Download developmental psychology - University of St Andrews

DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY
ON
LY
An Evolutionary Perspective
PS3033 / 2013-2014 /Semester 2
Dr Amanda Lucas - with Professor Andrew Whiten
GU
ID
AN
CE
Thursdays 9-11 and 2-5
Aims and Scope of the Course
FO
R
This course builds on what you learned earlier in the first year Developmental
Psychology course, but also links with Evolutionary Psychology taught in second
year. The aim is to develop an advanced understanding of several inter-related
aspects of the developing psychology and behaviour of children, and also of the
juveniles of other species, particularly non-human primates, in order to build an
evolutionary perspective on this subject. It deals with pretty fundamental
questions: how and why does our psychological development take the forms it
does?
2
ON
LY
A primary reason for adopting a strong evolutionary perspective is that
children and the ways they develop have been shaped by millions of years of
evolutionary selection pressures, so we can only understand why these phenomena
take the forms they do if we take an evolutionary approach. We can now call on
many discoveries to do this, and they come from a diversity of sources – studies
of contemporary children, of primates and other living species, and a variety of
fields extending to anthropology and even archaeology, where fossil teeth have
been used to infer the shape of childhood in our ancestral past.
A particular focus will be on social cognition, in part because there are many
reasons to think that taking “being social” to new extremes was a key theme
shaping the evolution of our minds, and in part because a plethora of fascinating
recent discoveries on this topic abound.
___________________________________________________________
FO
R
GU
ID
AN
CE
The course is based on 5 x 2-hour morning sessions mostly occupied by lectures,
plus afternoon seminars and discussions of the material covered.
Core reading is listed along with each lecture outline. As a rule of thumb, half
the marks for assessed work (essays, exams) will be based on the expectation you
have assimilated these core readings. Put another way, read these if you aspire to
a good degree! The expectation for Upper Second performance or better is that
the written work submitted for assessment will show evidence of reading into the
further material listed (see also the general criteria set out in the Honours
Handbook, online).
___________________________________________________________
Accessing Readings
Readings are listed in the University Library’s electronic archive systems, which
you can access through Moodle, or via ‘Reading Lists’ on the Library’s homepage.
You can click on the entries to directly access pdfs of journal articles because
the Library subscribes to the relevant journals. You can often get these pdfs via
Google Scholar or other sources as well.
Relevant books are on short loan in the South Street Library (entry in St
Mary’s Quad).
___________________________________________________________
Background Reading
You do not have to read the following but we offer these as overviews of
‘evolutionary developmental psychology’, ranked by our opinion of readability ………..
Flinn, M. V. & Ward, C. V. (2005). Ontogeny and evolution of the social child. In Ellis, B.
J. & Bjorklund, D. F. (eds). Origins of the Social Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and
Child Development. London: Guildford Press. As one might expect, there are several
relevant chapters in this book but this chapter is perhaps the most relevant.
Bjorklund, D. F. and Pellegrini, A. D. (2002). The Origins of Human Nature: Evolutionary
Developmental Psychology. Washington, DC: APA. Most useful overview is Chapter 2
(but the writing style is admittedly a bit on the dry side!).
3
_______________________________________________________
Lectures for Week 1
30th January 2014
ON
LY
COURSE OUTLINE
_______________________________________________________
AN
CE
The ancestry of childhood: hunter-gatherer niches
The fossil record for the past provides us with several key landmarks in our
behavioural ancestry, but it is of course limited in the detail is can provide.
Accordingly reconstruction of human psychological and behavioural evolution has
relied heavily on supplementing this record with inferences drawn from the
comparative study of present day sources. Two have been especially important in
doing this: non-human primates, because of our ancient primate ancestry; and
hunting and gathering peoples, because our more recent ancestors lived by
hunting and gathering for evolutionarily significant millennia, by comparison with
which the phase from agriculture on has been little more than a blip. We shall
exploit both sources of information in our efforts to make sense of why
childhood and the underlying processes of development are like they are.
This lecture focuses mainly on the hunter-gatherer model of ancestral
childhood, but we shall also begin to refer to research on developmental
phenomena in other primates where it’s appropriate.
GU
ID
Core Follow-up Readings
Hunter-gather lifestyle and human evolution
 Lee, R.D. (1979) The !Kung San. see Chapter 15, especially ‘Lessons of the
!Kung’.
 Whiten, A. & Erdal, D. (2012) The human socio-cognitive niche and its
evolutionary origins. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 367,
2119-2129.
 Konner, M. Hunter-gatherer infancy and childhood: The !Kung and others
(2005) in B. S. Hewlett & M. E. Lamb (Eds.) Hunter-Gatherer Childhoods.
