PSY 105 Midterm (Developmental Psychology)

Piaget's claims about the object concept

- Not present at birth, develops with experience - Takes 18-24 months to fully develop

what did the fear learning in monkey's suggest

- Suggesting that some fears are harder to learn than others, suggesting natural tendencies

Who is Jean Piaget?

- Founder of Cognitive Development research - Published his first paper at 10 - Theories still have profound influence on the field today - Particularly interested in the types of reasoning errors children make - Stage Theorist - Constructivist: "child as scientist"

Some languages only have a small set of imprecise terms for number, e.g., "one", "two", "many". How would someone from one of these cultures represent an exact large number (like 18)?

- They would represent it approximately! For instance they might tap the table somewhere between 12 and 24 times.

Rousseau view on the nature/nurture debate

- followed the nature view - believed children have an innate moral sense - Believed children were innately good and we were making children bad

continuous growth

- gradual process--growth happens slowly - a slowly increasing line - ex: tree

discontinuous growth

- growth happens in leaps or spurts - development happens in stages - ex: caterpillar to chrysalis to butterfly

learning through teaching vs learning through exploration

- in learning through teaching we are learning things from other people - in learning through exploration we learn by exploring the world around us

Infant Arithmetic (non-looking time studies)

- infants given 2 choices one cup with 3 crackers and one with 2 -infants in general choose the cup that has more crackers in it because they want more crackers showing they have basic knowledge of numbers

Testing specialized learning mechanisms in rats

-Rat eats food and a tone is played at the same time which causes nausea or shock at different times

what is the guiding theme of developmental psychology?

nature vs nurture

where do number concepts come from?

- infants have beginnings of "core knowledge" of numbers and how they work -culture plays a big role - Symbolic systems are different across cultures, and influence mathematical reasoning

nothing is just _____ or just ______

- nature - nurture

Piaget believed it was possible to study ________

- the contents of the mind

A not B error new evidence when 7.5 month old babies look in the correct location, even though they reach to the wrong place. This suggests that

- they might have some understanding that the object is there, and not in the old location but they don't have the ability to act on that realization

what would be an example of general purpose learning with the mouse?

- this is false - the rat associates food and tone with nausea, and food and tone with shocks - the rat just knows something bas happened with a new stimulus but doesn't know what stimulus causes what output

why do babies walk?

- walking is extremely effortful and takes a lot of practice but it is more efficient, it is a social convention (it is what other people do!), it allows you to carry things with you, it supports new types of interactions

cradle board experiment

- when testing the native Americans without using cradle board had an average of 15.05 which means the cradle board did not effect motor development

findings from Adolf reading

- when the baby was in their experienced condition they were better at avoiding the gap that was too risky but when the baby was in their less familiar crawling position they are not as good at avoiding the risky gap - as the baby gets better at a motor skill they are better at judging their own abilities - what the baby learns in one mode of action (ex: sitting or crawling) does not transfer to another mode of action (ex: walking)

child as an active learner

-Children can shape their environment by choosing what to pay attention to. -ex: babies like to stare at their moms face initially which leads to more social interaction because the mom will pay attention and give him/her input.

How children learn the meaning of number words

-Children learn the meanings of number words one at a time - there are one knowers, two knowers, three knowers, and cardinal principle knowers - Takes 6ish months for a child to move up a knower-level - Cardinal principle: Eventually kids have an insight that last word used in the count list gives represents the numerosity of the set

child as scientist

-Children may arbitrarily set up "experiments" to get a better understanding of their environment by changing their actions and seeing how the outcome changes.

