Infant and Child Dev. - Ch. 1 - 6 (Exam 1)

what about instrumental conditioning?

(aka Operant conditioning) - involve learning the relation between one's own behavior and the consequences that result - most instrumental conditioning research with infants involves positive reinforcement, in which a reward reliably follows a behavior and increases likelihood that the behavior will be repeated - contingency relation between infant's behavior and reward * infant learned within minute that kicking will cause mobile to move - baseline kicking rate is measured when infant NOT connected to mobile - during learning, infant connected to mobile - during test, infant NOT connected to mobile

how do cultural practices influence dev. in our culture?

- "Back to Sleep" to reduce SIDS has increased age at which infants roll over - better view of world from backs --> less motivation to roll over - spending less time on belly may cause arm strength to develop more slowly - by 18 months, no differences in locomotion

what kinds of sounds do infants make? and when?

- "animal" sounds from birth (burps, cry, sneeze, grunt, sighs) - vocalizations * cooing: 6 weeks * babbling: 7 months * 1st words: 12 months

how do infants attribute dispositional states?

- 12 month olds seem able to attribute distributional states - infants watched film that adults interpret as a ball "trying and failing" to get up a hill and being helped by a triangle and blocked by a square - infants' looking behavior indicated that they expected the ball to approach the helpful triangle while avoiding the hindering square * takes very little for adults to make attributions * babies acted surprise if ball avoided approach of helper

What was Esther Thelen's experiment?

- 2 experiments to test hypothesis that rapid increases in infant's weight made it impossible for them to execute stepping motion 1) weights attached to infant's ankles who still have stepping reflex -- and babies suddenly stopped stepping 2) infants who no longer showed reflex DID when suspended waist-deep tank of water that supported their weight ** movement pattern and its neural basis remains, but masked by changing ratio of leg weight to strength

"Stat learning by 8 month old infant" - J, A, and N

- 2 facts support nativist position experience -- independent mechanisms as necessary and dominant in language acquisition - complex production develops rapidly - language input available - word segmentation tough b/c no invariant acoustic market for word boundaries in fluent speech ** experimental evidence show infants can use statistical learning to segment/identify words in speech

what about the Pikler House (orphanage) in Hungary?

- Dr. Pikler --> respect for babies * full attention * slow down * build trust * "with" not "to" -- talk through care-taking - don't put babies in physical positions they can't get themselves into (except for safety) - uninterrupted playtime - tune into the cues and respect the child's message **appropriate infant-directed speech supports normal language acquisition, word comprehension, and infant-caretaker trust + bonding

how does the visual cliff illustrate interdependence of different domains of development?

- Gibson & Walk: 6 to 14 month old infants perceived and understood significance of depth cue of relative size - using heart rate deceleration as dependent measure, infants perceive difference in depth but showed no fear of deep size - experience of moving around in environment shapes babies' understanding of differences in height of surface ** social referencing - infants who have just learned to crawl --> may crawl over deep side of visual cliff

In Piaget's theory, how are kids seen as?

- active - learning on their own - intrinsically motivated to learn

what about a baby's visual acuity?

- acuity approaches that of adults by age 8 months: reaches adult acuity by 6 years old - increase in density of photoreceptors - increase in lens accommodation - increase in focusing

do kids learn instances or rules?

- apply rule of language to new words - kids implicitly learn rules and use them - kids' performance on "wug" test indicates that kids have internalized rules

when do looking preferences for mom's face change?

- around 1 month, look longer at stranger's photo than mom's if both accompanied by speech - if no speech, stranger preference emerges at 5 months, BUT infants smile more when looking at mom's photo - at 6 months, no differences in looking time to mom/stranger when pics paired, but ERP response stronger to mom ** brain response changes to adult pattern beginning at 24 months - ERP response to mom's face remains strong - beginning at 24 months, ERP response transitions to stronger responses to novel faces, monkey faces, inverted faces

what about locomotion?

