PSYC 206 Lifespan Development Bilge Yagmurlu

Chapter Overview Brain Development Preoperational Development Information-Processing Approaches to Cognitive Development

Brain Development Brain Development After infancy, brain development slows 80% of adult weight at start of early childhood 90% of adult weight at age 5 Contributions to growth Myelination of the frontal cortex Length and branching of neural connections Synaptic pruning

Brain Development Visualizing, planning and controlling actions Variability in development of different brain areas may contribute to unevenness of early childhood cognition Some areas are not connected yet Myelination of frontal cortex and hippocampus Visualizing, planning and controlling actions Scale errors Experience dependent

Preoperational Development The preoperational stage From Piaget’s theory Cannot perform mental operations Mental operations: The mental process of combining, separating, or transforming information logically.

Centration The tendency to focus on only one feature of an object to the exclusion of all others. According to Piaget, the greatest limitation of young children’s thinking E.g., red ball with stripes Gives rise to 3 common errors: Egocentrism Confusion of appearance and reality Precausal reasoning

Egocentrism Egocentrism: The tendency to be captive to one’s own perspective and unable to take that of another tendency to ¨center¨ class inclusion tasks lack of spatial perspective taking egocentric speech lack of “theory of mind”

Egocentrism Children cannot grasp the concept of conservation. Understanding that physical properties of objects can remain the same even when their form changes.

Conservation

Conservation Conservation of Substance Conservation of Number 2 identical balls of clay One is deformed “Do the two pieces have the same amount of clay?” Conservation of Number 2 identical rows of coins One row is rearranged “Do the two rows have the same number of coins?”

Class Inclusion Tasks 8 beads: 5 black, 3 white Are there more black beads or white beads? Black... Are there more black beads or beads?

Spatial Perspective Taking Allowed to view diorama (3 mountain experiment) from all sides Seated on one side; doll on opposite side Asked to identify how things would look to doll Almost always chose view corresponding to their own point of view

Spatial Perspective Taking Critics: Performance is affected by task demands. Familiar and easily differentiated objects

Children were presented with a more familiar scene than the 3 mountains-- a farm scene that has a building, a lake with a boat in it, and a horse and a cow were asked to describe how Grover’s view of the scene looked like as he drove around the farm When the objects are easily differentiable, young prechool children can display non-egocentric spatial taking 14

Speech Egocentrism Piaget emphasizes the egocentric nature of preschoolers’s speech (collective monologues) where no actual communication takes place children separated by a screen from peers were asked to describe the blocks on their side of the screen to the listener so that s/he can manipulate the blocks similarly

Confusing Appearance and Reality Young children may often confuse appearance and reality Cat-Dog task: De Vries showed children a picture of a cat wearing a dog mask. Front half was behind the screen when the mask was put. most of the 3-year-olds believed that the cat had become a dog.

Appearance-reality tasks Flavell’s Sponge-Rock task: showed a sponge which looked like a rock

Appearance-reality tasks Flavell’s Sponge-Rock task Once children discover that the rock is really a sponge by touching it, they insist that it not only feels like a sponge but also looks like a sponge. The ability to understand that appearance and reality might be different

Growth of the ability to understand (a) a masked cat remains a cat (b) a sponge is not a rock, though it looks like one 19 Age (years)

Confusing Appearance and Reality Task demands When measures include familiar and meaningful tasks for young children, they are more likely to show what they know 20

Precausal Reasoning The tendency to reason from one particular to another, rather than engaging in cause-and-effect reasoning

Neo-Piagetian work Preschool children have more advanced reasoning capabilities than Piaget’s methods give them credit for. a range of studies that showed how preschool children are not so limited in their ability to decenter

Theory of Mind Ability to represent others’ mental states such as thoughts, beliefs, and desires. Age 2: child is able to distinguish between own and other’s desires. E.g., chocolate cake (self) vs. orange cake (story character) Age 4-4.5: child has a mature understanding of the mind 23

Theory of Mind Ability to represent others’ mental states or “mind reading” There is a single reality and people may have different representations Understanding false belief Understanding deception Understanding appearance-reality 24

