PSYC3341

Why is there a scepticism of the competence of younger children to provide evidence to the court?

"Most dangerously, a policeman taking a statement from a child may without ill will use leading questions so that the child tends to confuse what actually happened with the answer suggested implicitly by the question" (Heydon, 1984)

what is the effect of bilingualism on flexibility of infant memory?

- 18-month-olds who are bilingual have higher imitation scores when you ask them to do a hard transfer task - Usually, language things aren't useful until you're learning language but this phenomenon is true of younger babies as well: 6-month-olds who are learning more than one language have an advantage over monolingual babies when you ask them to imitate with a different puppet

how did Ceci, Ross and Toglia adapt the Loftus 3-stage paradigm for studying the age-range changes in suggestibility in kids?

- 4 age groups (3.5 years, 5-year-olds, 8-year-olds, 11-year-olds) x 2 (control vs mislead) - Most of the kids in the control group (i.e., when there is no misleading) did really well on the recognition test - When we introduce the misleading suggestions however, every group showed significant suggestibility effects - Only the very youngest children showed a higher level of suggestibility - there was no difference in the size of the suggestibility effects between the other 3 age groups (i.e., the 11-year-olds were just as susceptible to misleading suggestions as the 5- and 8-year-olds)

describe Weikum's 2007 study of babies' ability to discriminate the look of language

- 4- and 6-month-olds can discriminate languages with the sound turned off, but 8-month-olds cannot (if they're monolingual) - by 8-months only the bilingual babies can discriminate between the looks of languages, the 8-month-old monolingual babies can't --> experience with both languages allows bilingual infants to retain the ability to discriminate between them at 8 months

monster in a box study (Bourcher & Davis, 2000)

- 5- and 6-year-olds are shown one (of three) sealed and empty box and were told what to imagine was in it - They were then asked a series of questions about whether they thought something was really in there. - In the positive and neutral conditions, they were happy to open the box but in the negative condition, they were reluctant to open it (even though they acknowledge that it was empty) - their imagination is not totally divorced from their reality even in early school years

Learmonth et al. (2004) made the context change smaller/less significant - all testing was done within the babies' house. What were the results of this?

- 6-month-olds imitate in all conditions except when it's a different room AND a different mat (i.e., no similarities to learning context) - both 9- and 12-month-olds can both handle all conditions - Note: it is not the case that by 12-months infants can handle changes in context and 6-month-olds can't; not switch or stage like (not quantitative) - the magnitude of the changes they can handle changes really gradually (qualitative)

what developmental pattern do we see emerging for the understanding of false beliefs?

- < 3.5 years: typically give a realist answer (i.e., answer based on their own knowledge, not on the basis of false belief knowledge) - 3.5 years - 4 years: answer inconsistently so sometimes they give the false belief answer, sometimes they don't; show confusion/confliction - By 4 years: most choose the correct false belief answer

what is the "Sally-Anne" (displacement) task?

- A child watches a number of events in front of them (with puppets) and is then asked to make some predictions - This is a false belief task because to answer correctly, you have to take into account Sally's false belief (i.e., belief that the ball hasn't moved --> false, it has moved) - Sometimes kids will (egotistically) assume that because they know where the ball is (since they've watched the whole interaction), Sally should automatically know where the ball is too. However, this doesn't take into account the false belief perspective of Sally.

what are the applied implications of our knowledge of symbolic thought in children?

- A common prop that is used in child sexual abuse forensic interviewing is "anatomically correct dolls" so the kids can show what they observed/experienced - For older kids, they may be good at enhancing kids' reports but for younger kids (particularly under 3), there is evidence that accurate recall using these dolls is no better than using no dolls at all - This is in line with the symbolic thought hypotheses above because using these dolls assumes a high level of understanding of the connections between symbol and referent (because the doll is used as a symbol to represent something real-life) - If 2.5-year-olds struggle with this relationship, then you can't expect them to accurately use the dolls for their intended purpose - So, don't assume symbol-referred relations that are transparent to adults are equally obvious to children

what is the difference in alcohol consumption patterns between adult rats and naive teen rats?

- Adult rats need to be conditioned to drink alcohol (and from a state of thirst too) - they won't drink it voluntarily - Naïve adolescent rats will voluntarily consume 2-3 times as much alcohol as adult rats

according to Mischel et al. (1988), pre-schoolers who don't eat the marshmallow grow into adolescents who...

- Are more interpersonally competent - Have better concentration, self-control and frustration tolerance - Get better SAT scores, higher IQs Hence, inhibiting a response (especially to an emotional situation) was found to be highly predictive of success

describe babies' ability to discriminate between different auditory speech

- Around 9 months of age infants lose the ability to discriminate between speech contrast that are not part of their native language (Werker and Tees, 1984) Kuhl, Tsao & Liu, 2003 - 9-month-old infants from Seattle exposed either to Mandarin or English - Babies with in-person training can still discriminate between the contrasts in Mandarin. Interestingly, babies with audiotape experience or video but not live interaction don't have the same benefit

what were the results of the original big snoopy/little snoopy task?

- By age 3, children do pretty well. They have 75-90% of errorless retrievals - But at age 2.5 (only 6-months younger) they're very bad at it - only 20% of errorless retrievals

what 3 notable observations came from the Australian Secondary Students' Alcohol and Drug Survey, 2005

- By the age of 16-17, binge drinking is relatively common (more than 5 for females and 7 for males in a period of a week) - Most teenagers have tried alcohol by 14 years of age - Teenagers tend to binge; on average they drink twice as much per session as adults

what is the "Smarties" (Container) task?

- Child watches some characters interact and is then asked to make a prediction about what an objective 3rd party expects to be in the box - From a false belief perspective, Jenny should say "smarties" tests whether the child understands the false belief perspective or whether they give an egocentric/realist answer

describe the effects on brain development of institutionalisation

- Community group: response to visual stimulus is a little bit faster and bigger than both the foster and institutionalised groups - The foster care group is bigger (but not really faster) than the institutionalised group - If you're placed into foster care before 24 months, the power spectrum of your EEG looks more similar to community kids than if you're placed after 24 months

the researchers behind the Induction then Recognition (ITR) Paradigm said that being able to deduce which category has beta-cells could be done one of two ways:

- Conceptually: cats have beta cells - this is a property of the cat category; OR - Perceptually: memorising the stimuli = the thing that looks like this has beta-cells and the thing that looks like that does not

describe Albert Michotte's launching illusion

- Determines how sensitive we are to spatial/temporal contiguity - Adults are highly sensitive to this illusion that is driven by spatial and temporal contiguity - By 6 months, babies babies have picked up something about the importance of spatial and temporal contiguity in suggesting causal relations

How were Sloutsky's Developmental ITR findings re-thought?

- During the training phase, they allowed kids and adults to look at the pictures as long as they liked --> progression from trial-to-trial was self-paced - Without controlling the rate of exposure to those stimuli this is problematic: adults will quickly detect category-property relationship (such that they have little exposure to each stimulus); and children, while they still may understand the category-based nature of the task, could find the stimuli interesting or be more cautious and end up with longer exposure times to it - Perhaps then, the differences in memory performance in the induction condition could be due to differences in stimulus exposure rather than differences in reasoning strategies

in terms of multisensory integration, what can 4 month olds integrate?

- Emotion (facial expressions with voice) - Gender (male voice with male face) - Speech sounds (vowel sounds with mouth movements) - Speech synchrony (soundtrack with mouth movements) - Number (items in a display with number of drumbeats)

what are event-related potentials (ERPs)?

- Event-related= in response to a stimulus - High temporal resolution - good at picking time differences in brain activity - Low spatial resolution - not good at telling you where the signal came from in the brain

Can kids transfer screen learning to real life?

- Experimental: Half of the 12- 15- and 18-month-olds were shown video recordings of the puppet task and the other half were shown the demonstration live - Can see that the number of actions that video-demonstration babies performed at test is the same as the control group in 12- and 15-month-olds and above chance, but still not as good as the live demonstration group in 18-month-olds

describe Repacholi & Gopnik's experiment about understanding the relation between desires and behaviour

- Experimenter presents two bowls of food: one of crackers (appealing food), one of broccoli (unappealing food). - Child tastes each food and tells the experimenter which he prefers. - Then the experimenter tastes each food and produces either a happy emotional expression ("Mmm!") or a disgusted expression ("Eww!") - Experimenter holds her hand out in between the two bowls and asks the child "Can you give me some?" (without looking at or indicating either bowl). - The child then has to decide which food the adult would prefer - 18-month-olds gave the food the experimenter was happy about, even if it was not the one they themselves preferred. 14-month-olds gave the food they preferred.

Casey et al., did a 40-year follow up of the original marshmallow task. What happened and what was found?

- Followed up the original participants from the marshmallow task when they were adults and put them in an fMRI scanner while they did a test of inhibition: Go/No-go task - Those adults, who as kids, waited a long time for their marshmallows didn't perform any differently than those who waited a short time on the inhibition task in the "cool" condition - But when the task involved "hot" cues (had affective valence associated with them), the short-delay kids were more likely to be impulsive and press for the wrong faces than long-delay kids - Their inhibition ability as pre-schoolers mapped onto their inhibition ability as adults

what were the results of the incredible shrinking machine test? (as a method of testing Hayne's theory of childhood amnesia)

- For every age group, performance on the verbal memory tests were much worse than other modalities, especially for the youngest babies. By comparison, their memories when tested visually or behaviourally were much better

what factors affect infant and adult memories alike?