Truths to combat sign language myths:

- Deaf people are NOT cognitively impaired - There is NO universal sign language - Sign languages ARE real languages

what are the classic failures of the concrete operational stage

- Reasoning about logically impossible rules - children reject formal logic when the rules go against their personal (concrete) experiences

Putting Phonemes Together: Word boundaries

- Segmenting the speech stream into words is hard - the silences between words are not at word boundaries

what do infants have in the Sensorimotor Stage

- Sensorimotor intelligence - Reflexes

general facts about Piaget's stages

- Order matters more than exact age - Strong evidence against stage theory: skipping stages or regressing - Stages apply to thinking about multiple domains

Two main problems with an association-based account of learning language

- Over-regularization - Poverty of the stimulus/Too many meanings

one parent, one language

one parent speaks one language and the other speaks a different language

how can the typical developmental trajectory influence important aspects of our world

- Controls for understanding atypical & clinical cases - Importance of early detection of developmental delays and disorders - Basis for policy decisions - Get people the help they need (as early as possible)

bilingual experiences

- One-parent, one-language - Home language vs. outside language

what type of fundamental questions about the human mind does developmental psychology try to answer?

• What is the starting point? • How does experience influence development?

Over Regularization & Rule Learning

- Children create new words based on grammatical rules - Children's mistakes (e.g., "sticked") tell us that they've learned grammatical rules

rules of counting : Cardinality principle

- The last number word used indicates the set size

Bilinguals and brain health

- Executive functioning benefits seen in elderly - Bilinguals get later Alzheimer's diagnoses - Bilinguals can maintain cognition functioning with worse brain atrophy (bilinguals are able to use more brain connections even when they have less brain matter)

example of object permanence error

- Piaget's controversial claim that infants lack object permanence - "out of sight, out of mind" - Infants (younger than 8-months) reach for objects that they can see, but as soon as an object is hidden, infants stop reaching

mentalinguistic awareness example

- "In English this is called an airplane. But, in this game it is called a turtle. So, can turtles fly?" - monolingual kids would say no but bilingual kids might say yes

when do infants say their first word

- 1 year old

when do babies start to form sentences

- 2 years old

Evidence that kids are different from us

- A 3-year-old, who is jealous of another child who has two cookies, is satisfied when his father breaks his one cookie into two pieces - A mother tells her 4-year-old child, "I'll always be older than you." The child asks, "How do you know that?" - One 3-year-old believed that when children grow, their baby bones fall out, like baby teeth, and then get new "grown-up" bones

Who was Genie Wiley and what did her case provide us with?

- A feral child who was the victim of extraordinarily severe abuse, neglect, and social isolation. - Genie's case provided an opportunity to study aspects of human and language development

core knowledge of the approximate number system in adults

- Adults (humans, rats, ducks, pigeons, and non-human primates) have a system for representing approximate numerosity of large sets - Without counting! - when you see a large group of something you can estimate how much there is relative to each other and you don't have to count to see what one has more (think about assignment with blue and yellow dots)

example of A not B error

- After seeing an object hidden at (A) multiple times, infants search for it at (A: old location), even when they watch it being hidden at (B: new location) - they think every time I reach here I get a toy, not the toy is here because someone put it here. - babies might think that the action of searching is what is creating the object to appear -even when babies can search for hidden objects successfully, they still make this error suggesting they might not represent the object as existing independently of their own actions.

Why study developmental psychology?

- Answer fundamental questions about the human mind - Understanding the typical developmental trajectory can influence important aspects of our world

rules of counting: Abstraction principle

- Any set of discrete objects can be counted

why is the Approximate number system (ANS) important

- Better ANS is related to better performance on standardized math tests longitudinally!

cognitive benefits of bilingualism

- Bilinguals have to constantly inhibit their non-used language - Practice with selective attention and inhibition may lead to increased Executive Function -bilinguals are better at rule switching tasks -better at learning new rules

environment(nurture)

- Blank-slate: Infants have limited initial structure, and learn (via general-purpose learning mechanisms) from experiencing their environment - the things "written on the slate" shape the life of the individual - includes learning by association --> the things you associate with affect what gets written on your slate (what affects your life) - Different environments can have large effects on outcomes - the environment includes: Everything else, Physical world, Social world

core knowledge of the approximate number system in infants

- By 6 months, infants discriminate arrays of different approximate numbers - they look longer at novel numerosity - More interest in changing than constant numerosity - it has been found that the findings are not just about non-numeric perceptual properties because infants discriminate even when amount of ink is controlled - infants can only do this when there is a relatively large difference between the numerosities (ex: Can do 8 vs. 16, but not 8 vs. 12)

