Psychology 2410A/B Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Naturalistic Observation, Selection Bias, Random Assignment

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 2410A/B
• Professor: Lynne Zarbatany

Document Summary

Developmental psychology: the study of patterns and processes of change in mind and behaviour throughout the lifespan. : showing that your policies work through data. Motor development, physical development, cognition, social development, language, morality, motivation, emotion/regulation, perception. Implies more, bigger, or better but not qualitatively different; a continuous. Stage-like change: qualitative (transformational) change from lesser to greater levels of complexity; like a staircase. Empiricist perspective: development primarily the result of experience; linking together co-occurring events (e. g. , statistical experience; linking together co-occurring events (e. g. , statistical learning) Nativist perspective: prewired learning systems for particular kinds of information (e. g. , language) Experience can transform biological processes (e. g. , epigenetics (when genetic code is modified b/c of your experiences, and this effects behaviour); hpa reactivity(stress responses changing b/c of experiences)) Methods: procedures for gathering data (measurement) (e. g. , surveys, tests, mris, pets, observations, tasks) Design: structure of study and implications for making inferences re causal relations between variables (e. g. , experiment, correlational, quasi- experiment)