Developmental - Growing Social Module

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Introduction to developmental

Developemental as historically situated - changing views of the child. Changing views of childhood. 

Pre Industrial Revolution - Infancy, Adulthood

Post-Industrial Revolution - Infancy, Childhood, Adulthood

Information Revolution - Infancy, Early Childhood, Middle Childhood, Adolescence, Middle Adulthood, Late Adulthood

Development: a specified state of growth or advancement, doesn't apply to everything however. Basiscally it's talking about complex changes over a lifespan plus accross seperate domains of development some involve abilities advancing, some involve abilities decreasing, some involve becoming more specialised. All are complex and overlapping. 

Modern Theories: Psychodynamic, Behaviourism, Piaget's theory of congitive development, cultural learning theory, Vygotsky.

Tabul a Rasa: theory at birth the human mind is a 'blank state' without rules for processing data and that data is added and rules for processing are formed solely by one sensory experiences. 

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Introduction to development 2

Questions across developmental theories: What changes? 

  • Behaviour (what is obseravable in an organism/walking/talking), cognition (the process of the mind, when do these develop?), biology.
  • Universals of developement (key trends of development that the majority of people might demonstrate at a given point e.g. walking) (changes - at what point a child begins to walk)
  • Between-group differences (big differences across large groups, but differ between different type of groups e.g. children who learn just one language as they grow up or children who learn more than one language as they grow up) (compare and see differences between these children)
  • Individual differences (all children are different, not everyone achieves the same milestones that are expected) (Difference does not necessarily mean problem, many roots to the same development)

What causes these changes? Social/interactionist influences affect a child learning languages or cognitive psychologists believe it is the innate that affects a child learning language.

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Introduction to development 3

What is the function of the change?

Ontogenetic vs phylogenetic: development of an individual (e.g. walking, wouldnt be able to run away from danger or go out and find food) vs evolutionary history of a population and how it's related to others (e.g. walking, part of a species, produce more of our species if we run away from danger.)

  • Are changes discrete (particular discrete changes, e.g. children moving into different stages of development, Piaget agrees with children going through discrete changes) or continious (ongoing process, constantly changing?)
  • Domain-general (whatever change such as walking it's just common mechanisms that underlie all those changes) or domain speicific (different mechanism underlying all changes, e.g. a different mechanism for language and another for walking)
  • What is geneticaaly pre-determines vs environmentall influenced? born with this pre-determines aspect for example learn language vs socially or interactionally influenced. Environemental/experience.
  • Most theoriests now interested in the intercation between these
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Introduction to development 4

Research methods in developmental psychology:

  • Longitudinal design: following children over a period of time to examine age-related change
  • Self-reports: use of structured or unstructured interviews to gain insight into children's thoughts
  • Correlational design: examining relationships between two or more existing variables
  • Experimental design: objective observation of of children, either in natural environments or lab settings
  • Cross-cultural study: taking a 'snapshot' of child participants at a particular point in time
  • Systematic observation: following children over a period of time to examine age-related change 
  • Ethnographic approach: observation-based exploration of children's lives, from the perspective of the children themselves
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Pre-natal development through to infancy

Fetal development:

  • Approximately 40 weeks
  • 3 trimesters 
  • Human babies are born fairly helpless, they are reliant on their caregivers
  • Cannot stay in the womb, however and come out when they will not be reliant on their caregivers due to mechanics of birth (head size) and therefore, if the child's head was too big during birth it could get stuck. However, others have argued why women's bodies wouldn't evolve with this mechanism of the body. 
  • However, a helpless baby helps build a relationship with the caregiver (in the future you are more likely to look after them better)

Learning about infants: (several experimental approaches)

  • Preferential looking: demonstrated consistently. Babies prefer to look at a certain things than others (e.g. prefer to look at an image of a smiley face over a non-smiley face). They prefer to look at stuff they are able to percieve (seemingly begin to mirror facial expressions)
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Pre-natal development through to infancy 2

  • Habituation/dishabituation paradigms: response to novel stimuli e.g. turns head, heart beat slows, **** patterns change. Ongoing stimuli causes habitution e.g. decreased response, evidence of training/memory. Change in ongoing stimuli causes dishabituation (evolutionary - keeps us safe, as we notice new stimuli)

Auditory perceptions before birth:

  • Habituation/dishabituation action observable in utero (found through foetal heart rate monitors)
  • Recognition of mothers' voice. More marked dishabituation to recording of mother reading
  • New-borns will choose to listen to familar language patterns. 

Visual perception after birth:

  • preferential looking
  • face perception - general bias towards patterns with elemants in the upper half
  • Preferance for caregivers face within first few days of life
  • Discrimination of faces, becomes specialised to human faces overtime (perceptual narrowing)
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Pre-natal development through to infancy 3

Perception/conceptual development:

  • Making sense of physical world and how things fit together 
  • Use of violation of expectation paradigms (habituation/dishabituation). More interest in something that is physically impossible rather than something that is physically possible 
  • Enables infants to demonstrate understanding of key properties of objects e.g
  • Solidity - two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time
  • Support - unsupposrted objects fall
  • Shape and size consistency - objects remain the same although they change their appearance depending on distance from the observer/angle at which they are seen

Developmental Milestones: Motor Skills:

  • Simple reflexes - present at birth and almost certainly innate, these include primitive (infantile) reflexes; functional infantile reflexes, Vestigal infantile reflexes (something that is left over from previous evolution that is no longer in use)
  • Cephalocaudal (first gain control of head, moves downwards) and proximodistal (gain control of trunks first) trends
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Attachment

Attachment Theory: (originally applied to infants, however, recently also applied to adults). "The propensity to make strong emotional bonds to particular individuals (is) a basic component of human nature, already present in germinal form in the neonate". Emphasises the realtional basis of all human communication. 

Affectional bond: a 'special tie' between two individuals - desire to maintain closeness (attachment is a type of this)

Attachment: a variety of this, where sense of security is bound up in the relationship

Attachment behaviours: behaviours which facilitate physical proximity to and intercation with an attached individual i.e. eye contact, smiling, touching, clinging, crying 

Development of parent-child intercation and relationships: (Bowlby):

  • Early non-intentional infant attachment behaviours (from birth): e.g. crying if their hungry, leading adult to give intentionally 
  • Beginings of intentional attachment behaviours (from 3 months): e.g. lifting head up, reaching for things, smiling, crying changes for specific things, crying with no tears for a response
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Attachment

Attachment Theory: (originally applied to infants, however, recently also applied to adults). "The propensity to make strong emotional bonds to particular individuals (is) a basic component of human nature, already present in germinal form in the neonate". Emphasises the realtional basis of all human communication. 

