Social Dev. Theories Exercise• Name all psychological/behavioral gender differences

you can.• Name all gender stereotypes you can.• How would each of the following types of theorists

explain such gender differences:– Behaviorist learning theorists?– Social Learning theorists?– Social Cognition theorists?– Bioecological theorists (how would each of the 5 systems

influence gender)?– Evolutionary theorists?

Gender Development

Gender Differences Across Dev.

• Toy preferences as early as 1 year– Not only preference for gender typical toys but neutral toys if

believed gender appropriate

• Play Style– Rough and tumble play– Large vs small groups– Competition (50% males, 1% females)– Pretend play (heroes vs. families)– Aggression (physical vs. verbal/relational)

• Communication– Shared emotion vs. shared activities/interests– Problem solving: Compromises vs. physical force

Gender and Learning Theories

Behaviorist Learning theories:• Reinforced: Encouragement, rewards, punishments, peer pressure

Social Learning theories:• Children learn about gender through observations: (parents, peers, media) and direct teaching

• Observing their own gender more

Direct Teaching:•PARENTS DO:

reward gender appropriate behaviorBuy gender appropriate toys

(could be result of child’s pre-established prefs) are supportive of sex-appropriate playTalk differently to children (e.g. emotions)

•PARENTS DON’T:Display a difference in warmthDiffer in interactions or responsivenessOverall not more restrictive in activities

•By 1-1.5 years already differ in terms of toy pref.•Before birth differ in activity level

Gender and Social Cognitive Theories

•Look at the development of gender-role knowledge

•Kohlberg’s Cognitive Developmental TheoryChildren actively construct knowledge of gender:

3 Stages of Gender DevelopmentGender Identity (2 years; knowing who you are)Gender Stability (3-4 year; knowing gender is stable

over time)Gender Constancy (5-7 years; stable over time AND

situations—not influenced by superficial changes)

Gender Schema Theory

• Children develop gender schemas, which are mental representations incorporating everything they know about gender

•Gender self-socialization•the child determines what other info they learn about gender

E.g. initial prefs for trucks leads them to learn more about trucks and little about dolls

• Schemas lead to a confirmation bias (remember info that “fits/confirms”schema and distort or forget other info)

[think back to Dodge’s info processing, how we encode and interpret info]

4. Gender and Ecological Models

•Bioecological ModelChildren learn and are influenced by gender at every level

e.g. room they live, occupations/genders of neighbors, media, belief systems of the culture, time period etc.

Gender and Evolutionary Models

•Evolutionary PsychologyGender behaviors are genetically based to influence survival and mating

E.g. physical activity, aggression in males due to “hunter” characteristics, need to compete for matesE.g. nurturance and emotional characteristics in females, playing with dolls is the ‘caregiver’ in females

Parental investment theory (differences in relationships/behavior due to different investment needs of males vs. females in passing on genes)

Biological Explanations• Female rats and rhesus macaques treated with

testosterone = increased male-typical sexual behavior, rough and tumble play, activity level, aggression

• Critical periods (different for different sex-typed behavior)– ~8 weeks gestation – 6 months of age

Biological Explanations

• CAH Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia– a group of inherited disorders– deficiency in steroid hormones (cortisol and

aldosterone) which leads to overproduction of androgen (male sex hormone)

– Rare: 1 in 2-20,000 births– Females: ambiguous genitalia, “masculine”

physical traits– Males: enter puberty much earlier

Biological Explanations

• CAH girls/CAH induced (androgens in pregnancy)– More time with “male” toys

– Greater preference for male playmates

– Reduced gender identity/Less satisfaction with gender

– when androgen reduced during pregnancy females = more feminine clothing

– Mixed results on aggression/rough-&-tumble play

Gender: Integrating the Theories

Maccoby’s theory combines evolutionary and biological data with ideas of gender schema (cognitions) and social models

Biology leads to differences in play styles

Observation + direct teaching + Peer Pressure

Self-socialization, gender segregation by compatibility

–Video on CAH and Gender Development!

Conceptual DevelopmentWhen, Where, Why, and How Many?

Concepts are general ideas or understandings that can be used to group together similar

– Objects

– Events

– Properties etc.

Concepts help us simplify the world and think more efficiently.

e.g Boy Scout rule for being lost in the woods without food

e.g. possible origin of stereotypes?

Perceptual CategorizationGrouping according to similar appearances (size, color, movement..)

• children first categorize according to overall shape, then later by function

• 9-10 month olds expect similar looking objects to perform the same function (e.g. castanets study)• By age 2, children can categorize to determine which actions go with which objects (e.g. knowing if a cup is used to “feed” an animal it can be used to feed a another animal but not a vehicle.)

Using Concepts to make Inferences

Language Concepts

• Language could not be learned without concepts (how would we know how to generalize word meanings?)

• Language can serve to point out NEW concepts (e.g. Xu and Carey--individuation)

• Pragmatics of language can emphasize importance or add weight to concepts (e.g. “carrot-eaters” versus people who eat carrots)

Time: Order of eventsKnowing what happened first, next, and so on…

• 3-month-olds can detect the order of events in a repetitive sequence.

– Pictures are shown alternately at A and B.

– Over time, infants start to anticipate the new picture.

• By 12 months, they can detect the order after only a single exposure to the sequence.

(Baby)Mom

A B

Haith, Wentworth, & Canfield, 1993; Bauer, 1995

Time• 4-year-olds can report that an event (e.g. birthday) that

occurred a week ago was more recent than an event that happened 7 weeks ago (e.g. Christmas)

• If event happened more than 2 mths ago, they aren’t very accurate until age 9

• By age 5, children can accurately estimate durations up to about 30 seconds

• Even young infants possess mechanisms for measuring the duration of arbitrary intervals (e.g., the duration of a tone)

Duration discrimination

6-month-old infants discriminate between tones of differing lengths at a 1:2 ratio, but not a 2:3 ratio.

