Developmental Psychology: Theories

• Everyone is born with the potential to become an adult human
• Growing up may not mean starting as a simplified adult
• Babies and adults share similar physical forms and habitats, unlike tadpoles and frogs

Mental Processes

• Though adults and babies have similar forms, their mental processes may differ
• Some theories suggest the difference is only due to babies having less experience
• Other theories suggest babies are not mini adults, but very different psychologically

Continuity vs. Discontinuity

• Whether development is continuous or discontinuous is a key theme
• The debate isn't always explicit but understanding it helps in comprehending theories

Nature vs. Nurture

• Some believe psychological processes are mainly genetic (nature)
• Others think they're from environment and experiences (nurture)
• Everyone agrees both combine, but the focus is on their relative impact

Behaviorism

• This stresses the importance of nurture
• Skinner had the most influence and saw children as mini adults
• Pavlov noted dogs salivating before eating and called it "psychic learning"
• Dogs made associations between events, like food containers and food access
• Pavlov investigated arbitrary sounds stimulating salivation by sounding a bell before feeding
• He paired the bell and food reliably, testing the dogs' salivation
• The dogs salivated profusely even without food when the bell was sounded
• Pavlov's classical conditioning theory is that individuals learn associations between stimuli presented together
• Skinner focused on associations between stimuli and responses, emphasizing reinforcement

Reinforcement

• Reinforcement is a stimulus following a response that makes the response more likely in the future
• Skinner showed behavior is from reinforcement history but didn't explain new actions
• He introduced "shaping" via successive approximation, where selective reinforcement shapes reflexes

Applying Shaping to Language

• Babies babble naturally around 8-10 months
• This includes language-like vocalizations with vowel and consonant sounds
• Parents respond excitedly, encouraging the child
• Over time, parental excitement decreases, except for vocalizations that sound like words
• The infant then emits more word-like sounds and fewer non-word sounds

Skinner's View of Infants

• Skinner thought infants and adults learn the same things, despite physiological differences
• Learning principles are the same for infants, adults, rodents, etc.
• Skinner saw infants as mini adults, viewing development as quantitative/continuous

Nativism

• Noam Chomsky reacted against Skinner's view of language development
• Infants learn to speak despite grammatically degraded input

Chomsky's Paradox

• Infants sometimes learn languages despite minimal exposure
• Learning a language is intellectually impressive, yet infants do it despite lower capacity
• Chomsky suggested infants are born with innate language knowledge, but not specific language characteristics
• We're born with language knowledge on a general level, presupposing shared elements across languages
• All languages have a universal and innate deep structure underlying the surface structure
• Language is interpreted by translating it into the deep structure
• Chomsky emphasized innate capacities in language learning, raising questions about other capacities
• He also leaned towards nature over nurture and assumed core faculties are innate

Maturation and Ethology

• Humans have the innate ability to walk, but don't start until about a year old
• Innate knowledge must stay dormant until the baby is strong enough
• Walking might be an innate capacity expressed through maturational unfolding
• Just because a capacity develops later doesn't mean it depends on learning or experience

Scenarios

• A baby without movement opportunity until 12 months would still walk soon after gaining the ability
• Maturational stages in humans lead to discontinuity in development
• Maturation transforms us from baby to adult, making adults distinct
• The maturational view is within the nativist tradition and rejects "babies as mini adults”
• Maturation's effect includes readiness to learn
• Chomsky proposed a language acquisition device controlled by a maturational clock to explain why infants learn language much easier after 18 months

Biological Preparedness

• Many language-learning details are speculative
• Children become attached to their parents, and goslings attach themselves to their mothers
• Konrad Lorenz studied goslings and suspected they attach to the first moving object they see or imprint upon that object

Lorenz's Research

• Lorenz hatched eggs in an incubator and moved his boots around the hatchlings.
• The Goslings hence attached to the boots, following Lorenz.
• Attachment starts around 10 hours after hatching and peaks at 30 hours
• After attachment, learning capacity switches off and the gosling lost capacity to attach its biological mother

Lorenz Conclusions

• Learning wasn't generally facilitated after 30 hours but attachment learning was specifically switched on
• Lorenz introduced biological preparedness, where learning something has maturational control and critical period
• John Bowlby, influenced by Lorenz, saw similar implications for human development
• Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth noted separation distress in humans emerges around 8-9 months
• Prior to this, babies are typically unfazed by their mother's departure
• The baby's distress is not assuaged by comforting attentions of an unfamiliar adult and can only gain satisfaction from the mother's return
• Bowlby regarded distress stems from a bond is formed when the baby matures, namely at about 8/9 months, and any disruption could be seriously detrimental to emotional development.