Affectional bond: a 'special tie' between two individuals - desire to maintain closeness (attachment is a type of this)

Attachment: a variety of this, where sense of security is bound up in the relationship

Attachment behaviours: behaviours which facilitate physical proximity to and intercation with an attached individual i.e. eye contact, smiling, touching, clinging, crying 

Development of parent-child intercation and relationships: (Bowlby):

  • Early non-intentional infant attachment behaviours (from birth): e.g. crying if their hungry, leading adult to give intentionally 
  • Beginings of intentional attachment behaviours (from 3 months): e.g. lifting head up, reaching for things, smiling, crying changes for specific things, crying with no tears for a response
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Attachment 2

  • Secure base behaviours (from 6 months): e.g. selectivity of who their happy to spend time with. 

Social Anxities: 

  • Stranger anxiety: not complete strangers sometimes. A person they haven't seen in a while e.g. grandparents 
  • Rare before 5/6 months
  • Usually emerges between 6-9 months
  • Begins to decline after 12-16 months
  • Seperation anxiety:  Begins around 9 months (continues for longer)
  • Appears to be culturally universal, but responses vary hugely between children

Modes of attachment: 

  • Secure (approx 2/3 of 12-18 months old)
  • Insecure (approx 1/3 of 12 -18 month olds)
  • Ambivalent/anxious resistant: clingy, really upset when parent leaves room, at the reunion they do not feel better they are more upset/violent (smack). 
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Attachment 3

  • This is due to inconsistent parenting, somtimes will respond to their child, other times they won't. More likely to get a consistent response if the child behaves the way it does.
  • Anxious avoidant: happy to chat with the stranger, not bothered when the parent leaves or returns. They monitored the heart rate of children, they look like they are not bothered but physiologically care. Putting up a defence, not responding in a way that might leave them reflected. This is said to be an adaptive response in an attempt to protect themselves
  • Disorganised: 80% (versus 10% in typical groups) of infants who are known to have suffered abuse/neglect demonstrate disorganised attachment. Sometimes may walk backwards at reunion as they are scared and need their caregiver but are also scared of their caregiver

Attachments are associated:

  • Insecure attachments may be associated with later emotional difficulties
  • Parents self-perception of their own attachment styles are >70% predictive of their own children's attachment styles.
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Development of prosocial behaviour and moral judgm

Prosocial behaviour: (behaving in a positive manner)

  • Voluntary and intentional action (something you choose to do by yourself, cannot be forced to do it
  • Produces a positive/beneficial outcome (nice for someone else)

Moral Judgment: 

  • Morals: a person's standard of behaviour or beliefs concerning what is and is not acceptable for them to do
  • prosocial behaviour is not automatically moral e.g. doing something that helps someone else but for the wrong reaons i.e. doing it for your own gain

Piaget Moral Reasoning:

  • Observational studies, engaged observation and moral dilemmas (set children hypothetical scenarios to reason through)
  • A constructivist (learn from experience) theory - children learn morality through encounters with peers.
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Development of prosocial behaviour and moral judgm

  • A finding they found was that  younger children tended to focus on the outcome of scenarios whereas older children reason through and state how whether the child had the intention of doing something negative.

Three stages: 

  • 0-7: Stages of morality constraint: In this stage children regard rules and duties as unchangeable "givens". Justice is whatever authorities (adults, rules or laws) say is right, and authorities punishments for noncompliance are always justified. Acts not consistent with rules and authorities are bad. In this stage they believe what ever dictates an action as good or bad is the outcome and not the intentions.
  • 7-10/11: transitional period: In this stage children typically have more interactions with peers than previously, and these interactions are more egalitarian, with more give and take, then are their intercations with adults. In games with peers children learn that rules can be constructed and changed by the group. They also learn to take one another's perspective and co-operate, they start to value fairness and equality and begin to become more autonomous in their thinking about moral issues
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Development of prosocial behaviour and moral judgm

  • 10/11+: Stages of autonomous morality: Children no longer accept blind obedience to authority as the basis of moral decisions. They understand rules are a product of social agreement and can be changed if the majority of a group agrees to do so. They consider fairness and equality among people as important factors to consider when constructing rules. Believe punishments should fit the crime and that punishments delivered by adults are not necessarily fair. They also consider individuals motives and intentions when evaluating their behaviour. 

Criticisms of Piaget:

  • Some evidence for these theories (including cross-culturally) BUT:
  • Piaget (as usual) understated how children's experiences of social intercation might vary, and these variations might be important (however, never talked about in such detail, a lot of individual cases between children)
  • Questions about the construction of the stories themselves (testing childrens ability to read and judge a story, listen to the words and make a mental model)
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development of prosocial behaviour and moral judgm

Kohlberg morality development:

  • stage theory - examined longitudionally (from age of 10) (a lot less outcome focus and a lot less defintive) 

1. Preconventional morality: reasoning in realtion to self. Conventions/rules/expectations not fully understood. It is obedience and punishment orientated (how can I avoid punishment) and also self-interest orientated (what's in it for me?)

2. Conventional morality: (other people around you and what they think). Centered on personal relationships. Interpersonal accord and conformity (social norms) (the good boy/good girl attitude). Authority and social order maintaining orientation (law and order morality - focused on fuffiling duties)

3. Post conventional morality: orientation to principles and rights. If principle and rule conflict, judge by principle. Social contract orientation and universal ethic principles (principled conscience) (ethical principles to guide themselves/ not seen cross culturally however.)

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development of prosocial behaviour and moral judgm

Criticism of Kohlberg:

  • Too subjective a measure (what is morality? can you measure it?)
  • Scale dilemmas were not standardised (never took them out and tried them out, therefore difficult yo know whether it fits adult morality)
  • Internal justification of the sequence of development 
  • Dilemmas are intuitive and unrealistic (Damon, 1977). Compare two bad outcomes, focus on male participants. 
  • Giligan, 1982: women's morality focuses on 'responsibility' and focus on impact of behaviour of others (context dependant) (looks different to mens)

Eisenberg's development of prosocial reasoning: 

Pre-school children: generally hedonistic responses (focused on one's own gratification), some needs base responses

Between 4-11: first respond according to others' approval/stereotyped "good and bad" (people e.g. parents would expect me to help this hurt boy), begin then to empathise.

