-
At what age do children generally undergo a sudden explosion in language acquisition?
Two years old
-
What are the 3 major issues in developmental psychology?
1. Nature vs nuture 2. Continuity vs discontinuity 3. Domain general vs domain specific
-
Type of study which takes groups of people of different ages, and compare in terms of their group performance on the variable of interest
Cross sectional design
-
Type of study which tracks the ability of different individuals over time, with repeated measures
Longitudinal design
-
Type of study which starts with groups of different ages and then follows up on these people and tests them and re-tests them
Longitudinal sequential designs
-
Type of study which involves testing the same children repeatedly over a short period of time to study the impact of an intervention or education programme
microgenetic design
-
type of study prone to practice effects, historical event effects, selective sampling and attrition
longitudinal design
-
type of study prone to cohort effects, and loss of interesting individual results due to averaging
cross sectional design
-
what you can be said to have when you understand the concept that objects still exist even when they can't be directly perceived
object permanence
-
According to Piaget, at what age does object permanence gradually occur
18months-2yrs
-
At what age do babies typically display the A not B error of stage 4?
8-12months
-
Which factors other than object permanence, have been shown to affect babies ability to avoid the A not B error?
short-term memory and spatial-location memory
-
Contempory methods for studying infant cognition involve measuring certain responses.. What are these?
physiological responses, sucking rate, facial gestures, simple motor responses, visual preference and attention
-
a popular method for measuring visual attention in babies?
habituation/dishabituation
-
What was the youngest age that babies were shown to express surprise at unexpected displays of impossible events such as the moving screen task?
5months
-
Which principle says that babies learn concepts according to their experience with the environment?
generalised learning principle
-
What is the theory proposed by Baillargeon that says that babies brains are already prepared in some way for learning about the correct ways in which objects in the world behave?
specialised learning system
-
What was the type of study in which Baillargeon found the best evidence for her theory of specialised learning systems by showing that even after hundreds of trials it is very dificult to habituate 5month olds to events which violate basic physical principles?
the study of support relationships
-
Thread-like structures which contain DNA, and exist in every cell?
chromosomes
-
A single cell formed by the fertilisation of an ovum by a sperm (and containing 46 chromosomes)?
zygote
-
How many allele's does each gene contain?
two
-
What is the term that desribes a gene with two allele's that are the same?
homozygous
-
What is the term that desribes a gene with two allele's that are different?
heterozygous
-
the genetic make-up of an individual?
genotype
-
the way the genotype expresses itself as a characteristic (physical or behavioural) of the individual?
phenotype
-
What are the two factors which may interact with, and affect the way a particular gene variation is expressed?
environment and also other genes
-
What is the first prenatal period, and when does it occur?
germinal period (0-14 days)
-
What is the second prenatal period, and when does it occur?
embryonic period (3-8wks)
-
what is the third prenatal period, and when does it occur?
fetal period (9-38wks)
-
what are the changes that occur in the embryonic period?
basic organs are formed and heart begins to beat
-
what are the changes that occur in the germinal period?
the zygot undergoes rapid cell multiplication and travels to the uterus as the blastocyst
-
At what age does the fetus begin to respond to light and other things outside the womb?
around 6months
-
At what age does the fetus become viable?
around 22-28wks
-
What does the term limited fetal viability refer to?
the limited ability of the fetus to survive outside the womb
-
What is the birth age at which babies are considered preterm?
36wks and earlier
-
what is the weight at which babies are considered to be of low birth weight?
less than 2500grams
-
what percentage of births in Australia are 37wks or earlier
5-10%
-
What are the groups of mothers at higher risk of delivering preterm babies?