Importance of Attachment

• Bowlby studied babies separated from their mothers for long
• Cases included babies raised in institutions without attachment opportunities, and this had profound effects as they failed to thrive

Maturation and Biological Preparedness

• Helps to understand innate factors combining with learning to drive development
• Learning is steered by innate processes whose timing is matures
• The environment and experiences determine the process
• Factors combine to allow milestones.

Milestones

• Milestones could be regarded as a kind of watershed, so that after achieving the milestone, the individual might be qualitatively different in some sense than before
• Babies after bonding might be regarded as being qualitatively different
• It would not be psychologically valid to think of a baby as a mini adult.

Stage Theories

• These maintain that children undergo psychological metamorphoses in their odyssey to adulthood
• Stages result from innate factors combined with experiential factors
• Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) suggested development depends on sexual fixations
• Babies start in the oral stage (erogenous zone is the mouth, gaining eroticism from feeding )
• Followed by the anal stage (erogenous zone is the anus, gaining gratification from withholding and expelling)
• Followed by the phallic stage, where the child gains gratification from touching the genitals and from contemplating differences between anatomies

Jean Piaget

• Freud's theory had tremendous influence and inspired Jean Piaget (1896–1980) for his formulation of stages
• Piaget had a radical influence across the world, with a continued legacy
• Piaget focused on biology
• Piaget's view: intelligence determines how creatures adapt to the environment
• To study intelligence, Piaget focused on humans, believing insight could be gained by understanding its development
• Cognitive development not continuous, dependent on more information. It proceeds by way of cognitive revolution
• As the child shifts onto planes of intelligence, he sheds many of the old cognitive limitations in a single sweep

Piaget VS "mini adults"

• Piaget did not regard young children as mini adults
• Children's thought is qualitatively different
• Their journey to full competence is only possible by going through successive stages

Intelligence vs the Environment in Piaget's mind

• Intelligence helps us adjust to our environment, divided into human/social/psychological and physical environment
• An individual adapts to (or changes) their physical environment to function optimally
• The individual comes to terms to problems in the human environment
• Piaget assumed a singular factor stood in the way of adjustment -egocentrism
• Egocentrism is not selfishness, but the inability to set aside the person's view point
• Understanding that achieved only as a monumental intellectual feat.
• Suggested that egocentrism is an obstacle that can be overcome in stages.
• Each subsequent stage has better adjustment to environment reducing in egocentrism

Egocentrism

• Infancy claimed to be most severe, the bay doesn't even discriminate between self and the rest of the universe.
• The individual progresses to early childhood and sheds the extreme egocentrism, now the child understands she is different, but her prospective on reality is relative to her vantage point
• By middle-age can overcome this and break free of shackles to imagine how things might be different depending on history

Piaget Implications for Education

• Adapt material to the intellectual level of the child
• Don't expect to engage in hypothetical reasoning before adolescence
• Does this mean to abandon all attempts to introduce children to Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings?, clearly, many love these stories and have no difficulty comprehending
• See an aptitude from make-believe from 18 months
• Although Children have imagination, does not necessarily follow that they can apply that to the task to working out on their own

Piaget vs. Maturationist

• Piaget talked about stages did not suppose to be maturationals
• Piaget was a stage theorist without being maturationist.
• Stages has a biological significance but are not controlled by a genetically determined maturational clock.
• Also fond of the phrase "genetic epistemology” which means something other and means “origin” and epistemology means “knowledge"
• Interested in how individual acquires it

Stages of Piaget

• Each successive stage is a adaptation to the prevailing state of egocentrism - thus, infant adapts to egocentrism so can distinguish but the new adaptation limits, where a more subtle form emerges
• Child finds the new better adaptation in overcoming
• Hence, knowledge (or levels of adaptation) is built stage by stage, each not only serves as a good adaptation but provides foundation to the next stage
• Missing a state will be likened constructing a five- story building without the third storey,.
• Advent mode necessarily rendered a previous adaption obsolete which challenges that if the child formulates a new way with understand the world, the other way can singer for a while

Siegler's Observations

• Children vacillate between new and old kinds of strategies in problem-solving, but the new better takes precedence
• calls this overlapping Waves their, children have strategies that co exist because prominence might swell new strategies.
• Advocates micro genetic - reveals that if repeated testing had been seperated by months, have been led to believe one had supplanted another with no overlap

Developmental Psychology

• Relates the various permutations, nature and nurture, continuity with discontinuity accounts, illustrated with ideas
• Framework aids the rest, to the perspective contribute of each nature.

Studying Development

• Survey research , intellectual growth social emotional moral artistic perceptual, aberrant, language
• Others employed others employ survey methods are systematic observation and is motivated by theatre theory , to decide is provide

Example of Explanation by Theory

• Piaget's theory of children, we contrive theory,
• Piaget show them model mountains, model
• The asked others what they saw on the other side
• Predicted that younger would see wrong photo
• Scrutinized that perhaps asking what their view of the photo was, so not about egocentrism, just a test of ability to answer questions