Newborns Reflexes

• Rooting: – turning their head to suck for food.

• Sensory abilities: – Prefer human voices to non-human– human faces to test patterns.– Within days they prefer mom’s smell and

voice to non-mom’s.

Reflexes

• Startle: or jumping to loud or sudden noises.

• Diving: babies hold their breathe underwater.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFnFQZtNzx8

• Grasping: touch his palm, he’ll grab.• The may lose some of these as cognitive

abilities develop, allowing thought to replace reflex.

Review: (not necessary to copy down)

• Infantile Amnesia: due to incomplete neural connections, few explicit long-term memories are able to be formed. – However, implicit memories of motor skills,

images, sounds and language development are built.

– Not episodic memories.

• Remember: learning is development of neural connections and synaptic change.

Newborns

• At this stage the brain has a high degree of plasticity.

• If one brain part is damaged, another part will pick up its function.

• Plasticity decreases as we get older.

Motor Development

• Visual Cliff experiment: shows babies can see depth, about the same time they can crawl.

Cognitive Development: Jean Piaget

• Child psychologist who first promoted the idea that children are not little adults with less knowledge.

• Recognized that cognitive development occurs in sequences

• in the same order for all children, no matter where they are born.

Piaget: Important contributions• Schemas: frameworks (concepts) in

which the mind organizes and interprets information.

Assimilate: you add new examples into a schema: four legged animals with tail go into concept of dog.

Accommodation: means you subdivide or change your schema: this four legged, tailed thing is different than a dog, it’s a new concept: cow.

Piaget: Stages of Development Sensorimotor: 0-2

• Experience the world through their senses. Walking, putting stuff in their mouths.

• Lack object permanence up until 8 or 9 mths.

Sensorimotor stage• At about same time as object

permanence, stranger anxiety develops.

• Hint: Look for the test question that this occurs at the same time as object permanence kicks in.

Preoperational: 2 to 6

• Children use language, but lack logical and abstract reasoning. Do NOT think logically about the physical world. – Make believe feels real, they don’t wonder

how Santa visits all those houses in one night.

• Egocentricism develops and they are unable to understand what others are thinking.

Preoperational: cannot understand conservation

• Conservation: understanding that volume or mass stays the same even when shape changes:

Another example of egocentrism thru conservation

• Do you have a brother? Yes.• Does your brother have a brother? No.• 8+4= 12. • What does 12-8=. I don’t know.• Close your eyes. Can I see you? No• How many brothers and sisters do you have? 2.• How many children do your parents have? I

don’t know.

Egocentrism in adults in the digital age

• Examples?

Criticism of Piaget: Theory of minds begins to develop

• Theory of minds: the knowledge that others feel differently than you, that they have different motives and understandings.

• Only humans, chimps and elephants proven to develop this.

• Use “lipstick test” to prove.

Theory of minds

Scores

• Fall between 9-36 with higher scores indicating empathy and need to categorize.

• Females tend to empathize more than males.

• Autistic people tend to score low on empathy (theory of minds) and higher on categorization, although they also categorize differently than non-autistic people.

Autism

• Pervasive disorder of theory of minds– marked by inability to understand what others

think and feel– difficulty with social interactions,

communication deficits, repetitive behaviors, and cognitive deficits.

– Spectrum, not exact

Remnants of Egocentrism

• Once we can do something, difficult to understand how others can’t.

• We imagine others notice us more than they do, particularly adolescents.

• False consensus and overconfidence effect.

Concrete Operational: conservation and reversibility develop

• Conservation: the ability to understand that properties such a mass, volume and numbers remain the same even if they change in shape or form.

Concrete Operational

• Reversibility: relationships flow both ways. In terms of arithmetic operations and social relationships. Ask a 4 year old (preoperational)

• Remember math problem and sibling question from before?

Concrete operational: 7 to 11• Children can think logically

• they now question Santa, but cannot think abstractly yet, not understanding concepts that can not be seen or touched.

• The ideas of truth and justice are not considered, only rewards and punishments.

Different cognitive ways of looking at your dog.

Formal Operational: 12+

• Abstract and systematic reasoning developments.

• Ability for mature moral reasoning occurs: Does someone who steals bread for his starving children deserve to go to jail?

• They can solve for x (an unknown) and understand what that means.

• They can analyze poetry for symbolism of greater truths.

Piaget: Criticisms• The main argument with Piaget’s finding was

that some of the skills he identified occur at younger ages than he supposed. – He simply did not develop the sensitive enough

tests to find them.

• Also many feel the stages are continuous, not one stopping and another starting.

•However, the stages and skills he uncovered are widely accepted today.