Unexpected Change Paradigm 25

Unexpected Contents Task Show Smarties box: “What’s inside this box?” (control question) Following the answer, open the box, show there is a pencil in it. Put the pencil back inside the box, close it. 26

Unexpected Contents Task “X has not seen inside this box. Now I’m going to invite her into the room and show her the box all closed up like this, in the same way I showed you. Then, I’ll ask what’s inside the box. What will X think is in the box?” 27

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Early understanding of others’ mental states Chandler created a treasure hunt game, where a treasure was hidden in a container by a doll who left a trail of footprints to the treasure the child was asked to make it difficult for people to find the treasure deception is a process of instilling a false belief in the other early use of deception indicates that they can reason about other people’s beliefs

Universality of ToM and Language 2-6-years-old Baka children, who lived in the rain forests of southeast Cameroon. Similar to findings reported for Western children, false belief understanding of Baka children displayed a significant development between 3 and 5 years of age. This was the first study carried out with children growing up in a preliterate society with a hunter-gatherer life-style and with no school experience. 31

Vinden (1996): cultures (Junin Quechua) without explicit mentalistic vocabulary Junin Quechua children had an earlier understanding of appearance-reality distinction than of false belief. While the understanding of the appearance-reality distinction improved with age, even children over 6 years of age performed poorly in tasks of false belief. In Western children, understanding false belief and appearance-reality distinctions tends to display parallelism in development and both abilities increase significantly from 3 to 5 years of age. 32

Universality of ToM and Language Vinden and Astington (1998): language and ToM are two interconnected abilities language and aspects of the context where language is learned must be taken into account in developmental studies. 33

Language and ToM Development of ToM and language English-speaking children use desire words more than cognitive words There may be some variations in rates of development and degree of conceptual elaboration across cultures due to language, but children acquire an understanding of representation independent of cultural differences.

Carlson & Moses (2001): 4-year-olds tend to outperform 3-year-olds on ToM tasks. As is clear from the table, there was a significant age difference for each of the ToM tasks (false belief: p < .001, appearance-reality: p < .05.) Theory of Mind Tasks 3-Year-Olds (n=62) 4-Year-Olds (n=45) Overall Average (n= 107) Age Differences (Pearson chi- square) False Belief 10% 49% 26% 20.8*** Appearance-Reality 47% 69% 56% 5.2* Table. Percentage of Children Who Passed Theory-of-Mind Items as a Function of Age. 35 35

Language and ToM Autism : is a "spectrum disorder." The spectrum includes several distinct diagnoses, as well as a whole range of different symptoms. Most cases of autism are diagnosed in children ages 2 to 4. It's during these early years that typical children develop critical social and language skills -- often delayed in children with autism. Child with autism is a late talker, prefers solo play, or tends to play in the same way over and over again. One person with autism may be very verbal, bright and engaged, while another is non-verbal, intellectually challenged and almost entirely self-absorbed.

Neo-Piagetian Theories The problem of uneven levels of performace Acquisition of knowledge passes through stages, but it occurs at different rates in different domains The information processing account is one of these alternative explanations…

Information-Processing Approaches to Cognitive Development The working of the mind as analogous to the computer Computer analogy Hardware (e.g., myelination of a particular brain region), Software (e.g., acquisition of a new strategy for remembering) 38 38

Information-Processing Theories Limitations in knowledge, memory, attention, speed of processing info

Information-Processing Young children’s cognitive difficulties caused by limitations of general cognitive factors: Knowledge Memory Attention control Processing speed Strategies for acquiring and using information 40

Information-Processing Theories Young children’s cognitive difficulties are caused by limitations on their ability to process information. such as distractibility, incomplete examination of stimuli, inability to hold several items in mind at once when tasks are arranged to reduce the load on children’s information-processing systems, their cognitive performance is enhanced Unevenness in performance diminishes because the cognitive limitations are gradually reduced through maturation.

Children display greater competence when they have deep experience in a given domain. Experience results in a rich knowledge base, which leads in turn to easier recall and more powerful ability to reason. 42 42