PSYC 101

Classifying attachment style from the strange situation

Criteria: - Active play and exploration in caregiver's presence - Preference for caregiver vs. stranger for comfort - Behavior of infant during reunions If distressed: Does the infant seek contact with caregiver? Does contact with caregiver calm the infant? If not distressed: Does infant greet the caregiver with positive emotion? Absence of anger, resentment, or withholding of contact

Origins of Social Knowledge?

Foundations of learning: Finding people: Faces Face perception is quick, automatic, intuitive We find faces even where none exist! Finding faces is important right away adaptive + intuitive = Maybe innate?

Lecture 9: Conceptual development in childhood: Theory of mind & false belief Reminder: Origins of Social Knowledge

Foundations of psychological concepts develop early! - identify social partners (starting at birth) - understand goals/ intentions (in first year) Is everything early developing??? (no)

Embryo Development

Four major developmental processes: 1. Cell division 2. Cell migration 3. Cell differentiation => stem cells 4. Cell death (apoptosis) - programmed cell death is important

Measuring intelligence: The beginnings

France, 1904: universal elementary education Alfred Binet asks: - How can we identify children who need extra help? Ask teachers? Biased! Want an objective, fair way Designed first intelligence tests (copy a drawing, repeat digits, recognize coins, explain why a statement did not make sense)

Lecture 16: Attachment Part 2 Theories of attachment

Freud: - mother-child relationship serves to satisfy physical and psychosexual drives - infant as "needy & dependent, motivated by drive reduction" vs Bowlby: - mother-child (caregiver-child) relationship is important in its own right - infants as: "competence-motivated", use primary caregiver as a "secure base" for exploration & learning

Lecture 18: Self & identity Many aspects of self-identity

Gender identity Religious identity Racial identity Ethnic identity National identity Generational identity Sexual identity Political identity Regional identity Professional identity Cultural identity Class identity Identity, and values, are important - A brief "value affirmation" intervention (writing an essay about your values, and why they're important to you) can significantly improve performance, and lessen performance "gaps"

Darwin's Theory of Emotion

Human emotions based on limited set of basic emotions, that are universal across human cultures Direct link between inner emotional states (feelings) & facial expressions Links are innate, found in young babies Indexing infant emotion: Facial expressions - easily identified and distinguished from one another - expressed through consistent facial postures - One indication of internal feelings 6 Basic' Emotions: - joy - anger (or fear/pain?) - sadness - disgust - surprise - fear (not seen in facial expression until ~7 mo)

Mental theory of psychology

Ideas about why or how things work, used to organize related information Like scientific theories, they predict and explain events Like scientific theories, kids test them and revise them!

Twin studies

Identical twins (monozygotic) - Share 100% of genes Fraternal twins (dizygotic) - Share 50% of genes (same as non-twin siblings) Both are raised in similar environments - Same womb, age, family, community, etc. Are identical twins different at all in their traits and behaviors? - If so, it is due to environment Are identical twins more similar than fraternal twins? - If so, it's due to genes

An anecdote from Susan Carey

Conversation with 3-year old daughter : Eliza: "That's funny, statues are not alive, but you can still see them." Susan: "What?" (Huh?) "What's funny about that?" Eliza: "Well, Grandpa's dead, and that's sad, because we will never see him again."

Marshmallow task update: Effects of trust, not just self-control? (Kidd, Palmeri & Aslin, 2013)

If you don't trust that adults can or will deliver on promises, it is rational not to wait Children waited less time if the adult experimenter had previously been unreliable... a lot less (Kidd et al., 2013) Delay of gratification measures tap into self-control, but also tap into trust (Michaelson & Munakata, 2016)

Autism by the DSM-5

Impairment in social interaction and communication - Impairments in nonverbal behaviors such as pointing, sharing - Poor eye-contact, facial expression, poor use of language - Failure to develop peer relationships Restricted and repetitive patterns of behavior - Restricted patterns of interest - Stereotyped and repetitive motor movements - Persistent preoccupation with parts of objects - Sensory sensitivity

Can we improve self-control?

In the Dunedin Study, across the first four decades of life, study members' self-control scores were only about half as stable as their IQ test scores Most effective way to improve self-control? - Early interventions in childhood!

Inter-Modal Perception aka. "cross-modal" perception

Inter (between) + modality (sense) In addition to perceiving things we just see or just feel, we must come to understand relationships between senses

Day Care?

Is daycare a bad thing? - Does less time with parent mean less chance to become securely attached? - Does daycare make parent seem less sensitive, leading to insecure attachment? NO. Daycare is fine, and the evidence on this is clear: - meta-analysis of 59 studies (Erel et al., 2000): - 1,100 representative mother-infant pairs (NICHD study,1997): Children who attend quality child care have the same (or better) outcomes as children cared for at home

Syntax knowledge?

Is this evidence of grammatical knowledge in kids? Argument For - they use stable word order - "eat cookie" not "cookie eat" - It SEEMS LIKE they know the grammar rules! Argument Against - They could be just copying exact phrases they hear - Maybe they are not learning the general rules, just memorizing specific examples Are kids learning grammatical rules? Test: Can they apply these rules to new words they've never heard before?

Beyond the marshmallow task: "The Dunedin Study" (of 1000 New Zealand children)

"A gradient of childhood self-control predicts health, wealth, and public safety" Measured self-control using nine measures: - Observational reports at 3 and 5 years - Parent, teacher, and self-reports of impulsivity, aggression, hyperactivity, and lack of persistence (Moffitt et al., 2011) Our 40-year study of 1000 children revealed that childhood self-control strongly predicts adult success, in people of high or low intelligence, in rich or poor

The "gene for" a trait?

"A new study has finally found the gene for schizophrenia" There is no one gene (or even 5, 10) that determine complex behaviors or traits There is no such thing as a "divorce" or "tv" gene Psychological traits always depend on: - Multiple genes interacting - Multiple environmental effects - Polygenic score: A new approach : A number that summarizes the estimated effect of many genetic variants on an individual's phenotype, typically calculated as a weight sum of trait-associated alleles Not very accurate (you wouldn't use a pregnancy test that said "there is between a 14% and 98% chance you are pregnant") and it raises big ethical questions

3. Continuity vs. Discontinuity Is development fundamentally more continuous or more discontinuous?

"Continuity Theories" - like a log graph (ex. trees, plants): Quantitative change "Discontinuity (Stage) Theories" - set points, then increase, then set points again (ex. caterpillar => chrysalis => butterfly): Qualitative change It depends on - How you look at it. - How often you look at it. - What aspect of development you study. The aspect of development you study: E.g., a child's ability to read and write might improve relatively continuously - Gross motor abilities might appear more stage-like (crawling, walking, etc.)

Analyzing facial expressions in detail

"FACS" (Facial Action Coding System) (Paul Ekman) Each emotion corresponds to distinct muscle combination Facial expressions as a window to underlying emotion Happiness: A real smile includes - 1. Crow's feet wrinkles 2. Pushed up cheeks 3. Movement from muscle that orbits the eye Baby FACS/ AFFEX (Oster, 2001, AFFEX: Morgan, Izard, & Hyde, 2014) Successful at coding most emotional expressions... But more difficult to code than adult's: - Baby fat obscures musculature involved - Infant's expressions are less differentiated

'Intelligence' as a single trait? (Spearman, 1927; Geary, 2005)

"General intelligence" - a factor that influences performance on all intellectual tasks g = 'general intelligence': Performance on many intellectual tasks is correlated - even seemingly different tasks: - Verbal reasoning: Vocabulary comprehension - Quantitative reasoning: Number series, quantitative tests - Abstract visual reasoning: Paper folding, copying - Short-term memory: Memory for sentences, digits Measures of "general intelligence" correlate with: - Grades - Brain volume - Information processing speed - Speed of neural transmission

Core Knowledge of Objects

"Intuitive physics": object permanence/continuity solidity cohesion (objects don't break apart spontaneously) support (basics only)

John Locke (1632-1704)

"Let us then suppose the mind to be a blank slate, void of all characters, without any ideas; how comes it to be furnished? .... To this I answer in one word, from experience." Mind as tabula rasa - 'a blank slate' Emphasized "Nurture" over nature

An Instinct For Language?

