Download session seven – developmental psychology part one

PSYC 112
PSYCHOLOGY FOR EVERYDAY
LIVING
SESSION SEVEN – DEVELOPMENTAL
PSYCHOLOGY PART I
Lecturer: Dr. Paul Narh Doku, Dept of Psychology, UG
Contact Information: [email protected]
College of Education
School of Continuing and Distance Education
2014/2015 – 2016/2017
Session Overview
• This session introduces learners to the principles of learning
and behavior by surveying relevant theoretical and empirical
approaches within learning psychology. The following topics
will be reviewed: Meaning and scope of learning, classical
conditioning and its practical applications, operant
conditioning and its applications, observational learning and
its applications, cognitive learning and its applications,
transfer of learning and the factors that affect transfer of
learning. Understanding these learning theories and principles
is an integral part of psychology and other domains of human
behavior, such as marketing, sports, health, education and
relationships
Slide 2
Session Outline
The key topics to be covered in the session are as
follows:
• Topic One – Developmental Psychology
and fundamental Issues
• Topic Two – Research Designs used in
human development studies
• Topic Three – Prenatal Development and
Teratogens
• Topic Four – Cognitive Development
• Topic Five – Two Types of intelligence
Slide 3
Reading List
• Refer to students to relevant text/chapter or reading materials
you will make available on Sakai
Slide 4
Topic 1 - Developmental
Psychology and fundamental
Issues
College of Education
School of Continuing and Distance Education
2014/2015 – 2016/2017
What is Developmental Psychology?
 Study of changes in people from
conception until death
Human
Development
 a branch of psychology that studies
physical, cognitive and social change
throughout the life span
 a branch of psychology that
studies physical, cognitive and
social changes throughout the
life span
Fundamental Issues:
Nature vs. Nurture
• What is role of heredity vs. environment in
determining psychological makeup?
– Is IQ inherited or determined early environment?
– Is there a ‘criminal’ gene?
– Is sexual orientation a choice or genetically determined?
• These are some of our greatest societal debates
• Mistake to pose as “either/or” questions
Nature versus Nurture
• Nature - the influence of our inherited
characteristics on our personality, physical
growth, intellectual growth, and social
interactions.
• Nurture - the influence of the environment on
personality, physical growth, intellectual growth,
and social interactions.
• Behavioral genetics – focuses on nature vs.
nurture.
Nature Versus Nurture
•
Most
developmental
psychologists agree that
development is a
product of an
interaction between
nature and nurture.
Fundamental Issues: Is Development
Continuous?
• Development means change; change can be abrupt
or gradual
• Two views of human development
– stage theories: there are distinct phases to intellectual and
personality development
– continuity: development is continuous
Topic 2 - Research Designs used in
human development studies
College of Education
School of Continuing and Distance Education
2014/2015 – 2016/2017
Cross-section Research Design
Slide 12
Cross-Sectional Design
Same Time
Compare
1-year-olds
Compare
4-year-olds
7-year-olds
Same Time
Different Participants
Different Participants
Different Participants
Longitudinal Research Design
Slide 14
Longitudinal Design
Compare
Tested at 1 year
(Time 1)
Compare
Again at 4 years
(Time 2)
Again at 7 years
(Time 3)
Same Participants
Different Times
Different Times
Different Times
Topic 3 – Prenatal Development
and Teratogens
College of Education
School of Continuing and Distance Education
2014/2015 – 2016/2017
Prenatal Development and
the Newborn
Life is sexually transmitted
Fertilization and Twinning
– Identical twins
– Fraternal twins
Prenatal Development and
the Newborn
Periods of Pregnancy
 Zygote
 the fertilized egg
 enters a 2 week period of rapid cell division
 develops into an embryo
 Embryo
 the developing human organism from 2 weeks through 2nd
month
 Fetus
 the developing human organism from 9 weeks after
conception to birth
Prenatal Development
Conception
30 Hours
6 weeks
4 months
special
molecule that contains
DNA
the genetic material of
the organism
section of DNA
having the same
arrangement
of
gene
chemical
elements
science
genetics
of inherited
traits
tightly wound
strand of genetic
chromosome
material or DNA
referring
to a gene that
only
influences the
recessive
expression of a trait
when paired with an
identical gene
referring to
a gene
that actively
dominant
controls the
expression of a trait
Dominant and Recessive Genes
Influences
• Prenatal development is mainly a function of the
zygote’s genetic code (nature), but the environment
(nurture) also plays a role
• Teratogens are environmental agents (such as drugs
or viruses), diseases (such as German measles), and
physical conditions (such as malnutrition) that
impair prenatal development and lead to birth
defects or even death
Prenatal Development and
the Newborn
 Teratogens
 agents, such as chemicals and viruses, that can reach the
embryo or fetus during prenatal development and cause
harm
 Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS)
 physical and cognitive abnormalities in children caused by a
pregnant woman’s heavy drinking
 symptoms include misproportioned head
 Critical Period
 an optimal period before and shortly after birth when an
organism’s exposure to certain stimuli or experiences
produces proper or adverse development
Topic 4 – Cognitive Development
College of Education
School of Continuing and Distance Education
2014/2015 – 2016/2017
Cognitive Development
• This field is Dominated by a man
named Jean Piaget.