-
indigenous mothers, mothers under 20yrs, mothers over 40yrs, multiple births, first time mothers
-
What are the factors that precit the outcome of preterm babies other than gestational age?
birth weight, gender, multiple or singleton, use of steroids to promote lung development
-
What are the interventions used to try to aid the development of preterm babies?
containment and lighting in the NICU, kangaroo care, tactile-kinesthetic stimulation
-
What kind of benefits does kangaroo care offer preterm babies?
accelerates the development of regulatory processes
-
What kind of benefits does tactile-kinesthetic stimulation offer preterm babies?
stimulates growth and decreses stress behaviours
-
What are the benefits that Tiffany Field found massage-therapy stimulation to offer to mothers with pre-natal depression who are trained to administer it to their babies?
mother-baby bonding and reduction of depressive symptoms in mother
-
What is the age range in which babies experience a rapid improvement in visual acuity (from being about 30-times worse than an adults and having difficulty distinguishing bright colours)?
0-4months
-
What types of things do babies prefer looking at?
patterned over plain, complex over simple, face over any other, red over other colours
-
At what age do the inner ear bones which support auditory function, form?
around 24wks gestation
-
Are babies auditory systems fully formed prior to birth?
yes
-
By what age do babies show a preference for mothers milk over a strangers?
6wks
-
do newborns show a prefence for sweet or salty tastes?
sweet
-
do 4month olds show a preference for sweet or salty tastes?
salty
-
what is the term for the reflex where babies will turn their head to feed if cheek is brushed?
rooting reflex
-
what is perceptual narrowing?
the narrowing to discriminatory perception of stimuli that babies have experience with
-
what is the term that refers to the narrowing of discriminatory perception to stimuli that babies have most experience with?
perceptual narrowing
-
By what age doe babies lose the ability to disciminate between faces of other species (like monkey faces)?
by 9months
-
At what age do babies begin to lose the ability to discriminate between faces of other human races?
by 6months has reduced, by 9months is lost
-
what other stimuli (apart from face recognition/discrimination), do babies show an increased ability to discriminate for?
language sounds/phonemes
-
how do researchers tell if babies can disriminate between different language phonemes?
seeing if they respond to contrasting phonemes which are present in their own language, versus only in other languages
-
up until what age can babies discriminate between language phonemes not distinguished in their own language?
10 months
-
how else can babies disciminate between different languages, other than by sound?
visual input (how the language looks)
-
At what age do babies begin to lose the intersensory perception discriminatory ability (discriminating language by visual input only), when brought up in a monolingual environment?
8months
-
What is the term for the process babies undergo where synapses responsible for coding certain stimuli are pruned away due to
lack of experience?
perceptual narrowing
-
What is the limiting factor that decides whether you are able to maintain a baby's language discrimination by exposing them to another language?
the exposure must be live, and social
-
What is the issue with using differnt measurement methods for different aged babies in studying their memory development?
comparing results as having measured the same thing (and not some other development)
-
What is the best task for comparing results of memory development tasks across different aged babies?
operant conditioning
-
methods used as indexes of memory in newborns?
visual behaviour and sucking
-
A method used as index of memory in 3-6month olds?
mobile conjugate reinforcement task
-
A memory indexing method used in babies over 6months old?
deferred imitation
-
How long do 2month old infants remember the mobile conjugate reinforcement task for?
24hrs
-
How long do 3month old infants remember the mobile conjugate reinforcement task for?
1wk
-
How long do 6month old infants remember the mobile conjugate reinforcement task for?
2wks
-
How would you interpret a baby looking at a novel stimuli longer than a familiar stimuli in the visual paired-comparison task?
that they remember the familiar stimuli
-
How would you interpret a baby looking at a novel stimuli for the same amount of time as a familiar stimuli in the visual paired-comparison task?
that the baby has forgotten the familiar stimuli
-
What does the deferred imitation task require a baby to do in order to imitate actions they saw demonstrated 24hrs earlier?
transform a mental representation into an imitated behaviour
-
What is the general principle for encoding (regarding age), that you can apply across different memory tasks?
older babies learn faster than younger babies
-
What is the general principle for retention (regarding age), that you can apply across different memory tasks?
older babies remember for longer than younger babies
-
What is the general principle for retrieval (regarding age), that you can apply across different memory tasks?
memory in older babies is less context specific than in younger babies
-
What are the two equivilant operant conditioning tasks that can be used to compare learning and retention in younger babies (2-6months) and older babies (6-24months)?
the mobile conjugate reinforcement task, and the train task
-
What is the baseline ratio an index of?
learning
-
what is the retention ratio an index of?
forgetting
-
how is the baseline ratio calculated?