- Forgetting over time - Length of exposure - Encoding specificity

what do we know about foster care and improving cognition?

- Foster care is effective in improving cognitive function for those children placed before age 2 - Duration of time in foster care is not as important as the timing of foster care intervention

describe Franchack & Adolph's 2014 experiment testing affordance recalibration in response to actual growth (pregnancy) vs lab-induced (pregnancy packs) manipulations to body size

- Franchak & Adolph (2014) tested pregnant women monthly over the course of pregnancy to determine whether they adapted to changing possibilities for squeezing through doorways. - Despite gaining belly girth and weight, pregnant women were as accurate as nonpregnant adults. - In addition, non-pregnant adults wore a "pregnancy pack" that instantly increased the size of their bellies, and gauged "passability" before and after attempting passage. - The judgments were grossly inaccurate prior to first attempt but participants were able to rapidly adapt to the prosthesis during the test session and were only marginally worse than actual pregnant women. - These findings indicate that experience allows for a rapid perceptual-motor recalibration for certain types of actions.

what are the 2 modes of perception under physiognomic characteristics?

- Geometrical-technical mode of perception: perceiving objects in terms of their objective, measurable qualities; - Physiognomic Perception: perceiving and reacting to stimuli according to their dynamic, emotional, expressive qualities e.g., blue is a cool colour with sad connotations while orange is a warm colour with happy connotations; slow slouched person = sad while fast slouched person = aggressive --> argues that we do not reason about these stimuli but instead it is an instinctive perceptual observation

what is the imitation of "complete" vs "incomplete" actions (Meltzhoff) experiment

- He got the infants to watch the adults interacting with a whole range of stimuli - In the incomplete condition, the babies watched the adults attempt to deconstruct the stimuli. In the complete condition, the babies watched the adults do this successfully. - Researcher was interested in whether the babies would just imitate the complete or incomplete conditions when given the stimuli to play with

Scarf et al. tested the operative conditioning hypothesis as an alternative to the helper/hinderer study. What was found?

- Helper becomes associated with collision when bouncing is removed = neutral stimulus is then preferred - Whichever character is associated with bouncing becomes the preferred

what are the results of the puppet task?

- If you change the context, 6-month-olds have a low imitation rate. By 12- and 18-months, babies will remember the task irrespective of where you test them = their flexibility for remembering the memory across contexts improves between 6- and 12-months of age - On average, 12-month-olds produce 1.5 of those actions and 18-month-olds produce closer to 2

what was the take-home message from the incredible shrinking machine test? (as a method of testing Hayne's theory of childhood amnesia)

- If you lay down a memory as a baby, you can't access it via verbal means --> babies were never able to translate their non-verbal memories into verbal memories

what is William's syndrome and how does it manifest in ToM?

- Impaired general intelligence but socially, they are outgoing, affectionate and don't have problems making friends - Spared (i.e., good) performance on False Belief /Social Cognition task

Do younger siblings locomote earlier than older siblings? (Berger & Nuzzo, 2008)

- In some families, yes - Researchers asked about both crawling and walking in pairs of siblings - However, it was a small and flawed sample since they did it retrospectively: they had the younger sibling come into the lab and asked parents to remember when the older sibling crawled and walked memory bias - Found that in the case of crawling, there were some cases where the younger sibling crawled first and other cases where the older sibling crawled first (about 50/50 split) --> not really compelling evidence for either theory - In the case of walking, most dyads showed the youngest sibling to walk earlier than the older sibling (60/40) --> imitation theory

what are the criticisms of the Ceci/Loftus paradigm?

- In the research paradigm, the events/details the children see/experience lack personal significance (i.e., you're watching events happening to other people) when in reality, the things they're reporting on have had personal significance to them - The situations presented in the lab also contain a low level of emotional involvement/arousal (which is no like what happens in real life)

describe the Induction then Recognition (ITR) Paradigm procedure (stage 1)

- Inductive prediction group: on each trial they see a picture of an animal and they then have to make an inductive prediction about it (e.g., it does or doesn't have beta-cells) --> on each trial they're given feedback that the animal either does or doesn't have beta-cells - Controls: on each trial they see a picture of an animal and they then have to memorise each - None of the images are given labels - Over training, the experimental children learn that only one category of thing has beta-cells e.g., just cats

what was learnt from the mobile conjugate task?

- Infants remember longer (forget things less quickly) as they get older i.e., their ability to retain a memory over a period of time gets longer and longer - At age 2 months, babies only appear to remember over a delay of less than a week - By age 3 months, babies appear to remember over a delay of a week (despite receiving the same training - By age 6 months, their memory is effective up to 2 weeks - The ability to retain learned information increases over time - babies forget less things as they get older

what is special about inductive reasoning?

- It's intuitive and requires no special training - It happens quickly and happens early in development (by 13-months)

why do 2.5 year olds perform so poorly but 3 year olds do so well on the big snoopy/little snoopy task?

- It's not inadequate or inaccessible memory representations (because they can still retrieve the toy in the model) - it's not that they don't understand the task (because they search systematically; they look first where the toy was hidden on the previous trial. They're also obviously motivated, paying attention, keeping track of info, just not the right info) - The 2.5-year-olds seem to be treating the model and the referent as independent

what are the goals of teaching young children?

- Learn things about their environment (instruction) - Stimulate them to explore the environment (exploration)

what predicts a high and very high risk of alcohol dependence?

- Low response to alcohol = high risk of alcoholism regardless of genetic vulnerability (because you drink more to feel the same as someone who is more responsive) - Genetic vulnerability + low response = very high risk

what is the developmental/educational significance of inductive reasoning?

- Maximizes the benefits of previous learning - Inductive reasoning is a part of most tests of general ability - Targeted as a key learning goal in Australian Educational curricula (ACARA "Thinking Strategies") - Key part of scientific reasoning

what is the effect of locomotion experience on flexibility in memory?

- Moving yourself around the world helps you to generalise memories across cues - Babies who are crawling do a much better job of imitating conditions where the cue and context have changed than babies who are not crawling - Only 9-month-olds who are crawling are able to imitate when you test them in a new place with a new prop

compare white (myelination) and grey (cell bodies) matter for foster and institutionalised kids

- No difference in grey matter between institution and foster kids --> both have smaller brain matter volumes - This is not the case for white matter (which happens over a larger amount of time)

what are the principles of infant development?

- Older infants learn faster than younger infants (= age-related changes in encoding) - Older infants remember for longer than younger infants (retention) - Older infants are better at remembering when parts of the situation have changed (retrieval)

what is the oddball task and it's results?

- On 20% of the trials you have a rare stimulus and on 80% of trials you have another stimulus and you're interested in the difference in brain signalling to detect this rare event and the frequent one - Can see that the frequent event results in higher amplitude sensory (early) components but the rare event results in higher amplitude attentional (later) components

Describe Fawcett & Markson's minimal group effect experiment

- One doll has brown hair, the other has blonde. One is dressed in green and the other dressed in blue. The boys got given boy dolls and the girls got given girl dolls and they were asked which one they wanted to play with more - They were also told that one doll likes a food that the kid likes and the other liked something different - The kids were much more likely to choose the doll that liked the same food and the doll that had the same hair/shirt as them - In the next experiment, the doll had the same hair but different shirt or different hair and same shirt - When you make the similarity something you can control (e.g., you decide which shirt you put on each morning), it drives less of a preference than characteristics that they can't control children were significantly more likely to choose the doll with the same hair as them over the doll with the same shirt as them

how does perception guide action in children?

- Perceptual information is crucial in guiding almost all actions - Infant is born with an urge to use its perceptual systems to explore the world and it is compelled to direct attention towards events, objects and the spatial layout of the environment; - Considerable perceptual knowledge has already developed when motor activity appears and serves to guide it. - Perceptual impairment delays motor development (deaf and blind children exhibit delays in achieving most motor milestones); - Reaching is promoted by the optimal (moderate) amount of visual stimulation; either very little or excessive stimulation yield slower motor progress (i.e., environmental influence)

which components of the cognitive interview are most likely not to work with children and why?

- Perspective taking - we know that theory of mind (which is related to the ability to take other people's perspective) is still developing so asking younger children to do this might be problematic - Reverse recall - difficult with adults let alone children

what is the relationship between physiognomic perception and intersensory experiences?

- Physiognomic perception was not restricted to just one sensory modality. For Werner, it existed in all sensory systems - he believed that information in all sensory systems were combined prior to the differentiation of the senses into separate modalities - If this is the case, Werner argued that you can have different sensory systems influencing one another through general body feeling (i.e., can't be pinpointed down to a single modality) - There is no reason why these nonsense words should be paired with these random shapes, respectively, but it is largely agreed that the round shape goes with "maluma" and the jaggered shape goes with "takete"

Children raised in institutions are at increased risk for variety of cognitive, social, and behavioral problems such as...

- Psychosocial dwarfism - Intellectual delay - Disturbances of attachment (usually because there is no consistent caregiver to attach to - the ratio of caregiver:child is low and the turnover rate is high) - Psychiatric problems (like ADHD, autism and conduct disorder - manifests differently across boys and girls, inattention/hyperactivity, autism-mimicry)

what the Bucharest Early Intervention Project (2000) ethical?

- Ran it by 3 different US institution ethics boards --> each approving it independently - No invasive tests; all measures were low-risk and based on behavioural measures or EEG - The risk:benefit ratio needed to be such that the risk was low and the benefit was very high (not necessarily to the individual children but children at large) - Important for children to be genuinely randomised

how did Melthoff confirm that the predictions of adult intentions was a social act?