London: Aldine Transaction.
FO
R
Afternoon Session (whole class)
(i) 2-4 p.m. approx. Critical viewing of ‘Human Ape’ (2007: Pioneer Productions),
segments amounting to about an hour, viewed with a mid-way interval, by whole
class. This programme shows a series of comparisons between the responses of
children and non-human primates (sometimes juveniles but not always) and will
form one basis of the continuous assessment written assignment (see below).
Therefore take notes of: - names of key scientists involved [see (ii) below];
- and key findings.
4
ON
LY
You should find you can review segments of the programme again later if you
wish, via YouTube.
Specific topics covered in the programme will be followed up in discussions of
related research papers in later weeks, for which you will be divided into small
working parties.
- During the video, note the work of Mike Tomasello and colleagues on helping
behaviour and altruism in children and chimpanzees - be ready to track down the
corresponding papers later in the afternoon, via Web of Science.
6th February 2014
ID
Lectures for Week 2
AN
CE
(ii) 3.30 p.m.approx. Focus Topic: Cooperation and altruism
- Use Web of Science (WoS) to track down a journal paper from the Tomasello
group for discussion the next week (Week 2), that was featured in the video
(thus, around 2006-7) and compares cooperation and helping in children and
chimpanzees. Before next week, read the paper, think about it and come to the
discussion session ready to contribute critically on the following questions: - What do you regard as the most important results?
- What are the authors’ conclusions, with respect to cognitive evolution?
- How well are these conclusions justified?
- What needs to be done to take this science further?
- How well did ‘Human Ape’ portray the studies of cooperation?
__________________________________________________________
FO
R
GU
The human ‘life history strategy’ in comparative perspective
Natural selection shapes not only the nature of childhood, but acts on the way
the whole lifetime is used, including such major elements as the optimal length of
adolescence and the preferred mode of mating (promiscuity, pair-bonding etc.).
In this lecture we examine several such factors, with the nature of development
at the core of our interest.
All mammals feed and care for their offspring, but weaning often marks the
end of major investment. By contrast, human parental support is extended far
beyond this point in development, and all along it takes many different forms.
Increased, elaborated and cooperative parental investment by both mothers and
fathers appears to be part of a larger ‘adaptive complex’ of features in the
developmental strategy our species evolved, the most basic of which is a long
childhood marked by special forms of social and non-social learning (so this
session links strongly with the next one on culture, as well as referring back to
the earlier material on cooperation). Once again, however, this special pattern did
not spring out of nowhere and the behaviour patterns of apes help us reconstruct
its evolutionary foundations.
5
ON
LY
Core Readings
Gould, S. J. (1977). Ever Since Darwin. Ch 7, ‘The child as man’s real father’,
Kaplan, H. et al. (2000). A theory of human life history evolution: diet,
intelligence and longevity. Evolutionary Anthropology 9, 156-185.
Further Reading
Bjorklund, D. F. and Pellegrini, A. D. (2002). The Origins of Human Nature:
Evolutionary Developmental Psychology. Washington, DC: APA. See pp. 4852, pp.87-91, for critical appraisal of neoteny and related matters.
Montagu, A. (1989). Growing Young. Granby, MA: Bergin and Garvey. Book length
treatment of the ontogeny issue.
ID
AN
CE
Afternoon session
Appraisal of article on ‘helping’ behaviour, identified in Week 1
Group ‘First’ – student surnames A-L; 2pm (to 3.30).
Group ‘Second’ – student surnames M-Z; 3.30 pm (to 5pm)
Part 1 – Discussion of ‘helping’ paper (see above, mid-page, for suggested
questions).
Part 2 – Use Web of Science (WoS) to identify another recent paper by
Tomasello and colleagues, on the topic of cumulative cultural evolution, a topic he
discussed in the ‘Human Ape’ programme, addressing both child and ape research
on the topic. This will be the focus for discussion in Week 3, addressing the same
core questions as listed on page 4 for discussion sessions.
___________________________________________________________
13th February 2014
FO
R
GU
Lectures for Week 3
Culture and its assimilation
Humans learn much of their behavioural repertoires from others: they learn
socially. And the totality of all that is acquired in this way by various members of
a society forms a sort of huge, complex life support system - a culture - which
each member is deeply dependent upon. The process whereby this is socially
transmitted (from generation to generation, for example) is sometimes called
cultural learning. More than in any other species, a human is what he or she is
because of the range and depth of cultural learning that has taken place. This
lecture analyses culture and cultural learning as adaptations, particularly as they
operate to support the hunting and gathering way of life.