- around 8 months of age, become capable of self-locomotion for first time as they (typically) begin to crawl - begin walking independently at around 13-14 months of age, using a toddling gait - crawling = usually 1st means of locomotion ** infants must learn through experience what new motor skills enable them to do

What is the process of development for Piaget?

- assimilation: translate incoming info in terms of existing schemata (concepts/action - knowledge structure) - accommodation: adapt/modify/change current knowledge - equilibrium: balance assimilation and accommodation

what about classical conditioning?

- associating an mutually neutral stimulus with a stimulus that always evokes a reflexive response - plays a role in infants' everyday learning - some emotional responses may be learned through classical conditioning

how do you prep for language production?

- babbling: producing syllables made up of a consonant followed by a vowel that are repeated in strings - take turns with baby's cooing/dialogue

what drives visual development?

- babies are born with astigmatism - the eye gets bigger until image is in focus - eye growth is determined by visual input

what about A-Not-B error?

- babies show A-Not-B error even if object isn't hidden but just waved around at 1st one, and then another position

any preference for infant's own face?

- beginning around 4-5 months, infants discriminate between a videotaped moving image of themselves and that of another person or object with facial features and attend more to the other - by 8 months, look longer at static pics of other than of themselves - mirror self-recognition emerges 18-24 months

what are the brain and behavioral responses to face change?

- by 3 months, much experience with face as a social stimulus - initially right and left hemispheres contribute to face processing at 4 months, left visual field, right hemisphere has advantage to face processing - adults show activation of particular ERP component when viewing faces... usual faces (human, upright) ... smaller amplitude ... for unusual (monkey, inverted) show larger amplitude - 6 month old perform equally well reorganizing human and monkey faces - 9 month olds perform much more accurately on human faces ** pattern of results suggests that face-processing abilities to develop with experience and become specialized

when do most kids combine words into simple sentences?

- by end of 2nd years - comprehension precedes production - telegraphic speech: kids' 1st sentences - generally 2-word utterances ("Daddy read", "drink juice") - over regularization: speech errors in which kids treat irregular form of words as if they were regular

Word detection vs. stat learning?

- can infants (implicitly) detect and use recurring patterns in speech - infants < 1 year old sensitive to distributional properties - in stat learning, individuals learn to detect patterns and regularities in the world (domain general learning mechanisms)

why are very young kids seldom "great conversationalists"?

- collective monologues: involve series of non sequiturs, the content of each child's turn having little/nothing to do with what other kid has said

what is intermodal perception?

- combine info from 2 or more senses is present from very early in life - very young infants link sound and sight, oral and visual experience, and visual and tactile experience

dreaming/writing

- creating pics --> common symbolic activity, accompanied by narratives - kids draw people = "tadpole" forms

what happens in the concrete operational stage?

- decenter: think in multiple dimensions - think logically, not just intuitively - classify objects into coherent categories and understand greater complexity of causation - 7 - 12 years old

what about habituation?

- decrease in responsiveness to repeated stimulation reveals that learning has occurred - infant has memory representation of the repeated, now-familiar stimulus - speed of habituation is believed to reflect general efficiency of infant's processing of info - continuity with general cognitive ability later in life

what about sensitivity to taste and smell?

- develops before birth - newborns prefer smell of breast milk and by 2 weeks of age can differentiate scent of their own mom's milk from that of other women

how is visual acuity measured?

- differential learning --> look at striped pattern vs. a plan gray square of the same size and overall brightness - gratings differ in spatial frequency

what is word segmentation?

- discovering where words begin and end in fluent speech - process begins during 2nd half of 1st year

what are the 4 stages in Piaget's theory?

- each builds on previous, has key developments, key limitation 1) sensorimotor: 6 substages (1st 2 years) 2) preoperational (movement in environment --> eyes, sucking, limbs) [age 2-5] 3) concrete operations (5 --> adolescence) [multidimensional thinking] 4) formal operations (abstract thinking, deductive reasoning)

What happens in the preoperational stage?

