1. How do we study developmental change?
The visual cliff
Responses to looming
Habituation and Dishabituation methods
Preferential looking technique
Robert Fantz (1961)

2. Developmental Psychology:
…the study of how psychological processes change over time.
It focuses on the changes that occur in people’s abilities and behaviours as they grow older.

3. Newborns’ Visual Preferences5 10 15 20 25 30 35
Total fixation time (%)

4. How do we develop cognitively?
Stage-like vs continuous development
Piaget’s stage theory (1896–1980)
Criticisms of Piaget’s stage theory
Vygotsky’s theory of continuous development ( )

5. How do we develop cognitively?
stage-like
continuous development

6. Criteria for stage-like development:
1. Ordered periods
2. Qualitative changes
3. Rapid transitions
4. Completion of each stage before the next.

7. Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development
Approx.
Age range
Developmental
milestones
Stage
0 to 2 years
Sensorimotor
Object permanence
Stranger anxiety
2 to 7 years
Preoperational
Ability to pretend
Egocentrism
3-mountain task
Conservation

8. focusing on certain aspects loosing sight of others
Concretism:
inability to extract the “abstractness” of something
Irreversibility:
of thought and actions
Centration:
focusing on certain aspects loosing sight of others

9. Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development
(continued…)
Approx.
Age range
Stage
Developmental
milestones
Concrete operational
Mathematical transformations
7 to 11 years
Hypothetico-deductive reasoning
Scientific reasoning
Potential for mature moral reasoning
11 to adulthood
Formal
operational

10. Lev Vygotsky’s theory of continuous development
internalization
zone of proximal development (ZPD)
(a.k.a.: zone of potential development)
static-assessment environment
dynamic-assessment environment