1. Development

2. Three Minute Review NONVERBAL COMMUNICATION facial expressions
fake vs. zygomatic smiles
eye contact
conveys dominance, confidence, attraction
body language
gestures
why do people gesture on the phone?
interactional synchrony
intonation
deception

3. children’s overgeneralization language acquisition critical periods
LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT
Skinner vs. Chomsky
operant conditioning vs. language instinct
children’s overgeneralization
grammatical errors and “Wug test”
language acquisition
critical periods
~6 months for learning phonemes
~6 years for learning grammar

4. Test Yourself
A child who uses the word “wawa” to refer not only to water but to milk, juice and other drinks is:
overextending the word
underextending the word
demonstrating conditioning of the word “wawa” with any liquid
babbling
autistic

5. Development Physical Development Cognitive Development
Social Development

6. Brain Development

7. Brain Development
during pregnancy, the brain can be highly susceptible to teratogens
radiation, drugs, viruses, toxins
explanation for morning sickness?
fetal alcohol syndrome
cluster of defects occurring in infants born to mothers that drink heavily during pregnancy
leading cause of mental retardation
even moderate drinking (e.g., three beers a day) may lead to children with a lower IQ and shorter attention span

8. Neural Development Grow, then prune Neural Darwinism
make too many neurons, then prune the ones you’re not using
“use it or lose it”
there are 30-60% more neurons in the fetus than in the adult brain

9. Myelinization basic sensory and motor areas become myelinated early
association areas become myelinated later

10. Cognitive Development
The infant’s world is a “blooming, buzzing confusion”
-- William James
How can you study perception and cognition in a non-verbal being (preverbal child, animal)?
Visual tracking
Preferential looking
Eye movement monitoring
Habituation
Sucking

11. Visual Tracking newborns will track facelike stimuli
innate preference for faces?

12. Orienting and Habituation
Orienting reflex
humans, including infants, pay more attention to novel than familiar stimuli
Habituation
infants get bored with repeated presentations of the same thing
Habituation paradigm
repeat the same stimulus over and over again, then change it slightly
does infant spend more time looking at new stimulus?

13. Preferential Looking present two stimuli on either side of centre
watch where infants look
in the best studies, the mom and experimenter are blind to the stimuli
spontaneous looking preferences
e.g., infants prefer high contrast
habituation
familiarize infant with one stimulus, then present it in combination with a new stimulus
infant looks more at new stimulus  infant could tell the difference
infant looks equally at old and new stimuli  infant couldn’t tell the difference

14. What have we learned?
Although newborns can see faces, faces must appear very blurry to them

15. Eye Movements newborns look at outside features of faces
older infants, like adults, spend much time looking at eyes and mouth

16. Behavior
Visual Cliff
Will the baby crawl over the glass to get to mom?
mobile infants won’t
pre-mobile infants did not appear bothered when placed on the glass

17. Sucking Response
newborns suck more when they hear their native language
newborns suck more when they hear their mom’s voice

18. Critical Periods (See Gray, pp. 135) Imprinting
Konrad Lorenz
Imprinting
baby ducks and goslings will follow on the first individual they encounter, even if it’s a human rather than the mother
imprinting must happen within five days after hatching
Critical period: A period in development during which some event has a long-lasting influence on the brain and behavior that it would not have if it occurred outside that period

19. Does Development Occur Continuously or in Stages?

20. Jean Piaget
Piaget, a Swiss psychologist, believed that “children are active thinkers, constantly trying to construct more advanced understandings of the world”
These “understandings” are in the form of structures he called schemes
Jean Piaget

21. Assimilation and Accomodation
Schemes are frameworks that develop to help organize knowledge
Assimilation - process of taking new information or a new experience and fitting it into an already existing scheme
Accommodation - process by which existing schemes are changed or new schemes are created in order to fit new information

22. Piaget’s Approach
Primary method was to ask children to solve problems and to question them about the reasoning behind their solutions
Discovered that children think in radically different ways than adults
Proposed that development occurs as a series of ‘stages’ differing in how the world is understood

23. Sensorimotor Stage birth - 2 years
Information is gained through the senses and motor actions (looking, touching, mouthing)
In this stage child perceives and manipulates but does not reason
Infant gradually becomes aware of relationship between own actions and their effects on environment
Object permanence is acquired

24. Sensorimotor Development

25. Object Permanence
mos.: Infant begins to understand that objects exist even when not in view

26. Preoperational Stage 2 - 7 years
Represents things with words and images but lacks logical reasoning
Can think symbolically (e.g., pretending a stick is a gun)
Thinking is egocentric: has difficulty taking the viewpoint of others
Fails to understand conservation
What does the doll see?

27. Conservation of Number
Is there the same number in each row?

28. Conservation of Length
Which stick is longer?

29. Conservation of Volume
Which container has the most volume

30. Conservation of Mass
Which is bigger?

31. Concrete Operational Stage 7-12 years
Can think logically about objects and events
Can see other’s perspective
Achieves conservation of number (~age 6), mass (~age 7) and weight (~age 9)

32. Formal Operational Stage 11 years and up
Can think logically about abstract propositions and test hypotheses systematically
Can understand hypothetical propositions
e.g., If all animals can fly and if rhinoceroses are animals, then all rhinoceroses can fly.
Becomes concerned with the the future and ideological problems
Not achieved by all adults

33. Critiques of Piagetian Theory
Underestimates children’s abilities
Overestimates age differences in thinking
Vagueness about the process of change
Underestimates the role of the social environment
tests were done on Western European kids
Vygotsky argued culture and social interaction were critical to development
Lack of evidence for qualitatively different stages
Not well integrated with neuroscience

34. Contradictory Experiments
In preferential looking experiments, 4 month old infants who did not demonstrate object permanence nonetheless looked longer at an unexpected occlusion event
Preoperational children chose the column with more M&Ms

35. Information Processing Perspective
Focuses on the mind as a system, analogous to a computer, for analyzing information from the environment
Developmental improvements reflect
increased capacity of working memory
faster speed of processing
new algorithms (methods)
more stored knowledge