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development of prosocial behaviour and moral judgm

Older children: begin to use internalised values/norms (begining to appeal to more universal issue)

Empathy: emotional reaction to others emotional state

Sympathy: empathy and sense of concern (both require some elemant of perspective taking

  • Both require perspective taking
  • 10-14 months: may become upset when seeing someone upset
  • 18-25 months: may comfort "upset" adult or help retrieve dropped object (demonstrates it is germinal at a very young age)

What influences prosocial behaviour:

  • Nature? (genetic/biological factors)
  • Nurture? (caregiver responses to own/others conduct) (encourage or not encourage certain behaviour/what is nurtured and rewarded and what isn't) (opportunities provided to engage prosocially)
  • Culturual differences (individualism vs collectivism)
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Deprivation

Long term congnitive outcomes of severly depreived children (at 4, 6, and 11 years old):

  • The study indicates that there were persistant effects on congnitive development at age 11, but there was significant improvement over time for the children with the lowest IQ at scores at age 6, with a loss at age 11 of the dose-response relationship between age at entry (length of deprivation) and IQ found at 6. Most strikingly, there was no measurable effect of institutional deprivation that did no extend beyond 6 months of age, but a substantial decrement in IQ associated with any duration of institutional deprivation above that age

Research approaches/study designs that have been used to find out this information:

  • The power of the study to detect the effects of the timing of deprivation was strengthened further by the use of stratified samle with similar, relatively large-sized groups of children entering the UK and being placed with their adoptive families before the age of 6 months, between 6 and 24 months, and between 24 and 43 months. A comparison group comprised children born and adopted in the UK before the age of 6 months.
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Deprivation 2

Significant factors that contribute to idividual differneces:

  • There are uncertainties regarding the extent to which the initial deficits are derived from malnutrition or social adversity and whether the subsequent gains are derived from improved nutrition or improved psychosocial circumstances
  • Severe stress experiences may damage the brain, perhaps especially the hippocampus.
  • Second, there is an experience-expectant developmental programming in which normal somatic development requires particular experiences during the relevant sensitive phase if the appropriate somatic structure is to be laid down.
  • Third, there is a different concept of experience-adaptive developmental programming, in which a particular form of somatic development is shaped by the specifics of experiences during a sensitive period of development in such a way that there is optimal adaption to the specifics of that environment. In the introduction we suggested a number of reasons as to why further catch-up might be expected. One possibility was that the influence of education might have been especially important in the cognitive domain. However, our findings indicate that the period of schooling between 6 and 11 did not result in any overall rise in IQ in the institution, reared adoptees as a whole.
  • Further, our analyses showed that this was entirely because of the effects associated with marked cognitive impairment. 
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Gender Development

Sex: biological (genetics, physical form)

Gender: social identity (behaviour, attitudes and self-concept)

  • Constructed as binary (a category that is one or the other) in many cultures. (In the west we've been binary, however there is slowly becoming a shift)

Biological Sex:

  • Chromosomes (X and Y, society doesn't like it when you have different chromosomes, science ignores it)
  • Hormones (testosterone, progesterone etc.)
  • Reproductive anatomy 
  • Sexual dimoprhism (the differences in appearance between males and females of the same species
  • Evolutionary arguments (majority of the biological females being vital to producing offspring, me can't do this so they'll be better adopted to doing something else
  • But how much is vestigial? (forming a very small remenant of something that once was greater or more noticeable)
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gender development 2

Gender Typing:

  • Associations of objects, activities, roles or traits with one sex or the other in ways that conform to cultural stereotypes.
  • Origins: Product of biology/genetics? product of environment? (how we treat boys/men/women/girls). Cultural constraints? (not the just product of the immediate environment, how the treatment relates to bigger cultural issues.)

Gender typing influences:

  • Genetics: widespread evidence cited from animal observation/studies
  • but be aware of anthropomorphism (applying human cultural expectations to animals)
  • Evolutionary arguments for sex-aligned behaviours and traits (behaviours and traits said to be done by one sex over another
  • Hormones: Androgens affect structural brain development (effect aspects of brain development) (lateralization: how some neural functions or cognitive proceses tend to be more dominant in one hemisphere than the other)
  • Links to gendered behaviour than complex/unclear 
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Gender development 3

  • Environmental: Parents: Indirect cues/language. From (almost) birth: new born baby, dressed in various ways (blue, pink, neutral). Analysed how people interacted with the baby, if it was a  girl they were more likely to choose dolls and if it was a boy they gave them toy guns, soldiers. If the gender was no identifed they almost always assigned the baby a gender.
  • Gender Essentialism: parents use a lot of language like 'brave, strong, powerful', this is usually to describe boys.
  • Gender-appropriate activities: e.g. schools there was different activities chosen for the different sexes to do e.g. sport for the boys
  • Museum study: if the parent was with their boy they were more likely to go into detail at museums rather than if they were with girls
  • Teachers: Emphasise/extend gendered distinctions 
  • Discipline techniques: possible cultural differences (girls: explaining why they shouldn't do the incorrect behaviour where as if it was the boys more likely to just imply not to do the behaviour, no explanation)
  • Peers: more play with the same sex = more gendered typed behaviour
  • social influence styles
  • Emerges between 3-6 years
  • In group favouritism: subcultures
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Gender development 4

Gender Identity: a persons self-image with regard to gender, often (not always) in terms of relative masculinity or femininity 

Social Learning Theory: Acquire gender-typed responses through modelling and reinforcement 

  • Triadic model of reciprocal causation (three factor model):
  • Personal (cognition and motivation), environmental and behavioral factors. 
  • Learning through tuition (actively teaching gender roles), experience and observation 

Kohlberg's cognitive development theory: Stages of development:

  • Gender Identity (by 30 months): They categorise themselves as either a boy or a girl. However, they do not yet realise that gender is permenant e.g. they may believe a little girl can grow up to be a father.
  • Gender stability (around 3-4 years): come to realise that gender remains the same over time ("i'm a girl, and i'll always be a girl". However, still not clear that gender is independant of superficial appearance and think if a boy puts on a dress and looks like a girl he is one.
  • Gender constancy (around 6 years): gender is invarient across situations. ("I'm a girl and nothing i do will change that")
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Gender development 5

Gender Schema Theory: 

  • Information-processing approach
  • Early age: pick up gender-types preferances 
  • Organise into self-gender schemas (process the world through their relevant schemas they have)
  • Gender-schematic and gender-aschematic
  • Schemas then used as filters (learning about the world becomes infelcted by these gender shemas) e.g. biases in remembering experiences
  • Model too simplistic? (children 7-8 appeared more likely to observe and then remember activites being done by someone of the same gender as themselves 
  • "Interest filter": as well as having gender schemas that filter the world, we also have an interest filter. If it's not relevant to our gender, and we show interest towards it. 