# of kicks in the immediate test divided by # of kicks in the baseline period (immediate/baseline)
-
how is the retention ratio calculated?
# of kicks in the long-term retention test divided by # of kicks in the immediate test (retention/immediate)
-
What does a baseline ration greater than 1 mean?
baby has learned something about the contingency
-
What does a baseline ratio of 1 mean?
baby has learned nothing about the contingency, or simply forgot the initial learning
-
What does a retention ratio of 1 mean?
baby's retention of contingency learning is perfect
-
What does a retention ratio of less than 1 mean?
baby has forgotten something about the previous contingency learning
-
Does the reactivation paradigm of the mobile conjugation reinforcement task show that teh 6month old baby's forgetting is a storage or a retrival problem?
retrival because the context-specific reminder given after period of forgetting results in perfect retention in testing 24hrs later.
-
What does the reactivation paradigm of the mobile conjugate reinforcement task tell us about the context limitations of memory of 6month old babies?
that their memory is context-specific
-
What are the time limitations of tv watching recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics for children 2yrs or older?
no more than 2hrs per day
-
What are the time limitations of tv watching recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics for children younger than 2yrs old?
no tv at all
-
Are infants able to use video/television as a learning medium, and why?
No, because they have trouble converting 2d into 3d representation
-
Is tv effective as an educational tool for children?
only if the content is right, eg high language content
-
Are children more or less likely to imitate aggressive behaviour seen on tv as compared to observed live?
They are just as likely to imitate aggressive behaviour seen on tv
-
How is the play of infants and toddlers affected by having TV playing in the background?
shorter and less creative play
-
Why might distractions to infant/toddlers play by background TV influence their later cognitive development?
Because play is an index and predictor of later cognitive development
-
What are two factors found in correlational studies to be associated with children who watch more than 2hrs of tv a day?
1. less engagment in organised physical activity 2. lower likelihood to consume healthy snacks
-
In a study in which children were shown either food or non-food ads prior to watching a short cartoon, which children were more likely to consume high sugar and/or high fat snacks?
the children who watched the food ads
-
In a study in which children were shown either food or non-food ads prior to watching a short cartoon, which children were more likely to consume a higher level of food in total and what was the finding regarding differences within body-type grouping?
overweight and obese children cosumed the most, but within each body-type group the children who saw the food ads consumed more than those who saw the non-food ads
-
In a study in which children were shown either food or non-food ads prior to watching a short cartoon, which children remember more of the food ads relative to non-food ads?
the overweight and obese children
-
When considering cognitive development, what type of thinking and representation is typical of preschool age children? and what is a basic example of this?
symbolic repesentation, basic example is object permanence
-
In what age range do children experience a language explosion which sees them adding an average of 10 words a day to their receptive vocabulary?
1.5 to 10yrs old
-
What are some examples of the types of changes children show with development of symbolic representation after 2-4yrs of age?
language explosion, symbolic drawing and role-type/fantasy play
-
What are the two types of cognitive limitations on children that Piaget identified as capturing the distinction between thinking and reasoning of younger (2-4yrs) & older (5-6yrs) children?
