PSYC 111 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Child Development, John Bowlby, Baby Food
27 Jun 2018
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Developmental psychology is the study of how behavior changes over the lifespan.
Considerations in Developmental Psychology:
Post Hoc Fallacy: The logical error - the mistake of assuming that because A comes
before B, A must cause B - is called post hoc fallacy.
Bidirectional Influences: Developmental influences are directional. Parents influence
their children's behavior, which in turn influences parents' reaction.
Challenges of studying Developmental Psychology:
Cross-sectional design: It is a design in which researchers examine people who are at
different ages at a single point in time. However, they do not control for cohort effects.
oEffects due to the fact that sets of people who lived during one time period,
called cohorts, can differ in some systematic way from sets of people who lived during a
different time period.
Longitudinal design: In this, psychologists track the development of the same group of
participants over time.
oHowever, they can result in attrition, which is when participants drop out of the
study before it is completed. Also, it can be difficult to generalize the results because
the people can be raised differently and have experienced different things.
Prenatal Development:
During the prenatal (prior to birth) period of development, the human body acquires its basic form
and structure.
Germinal stage: First and shortest stage. Begins when the sperm cell fertilizes with the
egg to produce the zygote and ends when it attaches to the uterine wall. It lasts for 2 weeks.
This is important because when it attaches to the uterine wall, it will start its dependence on
the mother. Amniotic fluid will be produced and the placenta forms. Not many zygotes last
this stage. The zygote begins to divide and forms the blastocyst, and attaches to the uterine
wall.
Embryonic stage: Starts with attachment to the uterine wall and ends with the
formation of bone cells. Lasts from 2nd to 8th week. It quadruples in length. Organs start to
form and operate and the embryo starts to move. This stage is very sensitive. There are
critical period for all organs and this stage is the most susceptible for organ malfunction due
to external agents. These external agents are called teratogens such as alcohol, smoking,
depression, malnourishment.
Fetal stage: Starts with the formation of bone cells and ends whenever the birth occurs.
From 8th week to almost 38 weeks. This is when the fetal grows up to 20 inches and
movements occur which the mother can feel. Mothers with twins report the movements to
occur. We can hear the heartbeat of the fetus and also determine the sex of the fetus at this
stage. They sleep and wake up, showing their activity. There is rapid growth but at the 7th
month, it slows down .At this point, the fetus can survive outside in the world. Eyelids are
about to open and the brain begins to weigh similar to that of a newborn. At birth average
length is 20 inches and average weight is 7.5 pounds.
Motor Development:
Early Reflexes: Infants are born with motor behaviors or reflexes triggered by certain
stimuli. These are innate. They fulfill survival needs. The sucking reflex is a response to oral
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stimulation. Rooting reflex fulfils the survival need of eating. Grasping and stepping are
reflexes used by infants to learn how to walk. Babinski is if you stroke a baby's sole from
bottom to top, they will stretch their toes and curl them in. Moro is when someone throws a
baby in the air to catch them, and the baby will open his arms up and close them in a motion
of embrace.
Motor milestones: Motor behaviors are bodily motions that occur as a result of self-
initialed force that moves the bones and muscles. The major motor milestones during
development include sitting up, crawling, standing unsupported, and walking. Different
children reach these milestones at different ages but they're usually in the same order.
Variability: There is a variability in how kids learn to walk or perform other actions.
Some kids might roll on the floor instead of crawling and try to get on their knees instead of
sitting up straight. Thus, there's variations in movements and times in regards to motor
development in children.
Cognitive Development:
Cognitive development is how we acquire the ability to learn, think, communicate and remember
over time.
Piaget's Theory:
He attempted to identify the stages that children pass through on their way to adult-like thinking.
He believed that children are very active when it comes to learning. Children learn these things
without instructions from other older people. They acquire new abilities and apply them. He
believed there were certain general principles:
Assimilation: The process of absorbing new experience into our current understanding.
Accommodation: the process of altering beliefs about the world to make them more
compatible with experience. This also helps children enter a new stage and look at the world
in a new way.
Piaget saw the development as stages that children experience and each stage is different from the
other. It isn't a gradual increase, it is developing from one stage to another and the way a child sees
from a stage is very different from the way children from the other stage see.
Piaget's Stages of Development:
Sensorimotor stage: It focusses on the here and now. They gain information through
physical interactions. Children lack object permanence, that is, the understanding that objects
continue to exist even when they are out of view. This isn't prevalent in babies. They also
exhibit reflexes during this stage. Toward the end of this stage, they learn to imitate other
people.
Preoperational stage: From 2 until 7 years, marked by an ability to construct mental
representations of experience. They understand symbolic representations. They learn that
one thing can depict another such as using a banana as a phone and a finger for toothbrush
during child play. There is an improvement in language. Their drawings depict more than they
did initially. Piaget observes that a child's thinking is very rigid in this period.
oLack of conservation means merely changing the appearance of objects does
not change their key properties. For example, there are 2 cups of liquid A and B. Take
one cup and put it in a flat bowl in front of a child. When the child is asked which one
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Document Summary
Developmental psychology is the study of how behavior changes over the lifespan. Post hoc fallacy: the logical error - the mistake of assuming that because a comes before b, a must cause b - is called post hoc fallacy. Parents influence their children"s behavior, which in turn influences parents" reaction. Cross-sectional design: it is a design in which researchers examine people who are at different ages at a single point in time. However, they do not control for cohort effects. o. Effects due to the fact that sets of people who lived during one time period, called cohorts, can differ in some systematic way from sets of people who lived during a different time period. Longitudinal design: in this, psychologists track the development of the same group of participants over time. o. However, they can result in attrition, which is when participants drop out of the study before it is completed.