Over-regularization

- Children say things they have never heard an adult say before (e.g., "go-ed"), AND, adults do not tend to correct these grammatical errors - children applying language rules even when the application results in an error - if we were learning by association it couldn't be possible that the child would say "goed" because the child has never heard an adult say "goed" before

biology(nature)

- Core-knowledge: Infants are born with a lot of initial structure in place which guide maturation and development (via domain-specific learning mechanisms) - Different environments have small influence over outcomes (constrained) - Genes (from our parents) regulate growth and development of psychological abilities

Bilinguals phoneme discrimination

- Discriminate all phonemes in their languages - May be better discriminate phonemes from new languages! - Are better at learning new phonemic distinctions as adults!

what are the classic failures of the pre-operational stage

- Egocentrism: See things only from their perspective - Conservation Tasks: Centration (focus on one feature at the exclusion of other important ones)-> lines of pennies example

what are the two core knowledge number systems

- Exact small numbers (object tracking) - Approximate large numbers

Reaching is goal-directed

- From the beginning, infants are reaching towards objects—anticipatory reaching - Reach in direction of object, using a straight path - By 10-12 months, infants anticipate object features in their reaches by pre-shaping their hands (widens or shortens grip based on the look of the object they are trying to grab) - Development continues with more challenging reaching tasks (grabbing a spoon the correct way)

nature in fear learning

- Humans (and other animals) are predisposed to develop fears for some things more easily than others

what do children not have in the concrete operational stage

- Hypothetical General Logic - Ability to think outside of personal (concrete) experiences

infant arithmetic with larger numbers

- Infants can discriminate small numbers, but the system breaks down with larger numbers - Fail when 4 or more objects - infants have a limited capacity for tracking more than 3 items(it has to do with working memory)

core knowledge in infant arithmetic

- Infants have a system for reasoning about small, exact representations of number - 5 month olds viewed "addition" or "subtraction" events - Infants looked longer at the "wrong answer" and were surprised when the math equations didn't line up - babies also suggest that they know the specific number of toys that should be there (not just that they know that adding should result in more than 1)

how do infants learn the boundaries between words?

- Infants pay attention to transitional probabilities to identify which units are words - they calculate how likely it is for sounds to occur right after another - for example, the probability of hearing "bee" given I have heard "bay" is high but the probability of hearing "bay" given I have heard "ty" is low

A not B error: new evidence: changing posture

- Infants were trained to search in location A when sitting on their mom's lap - Infants either stay seated when the experimenter hides the object at B, or switch to standing in mom's lap - Less likely to make the error from the standing position! (More likely to search correctly in the new location at B)

creating language without a model

- Infants who are Deaf and born with hearing parents create homesign systems

what does executive functioning develop that might be necessary to pass the A not B test

- Inhibitory control - Working memory - Selective attention

Learning Fear: Little Albert

- Initially shown a white rat and the baby has a neutral (or positive) response - also initially experienced a loud noise and the baby has a negative and fearful response Training - baby goes through some training and every time the white rat is around, a loud noise is played After training - the white rat appears to be scary! - other researchers found that fear generalizes (when baby Albert is shown a fuzzy bunny he is also scared) •Conclusion - Fear is learned (Nurture)

new evidence with the A not B error

- It turns out that there isn't an age where infants magically "get" the A not B task and search correctly - Under 8-months: tend to fail with any delay - 9ish month-olds: pass with short delay (2.5 seconds) but not longer delay (5 seconds) - 12-month-olds +: pass with longer delays (even up to 10 seconds)

experiment showing learning through teaching vs learning through exploration

- Kids were randomly assigned to 1 of 2 conditions (teaching vs exploration) and were asked to play with a toy that they have never seen before - In the teaching condition the child pays attention to the part of the toy that the researcher showed him how to use and doesn't put much attention on the other parts of the toy - In the exploration condition the girl explored more of the whole toy and not just the one part of the toy that the child in the teaching condition payed attention to.

bilingual and monolingual children experience differences in

- Learning language - Cognitive Abilities - Social abilities

the social benefits of bilingualism are..