1. perceived appearance vs inferred reality & 2. irreversibility vs irreversibility
-
Name one example of the problem of perceived appearance vs inferred reality displayed by 2-4yr olds?
conservation of volume & conservation of numbers
-
Name 3 examples of the problem of reversibility vs irreversibility displayed by 2-4yr olds?
egocentric thinking, the 3 mountains problem, collective monologue
-
What are some of the problems with the studies which claim to show Piaget's 2 kinds of cognitive limitations on young children (perceived appearance & irreversibility)?
the tasks may have set up performance barriers such as understanding the language used in the experiment questions & perceived demand characteristics of the questions
-
Are young children able to show a greater understanding of number concepts (that what has previously been theorised by Piaget) once performance barriers are removed from testing situations?
yes
-
What are 4 important reasons for understanding the development of children's understanding of health & illness concepts?
1. encouraging healthy behaviour in children; 2. understanding children's concepts of non-directly observable phenomena; 3. reducing treatment anxiety in ill children; 4. understanding children's concept of living vs non-living things
-
What are the 3 features of preoperational thinking in children under 7's concepts of illness?
1. understanding of contagion is overgeneralised; 2. understanding of contamination is undergeneralised; 3. immanent justice used as a causal mechanism
-
What did Siegal's studies of young children's understanding of contagion & immanent justice find?
That when children were not asked leading question & were provided with alternative illness causes, they were able to make correct causal judgments of illness & show greater comprehension of invisible causes of contagion/illness
-
In regards to the 3 facts about early attachment, what have most babies shown by 12-18months of age?
attachment to at least 1 figure
-
In regards to the 3 facts about early attachment, what are the 2 facts regarding styles in attachment?
1. children show different styles of attachment; 2. these styles are relatively stable over time
-
What are the 4 different styles of attachment of children to parents?
1. secure; 2. avoidant; 3. resistant; 4.disorganised/disoriented
-
What are the features of secure attachment & what percentage of children exhibit this style?
child sees parent as a secure base & seeks contact with parent after seperation. 65%
-
What are the features of avoidant attachment & what percentage of children exhibit this style?
child is non-responsive to parent & is slow to greet them after a seperation. 20%
-
What are the features of resistant attachment & what percentage of children exhibit this style?
child clings to parent & is angry with them following seperation. 10-15%
-
What are the features of disorganised/disoriented attachment & what percentage of children exhibit this style?
child shows a variety of confused & unexpected responses such as crying at unexpected times. 5-10%
-
What are the 2 theories regarding the differences in attachment?
1. parenting environment; 2. temperament
-
What does the theory of parenting enviroment (as an explanation of differences in attachment) claim?
That the degree of responsive/sensitive parenting governs the level of secure attachment displayed by the child (positively correlated)
-
What does the theory of temperament (as an explanation of differences in attachment) claim?
That attachment is governed by stable individual differences in early emotional expression & behaviour (like personality for babies)
-
What are the two extreme temperament types proposed by Kagan (as a system for measuring infant temperament)?
1. inhibited; 2. uninhibited
-
What are the features of the inhibited temperament type proposed by Kagan (in his system for measuring infant temperament)?
high emotional response & reactivity to novelty, high resting level of arousal in the amygdyla
-
What are the features of the uninhibited temperament type proposed by Kagan (in his system for measuring infant temperament)?
low emotional response & low reactivity to novelty, low levels of basal rate arousal in the amygdyla
-
What are the differences in physiological reactions to novelty that are displayed by inhibited children in comparison to uninhibited children?
higher heart-rate; higher levels of cortisol; pupil dialiation & blood pressure changes; differences in EEG (higher right side)
-
According to longitudinal research, what % of babies display inhibited behaviour patterns, what % are v. comfortable with novelty, & what is the stability of these styles?
20%, 40% and 30% retain these temperamental styles into preschool years
-
In the study of 1-4yr olds by Fox, which group of children (grouped according to temperamental style) showed the least stability over the course of the study?
Inhibited children. Half became less inhibited due to exposure to non-parental care (as opposed to exclusive parental care up until the age of 4yrs)
|
|