- Same experiment again except in one condition, they saw a human do the action and in the other condition they saw a robot do it (with a person in the background) - If it's a social cognitive thing, the baby (18-month-old) should be able to complete the action of the human but not the robot because they can read the intentions of the adult but not the robot. - They completed the incomplete adult model but they just copied the incomplete robot model strengthens argument for ability to interpret adult intentions

what was involved in Diamond et al.'s tools of the mind curriculum?

- Scaffolded pretend play - constantly negotiating the rules of the game and doing what everyone wants vs what you want - guided opportunities for regulation - teacher looks for instances in the children's interactions where there can be lessons built around emotion regulation and flexibility - inhibition games - + standard literacy/numeracy

According to the traditional view of perception, there are 2 stages of perception. What are these?

- Sensation: occurs when external physical stimulation activated sensory receptors (eyes, ears, tongue, nostrils, skin) and is considered highly ambiguous - Perception: interpretation of sensation; often with help from non- perceptual information and processes (memory, reasoning, decision making etc..)

what do we get from an Electroencephalogram (EEG)

- Sensors are placed on the scalp to record tiny electrical signals generated by the brain - We can play the infant sounds or show them pictures and timestamp their brain's responses to each of them to create waveforms called event-related potentials (ERPs)

What is the differentiation theory of perceptual learning?

- Sensory stimulation is not ambiguous and impoverished, but highly structured and rich in information; - Perceptual learning is a process of differentiating previously indistinct and imprecise sensations

describe Sugita's 2011 study on monkey's ability to discriminate faces when there is no face experience

- Separated baby monkeys from baby monkeys at birth and they were raised by (masked) humans but didn't get exposure to faces at all for either 6-, 12- or 24-months - They were then tested on their ability to discriminate between human and monkey faces using visual paired comparison task after their time of deprivation and then at two other time points: 1. 1 month experience with either human or monkey faces 2. 12 months experience with both (since they were raised with their peers and fed by humans) - Immediately after deprivation (test 1), monkeys could discriminate between both human and monkey faces - After deprivation and 1 month experience, monkeys could discriminate between only the group they were experienced with - after 12 months experience, monkeys could still only discriminate between the group they were experienced with · When the brain is deprived of experience and then it gets experience, the tuning process happens even faster than if it hadn't been deprived

Do babies learn from falling?: Karen Adolph sets up environments where babies can fall safely and measures how long it takes them to learn to avoid falling

- She first set up a platform that was totally solid all the way across it but there is a light partway along it - To begin with, babies just walk along the completely solid platform - Then, they take out a midsection of the platform and replace it with a ball-pit of foam. However, the whole platform is covered so that you can't see where the pit is. - There is a blinking light that tells you where the ground will fall away - They then see how many trials it takes babies to stop on the edge by the blinking light (i.e., how long does it take them to learn that continuing past it means that they will fall) - Turns out that it takes MANY tries - An adult cohort show that they only fall once and show learning in consequent trials But, for newly walking babies, the number of times they fell before they stopped on the edge and did something adaptive (e.g., crawl or leap or lower themselves) was 7 (for 15-month-olds)

describe Exp. 2: ITR with FIXED presentation of Training Items (2.5s each)

- Stimuli fixed at 2.5s (which is usually less than kids spend on it) - Found that in both the control and induction condition, the adults memory performance is better than the children - It is assumed that the adults are doing the task conceptually - The fact that children are doing poorer than the adults, in induction suggests that they are doing the task conceptually as well

what are the results of the modified recognition test?

- Suggestibility effect exists in both standard and modified test conditions (larger in standard test kids) - The difference between control and modified test kids' results can't be explained by social demand because in this test, there is no social demand at stage 3 - it can only really be explained by some kind of memory mechanism like retrieval competition THUS, suggestible reports are a result of BOTH memory and social/demand processes

what is Howe and Courage's current theory of childhood amnesia: Autobiographical memories & development of self-concept

- Suggests that the barrier to the development of early memories is partly due to the fact that we need to have developed a self-concept first - Without a self-concept, all of the experiences of the first few years of life aren't psychologically attached to you - Hence, our ability to access these memories as an adult depends on the development of a self-concept

what are some common errors/failures of representational insight?

- Symbol = referent (i.e., no distinction between the two such that you see them as identical to each other) - Symbol and referent are treated as independent (i.e., too much distinction almost) - especially when the symbol is highly salient/interesting

Motor training at 3 months improves object exploration a year later (Libertus, Joh & Needham, 2015) - describe this study

- Systematically varied reaching experiences in three-month-old infants who were not reaching on their own yet and examined their object engagement in a follow-up assessment 12 months later. - Three groups: Active training with Velcro mittens and toys, Passive training with no Velcro on their mittens, Control - The toys they were given to play with all had Velcro on them too --> meant that experimental infants inadvertently picked up the toys - A year later, at 15-months of age, they used a bead-maze toy to investigate how much the infants engaged in motor exploration and manual engagement - Results revealed increased object exploration in 15-month-old infants who experienced active reaching at 3 months of age compared to untrained infants or infants who only passively experienced reaching. - These findings provide evidence for the long-term effects of reaching experiences and illustrate the cascading effects initiated by early motor skills.

describe Barbu-Roth et al.'s (2009) Neonatal Stepping in Relation to Terrestrial Optic Flow study

- The experiment examined whether newborn stepping, a primitive form of bipedal locomotion, could be modulated by optical flow. - Forty-eight 3-day-old infants were exposed to optical flows that were projected onto a horizontal surface above which the infants were suspended. - Significantly more air steps were elicited by exposure to a terrestrial optical flow specifying forward translation than by a rotating optical flow or a static optical pattern. - Thus, a rudimentary coupling between optical flow and stepping is present at birth, suggesting a precocious capacity in the newborn to perceive and utilize visual information specifying self-motion

describe the experiment: Inaccuracy of Affordance Judgments for Firefighters Wearing Personal Protective Equipment (Petrucci et al., 2016)

- The study examined how well firefighters are able to perceive their obstacle crossing abilities while wearing firefighting protective equipment. Firefighters were asked to judge whether they could cross over, under, and through different obstacles that simulated idealized fireground situations. - Overall, a general lack of awareness of their personal protective equipment for obstacle crossing ability was observed. Perceptual judgment errors were found for each obstacle type, the largest occurring with an overestimation of ability to pass under an obstacle.

what is wrong with Howe and Courage's current theory of childhood amnesia: Autobiographical memories & development of self-concept?

- The timeline in the development of the self-concept and the development of childhood amnesia doesn't quite line up --> most normal developing babies seem to be able to respond well on the Rouge test by 12-18 months of age...but childhood amnesia lasts much longer than this - assumes that childhood amnesia represents discontinuity in childhood development - says that our autobiographical memory works in a qualitatively different way to all other memories

describe the perception-action interaction in infants

- The visual experiences are intimately tied to infants' posture. - Compared with walkers, crawlers' field of view contained less walls and more floor. Walkers directed gaze straight ahead at caregivers, whereas crawlers looked down at the floor. - Crawlers obtained visual information about targets at higher elevations—caregivers and toys—by craning their heads upward and sitting up to bring the room into view. - Because infant locations, postures, and behaviours change systematically with development, the datasets for learning change systematically with development too. The developing abilities of infants - sitting up, crawling, walking - open and close gates for visual experiences with different contents and statistical structures.

describe the puppet task as an example of deferred imitation

- There is a puppet with a mitten on its hand - you pull the mitten off, shake it (there is a bell inside) and then you put it back on - Compare the rate of imitation (the number of actions the baby performs) in the experimental group with rate of imitation in the control group - Manipulations of stimulus cues: Cue change - colour/form of the puppet AND Context change - home vs lab

what were the results of Hayes & Delamonthe's study which compared the effectiveness of cognitive interviewing (context reinstatement and report all components) where children have/have not been misled about witnessed events?

- There was an increase in memory accuracy from standard interview to cognitive interview in both cases --> cognitive interview is good in increasing memory accuracy however, cognitive interview did not undo the negative effects of suggestion - Strong suggestibility effect: control group (who received no suggestions) were always better-performing than the misled group

what is Hayne's current theory of childhood amnesia: Representational formats + encoding specificity

- This approach does not suggest that autobiographical memories are a different kind to other memories - Involves the way in which they represent events in memory (representational formats) and encoding specificity (i.e., memory retrieval is dependent on the match between encoding and retrieval conditions) - Children (3+ years) and adults both encode memories via sensori-motor and verbal methods. However, when retrieving these memories, we only do so verbally (we are asked and thus, answer questions about them) - There is a match between the kinds of methods you're using to retrieve memories and the methods you're using to encode memories: verbal - In infants (under 3 years), by definition, they can't use verbal methods to encode memories so it's completely dependent on sensori-motor methods. Yet, in seeking to retrieve these memories, we still ask verbal questions --> mismatch between encoding and retrieval methods --> might be enough to explain why infant memories are hard to access

how permanent are memory stores at 6-month-olds? (Perris, Myers & Clifton, 1990)

- Took babies aged 6.5 months old and trained them on auditory localisation task - By the end of the training period, babies were reliably trained to turn their head in one particular direction - Either 1 or 2 years later, the babies were brought back to the lab (long retention interval) and they tested for the degree of auditory localisation --> did they turn their head in the trained direction to expect the sound? - Experimental group seemed to remember to turn their head in a particular way while the controls did not --> suggests that babies are capable of forming memories that can persist over time (at least 2 years)

Do pre-schoolers use taxonomic (category) information in induction? (Gelman et al., 1987)

- Triad tasks with 4-year-olds - Child is shown a training example (black cat) and told it has a particular feature - Then they're shown two other stimuli and asked which of the two also has this particular feature - Found that children at 4-years-old tend to choose the conceptually similar stimuli: the other cat they claimed that all developmental groups grasp "taxonomic assumption" --> things that have the same category label can be assumed to have many things in common

what were the final conclusions from the ITR studies?

