PSYA02H3 Chapter 10.1: PSYA02H3 Chapter 10.: Chapter 10.1 (Physical Development from Conception through Infancy)

• School: UTSC
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYA02H3
• Professor: Kyle Danielson

Document Summary

Developmental psychology: the study of human physical, cognitive, social, and behavioural characteristics across the lifespan. Cross-sectional design: used to measure and compare samples of people at different ages at a given point in time. You could compare people of different age groups, say, groups of 1-, 5-, Advantages -> relatively cheap and easy to administer and they allow a study to be done quickly. Disadvantages -> can suffer from cohort effects: differences between people that result from being born in different time periods. Longitudinal design: follows the development of the same set of individuals through time. You would select a sample of infants and measure their cognitive development periodically over the course of 20 years. Advantages -> fixes the problem of cohort effects. Disadvantages -> often difficult to carry out and tend to be costly and time consuming to follow, due to the logistic challenges involved in following a group of people for a long period of time.