"Man has an instinctive tendency to speak, as we see in the babble of our young children, while no child has an instinctive tendency to bake, brew, or write" - Darwin - Human society has language - Person (normally developing, healthy) has language - By 5 years, children master the basic structure of their native language

How to test these theories? Can we study attachment in the lab?

"Strange Situation": Mary Ainsworth (original studies: 1960's & 1970's) Child put through series of "episodes" involving repeated separations and reunions with caregiver. Observed patterns of behavior thought to reflect differences in quality of attachment

When it comes to antidepressants:

"There's no simple answer when balancing risks of drug side effects in newborns and untreated depression in mothers."

False Belief Task (e.g., Sally/Anne Task; Wimmer & Perner, 1983; Baron-Cohen, Leslie & Frith,1985)

"Where will Sally look?" Results: Difficult for children before ~4-5 At ~5 years: children get it right (typically-developing kids)

Shape Bias (Landau, Smith & Jones, 1988)

"Which one is a dax?" Children think a new word refers to objects of that same shape

Six States of Arousal

1. Active sleep - 8 hrs 2. Quiet sleep - 8 hrs 3. Crying - 2 hrs 4. Active awake - 2.5 hrs 5. Alert awake - 2.5 hrs 6. Drowsing - 1 hr

Do babies really have adult-like emotions?

1. Discrete Emotions Theory (Carroll Izard) - Emotions are innate - Each emotion is qualitatively different, and associated with a different set of bodily and facial reactions - Emotions are distinct -- even early in life 2. Undifferentiated Emotions Theory (Sroufe, 1979,1995) - Early emotions not distinct - Some think: We start with 2 dimensions - High arousal vs. low arousal - Positive vs. negative feeling - Experience pulls apart these simple emotions into more complex forms

How would we know?

1. Hearing: Do newborns remember what they heard in the womb? For last 1½ months of pregnancy, mothers read aloud 2x/day Babies tend to like familiar things. Do newborns prefer hearing the book mom read? Sucking in a certain way turned on a tape of the mother reading the book they heard in utero, or a new book 3rd trimester fetus can hear in the womb, and remember! Newborns prefer to hear : - Their own language over foreign languages - Their own mother's voice over another mother's voice - Their mother's voice MODIFIED to sound like it did in the womb... they prefer this MORE than the sound of mom's voice without this modification - Can't be due to post-birth learning! 2. Taste: Do newborns remember what they tasted in the womb? (Flavors of mom's food gets to the amniotic fluid!) At 8 mo. gestation, fetuses form memories of tastes! Implications: Should you "educate" your unborn child? Don't worry about it - not needed!

Self control is part of "executive function"

1. Inhibition - Ignore distractions and stay focused - Resist making one response in favor of another 2. Cognitive flexibility - Flexibly switch perspectives, focus of attention, or response mappings 3. Working memory - Hold information in mind and manipulate/ reason about it

Emotions serve functions

1. Promote survival - Negative emotions help you avoid harmful things - Positive emotions help you approach things that are good for you. 2. Motivate action - Without emotions (some have argued), we wouldn't act 3. Communicate - For babies: Motivate caregiver to act

Social cog. dev. helps understand ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder)

3 examples: - False belief tasks - Heider & Himmel's 1944 animations - Attention to faces and eyes

Effects of training with sticky mittens

3 month old infants who are trained to pick up objects treat the reaching action of another person as goal-directed. (Woodward & Needham, 2005) By 1 year, infants actually know a lot about goals...They expect agents to act rationally (take the shortest/ easiest path toward their goal) Infants expect an animate agent to "take the shortcut"

How does goal understanding develop?

3 month olds don't understand others' reaching actions...they also can't reach for objects yet (successfully) Does motor experience matter? How does goal understanding develop? Do we learn to understand others' actions by experiencing our own actions? What if we give 3 month olds reaching experience... earlier than is usually possible? "Sticky mittens" study Training group: Velcro mittens = early experience with successful reaching! Control group: Normal (non-sticky) mittens

Lecture 3: History & theories First Developmental Study?

Ancient Egypt (~630 BCE) Psalmtik ll A Shepherd His Kids Is Phrygian the "Original" language? (still no.)

Infants make different predictions about what animate agents vs. objects will do

Animate agents have goals Inanimate objects don't Do infants know this?

Lecture 12: Genes & Heritability, Part 2 Adoption studies

Are adopted children more like their adoptive parents, or their biological parents?

Today's big questions

Are there I.Q. differences by gender? By race? (If so, what would these differences mean?) Should research on race and IQ be banned?

True beginning of our field? Philosophers Greeks argue about development ~340 B.C.

Aristotle: - Knowledge comes from experience - child-rearing should adjust to needs of child Plato: - Knowledge is innate (built in): - strict discipline is important for everyone Familiar Themes: - influences of nature & nurture - interested in the proper raising of children

The newborn infant

Arousal level Sleep - function of sleep? visual system org? learning? Sleep patterns Crying & soothing; Response to Distress (delay it?) Evolutionary functions of: Crying, cuteness

Age Changes in Infants' Phoneme Perception

6-month-olds from English-speaking families easily discriminate between syllables in Hindi (blue bars) and Nthlakapmx (green bars) 10- to 12-month-olds do not Perceptual narrowing!

Mutual Exclusivity (Woodward & Markman, 1998)

Assumption that each thing will have only one name Kids infer what a new word means by ruling out objects they already know

How do infants understand attachment?

According to Bowlby: Child develops an Internal Working Model of Attachment - Mental representation of self, caregivers, & how relationships work - Affects expectations about relationships throughout lifespan

Pre-1950's mainstream view

Adequate nutritional care is all you need for normal development Little to no emphasis put on emotional care.

Attachment: Summary

Attachment is a critical part of normal social and emotional development Separation and institutionalization have known, dramatic negative effects Children's quality of attachment predicts later social functioning, especially the quality of one's relationships Parental sensitivity is the most important factor determining the quality of parent-child attachment (and parenting classes can increase this sensitivity!) Quality daycare does not have negative effects (on attachment or other outcomes)

Bowlby's Attachment Theory

Attachment process rooted rooted in evolution: - innate basis (e.g. need for attachment) - BUT quality of attachment highly dependent on infants' experiences with caregivers. Ex. Konrad Lorenz (imprinting, "attachment" in animals)

Hearing & Motion?

Auditory/Motor 'Entrainment' (example of inter-modal perception) A Recent Test (Zentner & Eerola, 2010, PNAS) 120 infants (5 mos. to 2- year-olds) heard rhythmic beats, classical music, & speech babies move in response to music (e.g., arms, hands, legs, feet, torsos & head) more in-sync they were = more smiling Cross-Species Comparisons: African Grey parrot Alex (in the lab) Sulphur-crested cockatoo Snowball (at home)

Big questions

Can social cognitive development help us understand atypical development/ developmental disorders? How can atypical development help us understand the origins of social cognition? How do we think and reason about other people? <=> What is different/impaired/delayed in atypical development?

Lead exposure decreases I.Q. Flint, Michigan Water Crisis

Can't trust

Self-control predicts SAT score (Shoda, Mischel, & Peake, 1990)

Children who delayed longer at age 4, at 14 were: (a) more academically competent (b) more socially competent (c) more verbally fluent, rational and attentive (d) better able to plan for the future (e) better able to deal with frustration and stress

Lecture 15: Attachment (Part I) What is attachment?

Close, enduring emotional bond to parents or other caregiver. Necessary for normal social & emotional development

Self-concept in adolescence

Common beliefs: - My feelings and experiences are unique, special, weird, not shared by others - Worry about other's judgements: Imaginary audience, a.k.a. 'the spotlight effect' Wear embarrassing t-shirt into classroom; How many people noticed? (Gilovich, Medvec, & Savitsky, 2000)

Improving self-control

Concentration exercises can help strengthen self-control Sports and martial arts are beneficial for executive function Some computer games may show benefits as well but...