- Under fixed item encoding conditions: - Adults activate category-level information during induction - Children activate category-level information during induction - Sloutsky & Fisher results may be an artefact of their self-paced training procedures - Hence, taxonomic assumption does operate in pre-schoolers/early school-age children i.e., they can do conceptually based inductive reasoning

can you reverse perceptual narrowing? (Anzures et al., 2012)

- Video exposure to Asian or Caucasian faces - Tested (longitudinally) with female and male faces after first lab visit then 1-2, and 3 weeks later - Some evidence that you can undo this effect After 3 weeks, babies show marginally above-chance preferences for the novel face --> suggesting maybe they can discriminate

Perception guides action: effect of floor pattern speed on the rate of walking - describe this study

- Warren et al. (1996), using a treadmill and a wide-field-of-view projection screen, coupled a visual flow pattern to the rate of actual walking. - Observers were instructed to walk at a comfortable speed. The gain factor specifying the rate of flow as a function of walking speed was manipulated by an experimenter in a periodic manner. - To maintain the walking at a comfortable speed, participants increased walking speed when the rate of expansion of the visual was reduced; walking speed decreased when the rate of the visual pattern increased. - So, comfortable rate of walking was determined, not by their motor output but was signalled by the speed of optic flow

describe congenital "minamata" disease

- Was a problem back in the 1950s when Japanese factories let copious amounts of chemicals into the ocean around communities who relied on fish - In adults, the exposure of mercury through the fish you eat is bad for the brain. It makes its way to the brain easily and particularly targets parts of the brain responsible for motor behaviour - Mothers whose diet primarily consists of fish were impacted most. Babies were born with Microcephaly, ataxia, seizures, mental retardation and symptoms like cerebral palsy

what were the results of Hannon & Trehub's (2005) study of babies' ability to discriminate Balkan music?

- Western 6-month-olds infants can discriminate rhythms from all cultures (Western and Balkan) - Western 12-month-olds cannot discriminate between Balkan rhythms - they've lost their ability to discriminate - However, with just a couple of exposures per day over a couple of weeks, 12-month-olds were able to retain the ability to discriminate alterations to rhythms from an unfamiliar culture - Seems that this is a developmentally sensitive period thing because they did the same thing with adults and found that the same amount of experience with adults made no difference to their ability

Do young children access category-level information when doing induction according to Sloutsky & Fisher?

- When both groups are told to do memorisation --> adults are better memorisers, they're memory is better than kids - When they're doing induction, adults are doing it conceptually (because they have higher scores) and the kids are doing it perceptually (because they have lower scores) - They say that no, young children do not access category-level information when doing induction

what were the results of Meltzhoff's experiment?

- When given the opportunity to interact with the toys, 18-month-olds completed the actions in both conditions (complete and incomplete) whereas the 12-month-olds mimic whatever they've seen (whether its complete or incomplete) - The 18-month-olds can predict adult intentions

Under what circumstances does the minimal group effect not work in children?

- When one doll liked the same toy as the child and the other had a different preference, the child was much more likely to choose the doll with the same preference. - If you make the similarity between the child and the doll arbitrary (i.e., child and doll get a sticker), kids are not going to choose this doll based on this arbitrary trait, even though they share something in common: having the sticker - So, kids weigh up the extent to which it's an endearing and enduring characteristic of the other 'person' such that they're more likely to make similarity judgements when it's a preference behaviour or something uncontrollable and its not an arbitrarily created category

what results came from testing the social demand hypothesis: effects of questioner authority?

- When the child gives the misleading details, they don't seem as authoritative, so the child participant may be more resistant to the information given - When the adult gives the misleading details, they do seem authoritative, so we do see a suggestibility effect: a significant difference in memory accuracy between the control and mislead kids - Smaller (but still significant) suggestibility effect when the misleading info comes from children - Can conclude that social demand is playing some kind of role in children's suggestibility

is delayed gratification influenced by experience? (Kidd et al., 2013) think: art supplies and trust study

- Where the experimenter promised but didn't deliver the cool art supplies, children waited less time for the marshmallow than children who were promised and received the cool art supplies - Children's propensity to wait for a particular reward, depends on their experience with how reliable the adults in their environment are - Experience with reliable adults = wait a long time Experience with unreliable adults = wait a short time

what are the 2 approaches to how children perform inductive reasoning

- Young children are capable of using taxonomic cues (conceptual information) as a basis for induction - Young children rely on perceptual (rather than taxonomic) cues unless instructed

what is representational flexibility?

- Young infants' memories are often specific to the conditions of encoding - With age, their ability to retrieve memories even when the cues and/or context have change improves - Allows learning to be generalised to novel situations - For everyone, it's easier to retrieve memories when we have retrieval cues, in babies this is extreme

what is the prevalence of synesthesia?

- about 4-5% of the population - Equal in men and women - synesthetes are more likely to be left-handed than the general population - synesthesia appears to be inherited in some fashion; It seems to be a dominant trait and it may be on the X-chromosome - synesthetes are of normal (or possibly above average) intelligence, and standard neurological exams are normal - More common in children than adults

what happens in circuit formation?

- axons and dendrites increase - synaptogenesis (overproduction of synapses) - not all areas of the brain produce and prune away neurons at the same rate/time - this relates to the respective plasticity of the brain region - synaptic pruning: Experience determines which synapses will live or die; disruption in pruning: William's syndrome

Heinz Werner suggested that Physiognomic Perception and Developmental Synesthesia are intimately linked. How?

- both physiognomic perception and developmental synaesthesia exist prior to differentiation of the senses into separate modalities

Babies' ability to recognise objects and faces is specific to the context in which those faces/objects are presented. Describe Robinson & Pascalis's (2004) task which investigated this

- defined this context as the colour of the screen that the faces/objects are presented on - in the "same" condition, all babies will look at the novel face during test - they remember the familiar one - When tested in "different" condition, 6- and 12-month-olds show null preferences - they don't remember the familiar face in the different context - By 18-months, this flexibility has improved - it doesn't matter whether you test them with a same or different context, they still remember the familiar face (they can retrieve it despite the context)

Why is the theory of mind development so important?

- for forming and maintaining relationships - telling the difference between truth and lies - for games and sport

what happens in neurulation?

- formation of the brain and spinal tube - when this doesn't go right: anencephaly and spinabifida - Folic acid is important in preventing neural tube defects

describe the typical theory of mind milestones for infancy

- gaze following by 6 months - reacting to adults' emotions by 12 months - predicting other's intentions by 18 months

how does being in foster care improve height and weight?

- institution group is the flattest - Foster group is almost parallel with the community group - being in foster care improved their growth dramatically but they were still smaller

explain the initially controversial results of the helper/hinderer study. How is this overcome?

- looking time: 6-month-olds don't understand the difference between the helper and the hinderer whereas the 10-month-olds do - toy choice: most babies (6 and 10 months) choose the helper Pit helper and hinderer against neutral characters: Helper vs neutral: most choose helper Hinderer vs neutral: most choose neutral

describe the ToM milestones for childhood

- make believe play: 18 months - 24 months - desires and behaviour: 18 months - 24 months - imaginal vs real world: 3 years - false beliefs: 3.5 - 4 years

in the visual recognition task (VPC) what does a novelty and null preference indicate?

- novelty preference = retention of memory - null preference = forgetting

suggestibility is driven by which two causal processes?

- social demand - memory

what were siegal & beattie's (1991) criticisms of the Sally-Anne tasK?

- they suggest that it is a verbally bound task with a verbally ambiguous question: We assume it means "Where will Sally look for her marble first?", But children think "Where should Sally look for her marble?" - suggest that the S-A task is not measuring false belief competency but language competency - With a more explicit question, children under 4 years old could do it - As they age, children get more experience with language and that's why they do better, not necessarily because their ToM is better

teratogenicity depends on...

- timing of exposure - Dose of the drug/chemical - Duration of exposure (the longer you're exposed, the more systems/development is going to be impacted) - (Genotype - you might be genetically predisposed to be more severely impacted by a teratogen)

Can executive function skills be developed in the classroom? (Diamond et al., 2007)

- tools of the mind curriculum or regular literacy based curriculum - outcome measures: dots task, flanker task - For the more difficult tasks (incongruent conditions), children in the Tools of the mind curriculum did better than the kids in the standard control curriculum - The tools of the mind curriculum became more advantageous as the task became harder

what did Luddecke, Kulvicius & Worgotter (2019) do with affordances and robotics?

- used neural networks to design systems that can predict affordances given only a single two-dimensional RGB image. - These models can quickly (in less than 10 ms) segment 2D images of arbitrary size, depicting all kinds of scenes into regions that are specific to particular potential affordances. - This fast 2D-affordance detection can be used to provide a machine with good estimates of what to do in a scene using few computational resources e.g., clean up the room

what were Rubio-Fernandez & Geurts's (2013) criticisms of the Sally-Anne tasK?