• Expt. 1 -- 2 vs. 4 sec

– Success

• Expt. 2 -- 3 vs. 4.5 sec

– Failure

• Expt. 3 -- .5 vs. 1 sec

– Success

• Expt. 4 -- .67 vs. 1 sec

– Failure

Wynn & vanMarle, 2003

Space

• Infants tend to use egocentric representations

• Can use allocentric system but early in development landmarks must be obvious and right next to object (~9mths)

• Concepts like “next to” or “in between” emerge ~11 mths

Spatial RepresentationSelf-locomotion is important for understanding spatial

relationsExamples: • Visual cliff studies (understanding of depth)• Gap studies• crawlers or infants using walkers remember objects’

locations better than non crawlers of same age. • toy hidden in 1 of 2 wells babies who crawled to the other

side did better than those carried. Driver vs. Passenger in a car analogy!

Hermer & Spelke, 1994, 1996

2-year-olds encoded geometric landmarks but not featural ones even though featural information is more informative. Even rats and adults seem to have a preference for geometric cues over featural cues.

A = ~ 41% B = ~ 7%

D = ~ 45%C = ~ 7%

Spatial Representation

Dead Reckoning and ‘Mental Maps’• The ability to keep track of one’s location relative to the starting point and return directly back to it.

• Rats, ants, and geese (and humans to some degree) can do it

• 2-year-olds show some dead reckoning abilities--if led on circuitous routes they can return to the starting point more often than chance (this typically increases over development somewhat)

Same/Mirror Image Tasks

Dead Reckoning and Other Spatial Skills

• Sociocultural factors influence these abilities(e.g. aboriginal desert dwellers over city-dweller, video gamers)

• Gender differences favoring males (e.g. waterline on cup task)

Mental Rotation & Water-Level Tests

Causality

Kotovsky & Baillargeon, 1994

• By 11 months, infants expect the size of an object to be related to the amount of force it can exert on another object.

OR

Habituation

Test

Causality (con’t)Causal Relations

• 2 1/2 year-olds select the appropriate tool for retrieving the toy more frequently than 1 1/2 year-olds.

Tool Use– structural properties are causally related to tool’s

function(Chen & Seigler, 2000)

Figure 7.8, from text

Cause–effect relations

Hearing that wugs are well prepared to fight and gillies to flee helped preschoolers categorize novel pictures like these as wugs or gillies (Krascum & Andrews, 1998). In general, understanding cause–effect relations helps people of all ages learn and remember.

It’s easier to remember concepts and order of events if they are causally connected

Causality (con’t)Causal Relations

Magic tricks - searching for causes

– Most 3- and 4-year-olds do not understand the point of magic tricks. By age 5 fascinated by magic tricks because causal mechanism is hidden. (Rosengren & Hickling,

1994)

– 4- and 5-year-olds, but not 3-year-olds, will actively search for the cause of an apparent magic trick.

• The “Why” stage begins…

Number is...

• not a directly perceivable property of any individual object.

• an abstract concept that applies to sets of items.

• Numerical equality: realization that all sets of a certain number of objects have something in common is the most basic numerical understanding.

Numerical Discrimination• 5-month-old infants can discriminate between

pictures containing 1, 2, or 3 items.– They fail to discriminate larger sets in this way unless the difference

between the sets is large enough.

Habituation

… and so on

Test

Starkey, Spelke, & Gelman, 1990; Van Loosbroek & Smitsman, 1990)

or

or

or

… and so on

or

Two core systems of number

• Core System 1– Object tracking: up to 3 or 4 objects

• Core System 2– Approximate representations of large

numerosities

Infants’ Arithmetic

• infants of 5 months seems to have a basic understanding of arithmetic.

Large number discrimination

• 6-month-old infants discriminate:– 4 vs. 8, 8 vs. 16, 16 vs. 32– BUT NOT: 8 vs. 12, 16 vs. 24

• For larger sets (more than 4 items):

– Infants can discriminate values

that differ by a 1:2 ratio, but

not a 2:3 ratio.(Xu, in press; Xu & Spelke, 2000; Xu, Spelke, & Goddard, 2000)

Habituation Habituation

Test Test

Habituation Habituation

Test Test

. ...... ...... .

..

... . ....

..... .... ..... ..

..... ......

....

....... .

.........

... ...........

..

. ... .. ........ .

.

.. ..... .... .

... ..

..........

.. ... . .... .. . . .....

.....

.. ... . .... .. . .

+ = or

Number vs. Continuous Extent

• Pitting number against continuous extent by manipulating the size of the objects in the outcomes.

wrong # right #

right amount wrong amount

(Feigenson, Carey, & Spelke, 2002)

Counting• Some facts…

– Most children can count to 10 by age 3

– Most 5-year-olds can count to 100

– Most children do not understand relative magnitudes (i.e., ordinality) of the different numbers between 1 and 10 until age 5.

e.g. that 6 apples is more than 4 apples.

– Most children do not understand cardinality until age 5.e.g. Give-a-number task

• 2-year-olds:1 (and more than 1)

• 2 and a half-year-olds: 1, 2, (and more than 2)

• 3-year-olds: 1, 2, 3, (and more than 3)

• 3.5- to 4-year-olds: all numbers

Gelman and Gallistel’s (1978) 5 Counting Principles

• One-to-one correspondence- each object receives a single number label

• Stable order- number list is always said in same order

• Cardinality- total number corresponds to last number word said

• Order irrelevance- objects can be counted in any order

• Abstraction- any set of individuals can be counted