- Likely separable from cognitive benefits - Do not require speaking another language just require being exposed to another language - May arise due to differences in social experiences from monolingual children (bilingual children have to track people's mental states: who knows / understands each language)

locomotion

- Locomotion requires reasoning about obstacles and novel situations • Slopes • Gaps • Non-rigid surfaces • Potential tools / aids (e.g., hand-rail) - Requires prospective thinking and in the moment problem solving

what don't children have in the pre-operational stage

- Logical Operations

what do children have in the formal operational stage

- Mental Representations - Logical Operations - Formal Logical Reasoning (outside own experience)

what do infants not have in the Sensorimotor Stage

- Mental Representations - Logical Operations - they are not able to think of things that aren't in the here and now

what do children have in the pre operational stage

- Mental Representations (knowing to substitute banana for phone) - Capacity for pretend play

according to Piaget, cognition consisted of

- Mental images/representations (models) - Logical operations (used to manipulate & update representations) --> sorting things, finding relations

what do children have in the concrete operational stage

- Mental representations - Logical Operations - Ability to solve concrete logical problems

fear learning in monkeys

- Monkeys reared in wild are afraid of snakes, but monkeys raised in captivity are not - Show a monkey a video of a monkey screaming at the sight of a snake, this will cause the monkey watching to develop a fear of snakes as well - Tried to make a monkey scared of a flower by showing a video of a fearful reaction to a flower but it did not work

sociocultural context

- Norms, beliefs and ideals of the culture and subculture - Different cultural groups have different norms which may give infants a different environment and grow up with different norms.

when do children code switch?

- Switching isn't random: by 2- to 3-years old, bilingual children switch their language to resolve communication breakdowns

the brain has specialized learning mechanisms

- Think of the brain as a Swiss army knife - Brain has many tools to help make sense of world but you can't have too many tools in a Swiss army knife - we have some built in systems but we also have some that are not (the ones that are built in and the ones that are not are probably explained by evolution)

counting

- We have a procedure (counting!) that yields an exact measure of numerosity for any set size - Can discriminate large exact numbers, e.g. 238 vs. 239

does counting mean children know numbers?

- When asked "how many" young children can count correctly - Give-N Task: When asked "Can you give me 4" young children grab a handful without counting - Point to N Task: When asked, "Which is 4?" young children respond randomly - even though children can count to 4 doesn't necessarily mean that they understand numbers

Home sign system:

- When deaf children do not get any real sign language input at all, they create a sign-based communication system 'on their own' which they use to communicate with family. - This system uses the spontaneous gestures that the hearing family members make when they speak. - These gestures are the visual input for the deaf child, but the child adds a rudimentary grammatical structure to the way that she uses these gestures.

later evidence against the initial claim that being bilingual was detrimental to child

- When words from both languages are assessed (English and Spanish), bilinguals actually show higher (total) vocab

differences between cohorts of this new language that they created

- Youngest NSL signers are most competent (full blown language system) - Younger signers had a language model to learn from - Older NSL signers had to create the language, so its not as complete

Structured Observation

- a method that involves presenting an identical situation to each child and recording the child's behavior

Balanced bilingual:

- a person who is fluent in two languages, not favoring one over the other - Two native / fluent languages - likely learned both languages before 7 years old

interviewing

- asking children questions to see how they perceive the world

example to show assimilation and accommodation: we are trying to classify animate and inanimate things

- assimilation: a child who has never seen a rhino would know that it fits into the animate group - accommodation: your mom says plants are alive but you can't assimilate this into your existing theory of something being alive so you must change your initial theory

whole object assumption

- assume a new label refer to a whole object - words label whole objects, not parts or attributes

Mutual exclusivity assumption:

- assume that objects only have one label - If there is only one object to apply the label to, and that object already has a name, then the new label probably refers to a feature of the object - If there are two objects present, and you already know the name for one, then the new label probably refers to the unfamiliar object