Cognitive abilities: Are these about sex or gender? Very complex and controversial

  • Reported differences in abilities tend to have small effect sizes (the magnitude of the average difference of two groups)
  • compared with physical differences, and more clearly gender typed
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Cognitive and Language

Piaget's theory of cognitive developement:

  • Children are active contributors to their own cognitive growth (before Piaget, children were thought to be 'seen and not heard', they don't contribute very much, however, Piaget changed this)
  • They actively construct their knowledge and undertanding of their world, it is also an intercationist theory (invokes both nature and nurture) (goverened by our genes/learnt)
  • There are 4 stages, each child passes through them in the same order, the stages are universal

Schemas:  Units of genralised knowledge which we use to understand and respond to specific situations. Stored mental structures of linked elemants. Through 'organisation' become interconnected to form a complex knowledge system

Adaptation: the process by which children's schemas develop in line with their experience of the world (adaption takes place through the two processes of assimilation and accommodtion)

Assimilation: the process of taking in new informatio from outside and changing it (if necessary) to fit an exsisting schema. The new (info) is made to fit the already known (schema)

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Cognitive and Language 2

Use existing schemas to interpret and interact with the world, when assimilation occurs, the schema in essence doesn't change.

Accommodation: The process of changing a schema or developing a new schema in order to deal effectively with new information. The already known (schema) is changed to fit the new info.

New info --> cannot assimilate --> disequilibrium (the child becomes un-cognitively unbalanced for a while, slightly hinged. This is uncomfortable for the child, Piaget reckons this is a driving force for development to learn) --> accommodation --> assimilation --> equilibrium 

Sensorimotor stage: (0-2 years): Cognitive growth based on the children own sensory experience and motor actions. The child understands the world and acquired knowledge of it (constructs sensorimotor schemas) by direct motoric contact and manipulation of objects in the immeadiate environment. (DMC, the object moving backward and forward is not increasing and decreasing in size [retina] it is the same size. They discover by grasping the object and moving it backwards and forward they can feel that the object does not change in size, it feels the same)

  • At start (sub stage 1): infant has no sense of self, no object concept
  • By end (sub stage 6): has general symbolic function and can mentall represent absent objects and events
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Cognitive and Language 3

  • Sub stage 3 (4-8 months): Stage 3 error: no object permenence: (objects as distinct from the self, they can't mentall form an image of the object). Research: place an interesting toy in front of a child and simply place a cover over the toy, the child does not try to remove the cover, usually they look elsewhere. When the cover is removed they show to act suprised. However, if the object is only partially covered, they will attempt to uncover and reach for the toy.

Preoperational Stage (2-7 years): PO children can form mental representations, cannot perform mental operations, mental processes that have logical properties. PO children's thinking is not based on logic but is dominated by how things look to them. Piaget came up with several terms and taks to characterise the PO child's inability to logically manipulate information. 

  • Egocentrism: the inability to take another person's persepctive, centered on their own view of the world, don't appreciate other people's views of the world. According to Piaget, PO children believe that other people's experience of the world is exactly the same as their own own. Egocentrism is an outcome of a lack of logic. Piaget came up with the 'three mountains' task to assess egocentrism. 
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Cognitive and Language 4

Three Mountains Task: A child is sitting in front of a three dimensional model of mountains, each have distinct features, the doll is placed facing the model. They asked the child what the doll sees from a variety of pictures at different angles of the model. 6-7 year olds usually tend to pick the image of what they see. However, older children will choose what the doll sees (showing those in preoperational stage don't appreciate other's view of the world.

Conservation Tasks: 'Do they have the same amount of water or does one have more than the other?'. PO child answers 'same'. PO child answers, This one (tallest) has more. (pre-robust finding) (the child is censoring on one aspect, don't have the logical ability to deal with situations that don't seem how they appear.

Concrete operational stage (7-11 years): When they reach this stage, children are no longer dominated by how things look to them. They can now perform mental operations (think logically). They lose their visual egocentrism; can pass three mountains test. They now have the mental operations to enable them to pass coservation tests. According to Piaget, CO children have the operational processes needed to pass conservation tasks including:

  • Reversibility: they can mentally reverse the transformation 
  • Compensation: they understand one feature can compensate for another 
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  • Transivity: a form of reasoning in which two seperate pieces of info are mentally combined to arrive at a logical conclusion.
  • BUT CO children can only perform these logical operations with concrete objects (actual physical objects in front of them), actions and situations that they have experienced. They are not able to think abstractly or hypothetically until they reach the next stage.

Formal Operational Stage (12 years+): FO children can apply mental operations to:

  • Absract concepts (love, fear, justice)
  • Hypothetical notions (hypothetico-deductive thinking) never experienced or couldn't possibly experience in reality 
  • Symbols in reasoning (think logically in place of symbols and what they represent)
  • able to solve problems systematically 

Evaluating Piaget's theory: A child might have e.g. object permanence (competence) but still not search for the hideen object (performance). They may actually not be able to do the task on the day you ask them to do, even though they are able to.

  • Competence: underlying ability to do something 
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Cognitive and Language 6

  • Performance: whether someone actually does it
  • Piaget often underestimated child's competence. Changes to test procedure to reveal competence (often children are asked questions and often when they don't answer the question correctly the first time round, the question is usually repeated. Therefore, when the researcher asked the children the question again, the children assumed they answered the question incorrectly. Therefore, Rose and Blank only asked the question once)

Piaget and Education: Piaget advocates a readiness approach (at a particular stage they only have certain mental capacities to do certain taks. Therefore, they need to be ready to learn something)

  • Children can learn new concepts only when the cognitive structures and processes have spontaneously developed sufficiently for them to handle that new information, or else they can't assimilate it
  • When a child is ready the teacher should provide learning opportunities individually tailored to provoke moderate disequilibrium which will drive forward the process. 
  • Teaching should be in line with the child's current development stage (e.g. concrete materials in CO stage)
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Potental Problems: If a child is not ready yet, what is a teacher supposed to do? What if they don't develop spontaneously? (that's not the teachers fault but does that mean nothing can be done about it) How do we know if a child is ready? (huge variability between individual children anyway). Is Piaget correct in maintaining that teaching and adult support cannot appreciably, genuinly and permanently accelerate the process of cognitive development? (no amount of teaching will help if they don't have the correct cognitive and mental capacity)

Vygotsky's Theory of cognitive development: Vygotsky's theory is a sociocultural one; the child's culture and social world play a critical part in cognitive growth (disagreed profoundly with Piaget, that cogntitive ability unfolds without help and teaching). Each culture teaches the child what and how to think in order to bed adapt to the demands it sets. Social intercation with others, especially adults, is critical; the child will make little progresss if left to explore the world alone.

Vygotksy's zone of proximal (potential) development: ZPD is the gap between what a child can do unaided and what that child can do with help and instruction from other knowledgeable others.