Lecture 13: IQ & Executive function This week's big questions

What is 'intelligence'? - "The ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly, and learn from experience" - Not the same as "book learning . . . or test-taking smarts" - An ability crucial for "'catching on,' 'making sense' of things, or 'figuring out' what to do" Do I.Q. tests tell us anything useful? What causes individual differences in I.Q.? Are there I.Q. differences by gender? By race? (If so, what would these differences mean?) What else predicts success beyond just IQ? Can we change our potential for success?

Lecture 17: Emotional Development (Part 1)

What is Emotion? Transient Subjective feelings (e.g., fear, elation) Physiological correlates (e.g., adrenaline, heart rate) Thoughts that accompany feelings (e.g., how to escape or approach) Desire to take action (e.g., fight or flight) An emotional experience has all of these components- all at the same time. Where do our emotions come from? Developmentally? Evolutionarily?

Environmental effects can show up as "heritable" (even though they're not genetic)

When society reacts in a consistent way to innate biological traits, the impact of society will show up as "heritable" Amount of pigmentation (skin color) is heritable Amount of pigmentation + U.S. society —> racist treatment This treatment is consistent across generations Impacts of racism would show up as heritable "Heritable" IS NOT THE SAME as "innate"

The start of empirical research

When? 1800's and early 1900's Why? 2 things: 1. social reform movement (child labor laws) 2. Work of Sir Charles Darwin Child workers: - Industrial revolution: 5- & 6-year-olds working in coal mines, factories - hard labor Social reformers asked: How do early experiences affect later outcomes — their well-being, success as adults? - 1830s-1840s: First child labor laws, in Britain, Prussia, Massachusetts (e.g. no employment under age 10) Charles Darwin (1809 - 1882): Evolution by natural selection - Drew parallels between human prenatal growth and other animals' "Biographical sketch of an Infant" - Diary of his own child's development - Recorded systematic observations "Diary method" - one of the first methods for studying child development Sample Observation: "At his 8th day he frowned much. & I believe earlier— therefore if frowning has any relation to vision, it must now be quite instinctive: vision at this age is exceedingly imperfect.

The challenge: Word Segmentation

Where do words start / end? Attending to pauses won't help!

Sometimes, our intuitive theories aren't right... and this makes learning harder (McCloskey, 1983)

Where will the ball go? Part of the reason physics classes are seen as difficult... you're fighting (wrong) intuitions! Whether new information fits with our early-developing mental theories affects how easy it is to learn

Attachment is not the same as "attachment parenting"

Why attachment parenting is not the same as secure attachment: Parents who embrace attachment parenting can be distressed when they can't live up to its ideals. They shouldn't be

Summary: Emergence of Emotions

Why do emotions emerge in the order they do? - Primary emotions emerge early & are shared with other species - Complex emotions emerge later in development, because they require complex cognition that is not present in early infancy (e.g. a sense of self) - Note: Some other species show complex emotions, too!

How does the mind learn to do this? How do infants perceive the world?

William James ~1890: "The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion." Jean Piaget ~1930: "The [infant's] world is a world of pictures, lacking in depth or constancy, permanence or identity which disappear or reappear capriciously." These guys were not as right

Grammar Sensitivity?

Word order changes the meaning... do infants know this? Early abilities (12-16 mos): Hirsh-Pasek & Golinkoff, 1991: - Show infants two pictures, where descriptions differ in word order only - Infants reliably look at the picture that matches the spoken phrase

Origins of Social Knowledge

identifying social partners - faces, biological motion: from birth! Within 1st year : Abstract concepts of animate agents (and their behavior) versus inanimate objects (and their behavior) understanding others' goals - by ~6 mo! - Within first year - expect others to act rationally (take the shortest path toward their goals)

#2 - Classical Conditioning

associative learning via repeated pairings of a stimulus and response e.g., Pavlovian Conditioning Conditioning in Newborns: - Sugar Water (Unconditioned Stimulus) - Forehead touch (Neutral Stimulus) - Open mouth/sucking(Unconditioned response) - Conditioning: Every time you touch forehead, ALSO give sugar water Afterward: Just forehead touch = Open mouth/sucking (Conditioned response) A powerful, automatic, & all-purpose learning tool

Developmental Evidence? Do babies have many distinct emotions?

babies show a variety of emotions and facial expressions Positive Emotions: Smiling: - 1st Month: No "real smiling" (reflexive? gas?) - 2-3 Months: social smiles Happiness: - 2 months: smile when control event - 7th month: Smile more at familiar people Negative Emotions: Newborns: present but can be difficult to differentiate pain/distress? anger/sadness? fear? - 2 months: expressions for anger and sadness distinct from distress/pain Are emotions innate? - Are emotional categories universal (the same across all cultures)? - Or do they differ by cultural experience? - Do we just learn them from seeing/copying other people's faces?

Auditory Perception

begins Prenatally Development - well-developed @ birth - many aspects adult-like by ~6 mos (frequency range, intensity, localization etc.)

#4 - 'Prepared' Learning

biological predispositions that determine ease of learning e.g., Garcia effect, also "imprinting" Konrad Lorenz (ethologist)

#3 - Instrumental Conditioning aka., "operant" conditioning

changing of behavior by the use of reinforcement (reward) after the desired response, or punishment after undesired response learn association between behavior & result for example: a reward reliably follows a behavior. This increases the likelihood that the behavior will be repeated observed by at least 2 months "Skinner box"

Whole-Object Bias (Markman, 1987)

children assume the word refers to the whole object and not part, action or property

And have powerful learning mechanisms to build on this early knowledge!

habituation classical conditioning operant/instrumental conditioning "prepared" learning rational/ statistical learning observational/social learning

How Do Children Acquire Biological Knowledge?

Learning from experience (including with other people/culture) - Differences across cultures! - Urban vs. non-urban settings BUT innate biases shape our learning - We all start out with the same building blocks Children form mental theories of how things work...and revise their ideas when they get new evidence! - Theory-building and conceptual change

Are newborns a "blank slate"?

Let us then suppose the mind to be a blank slate, void of all characters, without any ideas; how comes it to be furnished? .... To this I answer in one word, from experience. - John Locke (1632-1704) If true... when is the mind "blank"? Just before first words? When does learning begin? At birth? Earlier?

Yes, but humans?

Let's clarify what's at stake here: What is the impact of separation from parents/ caregivers? What is the impact of not having a stable caregiver in early life? A (horrifying) modern day issue: Migrant children being separated at border The science is clear: Separating families has long-term damaging psychological and health consequences for children, families, and communities

Perception is Hard!

Let's make artificially intelligent computers! (How hard could that be?) 1960's intuitions: Chess Speech Vision 'Instinct Blindness': (the feeling that something is automatic & effortless can mask mental complexity!) "low-level": e.g., acuity, color, brightness "mid-level": e.g., pattern, depth, objects "high-level": e.g., recognition, categorization, intermodal correspondence

Soothing

Many effective soothing techniques, including swaddling (wrapping a baby tightly in cloths or a blanket), involve moderately intense and continuous or repetitive stimulation Parents of babies with colic, (excessive crying for no apparent reason) should seek social support and relief from frustration—and remember that colic typically ends within a few months

A Fundamental but Rare Skill

Many species show no awareness of self in the mirror (e.g., mirrors are perceived as extensions of the world) How to test: The Mirror Task (aka The 'Rouge Task') after ~18 mos infants link image in mirror to self - they touch the mark on their head In other species: - Many species show no awareness of self in the mirror (e.g., mirrors are perceived as extensions of the world) - Species that pass the mirror test: chimps, bonobos, orangutans, elephants, killer whales... and magpies Convergent evidence of advancement in self concepts by age 2 years - By age 2 years: Recognize self in photographs (Bullock & Lutkenhaus, 1990) Correct use of pronouns in language (me vs. you, "MINE") The "terrible twos"? A time of self-assertion! 2 year olds understand: "I have my own goals, they're different from yours" Evidence from emotional development: 'Self-Conscious' Emotions require some 'sense-of-self '

Exact nature & causes of autism? Still hotly debated

Many theories, complex etiology Many co-morbid conditions (anxiety, depression, gastro-intestinal problems) Interventions? Many... (Applied Behavior Analysis, social skills training, assistive devices for communication...)

