 Please get out your textbook and turn to page 7

Board Work:  True or False?? Young children learn to stereotype by observing older children and adults.

The Life Span: Infancy & Childhood

Infancy and Childhood – Developmental Psychology – the study of changes that occur as an individual matures – Main Issues studied:  1. Continuity vs. stages of development  2. Stability vs. change  3. Nature vs. nurture (heredity vs. learned behavior) Physical, Perceptual, and Language Development

How Children Acquire Knowledge!  Nature vs. Nurture … are babies born with certain characteristics and instincts or do they gain them from their environment?  Nature: Babies automatically know to cry, or make any sort of noise when they need something  Nurture: Almost by accident the baby cries out, but when they get the attention they need, they learn to keep crying/making noise as a form of communication  By the time children are 2 years old they have a vocabulary of between 500 and 1,500 words!

Nature or nurture?

Newborns Capacities – See – Hear – Smell – Have feflexes – Suck – Turn their heads – Look at things – Cry – Smile – Show signs of surprise or fright – Grasping reflex – an infant’s clinging response to touch on the palm of his/her hand – Rooting reflex – an infant’s response in turning toward the source of touching that occurs anywhere around his/her mouth – All can be measured by scientists

SIDS  Infants have been known to quietly and mysteriously die in their sleep. Physicians call this “sudden infant death syndrome, “ or SIDS.  We do not know why this happens…one theory is a result from a failure in the infant’s central nervous system in learning how to turn a reflex into a voluntary action (infant has not learned how to keep passages open for breathing).  No way to predict SIDS.  One way to help prevent SIDS is to position the infant on their side or back to sleep instead of their stomachs.

Physical Development Infant transforms through maturation and learning – At birth: – How big were you as a baby?? 95% of babies are between 5.5 and 10lbs. » 18 & 22 inches long Maturation – the internally programmed growth of a child (no amount of coaching will push a child to walk or speak before physiologically ready – he/she will develop at its own rate of maturational readiness)

Normal Progression for Infant for Physical and Motor Development 3 months – lift head 4 months – smile 5-6 months – grasp objects 8-10 months – crawl and start to pull into standing position months – walk – Developmental psychologists try to identify similarities and differences between baby’s development

Perceptual Development Infants have mature perception skills – Their preference = human faces, patterned materials – Gibson & Walk, 1960 = visual cliff experiment – Young infants = unafraid Older infants (6 months +) = refused to cross cliff

The Development of Language Language and thought intertwined – Can animals use language? Chimpanzees – have ability to use simple language – Washoe (chimpanzee) – learned sign language. By 5 years old she used more than 160 signs. (video) – Panzee – used a special computer to communicate – To arrange symbols and words in certain order (grammar) is only highly developed in humans

How Children Acquire Language Some psychologists believe: – Language is reinforced behavior – There is a window of opportunity to acquire language Steps to acquire language – Learn to make signs (“more, all done”) – Learn meaning of signs – Learn grammar – rules for arranging language symbols to produce new meanings

1 st year – Early on: babbling, cooing – Later: babbling begins to sound like native language (the child could learn any language at this point in their development) 2 nd year – 1 st sounds become symbols; learn approx. 50 words – Later: 2 word phrases – Use telegraphic speech: kind of verbal utterances in which words are left out, but the meaning is usually clear. Examples: “Daddy fall down,” “Where my apple.” – Understand certain rules but sometimes applying grammatical rules too consistently (processing past tense as adding “ed” …. “I went there yesterday” versus “I goed there yesterday” From 18 months to 5 years – child adds 5-10 words a day

Cognitive and Emotional Development  Why can a 4 year old not comprehend what a 7 year old can?  Jean Piaget was a famous Swiss psychologist who dedicated his career to understanding the developmental stages in children and young adults. More specifically, he wanted to know: “How does knowledge grow”?  “The child no longer tends to approach the state of adulthood by receiving reason and the rules of right action ready-made, but by achieving them with his own effort and personal experience; in return society expects more of its new generations than mere imitation: it expects enrichment”

 Jean Piaget  1896 – 1980  Born: Switzerland  Question: How does knowledge grow?  He studied his own 3 children and thousands of other children!  He created the different levels of cognitive development!