Social Development: Attachment

• Babies naturally attach to parents/consistent others– more comfortable with what is often seen.

Mere-exposure effect.

• There may be a critical period for attachment: if it does not occur during a certain period they child will have problems attaching later on.

Attachment styles

• Mary Ainsworth: Strange situation test: mother leaves baby in room with strangers. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTsewNrHUHU

Ainsworth Cont’d

• Secure: cries for a minute, goes off and plays, runs back to mom when she returns.

• Insecure/ambivalent: baby cries uncontrollably, can’t be comforted, mother’s return doesn’t help.

Attachment

• Develops from interaction between baby and others. – Physical touching is essential for normal

growth and development.

• Responsive Parenting is the key to secure attachment.– Those with a secure base, feel more

comfortable exploring the world, know that there is a safe haven.

Imprinting

• Imprinting is what ducks do… not people

• Baby ducks will follow there first thing they see assuming it to be their mother.

Harlow’s Experiment• Showed monkeys would seek comfort and

warmth over food and…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrNBEhzjg8I

what lack of attachment could do.Monkeys can literally die from lack of love.

Attachment

• Certain inborn temperaments predispose children to attach easily.

• Temperaments tend to endure and babies help “create” the environment they live in.

Attachment

• life stages are centered around attachments followed by separation

• specific childhood attachment style/stages can affect:

• Birth • infant to adolescent to leaving home• marriage and parenthood• being a parent to kids leaving, marriage

to death of spouse.

Effects of Insecure attachment

• Most abusive parents were abused. But not most abused kids become abusers.

• Most criminals were abused, but most abused kids do not become criminals.

• Other symptoms: nightmares, depression, drug and alcohol abuse, binge eating, aggression.

• Difficulty attaching to others as adults, and may move from relationship to relationship.

Attachment Influences: Temperament

• Related to the degree of excitability/reactivity/ activity levels:

• Pleasant: easygoing, relaxed, quiet, placid, predictable.

• Difficult: irritable, intense, reactive, unpredictable.

Parenting types can affect self-concept

• Authoritarian: demands unquestioned obedience. Do as I say!! Tend to be unresponsive.

Parenting Types

Permissive: allow children to make own decisions without supervision. Submit to children’s whims, get them what they want.

Parenting types• Authoritative: both demanding and

responsive. Exert control by setting limits, but encouraging input from the child and negotiation of rules, particularly with older children. Encourages discussion and cooperation.

Parenting Types

Rejecting-neglecting: disengaged, vest little, give little.

Behavioral Outcomes correlated with Parenting style

• Authoritarian: lacks good decision-making, tend to be moody, low self-esteem. Will cooperate with the group.

• Permissive: lack self-discipline and confidence; trouble making decisions.

• Authoritative: self-reliant, friendly and self-confident. Higher self-esteem. Feel in control of their lives.

Parental style and behavioral outcome: Correlational, so...

• Not necessarily causation.

• Perhaps temperament creates parenting style or the combination of parental temperament and children’s temperament creates parenting style.

• Do your parents treat your siblings differently?

Parental Influence

• Children heavily influence attitudes toward faith, politics and other social attitudes. (excluding sex and drug use).

• Parents provide children with much of their non-family environment (neighborhood, schools, friends, etc.)

Criticism of Parental Influences

• Recent studies of questioned the affects of child rearing on human development: generally, within extremes, other environmental influences have more power than parents: (friends, personal experiences, teachers, etc.)

Gender Identity: Sense of being male or female.

• People develop concepts of how a boy or girl “should act”, gender-typing

• sense of being a boy/girl, gender-identity.

• Developed by observations and imitation (family/culture): social learning theory

• Gender schema theory: after learning concepts of male or female (schema) adjusting behavior/attitudes to match.

Child Care

• Quality, low teacher-student ratios, stimulating, day care seems to have a moderately positive effect and little negative effect on children or attachment to parents.

Divorce and Children

• 90% of Children of Intact families have problems that fall within “normal ranges.”

• 74% of Boys and 66% of Girls in divorced families fall into that range.

Causes of problems in Children of Divorce

• PARENTAL LOSS

• ECONOMIC LOSS

• MORE LIFE STRESS

• POOR PARENTAL ADJUSTMENT

• LACK OF PARENTAL COMPETENCE

• EXPOSURE TO INTERPARENTAL CONFLICT

Development and Culture

• Attitudes toward work, family, behavior and education vary based on culture.

• Culture changes from place to place and time to time.

Development and Culture

• Culture and cultural expectations also contribute to schematic development.

• Asian children encouraged to develop self-concepts related to group, Western children as independent people.