1. child cannot do A alone (but is not too far off)

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Cognitive and Language 8

2. Adult helps and instructs child to do A (if they can successfully instruct the child and can then use the isntructions themselves)

3. Adult gets child to help and intruct him/herslef while doing A

4. Child does A alone (using self-instructions)

In this way, the adult finds the childs potential (ZPD) and turns it into actual development (thus accelerating learning)

Scaffolding: defined as an appropriate support framework for childrens' learning. It exploits their ZPD. High level of help which is gradually reduced as he or she becomes more competent, until child can eventually complete the task alone, having internalised the taught concept, technique etc. Parents employ scaffolding naturally with their children, without consciously reflecting on the process. (Middle class parents were scaffolding, intervening correctly)

Vygotsky - The role of Language:

  • Language does not just perform an external function of communication between people
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2. Adult helps and instructs child to do A (if they can successfully instruct the child and can then use the isntructions themselves)

3. Adult gets child to help and intruct him/herslef while doing A

4. Child does A alone (using self-instructions)

In this way, the adult finds the childs potential (ZPD) and turns it into actual development (thus accelerating learning)

Scaffolding: defined as an appropriate support framework for childrens' learning. It exploits their ZPD. High level of help which is gradually reduced as he or she becomes more competent, until child can eventually complete the task alone, having internalised the taught concept, technique etc. Parents employ scaffolding naturally with their children, without consciously reflecting on the process. (Middle class parents were scaffolding, intervening correctly)

Vygotsky - The role of Language:

  • Language plays a vital role in cognitive developement, transforming a child's thinking
  • Language does not just perform an external function of communication between people
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Cognitive and Language 9

  • Language also performs an internal regulatory function of monitoring and directing thought within a person (imbedded skill) (when you wake up, you think about what you're going to do during the day, what are your priorities through the day. Not saying anything out loud, however, we use this skill (language skill) to control and regulate our behaviour 
  • Verbal self-regulation develops in 3 stages: 
  • Parents instruct their children (to keep them safe, monitor traffic, green man. You will talk them through this, you don't want them to come in contact with this through natural contingencies) 
  • Children instruct themselves overtly using private speech (initially use them out loud, a lot what they're saying is important for what they're doing, to drive the speech along 
  • Children instruct themselves covertly - using inner speech 
  • Young children often talk to themselves as they play. Piaget called this 'egocentric speech' said it was pre-social, has no function and eventually dies out 
  • Vygotsky called it 'private speech', common when child is trying to solve problems or achieve important goals, or finds his or her activity is obstructed 
  • These self-directed monologues have a crucial function; they help children to plan, regulate and direct their behaviour (almost as if it helps them to stay on task)
  • Private speech is a transitional state between overt and covert (inner) speech or verbal thinking
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Cognitive and Language 9

  • Language also performs an internal regulatory function of monitoring and directing thought within a person (imbedded skill) (when you wake up, you think about what you're going to do during the day, what are your priorities through the day. Not saying anything out loud, however, we use this skill (language skill) to control and regulate our behaviour 
  • Verbal self-regulation develops in 3 stages: 
  • Parents instruct their children (to keep them safe, monitor traffic, green man. You will talk them through this, you don't want them to come in contact with this through natural contingencies) 
  • Children instruct themselves overtly using private speech (initially use them out loud, a lot what they're saying is important for what they're doing, to drive the speech along 
  • Children instruct themselves covertly - using inner speech 
  • Young children often talk to themselves as they play. Piaget called this 'egocentric speech' said it was pre-social, has no function and eventually dies out 
  • Vygotsky called it 'private speech', common when child is trying to solve problems or achieve important goals, or finds his or her activity is obstructed 
  • These self-directed monologues have a crucial function; they help children to plan, regulate and direct their behaviour (almost as if it helps them to stay on task)
  • Private speech is a transitional state between overt and covert (inner) speech or verbal thinking
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Cognitive and Language 10

  • Inner speech can re-emerge from its underground state
  • Berk showed that children produce more private speech when doing a difficult task than an easy one
  • Vygotsky catalogued many episodes that seemed to show private speech as an instrument of thought that can alter the course of activity

Evaluating Vygotksy: Recent research supports Vygotsky's view that language plays a key role in childrens' intellectual development 

  • Berk et al, the sooner the children develop inner speech the more intellectually advanced they become
  • There is considerable support for Vygotsky's view that children develop more quickly with expert help and guidance (not like Piaget said any change was superficial, change is meaningful)
  • Been successfully applied to educational settings and clinical settings but assumes MKO's will always enhance a childs' cognitive developement 
  • Silent on mauration, stages and developmental factors other than language 
  • Vague in places (doesn't state what types of social interaction encourage learning and language)
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Cognitive and language development (2)

Information processing approach:

  • Cognitive development is due to change in the childs' ability to process information. 
  • The approach takes human information processing analogous to that of a computer (e.g. hardware, in humans; childrens hardware changes e.g. brain developing)
  • What components of a computer determine it's ability to process information? (human software - rules and strategies allow for more effective processing)

Increasing in processing speed with development:

  • Reaction times on tasks require simple cognitive judgments (e.g. whether two items are same/different) improve throughout childhood. (reaction time improves throughout childhood, gradual change improvement on cognitive judgments)

Increases in processing capacity with development: 

  • Digit span (a measure of short-term/working memory capacity) increases with age. (give the child a string of items (letters or numbers), then ask the child to repeat the sequence correctly in the correct order. (going up the ages, the length of the sequence they can remember increases)
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Cognitive and language development (2) - 2

Development of processing strategies: 

  • the effect of verbal rehearsal on short-term memory:
  • Part 1 (Flavell et al, 1966)
  • Method: 5, 7 and 10 year olds shown 7 pictures
  • Experimenter points to 2-5 pictures
  • Children recall pictres immediately or after 15 seconds (in the order they were presented)
  • % rehearsal determined by E-lip reading children
  • Results: Age 5 (10% rehearsers), Age 7 (60% rehearsers), Age 10 (85% rehearsers)
  • Part 2 (Keeney et al 1967)
  • Method: 6-7 year old rehearsers vs non-rehearsers 
  • Non-rehearsers were taught to rehearse (went from 0% to 75% rehearsal) half of the rehearsers were given the same training (to check it was not giving them some non-speicific effects)
  • Measured effect of rehearsal on STM
  • Results: roughly half of the children didn't rehearse spontaneously (however, are capable of doing) - if you teach them to use rehearsal that improves their memory 
  • Applying organisation to sequence makes it much easier to remember 
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Cognitive and language development (2) - 3

Development of processing strategies: 