 According to Piaget, there are “4” stages of cognitive development!  Stage One (0-2 years): Sensorimotor Stage. During this stage the infant uses schemas that primarily involve his/her body and sensations.  Stage Two (2-7 years): Preoperational Stage. During this stage, the child begins to use mental images or symbols to understand things. Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development!

 Stage Three (7-11 years): Concrete Operations. During this stage, children are able to use logical schemas but their understanding is limited to concrete objects or problems.  Stage Four (11-upward): Formal Operations Stage. During this stage, a person is able to solve abstract problems.  According to Piaget, a person’s development through these four stages depends on both the maturation of his or her nervous system and on the kinds of experiences that he or she has had.  Everyone goes through the stages in some order, but not necessarily at the same age.

 Schema: Conceptual framework a person uses to make sense of the world.  Assimilation: The process of fitting objects and experiences into one’s schemas.  Accommodation: The adjustment of one’s schemas to include newly observed events and experiences. How do we change what we know?

Wow that was confusing, so here’s a big example:  A child sees a zebra for the first time and calls it a horse. The child assimilates this information into her schema for a horse. When the child absorbs this new information, she takes into consideration the different properties of a zebra compared to a horse, perhaps calling a zebra a horse with stripes. When she eventually learns the name of zebra, she has accommodated this information and her schema for horses has grown.

 Assimilation and Accommodation work together to produce intellectual growth.  When events do not fit into existing schemas, new and grander schemas have to be created.  Therefore, a child begins to see and understand things in new ways! More…

 An infant’s understanding of things lies totally in the here and now.  The sight of a toy, the way it feels, and the sensation it produces in an infants mouth are all he/she knows.  He or she cannot and does not imagine it, picture it, think of it, or even remember it.  When an infants toy is hidden from them, they act as if it no longer exists. Object Permanence

 If you take an infants toy and hide it under a blanket while they are watching, they will look under the blanket for it.  However, if you then take the toy from under the blanket and hide it behind your back, the infant will continue to look under the blanket.  Piaget called this object permanence: A child’s realization that an object exists even when he or she cannot touch it.  “Things continue to exist even though they cannot be seen or touched” As they get older things change…

Object Permanence

 Representational Thought: The intellectual ability of a child to picture something in his or her mind.  Once this is achieved, a child’s intelligence is no longer based on actions only.  In other words, a child can now think of something, rather than having to see it first! Representational Thought

 The principle that a given quantity does not change when its appearance is changed.  What??  For example, you take two identical short wide jars filled with water.  Then you pour the contents of one of these jars into a tall, thin jar.  A child under 5 will say that the tall jar contains more water than the shorter jar. The Principle of Conservation

 If you pour the water back into the short jar to show the amount has not changed, the child will still say that there is more water in the taller container.  Children under 5 can’t think two dimensionally (height and width). This happens because children are egocentric.  Egocentric: a young child’s inability to understand another person’s perspective. Cont…

Emotional Development  As children develop their abilities to use their bodies, think and express themselves they are also developing emotionally. Children become attached to specific people and begin to care about what they think and feel.

 Experiments with baby birds and monkeys have shown if the infant is too young or too old, the attachment usually cannot be formed, but the attachment itself is a kind of learning. If the attachment is not made, or a different attachment is made, the infant will develop in a different way. Experiments with Animals

 Lorenz ( ) became a pioneer in the field of animal learning. He discovered that baby geese become attached to their mothers in a rapid, virtually permanent learning process called imprinting.  Imprinting: Inherited tendencies or responses that are displayed by newborn animals when they encounter new stimuli in their environment.  After a few hours the baby geese are out of their shells, and ready to start waddling after the first thing they see that moves…do you see a problem here? So what does this mean?

 Lorenz substituted himself or some moving objects like a green box being dragged along the ground, the goslings would follow that.  Goslings are especially sensitive just after birth, and whatever they learn during this critical period, about 13 to 16 hours after birth, makes a deep impression that resist change.

 Critical Period: A specific time in development when certain skills or abilities are most easily learned. What is a Critical Period?

The Importance of Mothers  Separation Anxiety: Occurs whenever a child is suddenly separated from his or her mother. If the separation persists, the child may develop psychological disorders.  Harry Harlow’s soft “monkey mom” experiment. (video)