Developmental Psychology

Study of changes/continuities in an organism from conception to death

TRUE - Mother’s voice is most salient external stim that reaches the fetus (speech is low-pass filtered - focused on broader patterns and not finer details) - Amniotic fluid flavored by what mother has eaten Evidence - Newborns prefer mother’s voice + over other woman - Newborns prefer mother’s native language over other language - Acoustics of a newborn’s cry exhiit distinctive characteristics of the mother’s native language - Young infants recognize stories and music they were exposed to while still in the womb - Carrot juice amniotic fluid study – babies whose mothers drank carrot juice showed more preference for it

1) infants will attend/orient to stim they find interesting 2) Familiarization: infants prefer to hear/see stim they’ve been exposed to before 3) Habituation: if the infant has been repeatedly exposed to a stim to the point of boredom, they’ll prefer the novel stim

• DV is the infant’s sucking response/strength of sucks (strong = high amp) • Primarily used w auditory stim

• Invented by Fantz 1961 • Infants will look longer at stim they find interesting compared to uninteresting stim • newborns show preference for faces – esp faces of their own race (due to exposure/familiarity, NOT RACISM)

• Dev of sight • Can see 8-12in away, but after that their vision is worse than ours • Newborns esp attentive to faces/things that look like faces

• Dev of ability to execute movements (reaching, grasping, crawling, walking) • Born w small set of motor reflexes (rooting reflex, sucking reflex)

Def: Motor responses triggered by specific patterns of sensory stim Rooting reflex: infants move their mouths towards any object that touches their cheek Sucking reflex: infants suck any object that enters their mouth Motor reflexes disappear as infants learn more sophisticated motor behavior

Allows newborns to suckle

Cephalocaudal/”top-to-bottom” principle: tendency for motor skills to emerge in sequence from head to feet (e.g. head –> arms –> legs) Proximodistal principle: tendency for motor skills to emerge in sequence from center to periphery (e.g. trunk –> elbow –> hands)

Infants treat mini objects as if regular sized (e.g. trying to sit in small model train)

The development of thinking and understanding across a lifespan

• Considered father of modern developmental psychology • Created Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development; widely accepted bc it explained, not just described, development

• Children are like “little scientists” – naturally curious • Play active role in acquiring knowledge

Organized unit of knowledge the child uses to try to understand a situation

Apply existing schema to a new experience or object

Involves changing or creating new schemas in response to new info or experiences

• Theory doesn’t account much the role of other ppl in child’s world (e.g. siblings, parents, friends) • May have underestimated children’s abilities - age of acquisition for certain things may be earlier • Undervalues influence of sociocultural environment

1) Sensorimotor 2) Preoperational 3) Concrete operational 4) Formal operational

• Birth-2 yrs • Infants experience the world by sensing it and moving in it • Progress from simple reflex actions to symbolic processing • Begin to construct schemas (e.g. things come closer if I pull them) • Develop object permanence • Will look longer at events that violate their expectations

Type of schema that states that something is still present even if you can’t see it

• Examined object permanence in infants • Found that it developed much earlier than Piaget thought – ~3.5 months

• 2-7 yrs old • Dev of prelim understanding of the world (“BEFORE the operations to do the problem-solving tasks”) • Can mentally represent objects and think symbolically (e.g. use words as symbols for things) • Don’t pass conservation tasks until 6-7 • Egocentric; Theory of Mind doesn’t dev until later in preoperational stage • Have difficulty bc of centration and lack of reversibility

Child’s tendency to focus on one aspect of a situation (e.g. their perspective) and ignore other aspects