- egocentrism, centration - acquire ability to internally represent the world through language and mental imagery - begin perspective taking - age: 2 - 7 years old

what's most helpful for infant-directed speech/sign?

- eye contact - reciprocity --> wait for response (facial, vocal, gestural) - informative

what strategies do infants use to figure out word meaning?

- fast mapping: process of rapidly learning a new word simply from hearing the contrastive use of a familiar and the unfamiliar word - syntactic bootstrapping: strategy of using grammatical structure of whole sentence to figure out meaning - pragmatic cues: aspect of social context used for word learning

what about reaching?

- for 1st few months, infants limited to pre-reaching movements (clumsy movements towards general vicinity of objects they see) - infants begin successfully reaching for objects at ~ 3 to 4 months - around 7 months, as infants gain ability to sit independently, reaching becomes stable - reaching shows sign of anticipation by 10 months of age, infants' approach to object affected by what they intend to do with object

what does dev. of language skills beyond ages 5 or 6 years look like?

- foundations for language in peace - accomplishment in sustaining a conversation - complex grammar mastered by school-age kids - appreciation of multiple....

why are faces special visual stimuli?

- from birth, infants are drawn to faces - Why?? 1) bias towards configuration with more elements in the upper half than in the lower half 2) innate face "knowledge" - infant comes to recognize and prefer own mom's face after about only 12 cumulative hours of exposure --> but only if has heard mom's voice!!

what about bilingualism and multilingualism?

- growing more common in the US - bilingualism provides cognitive advantages to kids * vocab growth may be slightly slower in infancy and early childhood * metacognitive advantages, executive functioning advantages * code switching may be common & confusing to monolinguists

what about auditory perception?

- human auditory system is relatively well developed at birth, but hearing doesn't approach adult levels until age 5 or 6 - newborns turn toward sounds (auditory localization) - infants perceive subtle differences in human speech (recognize mom's voice prenatally)

what are factors affecting the A-Not-B error?

- infants appear more competent when tested via visual attention than with tests that require them to take action * memory limitations * problems with inhibitory control associated with immaturity of PFC * competition between representative system and response * social construal of task: change the interaction, change response - infants respond according to how they've learned

what is observational learning?

- infants as young as 6 to 9 months imitate some of novel actions they have witnessed - in choosing to imitate a model, infants appear to pay attention to reason for person's behavior - infants attempt to reproduce behavior of other people, but not of inanimate objects - by 15 months, infants can imitate actions they have seen an adult perform on TV

how/when do infants gain social knowledge?

- infants must acquire knowledge about people and their behavior * distinguishing animals and inanimate entities * knowing that behavior of others is purposeful and goal-directed - by end of 1st year, infants learned about how people's behavior is related to goals and intentions * suggesting very early precursors of theory of mind 15 months olds can make inferences about what person will do based on knowledge of what person knows ** verbalizing (implicit false belief test -- pass at 14.5 months) - 7.4 months: babies reach accurately - 5 months: babies reach for things in front of them

what is the violation-of-expectancy procedure?

- infants shown event that should evoke surprise/interest if it violates something that the infant knows or assumes to be true - infants indicate surprise at impossible events by dishabituating and staring

How does comprehension precede production?

- infants understand words before they can produce them - toddlers understand sentences before they can produce them - kids understand (some) syntactically complex sentences before they can produce sentences of equal complexity

how do babies understand intentions?

- infants who see human arm reach for object in same location assume that action is directed toward object, not the place - looked longer when hand went to new object in old place, than when it reached for old object * babies do understand that reaching is intentional * infants who dishabituate in reaching event toward novel object are demonstrating that they understand that reaching represents being intentional to grasp specific object

What is generativity?