- verbal versions of the false belief task considerably disrupt the child's ability to track perspective - Infants pass nonverbal FB tasks + 3yo consistently fail verbal versions - the experimenter changing from the narrator to the interviewer can be jarring - perhaps the progression from not understanding false beliefs to understanding false beliefs is not so stage-like. There is evidence that grasping the concept of false beliefs gradually develops as a child gains more conversational and social experience

what is ERP waveform analysis?

- we average out the ERPs to form "Components" = dips and troughs in the waveform - Amplitude = how big they are - Latency = how fast they are Components which peak sooner (first few milliseconds) are usually related to sensory processing and components which peak later (300-500ms) are usually to do with attention

describe some findings from the week 4 empirical reading

- while children with histories of institutional rearing have poorer memory and EF than never-institutionalized children at age 8, all children demonstrate growth in these skills over the transition to adolescence - there were early-emerging and stable disparities in attention, short-term visual memory, spatial planning and problem solving between ever- and never-institutionalized children, and foster care had no observable effect on these trajectories - On measures of spatial working memory, the gap widened between ever and never-institutionalized children from age 8 to age 16 - on measures of visual-spatial memory and new learning, foster children started out with more difficulties than never-institutionalised children at age 8 but demonstrated significantly steeper trajectories of growth than both never-institutionalised children and care-as-usual-children. By age 16, there were no discernible group differences. --> These results are suggestive of "catch-up" among those assigned to early foster care - children with histories of early deprivation have reduced structural connectivity of white matter tracts involved in limbic circuitry, frontostriatal circuitry, and sensory processing (28-30). Reduced integrity of white matter tracts connecting the temporal lobe and prefrontal cortex is associated with poorer neurocognitive functioning among neglected children

Linda Spear (2015) described two patterns of risky behaviour which put teenagers at increased risk of dependence. What are these?

1. Early initiation of alcohol consumption (i.e., children exposed to alcohol before 14 are 4x as likely to become dependent on alcohol than children exposed after 14) 2. Binge drinking during late adolescence (i.e., the level of binge drinking in year 12 predicts alcohol dependence way out in adulthood)

what are the 3 stages of prenatal development?

1. Germinal (0-2 weeks) 2. Embryonic (3-8 weeks) 3. Fetal (9 weeks - birth)

what are two ineffective techniques for overcoming suggestibility?

1. Hypnosis 2. Sociodramatic play

the PFC is responsible for which 4 things?

1. Inhibits impulses from other areas of the brain 2. Thinks through consequences 3. Prioritizes alternatives and strategizes (cognitive flexibility) 4. Risk taking (including drugs)

how should we teach children to use models?

1. Make it easier for the child to see correspondences between the model and the situation that is being modelled 2. After training with the EASY MODEL examine transfer learning to a more complex model It is possible to teach children how to use scale models, but it seems to be that the best way of doing this is via starting with easy models and then gradually ramping up to more complex cases. Repeatedly using the hard models doesn't necessarily lead to good outcomes

what are the 5 steps to building a brain?

1. Neurulation 2. Neurogenesis 3. Migration 4. Circuit formation 5. Myelination

what 2 other contextual issues are not accounted for in the Ceci/Loftus paradigm?

1. Pre-trial delay 2. Repeated interviews

list 3 core executive functions

1. Working memory: ability to hold information in mind and work with it in a way that helps you solve a problem (digit span task e.g., count back in 3s from 178) 2. Inhibition: the ability to stop yourself from engaging in a behaviour/response under conditions where it is not appropriate (go/no-go task e.g., push a button when you see x but hold off when you see o - x occurs frequently so it becomes habitual to press such that when o shows you need to inhibit responding) 3. Cognitive flexibility: ability to switch between kinds of thinking/rules flexibly

what are the 4 techniques used in the cognitive interview?

1. context reinstatement 2. "Report all" 3. Reverse recall (to break away from script memories) 4. Perspective taking

what are the two important aspects of the differentiation view of perceptual learning and ecological approach to perceptual development?

1. detection of distinctive features 2. perception of affordances

what core evidence do we have for Theory of Mind development driven by maturation of an innate neural model (nature)

1. early development: Early emergence of some ToM understanding might be evidence for an innate module since they don't have a lot of opportunity to learn via social experience 2. cross-cultural stability: Because external factors (e.g., social experiences) differ across cultures, there has to be one consistent factor for the development of ToM across them i.e., the brain 3. Specific deficit in kids with autism e.g., "mind-blindness" (Baron Cohen)

the phenomenon of childhood amnesia can be explained in terms of 2 well-documented cognitive processes:

1. encoding specificity 2. Language development

what is the Loftus 3-stage paradigm for studying suggestibility in adults?

1. event encoding 2. post event suggestion 3. memory test about what was seen in the original event

what 3 theories of childhood amnesia are false?

1. infants are incapable of forming long-term memories 2. Infants forget their earliest memory 3. infants repress their earliest memory

what are two developments occurring during early childhood?

1. make-believe play (requires you to understand the mind of that character) 2. mind as distinct from the physical world --> imagined vs real 'dog' (initially kids can't understand the difference between imaginary and real)

what are the 2 changes to memory for the event that produce suggestibility?

1. overwriting of the original memory "memory impairment" (Loftus) 2. Retrieval competition (When you are presented with a misleading suggestion, it competes in your memory system with your original memory. Because the misleading suggestion is more recent, it is often the reported thing)

what is the limit of viability for babies?

24 weeks

Institutionalised children show severe delays in cognitive development. What is their mean IQ?

70

If an adult is shown a novel image (e.g., a piece of clothing), you might recognise that this image represents a real object out in the world and hence, begin a search to find it. However, young children don't quite understand pictures in the same way. What do they do instead? How does this change as they age?

9-month-old babies and younger will look at pictures and study their visual features (similar to adults) but then will often go beyond that to start making manual interactions with them as if they are real objects; they attempt to physically interact with it This may represent a failure of representational insight - the child is not differentiating between the image and the physical object it represents If you track these children's interactions with the objects as they age, you can see they become more in tune with what pictures are about and become less likely to directly interact with the object - there is a gradual development of representational insight (where the symbol is a symbol and not the object itself)

how can facial features be altered in ways that make a face look more trustworthy?

A face resembling a happy expression, with upturned eyebrows and upward curving mouth, is likely to be seen as trustworthy while one resembling an angry expression, with downturned eyebrows, is likely to be seen as untrustworthy

what is executive function?

A set of higher order cognitive skills that typically have a long developmental trajectory

describe what week 2's empirical reading sought to investigate

A task measuring infant looking time was used to investigate the hypothesis that adding emotional expressiveness to other-race faces would help infants break through narrowing and reinstate other-race face recognition

why is affordance perception important in robotics?

Affordances play a crucial role in robotics since they are essential to be able to develop truly autonomous robots/vehicles, which can freely explore and interact with the environment e.g., red lights, crossings, passengers etc.

describe the Induction then Recognition (ITR) Paradigm procedure (stage 2)

After training, you give them a surprise recognition task where you present them with some old members (i.e., images they saw in training) and some novel members (i.e., images they haven't seen yet) both from the target category --> children are asked which cats they've seen before and which they haven't - If during training, you're thinking conceptually, you may do badly on the recognition test because after a while, you will have stopped looking at the specifics of each individual cat and just focus on whether it is or isn't a cat --> if "category-level" representation is activated during induction training = lower recognition sensitivity - If you are using a low-level perceptual strategy and memorising the qualities of each stimulus and associating those with the property (beta-cells) you'd do quite well --> if "perceptual-level" representation is activated during induction training = higher recognition sensitivity

what is the issue with rat studies when looking at alcohol effects?

Animal models are great except they often don't consider the social elements that are present in humans; also, you can schedule when to give rats of different ages alcohol, but you can't do this in humans - it wouldn't pass ethics to select a sample of 12-year-olds who you are going to intoxicate daily. SO, studies like this are often correlational but, in this case, you don't know what other factors are different between groups - perhaps premature alcohol consumption is a proxy for a different disorder common like CD to all these children. In animals, you can control for these things

how does the detection of distinctive features progress with development?

Before perceptual learning takes place, we can only make very broad distinctions and differentiations between different stimuli. As perceptual learning takes place, we make finer and more sophisticated differentiation between stimuli

what problem did Sloutsky & Fisher (2004) identify in Gelman's "taxonomic assumption" paradigm?

Believed that in the original Triad task, you could show that the typical pattern of induction (where you generalise from the test cat to the training cat) not because you understand the taxonomic assumption but because you're using a low-level perception strategy (i.e., auditory similarity) Gelman was looking at perceptual similarity in terms of visual similarity whereas these researchers identified that there is also auditory similarity between them since the stimuli are also allocated an audible sound: cat - perhaps the kids aren't understanding the category meaning of these images but they can match their sounds Shared labels increase auditory similarity of the target and test items

Do infants like the helper, dislike the hinderer or both?

Both - Infants perceive "helpers" as good and "hinderers" as bad and use these social judgements to guide choice behaviour Perhaps children come into the world with a sense of good guys and bad guys

what is causality?

Causality is the extent to which an event ("effect")/change in the environment is due to another event ("cause")

how are children with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome diagnosed?