#1: False belief tasks

Matched for Mental Age or Chronological age Results of Sally-Anne Test (2 trials per subject): - Typical children: 23 of 27 got 100% right - Children with Down's: 12 of 14 got 100% right - Children with Autism: 16 of 20 got 100% WRONG (the four who passed were 10-15 years old)

2 Main Methods

Method #1 - Preferential Looking: Look at 2 images; Measure looking time to each side. Confound: Side preferences???How to solve: Switch sides! Calculate % of time spent looking at one image (vs. the other) Method #2 - Habituation: Method: Visual habituation procedure After all trials, change something, does the infant detect the change? => dishabituation or continued habituation

Smarter than we think? Is there a fairer test of infants' cognitive capacities?

Method: Violation of Expectation Show infant two outcomes of an event, one of which is possible or expected and one of which is impossible or unexpected If infants have some prior knowledge or understanding, then they should respond differently to the 2 events Even when things are out of sight, 3 month olds are surprised when two solid objects go through each other

Grammar Knowledge

More evidence: Overregularization errors - treating irregular words as regular (e.g., 'he goed to the store'): Overregularization: Child: I used to wear diapers. When I growed up... Father: When you grew up? Child: Yeah, when I grewed up, I wore underwear. word: "man" Irregular form (what they hear): "men" Overregularized: "mans" word: "go" Irregular form (what they hear): "went" Overregularized: "goed" Young children over apply rules! Can't be just memorizing what they hear

Personality theory and the genetics of behavior

Personality theories have not recognized the genetics of behavior until recently - They have focused on nurture, not nature - Even schizophrenia and the affective disorders were regarded as solely products of experience in the family Genetic effects on clinical diagnoses - Identical twins are more similar in traits such as height, reading disability, autism risks, and other disease risks & diagnosis

5. The Sociocultural Context Cross-cultural studies as methodology

Physical environment = urban vs. rural neighborhood, house, daycare, school Economic resources, poverty = national wealth, societal wealth, family/individual wealth Social environment = parents, siblings, other family members, teachers, friends, peers, etc. Cultural traditions = language, values, traditions, attitudes/beliefs, laws, political structure, technology, etc

Egocentrism in Perspective Taking

Piaget's "3-Mountains" Task

What's really going on here? (McGarrigle and Donaldson, 1974)

Piaget's interpretation: Children at this age (~2-6 yo) are 'pre-operational thinkers' - they focus on only one salient feature, and ignore other relevant dimensions Tend to focus on appearance, surface features (height, length) Age 7: Children move to next stage ('concrete operational'), now can pass conservation tasks The prediction: Children age 2-6 yo. simply cannot solve these tasks - because of a broad, general cognitive limitation

What We've Learned.

Piaget's methods underestimated children's competence e.g., Object Permanence: Old methods - (e.g., complex reaching, asking, etc.): NO (until ~9 mos) New methods - (e.g., looking time): YES (by ~2 mos) Alternative Theory?

Across all cultures, adults believe

Plants are different from animals We can classify animals by their properties Organisms are suited to their environment (in some ways)

The test: Violation of expectation, but with sounds

Play individual "words" and "non-words" from the fake language, one by one Speaker location is marked with a small blinking light Measure: How long do infants keep looking at the speaker (to make the sound keep playing)? If they find the sound surprising, they should look longer (violation of expectation method) This is what they found: Infants looked longer looking for fake non-words, than fake words Infants learned the patterns, and used that to segment the speech stream into word-like units

What causes individual differences in attachment?

Possibilities: 1. Genetics - - In infancy: Twin/ adoption studies suggest no, or very small, heritable component (e.g. Bokhorst et al., 2003) - In adolescence: More heritable (40%, Fearson et al, 2013) 2. Experience: Differences in parenting?

How does phoneme perception develop?

Possibility #1: babies learn to tell different phonemes (speech sounds) apart, through experience —> they get better with age Possibility #2: babies learn NOT to tell apart the sounds that aren't important in their language —> they get worse with age??? Perceptual narrowing

6. Individual Differences How do we vary (as adults, as children) and why?

Possible sources? - genes - physical environment - treatment by other people - reactions to other people's treatment - choice of environments

Factors other than I.Q. are hugely important

Practical intelligence: - Includes mental abilities not measured on IQ tests ('emotional intelligence') - Predicts occupational success above and beyond IQ Self-control: - The ability to inhibit actions, follow rules, and avoid impulsive reactions - Predicts 8th graders' grades, above and beyond IQ

Language is social

Prediction: Children with atypical social cognition might also have delayed language development

Is face perception "built in"? (Results of Turati et al.'s (2002) measurements of how long infants looked at each stimulus in the pair when they are presented simultaneously.)

Preference for "top-heavy" patterns — even in non-faces This simple bias leads babies to look at faces Newborns identify social stimuli by more than just faces: They also prefer biological motion (Simion Regolin & Bulf, 2008)

Visual Preferences in infants: Some displays & findings

Preference for patterns (especially faces!) infants can see! But how well?... Newborns can see, but things are blurry

Color Vision?

Preferential looking method? won't work! But infants don't always have color preferences! And different infants have different preferences! How can we figure out if infants perceive colors? The key: Make the baby very bored. Show them the same thing over and over until they are bored of it... So bored that they prefer anything else Limitations in the early months (0-3 months): - poorer in 1st month, highly saturated red at birth - 3 months and older = adult-like

Tools of the Mind

Preschool program improves cognitive control: Randomly assigned to Tools of the Mind, or a normal preschool curriculum (control group) All low income families (<25,000/yr) >80% of day: Activities scaffold & challenge self-control

This is impressive: Meanings are tricky!

Problem: 'Reference' What do the words refer to?

How to Test?

Problem? Infants can't do much. => eat/sleep/poo, Look around, Prefer to look at interesting things over boring things Solution: Use looking time!

Parenting 1940's Style

Professional Advice Dominated by Behaviorism: reward/punishment shapes behavior - feed them on a schedule - let them cry social contact is not important and can even be dangerous To quote John Watson again:

2 year old children fail to understand what others can see (experiment by Alison Gopnik & Andy Meltzoff):

Put a screen on the table between experimenter and child. Ask the child to hide the toy from the Experimenter. 24 and 30 month olds (2 years) - Put it on the experimenter's side! (hidden from their own view!) Or : They hide it behind their back (hidden from everyone, including themselves) At 3 years (36 months old) - hide toy by putting it on their side of screen (they can see it, but experimenter can't)

Do infants view human actions as unpredictable, or as goal-directed?

Reaching for a goal (the ball) Movement along a specific path (Woodward, 1998) Method: - for half of infants, reach to ball; for other half of infants, reach to bear then switch the locations of the two objects. On alternating test trials, reach for each object Violation of expectation task: which one is more surprising?

What does it mean to say "height is 90% genetic"?

Really, we're talking about heritability ... It's a measure of how much genetics explains differences across a group of people Groups, not individuals - Heritability describes reasons for differences between people in a population, not the "make-up" of a single individual Heritability - The percent of the differences across people that appear to be caused by genetic differences, in a given population e.g., how much more alike identical twins' heights are, than fraternal twins' heights - Twins are more linear and straight than the fraternal twins' graph, where it has more spread

Are young children's biological concepts different from adults'?

Sometimes, yes: Concept of "alive" (Carey, 1985) Concept of alive (pre-school age kids)? - They mean: real, visible, present, or existing Alive vs. Dead: - They mean: Animate vs. inanimate - Consequences: Objects? Plants? "What does it mean to die?" - To stop doing things, to become invisible, to go away, to live underground

How to test: Phoneme Perception

The Conditioned Head-Turn Method Perceptual narrowing (again)!