- infinite utterances from finite elements: every language has limited # of phonemes and very large but still finite # of words * recursion or nesting contributes to generativity ** element of language that can be combined in novel ways to produce an unlimited # of correctly formed utterances

connectionism

- info-processing approach that emphasizes simultaneous activity of numerous interconnected processing units

What are the psychological implications of basic skills acquired in infancy?

- integral to simple acts of looking, reaching, and walking are hallmarks of psychological dev. 1) Agency 2) Prospectivity --> think of future 3) Behavioral flexibility 4) Means-ends problem solving - goals can be achieved - use different means to solve problem * Motor-milestones dynamically affected by growth, development, and experience * perception of some physical properties is present at birth - perceptual abilities advance with experience - sensory operations functional at birth

What is Piaget's view on nature and nurture?

- interact to yield cognitive development - adaptation: responding to demands of environment to meet one's goals - organization: integrating particular observations into coherent knowledge

what is the visually evoked potential method?

- it examines changes in brain activity - measuring brain response to visual stimulus - rapid alteration between gray background and stripes - when stripes are easy to see, the brain will differentiate stripes from gray... otherwise it won't

what about the habituation method?

- it relies on infant's memory and attention - same image over and over until the baby habituates - show a new image and see if the baby dishabituates - measures looking time

How does Piaget describe development?

- it's discontinuous (consists of discrete stages) - Central properties - qualitative changes - broad applicability across topics and contexts (domain general) - brief transitions - invariant sequence

how rapidly do infants learn words?

- kids have vocab of about 50 words (~18 months of age) - "vocab spurt" occurs due to: * adult influences on word learning * amount and quality of speech * context in which words are used by talking adults * consistency between visual environment and spoken words

What happens in the sensorimotor stage?

- know the world through senses and actions - object permanence, imitation - age: 0 - 2 year old

how/when do infants gain physical knowledge?

- knowledge of gravity begins in 1st year * infants look longer at objects that violate expected motion trajectories - infants gradually come to understand under what conditions one object * this gradually refined understanding of support relations is presumed to result from experience * over time, different scenarios shock them * as early as 3 months, understood objects that are unsupported will fall * 12.5 months --> central gravity understanding

what are the processes of language acquisition?

- listening and speaking (or watching + signing) - understanding what others are referring to - producing intelligible speech or signs ** amount of language exposure is critical to development ~ 30 million word gap ** size of vocab important for kids

any preference for dad's face?

- minimal research - no preferences among newborns who sucked pacifier to view videotape of dad or male stranger - at 4 months, no visual preference for dad's face over unfamiliar face - unless infant's primary caretaker is the dad

What are dynamic system theories?

- most contemporary theory - back bone: Piaget, Info Process - focus on complexity of interactions between domains of experience and development - Esther Thelen: stop reflex, reaching - seemingly simple is often complex and seemingly simple changes in capability may trigger complex ** simple changes can trigger complex changes

how do cultural practices influence development?

- mothers in Mali exercise their infants ==> accelerate dev. - exercises don't harm and do speed up early motor skills

what characteristics errors do English learning toddlers make?

- mouse --> mouses (mice) - sheep --> sheeps (sheep)

when do infants start to recognize words?

- much earlier than parents realize - own name by 4.5 months - 6 months look toward correct object when object name presented and 2 objects shown - toddlers even more impressive word recognition abilities

What first words are strikingly similar across cultures?

- names for frequent caregivers (parents, etc.) - names for pet, bottle - social function words: bye-bye, hi/hello, uh-oh ** babies' first spoken words are usually - more recognizable to parents than to strangers - produced around 1st bday - names of common objects, fam members, or social greetings

how is a kid's story-telling ability enhanced by parents' elaborate conversational style?

- narratives: description of past events that have basic structure of a story usually can be produced by 5 years old *conversational skills increase with cognitive and social development * dev. also increases ability to take other people's perspectives ** elaborate conversation = better language and vocab dev.

What reflexes are developed?