  • the effect of verbal rehearsal on short-term memory:
  • Part 1 (Flavell et al, 1966)
  • Method: 5, 7 and 10 year olds shown 7 pictures
  • Experimenter points to 2-5 pictures
  • Children recall pictres immediately or after 15 seconds (in the order they were presented)
  • % rehearsal determined by E-lip reading children
  • Results: Age 5 (10% rehearsers), Age 7 (60% rehearsers), Age 10 (85% rehearsers)
  • Part 2 (Keeney et al 1967)
  • Method: 6-7 year old rehearsers vs non-rehearsers 
  • Non-rehearsers were taught to rehearse (went from 0% to 75% rehearsal) half of the rehearsers were given the same training (to check it was not giving them some non-speicific effects)
  • Measured effect of rehearsal on STM
  • Results: roughly half of the children didn't rehearse spontaneously (however, are capable of doing) - if you teach them to use rehearsal that improves their memory 
  • Applying organisation to sequence makes it much easier to remember 
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Cognitive and language development (2) - 4

Development of processing strategies: 

  • the effect of verbal rehearsal on short-term memory:
  • Part 1 (Flavell et al, 1966)
  • Method: 5, 7 and 10 year olds shown 7 pictures
  • Experimenter points to 2-5 pictures
  • Children recall pictres immediately or after 15 seconds (in the order they were presented)
  • % rehearsal determined by E-lip reading children
  • Results: Age 5 (10% rehearsers), Age 7 (60% rehearsers), Age 10 (85% rehearsers)
  • Part 2 (Keeney et al 1967)
  • Method: 6-7 year old rehearsers vs non-rehearsers 
  • Non-rehearsers were taught to rehearse (went from 0% to 75% rehearsal) half of the rehearsers were given the same training (to check it was not giving them some non-speicific effects)
  • Measured effect of rehearsal on STM
  • Results: roughly half of the children didn't rehearse spontaneously (however, are capable of doing) - if you teach them to use rehearsal that improves their memory 
  • Applying organisation to sequence makes it much easier to remember 
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cognitive and language development (2) - 5

Task: learning list of words. 8 year olds: typically just repeat words. 13 year olds: recall more words by organising the words into category groups. Organisation strategy improves through school years, is used spontaneously by older children, but can be taught to younger ones.

Siegler's overlapping waves theory: Don't think in terms of stages (like Piaget) it's much more variability and individual strategies. The strategies compete with each other. It includes gradual frequencies of the wave. Multiple strategies may be used at any one time. Operating simultaneously throughout time. Some strategies are discovered (adaptive) some die out (unadaptive).

Metacognition: understanding, knowledge and executive control of one's own cognitive capacity (e.g. you will not remember someones phone number long term unless you take specific actions to place it into your LTM) (being able to maintain and increase your efforts when being faces with a difficult task. As children develop they become more aware of their cognitive abilities and limitations. Markman, 1979: 7 year olds are much worse than 11 year olds at monitoring their understanding of instructions (gave children deliberatly bad instructions on how to play a card game, the 7 year old did not notice this until they started playing the game whereas the 11 year old did.

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cognitive and language development (2) - 6

The IP approach and education:

  • analyse the requirements of problems that you present to pupils
  • reduce processing demands of a task to a minimum and keep them within the childs' processing capabilities (make sure no more bits of information are given at any given time than the child can cope with)
  • Treat the childs' errors as opportunities to promote new learning 
  • Encourage the childs metacognitive abilities 
  • Help children cope with their limited processing capacity by adopting suitable strategies 

Evaluating the IP approach:

  • Yields a detailed analysis of seperate components of cognitive functioning (more detail than say Piaget's theory, tries to combine different approaches together)
  • Numerous experimental studies, using rigerous methods and systematic hypothesis testing, have generated extensive insights into how cognitive processing changes with age (mainly group methodology - vigorous) 
  • Findings from IP research have helped develop new teaching techniques (e.g. schools encourage children to reflect their own mental processing to develop metacognitive 
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cognitive and language development (2) - 7

The IP approach and education:

  • analyse the requirements of problems that you present to pupils
  • reduce processing demands of a task to a minimum and keep them within the childs' processing capabilities (make sure no more bits of information are given at any given time than the child can cope with)
  • Treat the childs' errors as opportunities to promote new learning 
  • Encourage the childs metacognitive abilities 
  • Help children cope with their limited processing capacity by adopting suitable strategies 

Evaluating the IP approach:

  • Yields a detailed analysis of seperate components of cognitive functioning (more detail than say Piaget's theory, tries to combine different approaches together)
  • Numerous experimental studies, using rigerous methods and systematic hypothesis testing, have generated extensive insights into how cognitive processing changes with age (mainly group methodology - vigorous) 
  • Findings from IP research have helped develop new teaching techniques (e.g. schools encourage children to reflect their own mental processing to develop metacognitive 
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Cognitive and language development (2) - 8

  • metacogntive awareness (they don't just teach facts they also teach a bunch of strategies e.g. check what you know)
  • There are opportunities for combining its findings with studies of psychophysiological changes that occur with age (e.g. exploring changes in the brain that might parallel increased memory capacity with age) (how does the brain change as a result of this)
  • Findings from IP research are sometimes disparate and do not seem to offer a coherent, rounded theory of cognitve developement in the same way as Piaget did)
  • Use of the computer analogy means that IP researcher focus mainly on the logical aspects of cognitive processing and less on the emotional, creative and social aspects that affect thinking
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Cognitive and language development (3)

Categorical speech perception: (from 1-4 weeks) infant can discriminate between speech sounds (e.g. "ba" v "pa" (response to reflex and stimuli e.g. hunger)

Cooing: (4-8 weeks) infant produces drawn out vowel sounds ("oooh", "aaah") (first signs of language production) (voluntary control of vocalisation)

Word Segmentation: (from 7 months) infants can work out where the boundaries are between words in a constant flow of speech. (pre-reckless of comprehension) (played a couple minutes of 4 words, one continous stream of speech [novel words] can the child eventually work out where one word ends and another begins)

Babbling: (6-10 months) infant produces consonant vowel syllables (e.g. "ma") repeatedly in a string ("mamamama") (comprehend and produce words)

Word comprehension: (from 6 months) increases by average of at 25 words per month from 12-16 months of age. Understands average of 14k words by 6 years of age. (mainly words from objects - western world)

Word production: (from 8 months) increases rapidly (e.g. 14 words at 14 months, 300 by 24)

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cognitive and language development (3) - 2

Word combination: (from 18 months) child combines two words in telegraphic speech (e.g. "more juice") (get rid of the non-essential words, getting the essential information across) (learn to combine words in the correct order - syntax language)

Mastery of grammar: (from 30 months) child begins producing sentences with prepositions, conjuctions etc. 

Language development questions:

  • How do children acquire mastery of language in such a short time?
  • Is language acquisition governed by unique laws or principles and supported by special-purpose structures and process or by general abilities that apply to both linguistic and nonlinguistic aspects of the world?