Children are usually diagnosed with this as a consequence of their facial features (facial dysmorphology) rather than their brain damage --> can be traced back to alcohol exposure during the embryonic period where the facial features are fusing - Eyes aren't very open - Turned up nose - Dip in and thin upper lip - Underdeveloped ears

Are infants sensitive to social categories? (Mahakan & Wynn, 2012)

Exp 1 · In this study, they gave 11-month-old babies a little packet of beans (which they typically hate) and a little packet of goldfish crackers (which they typically like) · The babies were given a choice between these alternatives, and all chose the crackers · They're then shown a puppet show where one toy eats the crackers and likes them and the other tries the beans and likes them · Then the babies are asked to make a choice between the toys: the one with the same food preference or the one with a different food preference · Babies generally choose the toy that has the same food preference as them Exp 2. · They're then shown two puppets in a show, one wearing orange mittens (and liking it) and the other wearing yellow mittens (and liking it) · Test: which puppet do they choose? The one with the same mittens or different mittens · Most choose the puppet with the same mittens as them

differentiate Greenough's experience expectant and experience dependent

Experience expectant - Changes in the brain that occur in response to expected species-typical experience - Involves critical or sensitive periods early in life - Initial overproduction of synapses that is followed by synaptic pruning (mechanism) Experience dependent - Changes in the brain that occur in response to learning experiences that are unique to the individual - Allows the organism to learn/adapt to their specific environment throughout the lifespan (through strengthening and weakening of synapses) - New synaptic connections are formed with learning - (Think: London taxi drivers who have larger hippocampi because of their spatial experience with driving all around the city)

how do we know that babies are sensitive to spatial and temporal contiguity in suggesting causal relations?

Habituation studies using the Michotte "Launching illusion" (Leslie, 1987)

when a child is observing an environment, how do they workout the causes and effects?

Humean causal cues: - spatial/temporal contiguity - temporal priority - covariation

what are the two competing theories for the role of siblings in learning to move?

Imitation models: Younger siblings copy older siblings = move earlier Parental resource theories: Younger siblings need to share their parents with older siblings, less attention/support = move later

how do we know that infants can integrate sight and sound?

Infants look at the screen consistent with the sound being played (Spelke, 1976)

If you look at the way memory develops from infancy through to adulthood, one general theme is that there are strong continuities between processes underlying memory in infancy and childhood. What does this mean?

Infants' memories are affected by the same factors as children's (and adults') memory. Where there are developmental differences, they are differences in degree rather than type of memory (i.e., the quantity of memory capacity rather than the emergence of different kinds of memory systems)

describe the trade-off between instruction and exploration in kids learning

Instruction leads to efficient learning of target information but may discourage Exploration

describe the kitten with sewn eyes study

Kittens' visual system expects visual input and it doesn't develop normally if it doesn't get it --> this development is driven by species-expectant experience (which happens relatively early in life)

which study proves that balance and self-movement are dominated by the visual information (optic flow) which overrides vestibular and proprioceptive input?

Lee and Aronson (1974) - 13- to 16-month-old children placed in "swinging room" - In the room, the floor was stationary but the walls and ceiling swung backward and forward - The movement creates optic flow patterns - Children swayed back and forth in response the flow patterns created in the room (balance is disturbed) - Inexperienced walkers often fell over - Seems as though visual information is far more important than mechanical information for children Adults swayed minimally except when the balancing task is made more challenging

when considering the perceptions of child witnesses by Australian judges/magistrates, are child witnesses taken seriously?

Most children above 8 were rated as moderately competent to give evidence, however, they tended to rate children 6 and below to be too young to give evidence to the court

what are exploratory movements?

Movements that are produced in order to generate perceptual information

is narrowing domain general or domain specific?

Narrowing" is an example of domain-general plasticity that is common to all components of human communication - Music- Rhythm - Audiovisual speech - Sign Language - Auditory Speech - Faces The human brain has evolved to "expect" communication-related experience; it adapts to the unique form that communication takes in the culture that it was born into

how do we know that infants can integrate sight and proprioception?

Newborns can make their own facial expressions match those of another person

what is the pattern of remembering in infants when the context is changed?

Older babies are generally more able to handle changes in context and its more disruptive when you change the context after a long delay than it is after a short delay but the 6-month-olds in this study are totally weird (anomaly to the pattern) - they have baseline ratios that are pretty high even after a long delay and a changed context (they somehow forget after a short delay but remember with a medium-long delay)

how can we study joint attention?

One way to study joint attention is to set up a person sitting across from an infant (facing down) with two different objects to the left and right of that person. The person looks up and then very deliberately turns their head towards one of these objects. We then look to see whether the infant turns their head to look at the same object as the model.

Generally, how do people adapt to changes in body size? How can this be overcome?

Overall, people tend to underestimate how much the object changes their body dimensions and report that they can fit into a space that they actually could not fit into. Training is required for people to learn how attachments to the body change possibilities for behavior

what were the results of Bruck, Francouer & Ceci's (1995) experiment on children's reports of an inoculation/vaccination

Phase 1: Children with positive feedback reported less distress and crying than those given neutral instructions --> if you suggested that they showed less distress immediately after the needle, they remember showing less distress a week later Phase 2: interviews with misleading suggestions were conducted a year later Phase 3: control children were relatively accurate in their recounts but in each of the misled conditions, there are elevated levels of incorrect responding This provides some evidence that over a long delay and with repeated suggestions, 5 year old children can be misled about personally relevant and emotional situations

what does the ecological approach to perceptual development say about the relationship between perception and action?

Postulates a bidirectional interdependence between perception and action We must perceive in order to move, and move in order to perceive

the Dimensional card sorting task tests the 3 core executive functions all at once. How doe pre-schoolers perform?

Pre-schoolers find it difficult to switch and play a new rule - they have a hard time inhibiting what they learnt originally and cannot flexibly play the game by the other rule. This is not because they don't know what the rules are or are unaware that the rules have changed, it is just that the first rule has become so ingrained, it's hard to inhibit

what is the current best technique for overcoming the effects of misleading suggestions?

Prevention is the best cure! There doesn't seem to be an easy way of undoing those effects after the fact (despite how powerful it is at increasing memory accuracy)

what is the ambient optic array? how is this related to action and perception?

Refers to all surfaces and all objects in the visual field Information present in the optic array is dependent on the position and action of the observer: different parts of the environment are visible from different positions (for example, sitting or standing)

what is the understanding of false beliefs?

Refers to understanding that another person may have a belief about the world that is untrue and given this, understanding that they will react in a particular way

describe Exp. 1 S&F replication measuring training item Study Times

Replicated the above procedure but measured how long adults and kids were studying the stimuli during training because they're testing the idea that maybe kids are just more inherently engaged with the stimuli and spending longer time looking at them even if they understand the category basis to the category prediction Were able to replicate Sloutsky's findings in terms of recognition sensitivity: - Induction condition: kids outperform adults - Memory/control condition: adults outperform kids Inspection time data: - Kids spend much longer looking at the stimuli (3.5-4sec) regardless of whether they were in the induction or control condition

describe the result of a study investigating whether infants are sensitive to the trustworthiness of faces

Results revealed that 7-month-old infants are sensitive to facial signs of trustworthiness but not dominance This sensitivity was reflected in infants' behavioral preference and in the modulation of brain responses previously linked to emotion detection from faces

what is Judy Deloache's dual representation hypothesis?

Says that a mature understanding of symbols that children must acquire involves understanding: 1. the concrete aspects of the symbol 2. the relation to referent

what does the ecological approach to perceptual development say about the ambiguity of sensory information?

Says that sensory information is not ambiguous - input for perceptual processing is the entire structure of stimulus energy available at any point in an environment. Isolated aspects of the visual field might be ambiguous but the entire thing is not

how does the differentiation view of perceptual learning see sensory stimulation?

Says that sensory stimulation is not ambiguous but highly structured and patterned: It provides a direct, rich, dynamic, and continuous source of information and perception is a process of "information pick-up";

what do we know from Bullock & Gelman's 1979 "jack in the box" study?

Seems that by 3 years, kids are forming a hierarchy of cues - temporal priority is a stronger cue than spatial contiguity

what pattern of responding do we see when we make the symbol-referent relationship transparent?

Showed kids Terry the Troll and Terry's room --> he goes in the "shrinking machine" and is now small when you convince kids that the scale model is literally a shrunken version of the larger room, then they see the symbolic connection clearly as their performance goes up - however, in reality, this doesn't happen

what evidence is there for the Theory of Mind development being driven by social experience (nurture)

Since the false belief task is the gold standard for measuring ToM, Peterson & Siegal tested 3 groups on this: a down's syndrome group, children with ASD and deaf children raised by hearing parents. Results show that deaf children perform the worst = social/conversational experience is crucial for developing a ToM

what social demand/authority factor produces suggestibility?

Social demand/authority of the suggested information (Zaragoza)

What is multisensory integration?

Successful combination of information from different sensory modalities is necessary for a meaningful perceptual experiences (because objects/environments aren't defined by a single modality but by a series of sensory modalities)

what is the big deal about symbols?

Symbols support reasoning and problem solving - they go beyond sheer communication and allow us to understand and gain control of the world (e.g., we can precisely predict future events via maths which allows us to plan and control our environment)

what do teachers need to consider when teaching kids?

Teachers need to consider both WHAT is being taught and children's interpretation of WHY it is being taught

what system is the most susceptible to teratogen exposure?

The CNS is the only system to be developing through the entire gestation period which makes it susceptible to teratogen exposure any time during development

what is Daphne Maurer's neonatal synaesthesia hypothesis?

The Cross-Talk Hypothesis: synesthesia in children results from an abnormally high number of connections between certain areas in the cortex

what is encoding specificity?