- newborns show reflexes (innate, fixed patterns of action that occur in response to particular stimulation) - rooting and sucking, having clear adaptive value (others have no known adaptive significance) - stepping reflex: infant lifts 1st one leg then the other in coordinated pattern resembling walking (disappears around 2 months of age) - this is due to the fact that infants' rapid weight gain in 1st few weeks after birth causes their legs to get heavier faster than they get stronger

how do newborns recognize their mom's face?

- not all newborns easily recognized mom; newborns of depressed moms take longer to habituate to her face - recognition dependent on newborn seeing external and internal features - between 1.25 months and 2 months, recognize internal features - by 4 months, recognize mom by external features only

how do infants learn about the environment through active touch?

- oral exploration dominates at first - newborns can discriminate "nubby" from smooth nipples - newborns can discriminate heavy from light objects placed in hands - 4 months of age, learn to reach and manual exploration gradually becomes more prevalent

How do infants search for order?

- perceptual ability: infants actively search for order and regularity in the world around them - learning that facial features occur in same position - differentiation: extraction from the constant changing stimulation in the environment of those elements that are invariant/stable - discover affordances: possibilities for actions offered by objects and situations

what are distributional properties?

- phenomenon that certain sounds are more likely to appear together than others

how do infants and kids acquire components of language?

- phonemes: units of sound in speech; a change in phoneme changes meaning of word * phonological dev.: acquisition of knowledge - native distinction vs. non-native distinction * infant turn head at "new" distinct sound (older you get, you can't distinguish subtle changes in non-native language)

what about stat learning?

- picking info from environment, form association, among stimuli that occur in a statistical predictable pattern - infant sensitive to regularity with which one stimulus follows another

what about perception of music?

- possible biological function for music perception and preferences - infants share strong preference adults have for some music sounds over others - infants respond to rhythm in music - sensitive to melody, habituation to melody regardless of pitch

what types of faces do infants favor?

- prefer familiar faces - quickly prefer smiling faces - from birth onward, infants look longer at faces that adults find more attractive than those adults rate as less attractive, and interact more positively with people with attractive faces ** symmetrical faces * averaged features produced faces judged most attractive

what can newborns see?

- prefer patterns of high visual contrast b/c of poor contrast sensitivity - cones (concentrated in the fovea) differ from adults' in size, shape, and spacing - see low SF, not high SF (broad outlines, not fine detail) - limited color vision, but by 2-3 months of age, color vision is similar to adults

Jusczyk, Aslin, Saffran's experiments?

- preferences for real words heard repeatedly in speech - recognition of repeated pseudo-speech in synthetic speech - preferences for pseudo-words that follow typical phonemic patterns of native language

how would we know what a baby sees?

- preferential looking method - present 2 stimuli and see which one the baby prefers to look at --> big/thick/spread out stripes

how do we know what babies can see?

- preferential-looking technique: show infants 2 patterns or 2 objects at a time to see if the infants have a preference for one over the other - habituation: repeatedly show a stimulus until response declines - if response increases to a novel stimulus, we infer that the baby can discriminate - looking time, but also heart rate changes, ERP N2 component

what are theoretical issues in language dev.?

- prereqs for language acquisition are 1) a human brain (nature) 2) experience with human language (nurture) - nature and nurture interact

what is mean-end problem solving?

- process of using an action (the means) to achieve a goal (the end) * emerges in 2nd half of 1st year of life * inhibit dominant response * use simplest strategy (distance reduction)

Chomsky and nativist view?

- proposed humans are born with universal grammar * that all languages, no matter how different they may seem from another, have in common that they can be broken down into nouns and verbs and other grammatical forms

what about speech perception and comprehension?

- prosody - categorical perception - Voice onset time (VOT) - word segmentation - distributional properties

nonlinguistic symbols and dev.?

- range of symbols - symbols must be represented mentally in 2 ways at same time (dual representation)

scale models?