Surprise & Behavior (Stahl) 2015

- babies use what they already know in the world to stimulate further learning - babies learned properties of the objects that did surprising things but did not learn as well about object that didn't do amazing things -infants who saw one object do surprising things played with that object more, infants who saw both objects do amazing things played with both toys equally - infants changed how they played with the objects based on what they saw during the earlier part of the study (infants dropped toys if they levitated and banged toys if they saw them go through a wall)

you can not train your child to move stages ____ she/he is ______

- before - ready to learn

Home language vs. outside language

- being exposed to one language at home and one language outside in school

what does exposure to another language rather than being bilingual not work for?

- better executive functioning

Metalingual awareness

- bilingual children understand that labels are arbitrary conventions -bilinguals understand that labels are just words we all agree on to speak about things with - the ability to think about language as a system

why do bilinguals show better executive function?

- bilinguals show better executive function is b/c they have to constantly inhibit and excite certain parts

Dimensional Change Card Sort Task (DCCS)

- card-sorting task that tests the ability to sort by different rules or dimensions - Requires kids to learn a rule, and then inhibit that rule to implement a new rule - bilingual students are better at inhibiting executive function

discriminating phonemes: for adults, speech is

- categorical - adults hear either "bah" or "pah" there is no in between - our brain would categorize any in between sound into one of the two categories - as adults we are unable to hear differences between phonemes that so not exist in our native language

what part of language do infants have at birth

- communication - phonology (sounds)

Experimental Designs (two types)

- cross sectional: looking across groups of children. Doing a study where there are different kids in each classroom -longitudinal: test children while they are in one age group then waiting until they are in the next age group. Study of the same people over the lifetime

rules of counting : one-one principle

- each object is labeled by a single number word

what is a symbolic system?

- ex: count list 1,2,3,4,5

What else (other than object permanence) do infants know about objects?

- expectations that objects are bound (infants looked longer at broken rod pieces because they expected the rods behind the rectangle to be bound) - expectations about contact (By 3-months of age, infants find it unexpected for a box to float un-supported)

specialized learning does not mean that _______ doesn't matter! for example...

- experience - if a baby is hesitating to go over a cliff he/she is more likely to go over it if the mother is smiling than if the mother shows fear

infant approximate number system

- infants were randomly assigned to one of two conditions (1 condition was looking at 8 dots and the other was looking at 16) - infants who were habituated with 8 dots looked longer at the flashing screens of 16 dots which suggests that they understand that 8 is different than 16 - infants habituated at 16 dots looked longer at 8 dogs -this shows infants can differentiate approximate numbers

collecting data on children

- interviewing, naturalistic observation, structured observation, experimental design

babies discriminating phonemes

- it is evident that babies can discriminate phonemes because habituate to "bah" and then when you say "pah" attention once again increases - at first babies can hear all different phonemes even those not in their native language but there comes a point where they can no longer distinguish the phonemes in another language because they have learned enough English

Arnold Gesell

- known for creating motor milestones - pioneered use of video technology for analyzing behavior - One of the 4 fathers of developmental psych -Had a nature perspective -Figured out when a typical infant can do functions; we still use these norms today

Poverty of the stimulus/Too many meanings

- language input is messy and insufficient for figuring out all of the underlying rules of language and grammar -ex: Gavagai problem

language development

- language is a stunning achievement: it is complex structure at every level - there is a finite number of words + small number of rules but we have the ability to express an infinite number of sentences with infinite meanings - language is acquired easily by infants and young children - language does not require explicit instruction - you can learn more than one language - babies and kids seem to be better at learning languages than adults are

What is habituation?

- making infants bored by showing them the same stimulus over and over again - you can measure how fast the infant gets bored

how did Genie's isolation affect her speaking/language?

- never was able to learn the correct grammar of the English language - however, her vocabulary did improve over time

is it easier for infants and children to learn iconic signs over non iconic signs?

- no - Iconicity is not necessary, and is not necessarily easier to learn

does the magnitude of the numbers in the weber ratio matter?