The closer the match between the learning conditions and the test conditions, the better the chance that the baby will remember that contingency (we know this from changing the blanket in the mobile conjugate task)

what do we know from the mobile conjugate task and the effects of length of exposure on memory?

The longer a person (infant, child or adult) is given to learn a contingency, the longer they remember it --> That is, there is a direct relationship between how long someone is exposed to a contingency and consequently how long they remember it for after

what is the theory of mind?

The theory of mind is concerned with an individual's understanding of metal states (in self and others)

what is the optic flow gradient?

There is a greater flow in the foreground which decreases towards the center; A point in the distance where there is no flow (this is known as the Focus of Expansion, signifying destination or heading)

what is the relationship between intervention timing and it's effects?

Timing is important but effects are domain specific

When does the ToM development stop

ToM development doesn't stop there. It does continue to develop and refine right through our adult life (there is an argument to say that we never have a fully developed ToM because otherwise we'd consistently be able to read others' minds)

how does locomotor experience help you in Karen Adolph's falling task?

Toddlers with more locomotor experience learn to avoid falling faster

what is the enrichment theory of perceptual learning (traditional view of perception)?

Traditional view of perceptual development postulates that we need to learn to perceive - we must add stored knowledge and past experiences to the ambiguous sensory stimulations to arrive at meaningful perceptual interpretations; Perceptual learning is a process of enriching previously sparse and impoverished (meagre) sensations.

what is category-based induction?

Using knowledge of familiar categories to make inferences about the generalization of novel properties For example, you learn that a particular dog has sesamoid bones (i.e., learning a novel property about a familiar category). Then you are asked how likely it is that another dog, a cat, an owl and a rock has sesamoid bones

what is deductive reasoning?

Using the rules of logic to draw CERTAIN conclusions from given knowledge e.g., you're told that psychology students are hard-working and that Rachel is a psychology student. It must be the case that Rachel is hard-working

what is inductive reasoning?

Using what you know (background knowledge, previous observations) to make predictions about what you don't know These conclusions are probabilistic. Until we get more information from the real world, we can't be sure that this option is true. Our conclusions vary in certainty (sometimes their stronger inferences and other times they're weaker)

how do infants learn to use their memories flexibly?

Visual cues: categorisation and sensory preconditioning Motor cues: immediate imitation Language cues: labels

give an example of how perception guides actions and action generates perceptual information in babies

When babies perceive that a slope is too steep, it changes how they interact with it. When they change this action, their perception of the slope and the resulting environment post-slope is changed

until what age does auditory similarity overshadow visual similarity?

age 7 - younger children seem to weight auditory cues over visual cues more so than older children and adults

What is synesthesia?

an involuntary physical experience of a cross-modal association e.g., smell colour, days/months have a colour, words have tastes etc

what is a controversial technique for overcoming suggestibility?

anatomically-detailed dolls

what are teratogens?

any agent that can produce a birth defect or increase the incident of a defect in a population e.g., drugs, chemicals, infections, environmental agents

what neurocognitive assessments were taken and when in the BEIP?

at baseline, 30 months, 42 months, 54 months, 8 years, 12 years - Psychiatric symptoms - Language development - Socio-emotional development - Physical growth - Cognitive development Brain development

why is the adolescent brain is especially vulnerable to damage?

because it is in the midst of a great bout of pruning and rewiring

why is it recommended that expecting mothers stay away from eating large fish species?

because they're at the top of the food chain and will have accumulated a high concentration of mercury by eating lots of smaller fish each exposed to mercury

why is it unsurprising that babies' ability to discriminate sights and sounds is happening around the end of their first year of life

because we know that during infancy, the visual and auditory cortex and the language-related cortex are actively developing

If we make the model less interesting and less engaging in the big snoopy/little snoopy task, they might have a ________ chance of connecting it up with the actual referent

better In the high salience condition (standard condition), 2.5 year olds showed really poor performance (consistent with previous experiment) and in the low salience condition (modified condition), they performed better --> lowering the salience of the symbol helps them to make the connection between it and it's referent

what task aims to test children's understanding of more complex symbols?

big snoopy/little snoopy

what do we know about the development of covariation in children?

blicket detector, Gopnik - children learn covariation by 2.5-4 years and it's not the case that it's a later developing understanding Children's sensitivity to covariation patterns increases when they ACT on the detector rather than just passively OBSERVE

Understanding of dual representation develops at _________ rates for different symbol systems (but follows the same pattern/process)

different

the differentiation view of perceptual learning argues that the perceptual abilities that are essential for survival are present at birth. What is an example of this?

diving reflex - stops babies from breathing underwater via closing off the lungs; arms and legs move in a coordinated stroke and the torso flexes enough to propel it through the water for over 1m (however, they all need adult help to come back to the surface for the vital next breath)

when is the highest risk of birth defects from Zika virus?

first trimester

what were the findings of Baron-Cohen's 1991 study (false beliefs)

found that children with ASD show a specific deficit in false belief performance; that this impairment is independent of general intelligence because kids with a lower intelligence perform better than kids with ASD and thus, that kids with ASD must have a deficit in a specific brain module that drives/underpins theory of mind and false belief understanding --> evidence that the brain mechanisms which support false belief must be separate from general cognitive mechanisms (and that these are somewhat broken in kids with autism)

who is Heinz Werner?

foundation of the Differentiation Principle and Affordances

Depending on how much parental care different species require at birth in order to survive, they can be classified on a continuum from what to what?

from superprecocial (functional at birth) to superaltricial (highly dependent on parents)

how do we know that gaze following isn't just motor mimickry?

gaze following is a social cognitive act. If the infant follows the model with no eye contact, it's not a social act and therefore it's mere mimickry but if they follow the model with eye contact, it becomes social and we can conclude that the baby is following the model's gaze for the sake of attempting to understand the model's change of attention

Children placed in foster care show dramatic improvements in height and weight but don't recover from one other physical aspect. What is this?

head circumference --> may be that size of brain is smaller since the early processes of putting together the cortex were damaged at the time of deprivation and there's no way to make up for it after the fact

what predicts how well a baby will understand a symbol?

how similar the symbol is to the real object - the more realistic the image, the more likely the babies are to misunderstand the distinction between symbol and reality we see that they did the most manual exploration when it was a realistic image/symbol and the least manual exploration when it was a simple image/symbol If you want to get children to better understand the symbolic nature of pictures, you're better off giving more sketchy and less realistic pictures (because this will stop them from falling into the trap that the image/symbol = referent)

While they are certainly doing category-based inductive reasoning, there are certain more complex forms of induction that pre-schoolers/early school-age children struggle with such as

implications of sample size (monotonicity effect) - children <6 implications of evidence diversity (evidence diversity effect) - children <7-8

What is the minimal group effect?

in-group favouritism

Whenever development occurs, it proceeds from a state of relative lack of differentiation to a state of...

increasing differentiation and hierarchic integration

what is gaze following/joint attention?

is a reaction to non-verbal attentional cues in social interactions

what is meant by infants' reactions to adult emotional displays?

looking for an empathic reaction from a baby when it sees an adult exaggerate an emotion (through facial expression)

what is the neural difference between normal kids and those with FAS?

major difference in size; lack of complexity of sulca and gyrus across cortex = small heads, long-term cognitive delays and learning impairments

What is a potential reason for why babies of 33-months continue to fall 3 or 4 times?

maybe you don't learn from falling. Maybe falling isn't aversive. Maybe falling in the pit is fun (especially older kids)

what does the current evidence suggest is the "broken" mechanism in kids with autism

mirror neuron dysfunction

what task is used to measure "forgetting over time"

mobile conjugate task

what happens if a fetus is exposed to a teratogen in the first 2 weeks before it has implanted in the uterus?

most often what happens is if that ball of cells has been damaged, it won't implant itself and the woman gets her period (without knowing she was ever pregnant)

What are the benefits of upright locomotion?

o Go more/further o See more o Play more (because they have their hands free) o Interact more

what is meant by predictions of adult intentions?

observing whether children are able to predict what an adult is trying to do vs what they're actually doing

what is impression formation?

people use information from physical features and nonverbal behaviours to form impressions of individuals

what are affordances?

perceived functional properties of objects in relation to the observer: they specify which actions and interactions with the environment are possible

in hindsight, what may be problematic about the original marshmallow task?

perhaps the original marshmallow task is more a measure of the kinds of experiences children have had than their inhibition --> the task probably disadvantages kids from low SES backgrounds (with inconsistent parenting) and advantages those who were going onto become successful members of society anyway

when do we typically see two upturns in the trajectory of EF development?

pre-school and adolescence

What happens to perception-action coupling when perception changes? how can this be overcome?

prism goggles --> leads to inaccurate perceptual-motor coordination overcome by training/experience with the distorted world

what is one of the earliest kinds of tasks where we see differences in typically developing infants and atypical development?

reactions to adult emotional displays - Typical development: we see this empathic reaction by 12 months old - Atypical patterns: are delayed in showing these empathic (e.g., kids with autism)

it's likely due to a lack of _______________ that explains why no one remembers their infancy.

representational flexibility

children who perform well on ToM tasks also score well in...

