PY 105 Chapter Notes - Chapter 4: Harry Harlow, Mary Ainsworth, Synaptic Pruning
Social Development and Attachment
• From 8-12 months, infants experience stranger anxiety
• Infants have developed schemas
• Harry Harlow and Margaret Harlow - monkey experiment
o Infant monkeys separated from mothers and provided with a baby blanket
o When the blanket was removed, the monkeys were in distress
o Two artificial monkeys: one with a bottle and one with a cloth
o Monkeys preferred cloth monkey, only visiting the other one for feeing
o Comfort contact is essential
Mary Ainsworth - "strange situation experiment"
• Mothers would leave their infants in an unfamiliar environment
o Securely attached - play and explore; alone infant is in distress, mother returns and infant
will seek contact and is easily consoled
o Insecurely attached - less likely to explore may even cling to mother, when mother leaves
they will cry and remain upset or demonstrate indifference to departure and return
Parenting Styles
1. Authoritarian - attempting to control children with strict rules, demanding and not responsive
2. Permissive - allow children to lead the show, parents rarely discipline their children
3. Authoritative - parents listen to children, encourage independence, place limits, warm and
nurturing, allow children to express their own opinions
Adolescence - transitional stage between childhood and adulthood
• Begins at puberty and ends with achievement of independent adult status
• Brain undergoes three major changes: cell proliferation, synaptic pruning and myelination
• Prefrontal cortex continues to develop
• Limbic system develops more rapidly
Memory
• Encoding - process of transferring sensory information into our memory system
• Working memory - where information is maintained temporarily (includes a phonological loop,
visuospatial sketchpad, central executive and episodic buffer)
• Serial position effect - someone attempts to memorize a series of words
o In immediate recall, individual is more likely to recall first and last items
o Called primacy effect and recency effect
o First items are more easily recalled because they had more time to be encoded and
transferred to long term memory
o Last items are more easily recalled because they are still in phonological loop
Processes Aid in Encoding Memories
1. Mnemonic - technique for improving retention and retrieval of information from memory
a. Rehearsal
2. Chunking - information to be remembered is organized into discrete groups of data
3. Hierarchies - a child is learning about different animals in the zoo, useful to have a category of
"birds" and to include penguins, ostriches, etc.
4. Depth of processing - important for encoding memories, information thought on a deeper level is
better remembered
5. Acronym - ROYGBIV for rainbow colors
6. Dual coding hypothesis - easier to remember words with associated images than words or images
alone
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