We can also begin to make inferences about the evolutionary origins of this
special capacity through comparative studies. Similarities and differences in
chimpanzee and children’s social learning skills have been examined using
diffusion experiments with ‘artificial fruits’. The results of such studies seem
to reveal that chimpanzees can copy the behaviours of others with enough
fidelity to support the spread of behavioural traditions. They also show some
6
CE
ON
LY
important and intriguing differences between children and chimpanzees in socalled ‘rational’ imitation. Can such differences alone account for the ‘ratcheting’
quality that seems to define human culture? Some theorists think the answer is
no. In addition to our faithful ‘copying’ skills, social learning in humans is also
defined by particular forms of teaching, conformity and normativity, which may
be essential to the transmission of human-like culture. The development of such
capacities will be the subject of the next lecture.
Core Readings
Whiten, A. (2005). The second inheritance system of chimpanzees and humans.
Nature, 437, 52-55. [A concise introductory overview]
Whiten, A., McGuigan, N., Marshall-Pescini, S. & Hopper, L. M. (2009).
Emulation, imitation, overimitation and the scope of culture for child and
chimpanzee. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 364, 24172428.
Further Reading
Whiten, A. Horner, V. and Marshall-Pescini, S (2003). Cultural Panthropology.
Evolutionary Anthropology 12 (first part of double special issue on evolution
of culture), 92-105.
AN
Afternoon session
Discussion and appraisal of cumulative culture paper identified in Week 2
Group ‘First’ – students A-L; 2pm
Group ‘Second’ – students M-Z; 3.30 pm
See page 4 for the key questions.
FO
R
GU
ID
__________________________________________________________
20th February 2014
Lectures for Week 4
What is unique about human social understanding? How do these features
develop?
A puzzle from Lecture 3 was that whilst both humans and chimpanzees are
sophisticated social learners and innovators, only humans develop cumulative
culture. Why should this be so? Some researchers assert that human beings
have a unique capacity for ‘joint intentionality’. That is, the ability and motivation
to partake in collaborative activities with ‘shared goals’ and ‘socially coordinated
action plans’. Others, of course, argue that the beginnings of such a capacity is
also present in chimpanzees. Whichever viewpoint is correct, it is certainly true
that humans are exceptionally cooperative. This capacity may underpin human
forms of teaching, conformity and normativity, which (as outlined in lecture 3)
may operate to sustain cumulative culture.
This lecture will describe current theories of how joint intentionality develops
in human infants. A particular focus will be on an early manifestation of joint
intentionality – declarative pointing. The motivation to point out and share
aspects of the world with others does seem to be unique to human beings.
7
GU
ID
AN
CE
ON
LY
However, what does a 12-month-old infant understand when she does this? ‘Rich’
interpretations suggest that infants intend to influence the mental/intentional
states of others. ‘Lean’ interpretations, conversely, suggest that infants are
merely trying to bring about a behavioural response in others, without
understanding them as ‘minded’. Relational theoreticians, on the other hand,
suggest that infants’ understanding of others as intentional beings is embodied in
their direct experience of dyadic interaction. This embodied or ‘second person’
perspective bypasses the need to explain a precocious ability in infants to make
representational inferences about how self relates to other. This debate will
inform the last lecture, since understanding what it means to have a Theory of
Mind can also help us better define the nature of the developmental disorder
autism.
Core Reading
Tomasello, M., Carpenter, M., & Liszkowski, U. (2007). A new look at infant
pointing. Child Development, 78(3), 705-722
Further Reading
D'Entremont, B., & Seamans, E. (2007). Do infants need social cognition to act
socially? An alternative look at infant pointing. Child Development, 78(3),
723-728.
Reddy, V. (2010). How infants know minds. Chapter 5 – Early Conversations. OR
Reddy, V. (2003). On being the object of attention: implications for self–other
consciousness. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7(9), 397-402.
Racine, T. P., & Carpendale, J. I. (2007). The role of shared practice in joint
attention. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 25(1), 3-25.
Gergely, G., & Csibra, G. (2003). Teleological reasoning in infancy: The naıve
theory of rational action. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7(7), 287-292.
Tomasello, M., Carpenter, M., Call, J., Behne, T., & Moll, H. (2005).
Understanding and sharing intentions: The origins of cultural cognition.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 28(5), 675-690.
Background Reading
Carpendale, J., & Lewis, C. (2006). How children develop social understanding.
Blackwell Publishing. Chapter 4 – The development of social understanding in
infancy.