- no - the ratio is what matters not the magnitude of the numbers

is it plausible that babies learn everything via general purpose learning?

- no - we learn through association but we don't learn everything through association

human brains can solve a huge variety of different problems but is there really any 'general' solution to such a wide variety of problems?

- no, all problems require different responses

Aristotle and the nature/nurture debate

- nurture - all knowledge is learned through experience - each child is different and should be nurtured according to those differences

locke view on the nature/nurture debate

- nurture - Tabula Rasa-- coined "blank slate" term that implied that parents taught children to be either good or bad

naturalistic observation

- observing and recording behavior in naturally occurring situations without trying to manipulate and control the situation - a way of collecting data on children based on how they were reacting, and who interacted with who.

role of experience in the reaching experiment

- once the infants are not wearing the mittens, they are better at reaching for and exploring objects - Are more sensitive to the perceptual properties of objects (e.g., texture) - Are better at understanding other people's reaching as object-directed - Show greater social preferences for faces

Reaching tasks require more than understanding that the object continues to exist the babies need to

- pay attention to where the new location is, and hold it in memory over the delay between hiding and finding • to over-ride propensity to reach to the same place that they have been reaching to before (perseveration) • pay attention only to parts of the task that are relevant to reaching, rather than to other things that might be more interesting

plato and the nature/nurture debate

- plato believed in the core knowledge aspect of development (nature) - believed mental capacities and concepts are innate rather than acquired through learning - believed that we don't need to be taught basic things in life, we are born already knowing them

which would be the best evidence for specialized learning mechanisms with the mouse?

- rat associates food (but not tone) with nausea, and tone (but not food) with shocks

ANS in other animals

- rats don't have a count list but if you train them they will press the lever the correct number of times to get their food to be released -guppies swim to part of enclosure with more fish

Reaching experiment

- reaching training with sticky mittens - first randomly just felt around the table and the toys just happened to stick to it but eventually started looking for the toy and reaching for it

iconic signs

- signs that represent a thing itself and always bear some resemblance to the object to which they refer - Perceived similarity between the sign and its meaning (non-arbitrary)

The _______ and _______ in a person's language may influence their ________

- structure - ideas - thoughts

How do you test executive functioning in children?

- test their working memory, delay of gratification, Inhibitory control - commonly used task: Dimensional Change Card Sort Task (DCCS)

early exposure helps language learning

- the English grammar of immigrants vary based on when they came into the united states - the earlier they tried to learn English, the better their grammar was - children and adults who arrive in the US later can still learn English but they won't sound native in English - If you aren't exposed to a language by the time you are 7, you won't sound native in it

A not B error: new evidence: role of communication --> why is that when babies are given encouragement they are more likely to wrongly pick A

- the babies are more interested in the adults behavior than the actual object - the person is a distraction - they might want to repeat the excitement that they get when they reach for A even though they know it is in B because B won't get them the excitement that they want

Equilibration:

- the balance between assimilation and the accommodation that leads children to make a new theory that fits all the evidence - Process to accommodate when new evidence does not match understanding

A not B task failure and the brain

- the frontal lobe is necessary for executive functioning and the babies might not. be fully developed in that area - A not B error result of immature pre-frontal cortex (where executive functioning happens) - adults with frontal lobe lesions do worse on the task

rules of counting : stable order principle

- the numbers are recited in a particular order

What might Piaget say had changed between 7-months and 8-months, that leads the older baby to find the hidden object?

- the older baby has developed object permanence - The older baby knows that the object is still there, even when it is hidden.

code switching

- the practice of alternating between two or more languages or varieties of language in conversation - switching back and forth between languages

each homesign is not a full language, but what happens what home signers get together?

- they made one of their own

why might babies and kids be better at learning other languages than adults

- they might have different mechanisms at a young age that we might not have as adults

language background influences generalization of labels: monolinguals

- with the same language speakers, it is surprising if she uses the first label for the new object because she should know that each object only has one label - with different language speakers, the monolingual speaker has no expectation about what the second actor will do because she speaks another language

Reaching with and without parent

-Infants were more likely to reach for an object if it was in their reach and their parent was absent, but when the object was far out of reach the infants rarely reached unless their parent was present - parental presence vs absence only matters when infants could not reach the toy -Infants use reaching as a social tool to show that they want something, although they may know the object is out of reach they know someone will help them get what they want.