How do infants decide what is an animate agent?

The Johnson gaze-following experiment; 12 month old infants Logic: If infants think the blob is animate, they should follow its gaze Manipulate: The blob's features & behavior Measure: Whether infants turn to follow where the blob "looks" Did 12 month olds turn to follow the blob's "gaze"? Face: - Contingent (responsive) behavior: Yes - Not contingent behavior: Yes No face: - Contingent (responsive) behavior: Yes - Not contingent behavior: No (S. Johnson, Slaughter, & Carey, 1998)

"Theory of Mind"

The ability to attribute beliefs, intents, desires, knowledge, and other mental states to other people - that is, having an intuitive theory of other people's minds Understanding that others' perspectives can be different from one's own - Impairments in autism?

Vitalism (Susan Carey, 1985, 1999)

The belief that living things have a "life force" that helps them live, grow, move (Starts at ~6 - 7 years) Death is now seen as the end of life/ physical existence Functionalism - Organs, biological parts serve a purpose Why do hearts exist? "for beating" Why do lungs exist? "to hold air" Kids are overly functionalist (Deb Kelemen, 1999, 2003) (~age 4-10) Why do mountains exist? "for hiking" Why do mountains have steep sides? "so we can have pretty views"

What about 'magical thinking'?

The claim: "Young children live in a world in which fantasy and reality are intertwined" (Woolley, 1997) Do kids act like they really believe in magic? (Woolley & Phelps, 1994) - 3-5 year olds - Box 1: Real object - Box 2: Empty - Box 3: Empty, child imagines real object inside After they imagine the pencil: "Is there now a pencil in Box 3?" - Many say YES... New person enters and asks: "Can you give me a pencil?" - ... they don't actually look in Box 3 What about imaginary friends? - actually quite common (majority of kids report them!) - used for company; deflecting blame; indirect communication - correlated with lack of television; high verbal skill; & advanced Theory of Mind Can kids tell apart fantasy from reality?

Interacting with the Environment

State: The infant's level of arousal and engagement in the environment - Ranges from deep sleep to intense activity - Is an important influence in the newborn's exploration of the world

Statistical learning helps babies segment words (Saffran, Aslin & Newport, 1996)

Statistical learning does not mean "learning statistics" in the sense of mean, median, mode It means: Learning and recognizing patterns Transitional probabilities: how likely each syllable is to follow the previous one For example: "Pretty baby" "Good baby" "No, baby" "Bay" always followed by "bee" What comes before "bay" changes You might guess: Maybe "bay-bee" is a word

2. The active child How do children play an active role in their own development?

The Active Child: Examples 1. Preferences to attend to certain things - People over objects, Caregiver over others 2. Motivated to learn - Little 'experimenters': Dropping food tests: - Gravity - People's reactions! 3. Actively select their own environment (increases w/ age) - Choose friends, activities, book

Lecture 11: Genes and Heritability

Theme 2: What makes us who we are? Where do individual differences come from? We all have intuitions...

Lecture 10: Conceptual Development, Part 2 Children's mental theories

Theory of psychology Theory of physics Theory of biology

Autism is a Spectrum

There is a wide variation in the type and severity of symptoms people experience Severe learning disability (classic autism) Moderate learning disability Mild learning disability Average IQ Above average IQ Extreme ability in some areas (high function autism, Asperger's or PDD)

Complex emotions develop over the 2nd and 3rd year of life

These emotions relate to our sense of self, and understanding of others' reactions to us.

Feral children (Wild children)

These horrible but fascinating case-studies address ancient questions about our nature.

Behavioral genetic research designs

We can answer questions about the relative importance of genes vs. environment by studying families Are people who are more closely related genetically also more similar in their traits and abilities? Are people who share the same environment more similar in their traits and abilities? There are definitely environmental effects: - One twin smoked longer than the other; effects of lead exposure on IQ; etc. How can we tease apart effects of shared environment, non-shared environment and genes? - Twin studies - Adoption studies

A paradox

We develop the ability to think about other people's thoughts, beliefs, emotions and identities naturally, and easily, without being taught BUT... we can't get robots to do it. we can't get self-driving cars to do it. we can't get Siri/ Alexa/ GoogleHome to do it. and we certainly can't get them "learn it themselves"

Essentialism about social groups causes prejudice

We have essentialist biases when thinking about social groups (e.g. race/ ethnic differences) - these are socially constructed categories! - But people (including children) find it easy to think of social categories as more like species differences (not correct) Essentialism here is the "bad guy": - Results in the belief in fundamental, biological differences between people of different races/ ethnic groups, that are innate & unchangeable - Gender essentialism: Results in intolerance of gender- nonconforming behavior (including in childhood) - People who tend to use stereotypes tend to treat social groups as essentialized (Rothbart & Taylor, 1990)

Essentialism makes it hard to understand evolution (Evans, 2006; Kelemen et al., 2014, Shtulman & Shultz, 2008)

We intuitively expect an organism's species identity to predict its properties — which implies that all animals of the same species have the same properties. Not true! Evolution by natural selection depends on variation between individuals within a species (which lead to different rates of reproduction... resulting in changes to the frequency of traits over generations)

Lecture 6: Social Cognition - What do babies know about people?

We think about other people's minds naturally, and easily

Lecture 7: How do children learn language? Part 1

What Makes Humans Unique? Language! Symbols - Systems for representing thoughts, feelings, knowledge... and communicating them to others - no other species shows such creative and flexible use of symbols - most powerful symbol system...

How & why do people behave differently from one another?

What causes variation in behavior and development? To what extent are differences caused by genetics vs. environment? (behavioral genetics)

Early Ideas

What happens during prenatal development? #1 Quantitative change: "Preformationism" - 'spermists' vs 'ovists' 1695 scientific drawing: A tiny person inside a sperm! persistent idea until the 1800's! #2 Qualitative change: Aristotle called it: epigenesis - cells multiply and differentiate - new structures & functions emerge - not embraced until modern study of Embryology

Lecture 14: IQ & Executive function (Part 2) This week's big questions

What is 'intelligence'? Do I.Q. tests tell us anything useful? What causes individual differences in I.Q.? Are there I.Q. differences by gender? By race? (If so, what would these differences mean?) What else predicts success beyond just IQ? Can we change our potential for success?

"Core Knowledge"

initial seeds of knowledge that get learning started Early-developing (first months of life, maybe at birth) Evolutionarily ancient (other animals have this knowledge too) Continuity over development (these ideas stay put - and we build on them)

Visual Acuity?

no preference when stripes are too narrow to see at each age, find smallest width at which infants show a preference for stripes over gray

Sensitive Periods

sensitivity to many teratogens is highest in the first trimester (later exposure also causes defects, but more minor)

#1 - Flashback: Habituation

some sound can be heard in the womb ~6 mo gestation: external noises elicit movement/ heart rate change Habituation is a type of LEARNING Individual differences in habituation in infants: - Less robust dishabituation if brain-damaged, low-birth weight, younger - Speed of habituation and robustness of dishabituation correlate with greater IQ in childhood & adolescence

Phoneme Perception in Adults

sometimes difficult "My mom ordered a graduation cake' with a cap drawn on the top of my head'. What do you hear? bar or far the "McGurk effect" (McGurk & MacDonald, 1976)

"Other-Conscious" Emotions?

sympathy: acknowledging another's feelings & expressing compassion empathy: understanding & feeling another's feelings 'Emotional Contagion': tendency to catch and feel emotions that are similar to and associated with those of others Infants: contagious crying in newborns onward (empathy? aversion? lack of self concept?) Children: contagious yawning at 4 years.(correlated w/ empathy, social awareness) Dogs: Also show contagious yawning Contagious Yawning

Syntactic Development

syntax: rules for combining words implicit (unconcious) grammar: learned naturally, without explicit teaching e.g., word order matters in English -*"Bit the man dog" also: word structure (cat vs. cats) other languages also use pitch (tonal languages) Producing Syntax: ~12-18 mo: One-word speech - Some unanalyzed combination words: "Iwant", "Readme" Combining Words:• ~2 yrs: Two-word phrases, "telegraphic" speech: lacks nonessential elements e.g., 'give juice', 'more music'

Epigenetics is a young science, but it suggests that

the epigenome (gene activations) can be changed by the environment epigenome (gene activations) can be inherited & passed down (!!!!) Scientists are still actively debating this second claim! Bad/Good News...the impacts of bad or good environments we experience may be inherited by our children

Pragmatic Development

understanding conventions (conversational/social) & knowledge of how language is used sarcasm intonation rhetorical questions, questions as commands - e.g., "can you shut the door?"

