CHAPTER 1

 NATURE VERSUS NURTURE ◦ Nature: idealists, rationalists  Knowledge is inborn ◦ Nurture: empiricists  The mind is a blank slate – tabula rasa ◦ Behaviourism  Behaviour changes are caused by environmental factors

 STAGES & SEQUENCES ◦ Continuity-discontinuity issue  Quantitative – continuous in nature  ie. number of friends increase from zero to many  Qualitative – discontinuous  ie. the quality of friendships increases

 INTERNAL & EXTERNAL INFLUENCES ON DEVELOPMENT ◦ Maturation: genetically programmed sequential patterns of change  Universal – appearing in all children across cultures  Sequential – a pattern of unfolding skill or characteristics  Impervious – relatively to environmental influence ◦ However, maturational theorists agree that experience plays a role

◦ The Timing of Experience:  Critical period – any time period during development when an organism is especially responsive to and learns from a specific type of stimulation  The same stimulation at other points has little or no effect  ie. a duck at around 15 hours after hatching  Sensitive period – a period during which particular experiences can best contribute to proper development.  Similar to the critical period, but deprivation effects during this period are not as severe

◦ Inborn Biases and Constraints  Pre-existing conceptions and contraints on understanding of behaviour  ie. very young babies knowing that unsupported objects will move downwards; moving objects will continue to move in the same direction ◦ Behaviour Genetics  Heredity affects a broad range of behaviour  Seen through studies of identical and fraternal twins ◦ Gene-Environment Interaction  Child inherits genes, parents create environment  Inherited qualities affect behaviour, affecting reactions

◦ Internal Models of Experience  Creating by the child -- A set of core ideas or assumptions about the world, about himself and about relationships with others through which all subsequent experience is filtered ◦ Aslin’s Model of Environmental Influence  Maturation – no environmental effect  Maintenance – some environmental input is necessary to sustain a skill or behaviour that has already developed maturationally  Facilitation – a skill or behaviour develops earlier because of experience  Attunement – when a particular experience leads to permanent gain or enduring high level of performance  Induction – a pure environmental effect – a behaviour does not develop at all in the absence of experience

 THE ECOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE ◦ The importance of context in which child develops ◦ Emphasizes that each child grows up in a complex social environment  Culture – system of meanings, customs, values, attitudes, beliefs, morals  Individualism vs. collectivism  Individualism: individual persons whose achievement and responsibility is individual (Europe, North America)  Collectivism: emphasis is on the collective (the whole), group solidarity, shared duties and obligations, group decision making (Asia, Africa, South America)

 VULNERABILITY AND RESILIENCE ◦ Long-term study of children  Only 2/3 of children in poverty turned out to have serious problems  The other third – resilient – turned out competent, confident, caring  Similar environment  different outcomes ◦ Vulnerabilities – every child born with them  Temperment, abnormality, allergy, genetic tendency ◦ Protective factors – every child born with them also  Intelligence, coordination, smile, ◦ Vulnerabilities and Protetive Factors interact with the environment  produce results

 PSYCHOANALYTIC ◦ Behaviour is governed by conscious and unconsious processes ◦ Freud: argued that libido (sexual drive) is the motive force behind virtually all human behaviour  Personality has a structure, which develops over time  The id (source of libido), ego (the “executive”, more conscious element), superego (centre of conscience and morality)  Infant/todder is al Id, ego develops 2-5, superego begins to develop just before school age  Psychosexual stages: oral, anal, phallic, genital

◦ Erikson: proposed psychosocial stages  Influenced more by common cultural demands for children of a particular age  ie. toilet training at age 2, school skills by 6 or 7  Each child moves fixed sequence of tasks ◦ Both theorists believe though that meeting the stages depend on interactions with people and objects in the world. ◦ When a stage is not completed, it carries forward affecting ability to handle future tasks or stages

 COGNITIVE-DEVELOPMENTAL AND INFORMATION-PROCESSING THEORIES ◦ Emphasize primarily cognitive development rather than personality ◦ Piaget: the central figure  All children seem to go through same discoveries, same mistakes, same solutions  The environment does not shape the child – the child actively seeks to understand his environment  Sub-processes: assimilation, accommodation, equilibration

◦ Vygotsky  Complex forms of thinkking have their origins in social interactions  Learning is guided by an adult who models or structures the learning experience – scaffolding  New learning is best achieved in the zone of proximal development – too hard to do alone but can manage with guidance ◦ Information-Processing Theory  Use the computer as a model of human thinking  “encoding” – organizing info to be stored in memory  “storage” – “retrieval” –  Sensory memory – short-term memory – long-term memory

 LEARNING THEORIES ◦ Emphasis on the way environment shapes the child ◦ Classical Conditioning  ie. Pavlov – acquisition of new signals for existing responses (salivating dog)  Learning occurs when new stimulus is introduced  Other stimuli that are present around the same time as the unconditional stimulus will trigger the same responses  Become “conditional stimuli”

◦ Operant Conditioning  The process by which the frequency of a behaviour increases or decreases because of the consequences the behaviour produces  Reinforced vs. Punished  Positive reinforcement:  An added stimulus or consequence increases behaviour  Negative reinforcement:  Increases a behaviour because the reinforcement involves the termination or removal of unpleasant stimulus  Punishment:  Weakens behaviour (ie. grounding, taking away privileges)

◦ Bandura’s Social Cognitive Theory  Learning may also occur merely as a result of watching someone else perform an action (observational, modeling  Intrinsic (internal) reinforcements:  ie. pride, a child feels when figuring out how to raw a star  Satisfaction you experience after exercise  Through modeling, a child acquires attitudes, values, ways of solving problems, self-evaluation standards

 COMPARING THEORIES ◦ Assumptions about Development  Is the Theory active or passive?  Is Nature or Nurture more important?  Is development Stable or Changing? ◦ Usefulness  Can the theory generate predictions that can be measured or tested?  Heuristic value: does the theory stimulate thinking and research?  What kind of practical value does a theory have?

◦ Eclecticism: the use of multiple theoretical perspectives to explain and study human development