FO
R
Afternoon session
Group discussions with brief presentations
Group ‘First’ – students A-L; 2pm
Group ‘Second’ – students M-Z; 3.30 pm
The class will split into smaller groups. Each group will have read and in this
session discuss a short critique of Tomasello et al.’s theory of how ‘joint
intentionality’ develops in infants (as will be described in the lecture), as well as
Tomasello et al.’s reply to this critique. Each group will then feed back to the
rest of the class:
a) What is the critique’s main objection to Tomasello et al.’s theory?
8
ON
LY
b) How do Tomasello et al. respond to this objection?
c) What is your own opinion about which viewpoint best fits the evidence
(You may not all agree about this one, and so may gave a summary of the
views represented in your group)
__________________________________________________________
27th February 2014
Lectures for Week 5
1 - Theory of Mind – Guest lecture - Dr Emily Burdett
FO
R
GU
ID
AN
CE
2 - ‘Mindblindness’ in Autism
The ‘Theory of Mind Hypothesis’ of autism is pervasive and influential.
However, does it truly account for the social nature of the deficit? It is true
that young children with autism fail standard TOM tasks, but there is also
evidence that many go on to pass them when they are older. Some theorists
suggest that it is the motivation to share emotions in dyadic exchange (as
described in lecture 4) that is impoverished in autism, leading to a deficiency in
relating self to other, and thus in sharing and coordinating attention and goals.
In line with this idea, this lecture will present evidence that whilst individuals
with autism may develop an explicit, abstract ability to ‘reason’ about the mental
states of others, they may lack the ability to solve social problems ‘online’ within
the context of a naturally unfolding social interaction. This may suggest that it is
actually individuals with autism that develop a ‘Theory’ of Mind, whilst typical
development is also underpinned by an online, embodied understanding of self and
other that is rooted in the ‘shared’ quality of dyadic (followed by triadic)
interactions. Understanding the social deficit of autism in this way may better
illuminate how the disorder can impede the development of a capacity for cultural
learning.
Core Reading
Rajendran, G., & Mitchell, P. (2007). Cognitive theories of autism. Developmental
Review, 27(2), (You need only read pages 224-231 and 245-end)
Further Reading
Hobson, R. P. (2007). Communicative depth: Soundings from developmental
psychopathology. Infant Behavior and Development, 30(2), 267-277.
Klin, A., Jones, W., Schultz, R., & Volkmar, F. (2003). The enactive mind, or from
actions to cognition: lessons from autism. Philosophical Transactions of the
Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences, 358(1430), 345-360.
Whiten, A. (2013). Humans are not alone in computing how others see the world.
Animal Behaviour, 86, 213-221.
Background Reading
Carpendale, J., & Lewis, C. (2006). How children develop social understanding.
Blackwell Publishing. Chapter 3 – Understanding false beliefs.
Afternoon session
Review and discussion of essay writing
Group ‘Early’ – students A-L; 2 pm
Group ‘Late’ – students M-Z; 3.30 pm
ON
LY
9
Assessment
This module, like some others, is evaluated by 100% continuous assessment, with
no formal examinations. There will be two assessments, each requiring an essay
written according to the essay formatting rules in the Honours Handbook, except
for word limits, as follows. The time allowed for the second assessment is quite
constrained, but of course gives you very much more time to offer a considered
and informed answer than the alternative examination format.
AN
CE
Assessment 1 – A 1,000-word essay to be uploaded to MMS by 5 p.m. on Friday
14th February. Options are either: (a) The Nature of Hunter-gatherer Childhood. Using this essay title,
summarise and critically appraise the analysis of hunter-gatherer childhood
offered by Konner (readings, Week 1). What do you see as the implications of
this research for children growing up in the UK or other industrialised societies?
(b) Helping and Altrusim in Child and Ape. Using this essay title, summarise and
critically appraise the study discussed in class in Week 2, and one follow up study
by the same authors.
ID
Assessment 2 - A 1,000-word essay to be uploaded to MMS by 5 p.m. on
Wednesday 12th March. The two alternative questions/titles for this essay will be
emailed to all students at the end of the day on Wednesday 5th March. Should you
not receive this you will find the information on the Junior Honours noticeboard.
GU
Important Note on plagiarism and Turnitin
FO
R
Please note that all essay submissions are automatically checked for similarity to
other essays or published works using the software Turnitin. Cutting and pasting
of text from journals or internet resources (which Turnitin cleverly and
thoroughly picks out and highlights) is not allowed. Turnitin also shows up any
text duplicated between candidates’ submissions, including your own in different
years! Given the penalties for copying, including cutting and pasting, the lesson
is simple and clear:- Always write in your own words!