• He was developing IQ tests and
noticed that many children got
the same answers wrong.
• Thought to himself, “maybe these
kids are not stupid, but instead
think differently than adults.”
Piaget’s important concepts
• Children are active thinkers, always trying to make
sense of the world.
• To make sense of the world, they develop schemas.
• Schema- a concept or framework that organizes and
interprets information.
Infancy and Childhood:
Cognitive Development
 Schema
 a concept or framework that
organizes and interprets information
Infancy and Childhood:
Cognitive Development
 Assimilation
 interpreting one’s new experience in
terms of one’s existing schemas
 Accommodation
 adapting one’s current
understandings (schemas) to
incorporate new information
Schemas
• For example, a child may call all four-legged
creatures “doggie”
– The child learns he needs to accommodate (i.e.,
change) his schemes, as only one type of fourlegged creature is “dog”
– It is through accommodation that the number and
complexity of a child’s schemes increase and
learning
occurs
Piaget’s Stages of
Cognitive Development
Sensorimotor
Birth to 2 years
Preoperational
2 to 6 years
Concrete operational 6 to 12 years
Formal operational
12+ years
Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive
Development
Typical Age
Range
Description
of Stage
Developmental
Phenomena
Birth to nearly 2 years
Sensorimotor
Experiencing the world through
senses and actions (looking,
touching, mouthing)
•Object permanence
•Stranger anxiety
About 2 to 6 years
Preoperational
Representing things
with words and images
but lacking logical reasoning
•Pretend play
•Egocentrism
•Language development
About 7 to 11 years
Concrete operational
•Conservation
Thinking logically about concrete
•Mathematical
events; grasping concrete analogies
transformations
and performing arithmetical operations
About 12 through
adulthood
Formal operational
Abstract reasoning
•Abstract logic
•Potential for
moral reasoning
Infancy and Childhood:
Cognitive Development
 Object Permanence
 the awareness that things continue to exist even when not
perceived
Infancy and Childhood:
Cognitive Development
 Baby Mathematics
 Shown a numerically impossible outcome, infants stare
longer (Wynn, 1992)
4. Possible outcome:
Screen drops, revealing
one object.
1. Objects placed
in case.
2. Screen comes 3. Object is removed.
up.
4. Impossible outcome:
Screen drops, revealing
two objects.
