by genetic material, made up of DNA
- Genes: sections of chromosomes that code for a particular sequence and/or hold an effect on other genes
Epigenetics
- How genes and the environment work together to produce/develop an organism
Mechanisms Contributing to Genetic Diversity
- Mutations: Changes in sections of DNA caused by random or environmental factors
- Random Assortment: The shuffling of the 23 pairs of chromosomes in the sperm and egg
- Crossing Over: Sections of DNA switching from chromosomes during meiosis, increasing genetic variability
Alleles
- About ⅓ of human genes have 2 or more different forms, known as alleles
- Dominant Allele: the form of the gene that is expressed if present
- Recessive Allele: isn’t expressed if a dominant allele is present
- Homozygous: person who inherits two of the same alleles for a trait
- Heterozygous: person who inherits two different alleles for a trait
Sex Chromosomes
- Females have two X chromosomes in the 23rd pair, whereas males have an X and a Y chromosome
- The Y chromosome gives the protein to form testes, which produce testosterone and the sense of manliness
The Male Disadvantage
- The Y chromosome has only about a third as many genes on it as the X chromosome
- males are more likely to suffer inherited disorders from recessive alleles on the X chromosome (colour blind)
Genetic Origins of Human Diseases and Disorders
- Over 5,000 human diseases and disorders are presently known to have genetic origins
- Recessive gene: PKU, sickle-cell anemia, cystic fibrosis
- Single dominant gene: Huntington’s disease
- Sex-linked inheritance: Fragile-X syndrome, hemophilia
- Errors in meiosis: Down syndrome, Kleinfelter syndrome
- Deleterious effects: A debilitating blood disorder when both alleles are present
Phenylketonuria (PKU)
- A disorder related to a defective gene on chromosome 12, unable to metabolize phenylalanine
- Reaches near-adult capability by abt age 8
Memory
- Memory is like google - it finds the strongest (or most popular) connection based on keywords
- The process of retrieval strengthens the keyword-memory link, leading to possible false memories
False Memory
- Children are more likely to form false memories for plausible events than adults
- New protocols for interviewing children attempt to minimize false memory through appropriate techniques
Implicit Memory
- Implicit memory develops earlier and has a greater ability to withstand brain damage
- This suggests that implicit memory is evolutionarily older than explicit memory
- Implicit memory matures faster; fewer differences between children and adults
Explicit Memory
- Thought to be dependent on hippocampus development
- Hippocampus matures at approximately 18 months, in charge of long-term memory
- Also dependent on language, Explicit memory is Influenced by many cultural and learned factors
- Younger children also tend to encode routine, vs.unique, events
- Recall facility & frequency effects
Metamemory
- Metamemory refers to one’s memory capacity in terms of size, speed, and accuracy
- Preschool children tend to overestimate their memory performance (positive self-success bias)
- The relationship between metacognition and cognitive performance is bidirectional
Fetal Learning
- The earliest observations of fetal learning (and therefore memory) have occurred at 32 weeks gestation
- Newborn infants have been shown to prefer stimuli they were exposed to prenatally, like:
- Sounds (Cat in the Hat, mother’s voice and language)
- Smells (Own amniotic fluid)
- Tastes (Juice mother drank – to 5.5 months)
Infantile Amnesia
- Inability to remember autobiographical memories from early childhood
- Freud & repression; encoding differences from child to adult (like a Mac to a PC); a sense of self that's missing when young; young children have poor long-term encoding
- We do remember, we just don't remember remembering (implicit vs explicit)
What is Language?
- Arbitrariness: uses symbols that aren’t related to the concept they represent (eg. Children aren’t corrected for their pronouciation)
Chomsky
- Chomsky rejected the idea that language development is solely driven by the environment
- Proposed that surface structure of language is what we hear when people talk, with a deep structure underlying all languages (spoken or not)
- The ability to detect, understand, and use deep structure in an innate species-specific ability
- In people, the Language Acquisition Device (LAD) processes incoming stimuli, detecting underlying patterns
Nativist Theory - Chomsky
- Supports for Nativist:
- Similarities in all human language grammars, even those that aren’t verbal
- Children’s ability to create a Creole language from a pidgin in one generation!
- Children’s ability to create their own native language from mixing languages and words to make sentences
- Adult Ex: adult tourist from paris asking “as tu know ou le shopping mall is”
- Child Ex: Nicaragua kids made their own sign language from combining languages and symbols
- Pidgin: mixing languages and words to form your own sentence
- Creole: a pidgin language that has become the native language for kids of adult pidgin speakers.
- Infant Directed Speech: changing speech for baby; “look baby, do you see the elephant?Thats a big trunk!”
Lenneberg's Support for Nativist Theory:
- Complex language is found only in humans
- Common to all healthy humans, requiring little formal teaching
- Some language disabilities are genetic
- Its development is difficult to derail
- Develops in predictable sequence
- Portions of the brain and throat appear specialized for language
Critical Period
- Lenneberg proposed that there is a critical period for language development
- language-deprivation in childhood does not allow for ideal language development even with intensive learning (Ex - Genie’s mom drugging her so her legs stop working, putting her in a veggie state)
- Differences in grammatical competency based on age of language acquisition
- Children show better language plasticity after l.h.Damage
Why A Critical Period?
- ...
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Description
This quiz covers the key concepts and methodologies in developmental psychology, including different experimental designs and data collection methods. Explore cross-sectional, longitudinal, and microgenetic designs, as well as the role of observational and self-report techniques in research. Test your understanding of how developmental scientists describe, explain, and optimize human development.