Case study: Nicaraguan Sign

until the 1970's, Nicaragua had no schools for the deaf, and no signed language 1977-1983: oralist school created; deaf children brought together for the first time What does it show: - Age matters: younger learners' signs are more fluent and grammatical (they structure the words, and create a grammar! Adults don't) - Input matters: those who heard less-structured language input end up less fluent Questions that this case raises: - Where does the structure of language come from? - How can young learners create a language?

Food or Security?

"cloth mother" vs "wire mother" Separated infant rhesus monkeys from mothers at 6-12 hours after birth Monkeys were fed and kept healthy, BUT no contact with other monkeys Instead... the baby monkeys had Wire and Cloth "Mothers" available to them One of these had food available from it - Half of the monkeys were fed from the cloth mother - Half of the monkeys were fed from the wire mother Behaviorist Prediction: - Food = reward, so The baby monkeys should spend majority of time with the mother that feeds them. Harlow's Results: - Cloth Mother Wins! - Monkeys spent majority of time with cloth mother - regardless of whether this mother fed them. Secure vs. Insecure Exploration: Other Findings: monkeys with only a wire mother exhibited extremely abnormal social and emotional behavior as adults - Excessive and misdirected aggression - Stereotyped motor behavior (e.g., rocking) - Lack of interest in sexual behavior - Neglect and abuse of offspring Food is not enough

Can we improve intelligence? The role of "mindset"

'Mindsets' and achievement motivation (Carol Dweck): - People hold different intuitive mental theories of intelligence: 1. Fixed (entity) mindset - Think of intelligence as fixed and stable - Difficulty/ challenge seen as evidence of lack of intelligence - Motivated to avoid 'seeming dumb' to others & self, by avoiding mistakes and challenges Growth (incremental) mindset: - Think of intelligence as changeable through experience - Difficulty/ challenge seen as opportunity to grow, increase intelligence - Motivated to seek challenges and learn from mistakes Teaching kids to have an incremental mindset results in better performance (Blackwell, Trzesniewski, & Dweck, 2007)

Why children are horrible at hide and seek

(children really are horrible hiders...)

Executive function in preschool

- Children are learning how to be students - Taking turns - Sharing toys - Planning activities - Executing routines - Remembering events - Practicing numbers and letters - Following rules - Understanding stories

Does parenting cause attachment differences? (van den Boom, 1994)

- followed a group of infants at risk for insecure attachments ('at risk' = irritable shortly after birth) - 6 months after birth, randomly chose half of moms to receive experimental intervention for 3 months Intervention: training on how to recognize infants' cues, respond, and promote positive exchanges Control group: No training Results: - Intervention worked! - Parents showed more sensitive behavior - Rates of secure attachment went up: 62% in intervention group vs. 22% in control Effects relatively long lasting: - Rates of secure attachment a year later (18 months old): - 72% in intervention group - 26% in control group

Attachment Categories

1. Securely attached - Effectively use parent as secure base - some distress when parent leaves - happy to see parent return About 60% of middle-class kids fall into this category; fewer in lower SES groups 2. Insecure/Resistant (or "anxious-ambivalent") - child is clingy, explores less - very upset when parent leaves (sometimes uncontrollable crying) - child seeks contact when parent returns, but resists efforts at comfort About 10% of middle-class kids from the U.S. 3. Insecure/Avoidant - child is indifferent to parent before separation - behaves similarly to parent and stranger - does not greet parent upon return About 15% of middle-class kids from the U.S. Some kids don't fit any of these categories Disorganized/disoriented: - child shows no consistent way of coping - confused facial expressions (stress, fear, dazed etc.) - appears to want to approach parent, but also fear doing so 15% of middle-class U.S. kids; higher in low-SES; much higher in maltreated infants Long term effects? - Do infants' attachment behaviors predict social skill and success later in life?

Types of environmental influences

1. Shared environment (for sibs: same parents, house, school, etc.) 2. Non-shared environment = aspects of the environment that are different or unique across individual people - Birth order - Experiencing parents' behavior differently - Being affected differently by an otherwise shared experience (e.g., divorce) - Making different choices about activities, friends, etc. - Isolated trauma

How do genes & environment interact? Genetic & environmental influences interact in complex ways

1. The same environment has different effects on different individuals 2. Individuals with different genetic make-ups evoke different responses from the environment 3. Individuals with different genetic make-ups select and create different environment Classic experiment: - 7 plants (different genotypes) - 3 clippings taken from each one (identical genotypes) Take 3 clippings and plant them in high elevation, medium elevation, and low elevation Low elevation: - 7 different genotypes based on their heights Medium elevation: - Perhaps on 3 different genotypes are successful High elevation: - Multiple genotypes are successful Different successes for each elevation Many phenotypes can result from each genotype - depending on the environment it is in!

Thalidomide: 1950s

10,000 babies in 46 countries

Egocentrism (Remember the desires/preferences study...) (Repacholi & Gopnik, 1997)

14 mo: seem to think everyone has the same preference they do Even after they understand preferences... they remain egocentric in other ways

Middle adolescence & early adulthood

15-year-old composite answer: - Introspective, concerned with apparent contradictions 18-year-old composite answer: - More integrated, less concerned with what others think; focus on personal values and beliefs

Early Observations

1937-1943, US & Europe: More children: - Withdrawn & isolated - Overactive, distractible, abusive to others - lacked feeling for others - abnormal social behavior By adolescence: - History of stealing, violence, sexual misdemeanors WW2: - Many children orphaned or separated from parents - Placed in institutions - Adequate physical care... but not social care - No stable / reliable caregiver John Bowlby (1907-1990): Children in institutions, separated from their parents: - Were listless and depressed - Were emotionally disturbed - Had feelings of emptiness - Were unable to develop normal emotional relationships Resulted in policy changes: - Allowing hospital visitation by parents, shift from orphanages to foster care Charles Nelson on the impact of institutionalization: - Similar case from the 1980's: children in Romanian orphanages

Do babies use statistical learning? (Saffran, Aslin & Newport, 1996)

8 month old infants heard an artificial language: A stream of speech syllables with no gaps between "words" The only way to find "words" was to find patterns -- what spoken syllables tended to go together/ follow one another.

WHY SO HARD? False-Belief: "Smarties" Task (Gopnik & Astington) (1988)

A Simpler Version? young 3-year-olds fail 4 & 5 pass Why Such Late Development?