social competence and skilled communication

describe the workings of the incredible shrinking machine test? (as a method of testing Hayne's theory of childhood amnesia)

stage 1: kids (age 2, 2.5 or 3) were shown something "shrinking" in the machine and were asked to verbally describe it - even though the (younger) kids have low verbal skills stage 2: measured retention for the event (i.e., what happened when using the machine) either 6 months or 12 months later using verbal tests, photographic tests (shown things that did or didn't happen when using the machine and the child had to pick which instances did occur), re-enactment (able to demonstrate what happened when using the machine) - There should be a big difference in performance when they're tested visually/behaviourally compared to when they're tested verbally because they should be able to access memories through the visual or behavioural test and not through a verbal test

are children superprecocial or superaltricial? how does this affect perception?

superaltricial - this means they're not fully perceptive at birth, instead, the traditional view says they start with primitive and simple schemas and add information to existing schemas over repeated exposure with an object; elaborating or enriching a schema until they can distinguish among different objects

what determines which affordance-related behaviours are possible?

the body dimensions of the person performing the behaviour (e.g., whether or not an obstacle can be stepped over depends on leg length) - this changes continuously throughout development

what characteristic marks the end of the germinal and beginning of the embryonic period?

the closing of the neural tube

what is optic flow?

the effect of observer movement on the optic array (i.e., how a scene changes as you move around) Optic flow provides more information about an environment than just static optic array

how do we measure self-concept?

the mirror-marke (Rouge) test

describe the discontinuity in infant memory

the older you get, the more memories you remember for that age - its a continuous incline. HOWEVER, between ages 2.5-3 people are reporting almost no memories reliably --> this is the discontinuity

what is physiognomic character of perception?

the possibility that certain aspects of object's function could be perceived directly from it's physical qualities e.g., the perceptual qualities of a chair --> suitable for sitting or for standing on to reach a tall shelf

in contrast to Werner's idea of physiognomic character, what is the traditional view of the perception of objects' function?

the retrieval of an object's function is mediated by categorisation perception of physical structure --> categorisation --> retrieval of function

why are institutionalised kids smaller than normal (growth retarded)?

the stress (high levels of circulating cortisol) of the inconsistent caregiving makes it difficult for these kids to metabolise their food

what is the "gold standard" for assessing whether child has a mature theory of mind?

the understanding of false beliefs

what makes establishing causality complex, using an example?

there are multiple possibilities for why you might feel sick when driving home from a party - food poisoning, drunk too much, coincidence that an incubating virus is showing symptoms now

is the development of ToM mostly nature or nurture?

there is evidence for both!

why are institutionalised kids indiscriminately friendly?

they are competing for attention and resources

what happens in 2-3-month-olds if you change more than 2 of the 5 objects in the mobile conjugate task?

they'll look at it as if it's a whole new thing

describe the results of Bonawitz and Shafto's 2011 experiment about teaching 4-5-year-old children about a novel and multifunctional object

those in the pedagogical group were less likely to discover the other functions of their own accord (less likely to engage in exploration) and the interrupted condition resulted in more exploration Young children are not passive learners. They actively interpret teacher's pedagogical goals

true or false, there is a spectrum of effects of alcohol?

true there is also a condition called fetal alcohol effects (Suspected alcohol exposure and diagnosed retrospectively via learning impairments)

Learning to understand symbols involves representational insight, what is this?

understanding that an entity can stand for something other than itself

as a result of cognitive interviews, how much more information is accurately recalled?

up to 35% So, when no suggestions are given, we know that cognitive interview can be a powerful tool in increasing memory accuracy

what is microcephaly?

when a baby is born with a very small/disproportionate head and neck as a result of prenatal exposure to Zika virus

give an example of one of the most fundamental affordances in the environment

whether a separation between two surfaces (e.g., a doorway) is wide enough to allow a person to pass through it

how can facial features be altered in ways that make a face look more competent?

wider faces are seen as more competent

If kids are having difficulty connecting the model with the referent in the big snoopy/little snoopy task then making the model more interesting should make this _________?

worse increasing the salience of the model makes the kids think about the model less as a model and more as an object in its own right so 3.5-year-olds (who are usually good at the task) gave poorer performance (close to what you see from a 2.5-year-old)

are children more susceptible to suggestion than adults?

yes, children are susceptible to suggestibility but so are adults. However, younger children are the most susceptible.

Describe Patterson & Bigler's minimal group effect experiment

· 3-5-year-olds were randomly assigned to groups where one group wore red and the other wore blue t-shirts to preschool every day for 3 weeks · Children evaluated in-group peers more favourably than out group peers - this was not based on any other characteristic than the colour they wore

explain helper/hinderer study (procedure)

· Babies (6-months and 10-months) sit on their carers' lap and watch a puppet show · On alternating trials one shape is trying to get up/down the hill and the other shape present is a helper (pushing them up) or a hinderer (getting in the way) · Babies are shown this until they habituate and look away · Then at test, they're shown trials where the target is in the middle, the helper is on one side and the hinderer is on the other side and the target approaches one of these · DV1: looking time at helper approach vs hinderer approach event (do babies spend more time looking at the surprising event i.e., approaching hinderer? = this would imply moral understanding) · DV2: Toy choice (helper vs hinderer)

what are the alternative explanations for the helper/hinderer results?

· Both helper and hinder trials have collision between the characters (aversive) · In the helper case the target character shows joy at getting to the top of the hill (bouncing around). In the hinderer case, the target character shows depression at being hindered · Perhaps infants choose the helper because it is associated with bouncing and fail to choose the hinderer because it is associated with collision

describe the outcomes of each of the experiments in week 2's empirical reading

· Experiment 1: For white children at 3-months they could differentiate between Asian faces. However, white children at 6-months could not (baseline) · Experiment 2: white 6-month-olds could differentiate the same Asian faces depicted with angry or happy expressions · Experiments 3 and 4: yielded comparable results for white 6- and 9-month-olds tested with Black faces (i.e., narrowing with neutral faces, reinstatement of sensitivity when the faces were presented with emotion). · Experiment 5: showed that White 6-month-olds did not differentiate upside-down angry or happy Asian faces, and that White 9-month-olds did not differentiate upside-down angry or happy Black faces

why is an understanding of causality important?

· Helps us to understand our environment - "why things happen" · Helps us predict future events · Helps us to control our environment

describe the methods of each of the experiments in week 2's empirical reading

· Infants were presented with one Asian face as the familiarization stimulus. Then, they were tested for recognition by presenting the familiarized Asian face paired with a novel Asian face side by side. We used greater looking time to the novel face relative to the familiarized face at test to index face recognition. If infants were able to recognize individual Asian faces, they should look significantly longer at the novel Asian face than the familiarized one (i.e., novelty preference). · Experiment 2 used the same procedure as Experiment 1 with 6-month-old White infants except that we added angry facial expressions (for the Angry condition) or happy facial expressions (for the Happy condition) to the same Asian faces used in Experiment 1. · To assess the generalizability of the findings of Experiments 1 and 2, we conducted Experiments 3 and 4 with Black faces. · In Experiment 3, we tested 6- and 9-month-old White infants with neutral Black faces to establish that 6-month-old White infants would recognize Black faces but 9-month-old White infants would not. · In Experiment 4, we added angry and happy facial expressions to the same Black faces used in Experiment 3 for the Angry and Happy conditions, respectively. · In Experiment 5, we tested whether White 6-month-olds would differentiate inverted Asian faces depicted with angry or happy expressions, and whether White 9-month-olds would differentiate inverted Black faces with angry or happy expressions.

describe Palmer at al's 2012 study of babies' ability to discriminate between language signs

· Just like speech contrasts, signs are perceived categorically by native ASL speakers (but not non-signing adults) · Hearing 4-month old infants (but not 14-month olds) also perceive sign boundaries categorically · However, hearing infants growing up with ASL (12-18-month-olds) retain the ability to discriminate between signs in a categorical way whereas infants not exposed to ASL lose the ability

what happens in myelination?

· Myelin is a lipid/protein substance produced by supporting cells (glia) · Myelin insulates axons so that signals can travel faster · Happens in a bottom to top, back to front pattern in the brain · Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) distinguishes white (i.e., myelinated) from grey (unmyelinated; generally cell bodies) matter

what happens in neurogenesis?

· Neurons begin to be born around the 5th week, neurogenesis peaks 3-4 prenatal months (and like ovum's, the neurons you're born with are the neurons you have for life) · Other supporting cells, called "glia", are being born at the same time · Proliferation = hundreds of thousands of new cells born each minute · Errors in cell proliferation: microcephaly and macrocephaly

what happens in migration?

· Neurons move from the proliferation zone to the location where they will reside in the brain (6 weeks to 24 weeks) · Inside-out kind of process because the proliferation zone is very deep inside your brain and the ones which will live closest to it, migrate first and the ones which live further away will move last · Poorly understood phenomenon - we don't know how this happens · Neuroblasts "ride" glial fibers · disruptions in cell migration: lissencephaly (smooth brain) and agenesis of corpus callosum)

describe the brain development that occurs during adolescence (Jay Giedd)

· The density of cortical grey matter DECREASES with age - synaptic connections are pruned, and dendrites retract (in response to experience) · Happens in a back to front, bottom to top pattern · Prefrontal cortex (at the front and the top) is the last area to mature (late adolescence)

describe Heron-Delaney et al's 2011 study of babies' ability to discriminate between race faces

· Young infants can discriminate between faces of any race, but lose this ability by 9 months · Train Caucasian infants with picture books containing either Caucasian or Chinese faces between 6 and 9 months · Babies who were trained with Caucasian faces could no longer discriminate between Chinese faces. But babies who were trained with Chinese faces could. · So, with extra experience, infants retain the ability to discriminate other-race faces