Learning accounts: Skinner, 1957: Language is a verbal behaviour (any behaviour that has particualr properties) (verbal - misleading, not just speech). Verbal behaviour reinforced through the mediation of other people. Verbal behaviour can be categorised in terms of the stimuli that precede it (antecedents) and the reinforcing stimuli that follow it (consequences) e.g. mands (similar to demands/requests)

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cognitive and language development (3) - 3

Verbal behaviour: Mand: a verbal response which specifies it's reinforcer and whose antecedent is a state of deprivation 

  • Conditions:
  • A - child 'wants' ball (antecedents)
  • B - "ball" (mand)
  • C - child is given the ball (consequece)

Nativist accounts: Chomsky: asserted that language is too complex and is acquired too quickly and with too little environmental support to be the product of the reinforcement or other environmental factors. Therefore, it must be governed by an innate structure: A language acquisition device (LAD) (decipher constant stream of speech) LAD has a universal grammar built into it.

Evidence consistent with Nativist accounts: Sensitive periods for language devlopment. Children deprived of first language input in the sensitive period do not develop language fully. Learning a second language is easier in childhood than adulthood (making an appeal to biology) (took chinese immigrants and measured their knowledge of grammar. 10 years of exposure wasn't as effective in adults)

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cognitive and language development (3) - 4

Critique of nativist accounts: sensitive period evidence is not exclusively consistent with nativist accounts. Nativists tend to have an improverished view of environmental influences in language acquisition e.g. Brown found mother rarely gave explicit reinforcers for her child Eve's correct utterances (expressions by the mother of approval e.g. well done) BUT Moerk found Eve's mother often gave eve implicit reinforcers for correct utterances (e.g. repeating the utterance when the utterance was correct and not repeating it when it was not correct)

Model learning accounts: Modern behaviourists acknowledge that new behaviours can emerge without reinforcement through their studies of stimulus equivalence. In an equivalence study, you can use reinforcers to teach a child to point to objects upon hearing the corresponding words and then find they can say the words upon seeing the objects, without further training or reinforcement.

Language development: factors and abilities:

  • Infant/child directed speech: adult's speech to infants is slower, higher-pitched, more clearly pronounced, more repetitive, more exaggerated than speech to other adults. IDS is used implicitly to grab and hold the infants attention, help them discriminate the basic sound units
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cognitive and language development (3) - 5

  • that make up their language (phonemes), signal approval or disapproval and mark out corresponding referents. 
  • Joint Attention: infants monitor adults' direction of gaze and use it to determine what the adult is talking about
  • Cross-situational learning: infants notice regularities across learning episodes 
  • Linguistic constraints/principles: e.g. whole-object constraint 
  • Under and over extension 
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evolutionary and biological foundations

Evolutionary Psychology: builds upon Darwin principles of natural selection and sexual selection to help explain an organisms mental states and behaviour.

Natural Selection:

  • Variation: organisms vary as regards characteristics 
  • Inheritence: only some of the characteristics will be inherited 
  • Selection: characteristics that survival or reproduction will be retained and passed onto future generations 

Sexual selection: the selection characteristics that aid individuals to gain access to mates

  • Intra-sexual competition (males competing) 
  • Inter-sexual selection (choosy females)

The products of evolution: 

  • Adaptions e.g. umbilical cord
  • By products e.g. belly button 
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evolutionary and biological foundations 2

  • noise e.g. shape of belly button
  • Evolutionary psychologists attempt to identify and describe psychological mechanisms that are true adaptions 

Inclusive fitness and Kin Altruism: individuals pass on copies of their genes not only directly through their offspring but also indirectly by aiding other relatives (Kin Altruism). We can pass on 100% of our genes by helping to raise

  • Two offspring (50% each)
  • four grandchildren (25% each)
  • Eight cousins (12.5% each)
  • Inclusive fitness = number of genes passed on directly and indirectly. Underlies altruism.

Adaptionist Theory: Morning pregnancy sickness = normally considered a maldaptive illness. E.P perspective = an evolutionary adaption to protect the developing foetus from teratogens etc. 

Parental Investment Theory:

  • Males compete for females, EP says its due to sexual asymmetry of costs in producing offspring
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evolutionary and biological foundations 3

  • Females are the choosy sex because the cost is greater for females than males, so females have more reason to choose mates.

Biological foundations: Basic genetics: 

  • within each cell is a nucleus, containing chromosomes which store and transmit genetic code
  • chromosomes are made up of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid)
  • a gene is a segment of DNA along the lenght of the chromosome 
  • large proportion of human and nonhuman genes are identical e.g. chimp vs human = 98-99%
  • one pair of chromosomes is the sex chromosomes (** = female, XY = males)
  • original cell splits during meiosis (type of cell division that reduces the number of chromosomes in the parent cell by half produces four gamete cells) to form gametes (sex cells): sperm and ovum with number of chromosomes 
  • during fertilisation, sperm and ovum unite to form zygote with 46 chromosomes. 
  • Random pairing, crossover and mutation increase genetic diversity 
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evolutionary and biological foundations 4

  • Genotype: genetic material in individual inherits 
  • Phenotype: observable expression of genotypes 
  • Genotypes become expressed as phenotypes through the environment 

Dominant - recessive genes mendal: 

  • two genes (or alleles) control each dichotomous trait (a trait that seperates completely a set of living organisms that belong to the same species)
  • If the alleles are the same (homozygous) then the trait is inherited 
  • If the alleles (and not recessive allele) determines the inherited trait

Dominant - recessive characteristics/disorders:

Characteristics:

  • Dominant: dark hair, curly hair, dimples, tongue curling, far-sightedness, double-jointedness, types A, B, rh+ blood
  • Recessive: blond hair, red hair, straight hair, near-sightedness, cataracts, types O and rh- negative blood
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evolutionary and biological foundations 5

Disorders:

  • Dominant: huntingtons disease, marfan syndrome 
  • Recessive: phenylketonuria (PKU), cystic fibrosis, sickle cell anameia (sick cell trait = incomplete dominance)

X-linked inhereitence:

  • Occurs when a harmful recessive allele is carried on the X-chromosome
  • Affect many more males than females
  • Females sex chromosomes match, so that harmful recessive X can be suppressed by a normal dominant X allele 
  • Males sex chromosomes do not match, so harmful recessive X allele is unchecked
  • Conditions include male-pattern baldness, red-green colour blindness, haemophilia, fragile x syndrome 

Polygenetic inheritence:

  • Intercations among multiple inherited genes 
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evolutionary and biological foundations 6

  • source of many common disorders
  • often work in conjuction with environmental factors
  • conditions include some forms of cancer and heart disease, diabetes, schizophrenia and ADHD

Chromosomal anomalies:

  • Errors in meiosis result in zygote with more or less than the normal complement of chromosomes 
  • Downs syndrome: mothers ova do not divide properly. Fertiled egg contains extra copy of chromosome 12 
  • Produces intellectual disability, memory and speech problems, slow motor development, sweet temperament 
  • Increased risk for older mothers, possible ova weakening?
  • Turners Syndrome (X0): female has missing X chromosome, produces short stature, stunted sexual development, infertility 
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Learning Difficulties

Stages of reading development: (Chall,1979) 

  • Stage 0 (to 6 years) - prereading: 
  • children acquire prerequisites to reading such as knowing the letters of the alphabet and the individual sounds that make up words (phonemic awareness) (understand what sounds go with letters)
  • Stage 1 (7-8 years) - phonological recoding:
  • children acquire ability to translate letters into sounds and blend sounds into words ('sounding out') (can give sound correspondence for each letter)
  • Stage 2 (8-9 years) - read simple material fluently 
  • Stage 3 (10-14 years) - reading to learn:
  • children acquire complex, new information from text
  • Stage 4 (14 years+) - reading to appreciate multiple perspectives (novels and plays)

Pro-reading development:

  • pre-schoolers learning letter names is positively correlated with (but does not cause) later reading achievement
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learning Difficulties 2

  • Preschoolers' phonemic awareness (PA) predicts later reading achievement 
  • Explicitly teaching PA to 4-5 year olds enhances their later reading and spelling (require phonemic awareness)
  • Nursery rhymes as implicit to PA training (children with greater phonemic awareness, end up reading more and better

Phonological recoding:

  • words can be read in two ways:
  • Phonological recoding (PR) - direct route, associate whole word with its sound and meaning
  • Visual based retrieval (VB) - faster than PR as you can miss out all the steps
  • Beginer readers rely on PR (because they haven't found the link)
  • PR helps build up VB
  • Shift from PR to VB occurs most rapidly with words that are short, frequent, and regular (that can be sounded out) (can't use phonological recoding on irregular words such as lose).
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learning Difficulties 3

Dyslexia: 

  • difficulty in reading (and spelling) that does not result from general visual, motor or intellectual deficits or lack of educational opportunities 
  • poor phonological awareness and recoding 
  • poor verbal short-term memory, slower recall of names and objects
  • Impired reading of pseudowords (has a feel of a word but isn't a word e.g. 'parding')

Genetic base:

  • more common in boys than girls (15% english speaking boys, 5% girls)
  • Concordance is higher in MZ twins than DZ (MZ = 84% concordance rate, DZ - 48%)
  • has heritability estimate of at 50%

Environmental factors: 

  • dyslexic difficulties can be forestalled by appropriate education and compnsatory strategies 
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learning Difficulties 4

Strategies for Dyslexia:

  • strategies that de-emphaise PR and emphasises VB retrieval are largerly ineffective 
  • strategies that enhance PR work best
  • drawing analogies to known words with similar spellings
  • generating alternative pronunciations of vowels when the first attempt at sounding out doesn't yield a plausible word

Mathematical development:

  • most children learn to count by 3 years of age
  • understand 5 counting principles
  • one to one correspondence: being able to match one object to one other object/person
  • stable order: the counting tags chosen must be arranged in a repeated order
  • cardinality: number of objects in a set, the last the number is the object
  • order irrelevance: doesn't matter which way you begin the counting: you just have to remember where you started 
  • Abstraction: notion that any set of objects or events can be counted 
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learning difficulties 5

  • understanding of principles revealed in 'puppet studies'
  • 4-5 years: adding by counting from 1
  • 6 years: adding by counting on (e.g. start from 9 and count on from there) and 'decomposition' (dividing a problem into two easier ones)
  • gradual development of numerical magnitude representations 
  • childrens accuracy of NMR increases with age:
  • 3-6 years: numbers 1-10
  • 6-8 years: numbers 1-100
  • 8-12 years: numbers 1-1000
  • Improving childs NMR (numerical magnitude) improves subsequent learning of arithmetic

Development of conceptual understanding of arithmetic:

  • begins developing in preschool years with understanding of simple concepts e.g. commutativity of addition (a+b = b+a)
  • more complex concepts develop much later e.g. mathematical equality 
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learning difficulties 6

Mathamatical equality:

  • in earliest sums, no numbers appear after the equal sign e.g. 3 + 4 + 5 = (=means start adding)
  • in later sums, numbers appear on both sides of the equal sign e.g. 3 + 4 + 5 = _+5
  • most 9 year olds in the US get this wrong, saying 3 + 4 + 5 = 12 + 5
  • but when explaining why the point to the original 4 numbers showing implicit knowledge that the 4th number is significant (gesture-speech mismatch)

Gesture-speech mismatches:

  • children who exhibit G-S mismatches benefit more from instruction on maths equality problems than peers who do not
  • G-S mismatch is a sign that is ready to learn and is in the zone of proximol development for maths equality problems 
  • Children who are encouraged to getsure while providing answers to maths equality problems end up performing better than controls
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learning difficulties 6

Mathamatical equality:

  • in earliest sums, no numbers appear after the equal sign e.g. 3 + 4 + 5 = (=means start adding)
  • in later sums, numbers appear on both sides of the equal sign e.g. 3 + 4 + 5 = _+5
  • most 9 year olds in the US get this wrong, saying 3 + 4 + 5 = 12 + 5
  • but when explaining why the point to the original 4 numbers showing implicit knowledge that the 4th number is significant (gesture-speech mismatch)

Gesture-speech mismatches:

  • children who exhibit G-S mismatches benefit more from instruction on maths equality problems than peers who do not
  • G-S mismatch is a sign that the child is ready to learn and is in the zone of proximol development for maths equality problems 
  • Children who are encouraged to getsure while providing answers to maths equality problems end up performing better than controls
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learning difficulties 7

Dyscalculia: a condition that specifically affects the ability to acquire arithmetical skills (IQ is in a normal range) Difficulties with:

  • learning to count (not as facile as typically developing children)
  • understading simple number concepts
  • numerical magnitude representations 
  • learning number facts (lack confidence even when they produce the correct answer)
  • Affects 3-6% of the population

Causes of Dycalculia?

  • severe cases may be caused by abnorma functioning of a specific brain region
  • milder cases may have environmental causes e.g. minimal exposure to numbers before school
  • may, in some cases, be linked with dyslexia (could misundertsand the wording of the question, in print, not the actual mathamatical question)
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learning difficulties 8

Strategies for Dyscalculia:

  • targeting improvements in intuitive appreciation of numbers can improve dyscalculics arithmetic
  • Fuchs et al, study of fractions:
  • Instructions in magnitude comparison ('which is larger, 1/2 or 1/5?) and number line estimation ('where would 1/2 go on this number line?') improved 9-10 year olds learning of fraction arithmetic 
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