Fear learning in human infants

-Method: show infants picture of snakes next to other animals and measure looking -Infants do not show fear of snakes behaviorally but the fear of snakes can be easily trained -Infants preferentially associate fearful voices with snakes - Infants looked for longer at the snake image when fearful music played

stages of motor development

-Newborn: limited control of eye, head, and arm movements. No postural control or locomotion -3 months: Increasing control of head and eye movements, learning to roll over -6 months: sit independently; skilled reaching and beginnings of object exploration -9 months: crawling, pull up to standing, standing with help; fine motor skills improving, means-ends actions (multi-step actions--> pull blanket toward them to get the toy that is on it) -12 months: walking

what are the classic failures of the sensorimotor stage

-Object permanence - A not B Error

collecting data with infants

-Observation, experimental designs, measure behavior, measure looking (time/place), measure brain activity

How did infants exposed to Mandarin perform?

-infants who got live interaction with Mandarin speakers could discriminate phonemes, but all other infants (video or audio of Mandarin speaker) couldn't -"social" aspect of language

Learning language before birth

-infants can discriminate languages as soon as they are born - newborns notice when language changes: sucking rate dramatically increased when language switched from Russian to French -newborn infants already have developed preferences for their native language from the few months of hearing experience when the infant is still in the womb (suck more to their native language than to a foreign language)

timeline for learning language

-babble 6-9 mo -1 word 12 mo -2 word 18 mo -complex grammar 36 mo - order matters more than age - Same stage-like development seen across languages

Bilingualism and object labels

-bilingual infants knew that if you speak different languages they should have different labels for objects -monolinguals could not differentiate the different languages but still were surprised because they were not sure what the foreign language speaker was going to call the object

infant arithmetic with larger numbers example

-box and ball experiment - researchers showed infants they put balls in the box, but sneakily took them out - the study is to see how long the infants look when they see 2 balls go in and 2 go out vs when they see 2 go in and 1 go out - infants search more when 2 go in and only 1 ball comes out, suggesting they understand how subtraction works -Infants fail when there are 4 or more numbers involved

Why might infants stop discriminating non-native sounds?

-brain doesn't want to expend energy on phonemes that it doesn't need to know because it isn't a phoneme that it'll ever use in its native language

Can you extend the window of time during which infants can continue to differentiate non-native sounds?

-can be extended through experiences -experience with a native speaker of another language (live)

Bilingual vs monolingual vocab

-early studies showed it was too hard to teach children more than one language - monolinguals show higher English vocabulary

Mutual exclusivity in bilingualism

-if you use a novel term for 2 objects and the infant knows one of the objects already, they will give you the object that's not the one they already know. -bilinguals rely less on this than monolinguals - the more languages you learn, the less you rely on mutual exclusivity

locomotor development

-infants begin to walk around 11-15 months -different developmental trajectories to walking -before walking infants might crawl on hands and knees, crawl on belly, scoot in a sitting position, not crawl at all. -experience influences trajectory

what does longer looking time mean?

-infants can differentiate the old stimulus from the new stimulus -infant may be surprised by the new stimulus - the infant might have a preference for novelty

concept of "3"

-numerosity of a set (any set!) -related in specific ways to other numbers

weber ratio

-proportional difference between numbers -better at discriminating when this ratio is large (when the numbers of things shown is farther apart) - the weber ratio gets smaller as the number of dots shown are closer together and then the babies can't discriminate

Weber ratio: Approximate Number System (ANS) acuity

-ratio of smallest difference that can be detected -improves with age

how do we distinguish between large, exact numbers? - ex: how do we distinguish between 90 and 91?