Children's and adults' physical reasoning may be more similar than Piaget though

Adults have magical beliefs too Adults' beliefs: Blum & Blum (1974) - Walking under a ladder 47% - Knocking on wood 41% - Breaking a mirror 41% Blum (1976) - Walking under ladder 46% - Knocking on wood 46% - Crossing fingers 35% - Breaking a mirror 35% Gallup and Newport (1991) - Faith healing46% - Demonic possession 49% - Fortune telling 14% Frazier, as cited in Stanovich (1994) - Astrology (adults) 58% Gallup (1984) - Astrology (teens) 55%

Zika virus

Aedes mosquito

Piaget's Stage Theory

Age: 0-2: Sensori-motor 2-6: Pre-operational 7-10: Concrete operations 10-13: Formal operations

Sex similarities & differences in IQ

Average IQ scores of men & women are equal - IQ tests were constructed that way though! - but equal general intelligence has been found even for tests that are not constructed to equate men & women (Johnson & Bouchard 2007) Men's performance is more variable (more men than women at extreme low and extreme high IQ's) On average, women score higher than men on some tasks (working memory for spatial information; verbal skill) On average, men score higher than women on other tasks (spatial rotation, math skill) Remember: Differences here reflect socialization differences, as well as genetics

Modern Versions 'Controlled-Rearing' Studies (aka. 'Deprivation' Studies)

Behavioral studies with animals - If you raise a kitten in the dark, then turn on the lights, how will vision/depth perception develop? (Held & Hein, 1963 ) "Natural experiments" (unintentional deprivation) - for example, adults in poverty in India who have had cataracts their whole lives Cure their cataracts! Can they identify a cube vs. sphere, by sight (they've touched it many times)? No they can't! (Pawan Sinha, MIT) In children - extreme deprivation unethical. Sadly, still occurs...

Is learning really this simple? (Part 2)

Behaviorists thought there was only one kind of learning... simple associations Turns out we also learn in more complex ways

Is learning really this simple?

Behaviorists thought we could learn to associate any two things equally easily Turns out that's not true

An Important Fact About Beliefs.

Beliefs are independent of what's true! (Someone's belief can be wrong.) When do children recognize others' 'false beliefs'? (a much stronger test of belief reasoning)

Social cognitive work sheds light on ASD

Better understand differences: - False belief understanding - Social attribution - Early attention to eyes Formerly: - Low-functioning people with ASD given generic diagnosis of "retardation" - High-functioning people with ASD not given ANY diagnoses or resources - No hint that these very different groups of people had anything in common Now: - Understanding of social cognitive deficits as a common thread through the autism spectrum - ASD diagnoses allow for targeted support for both low and high functioning individuals

Learning word meanings

By 6 mo, babies already know some common nouns (they'll look toward the object you label) Learn ~50 words, then: Language explosion!(toddlers learn words FAST!)

But it really seems like parenting causes kids' differences!

Calm parenting style, calm child Anxious parenting style, anxious child Parenting book concludes: "It's important to use a calm parenting style" Calm parents have calm children (mostly) due to shared genes Same for most other individual differences... they're more genetic than you expect (about 50%) Parenting style is a part, but not the primary cause

Built for Language?

Children acquire language in a wide range of environments - when the input is chaotic, they structure it. - when the input is absent (but the need to communicate is present), they create it. Why? - Nativist interpretation: We have innate linguistic abilities that "fill in the gaps" of the environmental input There are innate, language specific learning mechanisms that make language-learning "intuitive" in childhood, but not adulthood

Essentialism

Children develop essentialist concepts of biological kinds (animal species) Essentialism: The intuitive belief that there is some deeper core, or essence, that defines something - and makes it the way it is.

Fast Mapping (Carey & Bartlett, 1978)

Children learn words after even just one exposure, even if it's only referred to indirectly! "Let's use the koba to measure which is longer. We can put the koba away now." TEST: Can you find the Koba?(Immediately, one week, and one month later... kids remember!)

Flashback: Noam Chomsky

Chomsky theorized: We are NOT born knowing any specific language's grammar The capacity for learning language is innate... There are built-in neural mechanisms that are for learning language! Other evidence...we learn language better in early life than we do in adulthood

Autism as a deficit in Theory of Mind

Claim of Baron-Cohen, others: Children with Autism have a specific deficit in Theory of Mind Deficit is worse for ToM than other aspects of impairment People can be cognitively impaired in other more general ways while ToM is preserved (e.g. Downs' syndrome) Innate? Autism does have a genetic basis (see: twin studies, next week) But: Experience also matters for theory of mind development: - Deaf children of hearing parents ALSO show delays in theory of mind - Deaf children of deaf parents do not show delays - The only difference? LANGUAGE EXPERIENCE

Essentialism in kids' biology (Johnson & Solomon 1997)

Cross-species adoption stories: A baby was born to a cow but raised by a horse DV: When the baby grows up, what kind of animal will it be? Finding: 5 year old children say the biological parent (not the adoptive parent) determines what kind of animal it will be (innate essence, not experience, determines species identity)

Darwin vs Lamarck

Darwin: - some born with longer necks - more successful traits are passed down Lamarck: - neck stretches & becomes longer - driven by 'inner need' - trait passed down to offspring (wrong. but maybe some experiences can be passed down)

Example: PKU (Phenylketonuria)

Defective gene on chromosome 12 Unable to metabolize phenylalanine Effects, Seizures, severe brain damage as phenylalanine builds up in the body Genetic... but easy to fix: Early diagnosis and restricted diet Now: Tested for at birth (blood test) immediate detection & intervention People with PKU now develop normally (no seizures, no brain damage)

Disability? Disorder? Difference?

Disability: - Americans with Disabilities Act: "a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities" - World Health Organization: "Disabilities is an umbrella term, covering impairments, activity limitations, and participation restrictions. Thus, disability is a complex phenomenon, reflecting an interaction between features of a person's body and features of the society in which he or she lives." Developmental disorder: - Atypical with negative consequences Developmental difference: - Atypical BUT emphasis on positive or neutral consequences - Neurodiversity movement

#6 - Observational Learning/ Imitation

Don't "reinvent the wheel": Learn from others! Powerful learning "shortcut" - More about this next class

Word Learning

For word learning to be possible, children must make some default assumption Biases/Constraints that help word learning: - Whole-object - Shape - Mutual Exclusivity

Standing Against Behaviorist Parenting

Dr. Benjamin Spock (1904-1998) Revolutionary ideas (for the 1940's): - Do what feels right for you as a parent, and you probably won't go wrong - The emotional relationship between parent and child are important - Most of all, children need to feel loved. almost everything else follows from there

Vaccines and the "Vaccine war"

Dr. Wakefield's paper? - he claimed vaccines caused autism Fraudulent & wrong: He made up the data, & cannot reproduce the results. What about other tests? The findings are strong & clear : Vaccines do not cause autism.

Testing baby object perception (Kellman and Spelke, 1983)

During habituation, 4 m.o. saw: A box and a vertical stripe behind Infants saw this as One continuous piece: Babies do not dishabituate Or, they saw: Two pieces! Babies dishabituate 4-month-old infants perceive objects like adults

Do newborns perceive faces? (Johnson, Dziurawiec, Ellis & Morton, 1991)

Each display starts in front, moves slowly to left or right. Measure: how far will NEWBORN INFANTS turn to follow it? Question: Will they turn farther to follow a face than a non-face?

Cross-Cultural Studies

Early Theory (e.g.,1960's anthropologists) believed facial expressions are learned through mimicry (NOT innate) BUT: studies in Papua New Guinea suggested cross-cultural universals (by Paul Ekman) - "point to face that matches emotion expressed in story" - "show me what your face would look like..." Suggests: possibility of universality & innateness Are emotions innate or learned? Blind vs sighted athletes when they smile What about other animals? Cross-species comparisons - The Same? Facial expressions and physiological data suggests that other animals have internal emotions, too

Crying

Early in infancy, crying reflects discomfort or frustration Crying gradually becomes more of a communicative act With experience, parents become better at interpreting the characteristics of the cry itself

The Marshmallow Task

Eat marshmallow now, or wait until instructor comes back and you get 2 marshmallows. 1/3 children eat it right away 1/3 children waited 20+ minutes Waiting for marshmallow--> delay of gratification

Kids' understanding of conservation may be more advanced than Piaget thought (McGarrigle and Donaldson, 1974)

Effect of social context: Can vastly improve kids' performance - Piaget generally underestimated the importance of social factors Take-home points: - At this age, children do sometimes focus on surface features, or use simpler rules for reasoning (as Piaget thought) BUT: This is not always the case! - Unchangeable, general limitations on children's understanding? Not true

How does a mature self-concept develop?