- reason by analogy - HAVE TO REMEMBER having more language facilitates memory

how are first words often used in high individualistic ways?

- reference: in language and speech, the association of words and meaning - overextension: use of given word in broader context than is appropriate - holophrastic period: period when kids use words in their small productive vocab one word at a time

what about the optokinetic nystagmus method?

- relies on a reflex response - measures the jumping of the eye when watching a series of objects moving - drag a panel of stripes, or rotate a striped drum and measure eye jumping - when stripes are too close, the eyes stop jumping from stripe to stripe

are electronic "educational" apps for vocab and reading good for infants and kids?

- rigorous evaluation has discounted publishers' claims - parents who use apps overestimate effects; those who like apps more, overestimate even more - parents who use apps speak and interact less with young kids - interactive video (Skype) produces positive effects

how does a baby's looking behavior change quickly?

- scanning - 1 month olds scan the perimeters of shapes - 2 month olds scan both the perimeters and the interiors of shape - age related change in acuity, sensitivity to higher spatial frequency info

what about infant observation of action and brain response?

- sensory-motor cortical areas for hand were more active in the hand condition - sensory-motor cortical areas for foot were more active in the foot condition - somatotopic organization of sensory cortex and of the motor cortex 1) plays a role in understanding movement of others 2) plays a role in imitation of others

what are characteristics of infant-directed speech/sign?

- slower - higher pitched/exaggerated movt - rhythmic, variable intonation, elongated vowels

what's required for language?

- species-specfic (only humans acquire language in normal course of dev., and species-universal) - language learning is achieved by typically developing infants across the globe - critical period: time during which language develops readily and after which (between age 5 - puberty) language acquisition is much more difficult and ultimately less successful - infant-directed speech: distinctive mode of speech that adults adopt when talking to babies and very young kids, used by essentially all cultures, to varying degrees

what is Piaget's theory?

- stand against which all theories are judged - constructivist: depicts kids as constructing knowledge for themselves - dev. mechanisms applied across all domains - using natural curiosity, development of nervous system and bodies - using general purpose, domain-general learning mechanisms

What are the rules for combining words into well-formed sentences?

- syntax: rules in language that specify how words from different categories can be combined *syntactic dev: learn syntax of language - pragmatic dev: acquisition of knowledge about how language is used (polite forms, sarcasm, irony, insult) - metalinguistic knowledge: understanding properties and functions of language (understanding language as language)

What is language development?

- systems of representing thoughts, feelings, stories, and knowledge that enable communicating these to other people * comprehension: understand what others say/sign/write * production: speaking/signing/writing

What happens in the formal operational stage?

- think systematically and reason about what might be and what it is - politics, fiction, ethics, religion, science of greater interest - 12+ years old

how is following movement "awkward"?

- tracking - newborn infants begin scanning the environment but can't smoothly track even slowly moving objets until 2-3 months of age

behaviorism

- using reinforcements (nurture) (Skinner --> domain-general)

what about imitating intentions?

- when 18 month olds see person apparently try, but fail to do an action, they imitate the action the person intended to do

What about motor development?

- wide variety when kids hits milestone - previously believed to reflect neurological maturation - dynamic-systems approach, emphasizes interaction of many factors: neural mechanism, but also increase in strength, posture control, balance, perceptual skills, and motivation ** baby on treadmill; dynamic systems theory - cognitive dev, social dev. better; exploration enhanced - walking posture better -- use treadmill - 80 min a day

any preferences for other people?

- with sufficient exposure, recognition of others is evident 2-3 months - ERP differences in 3m old infants for familiar faces vs. novel faces - by 8 months, a single exposure is enough to produce ERP differences between previously seen and novel face

what are the theories of cognitive development?

1) frameworks for understanding 2) raise questions about human nature 3) no single theory is adequate 4) approaches cover wider range of phenomena than any one alone

modularity hypothesis

brain has innate, self-contained language module that's separate from other aspects of cognitive functioning