-small number system is only good for 1, 2, or 3 objects so this won't work - large number system is only good for approximate, not exact differences so this won't work - what we need is a count list

Arnold Gesell: twin study

-trained one twin to climb stairs and did not train the other -the other twin was able to climb stairs even though she was not being trained -thought outside influence and experiences don't change a person that significantly -Evidence that genetically guided maturational processes govern development - shows importance of nature ad not nurture - you can't train the baby to do the motor development before it was ready to do so (the babies will both be able to do the motor skill at the same time regardless of outside influence)

language background influences generalization of labels: bilinguals

-with different language speakers, it is surprising if she calls the same toy the same label because the child knows that they speak different languages so they should have a different label for the toy

at what age can babies no longer hear phoneme sounds of a language other than their own?

1 year

How is language and thought incorporated in math?

1) Earliest NSL: No count list 2) Second cohort: Iconic count list (slower) 3) Third cohort: Non-iconic count list (faster)

social benefits of bilingualism

1) Knowing multiple languages changes the types of social interactions that one can have 2) Bilinguals are better at taking their partner's perspective in a social communication task

Piaget's stages of cognitive development

1. sensorimotor (0-2 years old) 2. pre-operational (2-7 years old) 3. concrete operational (7-12 years old) 4. formal operational (12+ years old)

Which of the following would be good evidence against a stage theory approach?

A child goes through the stages in a non-hypothesized order, for instance, stage 1 --> stage 3 --> stage 4 --> stage 2

what is developmental psychology?

A science involving the description and explanation of changes over time in the structure, thought, or behavior of a person

when told "look at the shoe" where would Eng monolinguals and Eng-Span bilinguals look?

Both groups would look at the shoe

Unbalanced bilingual/ just exposure to another language :

Dominant in one language but exposed to another

nurture in fear learning

Humans (and other animals) do not seem to develop these fears without specific experiences

when told "look at the Dax" where would Eng monolinguals and Eng-Span bilinguals look?

Monolinguals would look at the wrench, and bilinguals would not show a consistent response

non iconic signs

No perceived similarity between the sign and its meaning (arbitrary)

rules of counting: Order irrelevance principle:

Objects can be counted R--> L, L-->R, etc.

Epigenesis

Process of learning & development: moving between stages

What happens when you don't have a language model?

Social and language deprivation

what did the fear learning in human infants suggest

Suggests that infants may have natural inclinations about what to fear

infant walking down slope in Karen Adolf study

The task • Infant is placed in a standing position at the top of a slope, with an attractive toy at the bottom • The slope increases in steepness on each trial The question • How does the infant respond as the slope becomes to steep to safely walk down? • How does experience influence this response? -----> the baby has enough experience to judge what is too risky and then she looks to the adult for help

How do novice crawlers react in each position (sitting & crawling) when given the chance to reach across the cliff?

They reached for the toy only over small cliffs, and crawled over both possible and impossible cliffs

Assimilation:

add information to existing theory

a human's fear of snakes is

both nature and nurture

Accommodation:

change theory to match new evidence

some fears are ________ to learn than others

easier

which method of learning allows the child to learn more about the toy

exploration

iconicity in sign language

how much a sign depicts the thing it refers to

pre operational stage

in Piaget's theory, the stage during which a child learns to use language but does not yet comprehend the mental operations of concrete logic

Sensorimotor Stage

in Piaget's theory, the stage during which infants know the world mostly in terms of their sensory impressions and motor activities

concrete operational stage

in Piaget's theory, the stage of cognitive development during which children gain the mental operations that enable them to think logically about concrete events

formal operational stage

in Piaget's theory, the stage of cognitive development during which people begin to think logically about abstract concepts

initial equilibrium, disequilibrium, and new equilibrium

initial: theory A disequilibrium: new evidence doesn't fit theory A new equilibrium: theory B

this new evidence suggests

the babies memory is evolving as they are getting older

How do children solve the "Gavagai" problem?

through useful heuristics such as the whole object assumption, the mutual exclusivity assumption, and the examination of adults gave to indicate which novel object a novel word refers to

What is the Gavagai problem?

too many meanings of the same word