PSY 457LEC Study Guide - Fall 2018, Comprehensive Midterm Notes - Habituation, Visual Acuity, Sensorineural Hearing Loss
PSY 457LEC
MIDTERM EXAM
STUDY GUIDE
Fall 2018
Aug 29, 2018
Theories in cognitive development
Where does our knowledge come from?
• Nature (Rationalism): we may seem to learn from experience, but we knew it all along. It was all planted in
our heads.
• Nurture (empiricism): it may look as if your knowledge exceeds our experience, but it was all first in the
senses
• Constructivism: children create their own understanding of the world, through experiencing things and
reflecting from those experiences
Nativism vs empiricism
• Cognitive science framing of nature/nurture: where does knowledge come from?
• Nativist: innate knowledge and innate learning mechanism Impose biases in interpretation of certain
domains of information. We are made to learn certain things certain ways.
• domain specific learning mechanisms
• What could innate knowledge be?
• If you let go of an object, which way does it fall?
• Empiricist: people born as blank slates - all that is available is a general learning mechanisms that is applied
across cognitive domains. We can learn anything
• general-purpose learning mechanisms
Piaget
• First and still one of the most influential theories on cognitive development
• Where does knowledge come from?
•Children are not just mini-adults
•Interested in how child interpret psychics, numbers, liquids, morality
• Studied children by questioning them on their reasoning
•Children are ‘active thinkers’ or ‘little scientist’
• Constantly update understanding of the world around them
• Piaget Theory
•Children and adults are fundamentally diff in how they think
• Children development can be characterized in terms of stages
• Early reasoning differs qualitatively from later reasoning
• At any given point in development can be characterized in terms of stages
• Stages of Development
• Sensorimotor Stage (birth to 2 yrs)
• At birth, child’s cognitive system restricted to motor reflects
•Children build on these reflects to develop more sophisticated procedures
• Repeat in advert behaviors, generalize behaviors to other situations, develop chains of
behaviors
• Beginning of mental representations: Learning object permanence
•Failure in A-not-B task - child continuously to search the object where it was perviously
hidden
• Preoperational Stage (2 - 7 yrs)
• Learning to represent the world symbolically: mental imagery, drawing, language, math
•Pretend play
•Narrow attention
•Can only represent the static; no transitions: Conservation is difficult
• Egocentric: world only seen from their own perspective
• Concrete Operational Stage (7 - 11 yrs)
•Ta k e o t h e r’s p o v ; t a k e i n t o a c c o u n t m u l t i p l e p e r s p e c t i v e s
•Can represent transitions; conservation
• Become increasingly logic, stronger problem solvers
• Don’t yet consider all logically possible outcomes
• Do not understand highly abstract concepts.
• Formational Operations Stage (11 >)
•Reason in terms of theories and abstractions
• Start reasoning about the future and consequences
• More adult like reasoning
• Solving an even wider variety of problems
•Children are little scientist.
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Aug 31, 2018
Methods in Cognitive Development
What us innate and what is constant
•Innate
• Just learning mechanisms (empiricism)
• Mechanism & beginning stage (constructivism)
•Resilent constant bias (nativism)
•Constant
• Just learning mechanisms (empiricism, constructivism)
•Resilent constant bias (nativism)
Challenges to Piaget
• Issues with ‘stages’
• Less sudden changes than it may have seemed
• Reasoning not always similar (e.g., number conservation < liquid quantity conservation)
•Many individual differences
• Development can be accreted through training
•Discoveries of early competencies
•Object permanence by 3-4 months
• Advanced understanding of taste and weight by the preschool yrs
• Some early understanding of #
• Early understanding of causality
• Early categorization
• Thinking ahead in 5-yrs old
• Experimental Issues
• Experiments not always run in a consistent fashion
• Handwriting notes (no videotaping)
• Small sample size, unrepresentative sample
• Verbal reasoning may not represent abilities (lack of performance doesn’t always mean lack of
competence)
• Materials not always adapted to age
How to overcome experimental issues?
•How can we test infants and toddlers?
• We can learning from watching them, but do they really show all they know? Probably not
• Perhaps we can gather info from parents?
•Not without issues:
• Useless a child is extremely delayed, parents often don’t consider their child development to be
slow
•Differences in parents’ attitudes across societies
•Can only ask about current developments
•Parents need to be trained
•Use children’s natural behavior
1. Conditioning - Little Albert - do infants really learn this way?
2. Preferential Looking
• Given 2 objects to look at, infants look at the most interesting one
• Shortly after birth, infants have visual preferences
• This means that they must discriminate the images
• Babies aren’t blind when they are born (though visually not great)
•
• In recent years, we have started to use more sophisticated ways of testing visual testing.
• Robert dantz was the first to set-up this procedure using a “looking chamber”
• Children in box with 2 visual display on ceiling
• Experimenter observed and coded the infants eyes by looking through a peephole
• How long do they look at the object?
3. Forced choice
•Another way to test for children early preferences is a forced choice task
• Only works once infants have figured out grabbing
4. Ta s t e / s m e l l t a s k
•In the olfactory domain, we can test infants’ preferences for certain smells over others
•Feed infants different types of food
• Examine: facial features, crying, amount consumed
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Constructivism: children create their own understanding of the world, through experiencing things and reflecting from those experiences. Nativist: innate knowledge and innate learning mechanism impose biases in interpretation of certain domains of information. Children and adults are fundamentally diff in how they think. Useless a child is extremely delayed, parents often don"t consider their child development to be slow. Jut because infants don"t have a preference or one of the 2 items ,that doesn"t mean they can"t tell the difference. Advanced understanding of taste and weight by the preschool yrs. Experimenter observed and coded the infants eyes by looking through a peephole. Compute when the baby"s sucking tails off, and then change sound. Simple principle: if you show something to an infant often enough, they jul get bored. If they can detect the difference, they should. Visual fixation (older children: when baby looks.