Infancy and Childhood:
Cognitive Development
 Conservation
 the principle that properties such as mass, volume, and
number remain the same despite changes in the forms of
objects
Tests of Conservation
Infancy and Childhood:
Cognitive Development
 Egocentrism
 the inability of the preoperational child to take another’s
point of view
 Autism
 a disorder that appears in childhood
 Marked by deficient communication, social interaction and
understanding of others’ states of mind
Sensorimotor Stage
• Infant learns about the world through their sensory
and motor interactions (including reflexes)
• Lack object permanence, the knowledge than an
object exists independent of perceptual contact
• Symbolic representation of objects and events starts
to develop during the latter part of the sensorimotor
stage (e.g., use of telegraphic speech)
Preoperational Stage
• The child’s thinking becomes more symbolic and
language-based, but remains egocentric and lacks
the mental operations that allow logical thinking
• Egocentrism is the inability to distinguish one’s
own perceptions, thoughts, and feelings from
those of others
– Cannot perceive the world from another person’s
perspective
• The child, however, can pretend, imagine, and
engage in make-believe play
Preoperational Stage
• Conservation is the knowledge that the quantitative
properties of an object (such as mass, volume, and
number) remain the same despite changes in
appearance
– Some grasp of conservation
marks the end of the
preoperational stage and
the beginning of the
concrete-operational stage
– The liquid/beakers problem
is a common test of
conservation ability
Preoperational Stage
• A major reason why a preoperational child does not
understand conservation is that the child lacks an
understanding of reversibility, the knowledge that
reversing a transformation brings about the
conditions that existed before the transformation
• Child’s thinking also reflects centration, the tendency
to focus on only one aspect of a problem at a time
Tests of Conservation
Concrete Operational Stage
• Children gain a fuller understanding of
conservation and other mental operations that
allow them to think logically, but only about
concrete events
– Conservation for liquids, numbers, and matter
acquired early, but conservation of length acquired
later in the stage
– Develops transitivity (e.g., if A > B, and B > C, then
A > C)
– Develops seriation, the ability to order stimuli
along a quantitative dimension (e.g., a set of
pencils by their length)
• The reasoning of concrete operational children is
tied to immediate reality (i.e., what is in front of
them and tangible) and not with the hypothetical
world of possibility
Formal Operational Stage
• The child gains the capacity for hypotheticaldeductive thought
– Can engage in hypothetical
thought and in systematic
deduction and testing of
hypotheses
Formal Operational Stage
• In one scientific thinking task, the child is shown several flasks of
what appear to be the same clear liquid and is told one combination
of two of these liquids would produce a clear liquid
– The task is to determine which combination
would produce the blue liquid
– The concrete operational child just starts
mixing different clear liquids together
haphazardly
– The formal operational child develops a
systematic plan for deducing what the correct
combination must be by determining all of the
possible combinations and then systematically
testing each one
Formal Operational Stage
• The formal operational child can evaluate the logic of
verbal statements without referring to concrete
situations
–
For example, the formal
operational child would judge
the statement “If mice are bigger
than horses, and horses are
bigger than cats, then mice are
bigger than cats” to be true,
even though in “real life” mice
are not bigger than cats
Piaget
Preoperational Stage
(2–7 years)
•
•
•
•
Emergence of symbolic thought
Egocentrism
Lack of the concept of conservation
Animism
Concrete Operational
(7–12 years)
•
•
•
•
•
Increasingly logical thought
Classification and categorization
Less egocentric
Conservation
No abstract or hypothetical reason
Formal Operational
• Hypothetico-deductive reasoning
Stage
• Emerges gradually
(age 12 – adulthood) • Continues to develop into adulthood
Evaluation of Piaget’s Theory
• Recent research has shown that rudiments of many
of Piaget’s key concepts (e.g., object permanence)
may begin to appear at earlier stages than Piaget
proposed
– For example, research that involved tracking infants’ eye
movements has found that infants as young as 3 months
continue to stare at the place where the object
disappeared from sight, indicating some degree of object
permanence
Evaluation of Piaget’s Theory
1. Not all people reach formal operational
thought
2. The theory may be biased in favor of
Western culture
3. There is no real theory of what occurs after
the onset of adolescence
4. Despite refinements, recent research has
indeed shown that cognitive development
seems to proceed in the general sequence of
stages that Piaget proposed
Topic 5 - Two Types of intelligence
 Crystallized Intelligence
 one’s accumulated knowledge and verbal
skills
 tends to increase with age
 Fluid Intelligence
 ones ability to reason speedily and abstractly
 tends to decrease during late adulthood
References
• Coon, D. and Mitterer, O. J (2013). Introduction to
Psychology (13th ed). Wadsworth Cengage learning. Pp. 83115
• Feldman, S. R, Collins, J. E. and Green, M. J (2005).
Essentials of understanding psychology (2nd ed). McGrawHill Ryerson. pp. 289-330
• Kosslyn, M. S, and Rosenberg, R. (2006). Psychology in
context. pearson. Pp. 528-580
• Weiten, W. (2009). Psychology: Themes and variations (8th
ed). cengage learning. Pp. 440-475
Slide 53