Erik Erikson's theory of identity formation: - Identity formation happens in stages - Adolescence: Identity confusion, identity achievement - Need a 'time out' in adolescence to explore options and form identity ('psychosocial moratorium') Erikson's identity status categories: - Identity diffusion: no firm identity commitments, and not exploring options •Foreclosure: commitment to identity without exploration, based on values of others (most young adolescents) - Moratorium: exploring choices, not yet committed - Identity achievement: Coherent, stable identity seen as based on personal choices (Common at 17-19 years)

Limitations.

Estimates of heritability apply only to the particular group, people similar to those tested Heritability can differ markedly for groups of people who grow up in very different environments(e.g., low vs high SES) High heritability does not imply immutability

Nature & Nurture

Everything about you is jointly caused by the genetic material you inherited and the environments you have experienced from conception to now How much does each one matter? - John Watson, Empiricist viewpoint - "Environment is what shapes people > Genetics"

1. Nature or Nurture: Not an 'either-or' debate

Ex. 1. Fear can be learned (nurture) 2. 2.But can we learn some fears more easily than others? (nature) Little Albert Study (Watson & Raynor): Initially: rat = neutral Loud noise = negative Training: Paired with the loud noise, the rat became negative After training: Albert's fear generalized even to other fuzzy beings - - - - - - - - - - - - We can be afraid of spiders and snakes extremely easily, in comparison to bunnies, cars, and even guns

I. Nature and Nurture? How large a role does each play?

Ex. Schizophrenia Children of schizophrenic parents are more likely to develop it (Nature) Children growing up in troubled homes are more likely to develop it regardless of parental diagnoses (Nurture) Adopted children whose bio. parent was schizophrenic more likely to develop it, but especially if they grow up in a troubled home (Both)

4. Mechanisms of Dev. Change How & Why does change occur?

Explanation can be of multiple types: - Maturation of brain mechanism: e.g., frontal lobes & self-control - Experience-based cognitive change: e.g. insight, creativity - Cognitive strategy change: e.g., problem solving Brain structure doesn't tell us WHY: - Genetics changes the brain (maturation) - Experience and learning also change the brain!

Differences by ethnicity?

Facts: - The average IQ scores of children of different racial/ ethnic groups differ by as much as 10 points — BUT : - #1: The ranges greatly overlap (i.e. this doesn't tell you about the IQ of any individual person) - #2: This describes children's performance in the environments where they live — and there are differences across groups: In educational opportunities In socio-economic status Remember : Performance/ competence distinction Sources of Between-Group Differences in IQ: - Not genetic factors - Studies have found no links between cross-group genetic population differences and cross-group population differences in IQ. (e.g. Scarr et al., 1977) - FYI: There's more genetic variation within racial/ethnic groups than between them! - Socioeconomic factors - large effects - Sociocultural stereotypes

What is currently considered the most common human teratogen?

Fetal Alcohol Syndrome: - Maternal alcoholism associated with specific facial features, mental disability, attention problems, hyperactivity ~1 in every 1,000 infants born in U.S. How much (if any) is safe?

Measuring intelligence today

Figuring out a number series Analogies Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC) - (6 - 16 years of age) - Gives score on general intelligence, based on several sub-components (and many tasks) - The score tells us: The overall quantitative measure of child's intelligence, relative to other children of that age Scores are relative to other children of that age - One advantage: IQs at different ages are easy to compare

When might learning begin?

First few weeks: No brain or sense organs yet Third trimester (28+ weeks): A different story Does a (3rd trimester) fetus have experience? - Sight? ...minimal experience - Motor/ tactile? ...lots of experience - Hearing? - Taste? Smell?

When in childhood does development start to differ?

First stable diagnoses: About age 2 years - Many not diagnosed until much later Can we detect ASD early, and use this to guide and target early interventions?

Evaluating Tools of the Mind

Flanker task: Direction of inside arrow Reverse-flanker task: Direction of outside arrows

Fluid intelligence vs. crystallized intelligence

Fluid intelligence - The ability to deal with new and unusual problems Crystallized intelligence - Acquired knowledge, including verbal knowledge and expertise in a subject

An important finding

For low-income families, shared environment (including parenting) explains the differences in IQ between people in this group For high-income families, it's the reverse - genetic differences explains the differences in IQ between people in this group Ex. plants. Population A: Half get water, half get no water Population B: All plants get enough water, sun, etc. Are differences in the plants' height caused by environment, or genetics? For A: - Mostly caused by environment (access to water) - In this group: Genetics is not the major reason plants end up tall vs short - Population A: Low heredity For B: - Environment is the same for every plant: It's not causing most of the differences - In this group: The reason plants are different is mostly genetics - Population B: High heredity It's like a pie chart: If environment caused differences in the group tested, then genetics will matter less

Why Individual Differences in Temperament ?

Genetic factors (twin & adoption studies show this, for example: identical twins more similar than fraternal twins) Environmental factors: - Nutrition quality - Teratogens - Prolonged stress ("toxic stress") - Parental sensitivity Both NATURE & NURTURE play a role (and interact, as usual): - Study of adopted infants, their adoptive parents and biological parents - 9 mo infants given a frustration-inducing task - separated from fun toy by plexiglass barrier - DV: How long do infants continue to stay fixated on the frustrating barrier (rather than disengage & move on)? Findings: Interaction — Infants were more likely to fixate on the barrier only if they had BOTH: - Biological parents with anxiety/depression - AND adoptive parents with anxiety/ depression - Risk & resilience Temperament is newsworthy: Active role of the child, not 100% parent's nurture (Alexander Thomas, Stella Chess) - Infants differ in temperament! It's not all just good vs. bad parenting! - Parenting skills matter. But children's own temperament also plays an active role! 'Self-Conscious' Emotions require some 'sense-of-self '

What causes individual differences in I.Q.?

Genetics? Environment? Can we be more specific? Flashback: Infant habituation and I.Q. - Speed of habituation and robustness of dishabituation correlate with greater IQ in childhood & adolescence - Habituation speed predicts about 25% of variation in IQ in adolescence Remember from last class - Our genes matter — a surprising amount! (they explain about half of the variation between people, in middle-class America) - Same for IQ - In adulthood, genes play a bigger role in explaining individual differences (vs. in childhood) - Our environment also matters — though not always in the ways we expect! - How does environment affect IQ?

Key terms

Genotype: Genetic material you inherit Environment: Every aspect of your surroundings Phenotype: What you actually look like/ are like (appearance, behavior, etc.) - The expression of your genotype, in your environment Big questions: - In what ways do genes and environment interact? - How much does each factor contribute? - How can we pull apart the influence of genes from environment?

The inside essence, not surface features, determines an animal's kind (Keil, 1989)

Given an operation: - a white stripe - bag of smelly stuff in stomach School-age children say: It's still a cat (this is essentialism!) Essentialism is useful for thinking about species differences But we have a bias to use essentialist thinking... even where it doesn't belong

Nativism illustrated: Neonate reflexes

Grasping: closing the fingers around anything that touches the palm Rooting: turning the head in the direction of a touch on the cheek, near the mouth Sucking: suck any stimulus that is inside the mouth Stepping: resembles walking when supported

Guilt & Shame (... are not the same)

Guilt: associated with empathy for others - remorse, regret - wanting to make up for wrongdoing Shame: focus on self, rather than concern for others - may feel like hiding etc Evidence (Barrett, Zahn-Waxler & Cole, 1993; Aksan & Kochanska, 2005): Doll Experiment: 2 year-olds allowed to play with a "special doll" adult leaves room, doll's leg "accidentally" falls off - when adult returned... - some showed SHAME (avoided the adult, didn't tell) - some showed GUILT (did not avoid, told her immediately, and tried to repair the doll) - (Afterward: Toy was fixed, child reassured) - Individual differences in children's guilt remained relatively stable throughout the preschool years Eliciting Guilt vs Shame: - Parent's reaction can influence which emotion children experience: - parents emphasize wrongness of action: "You did a bad thing!" (guilt) - parents emphasize bad attribute of child: "You are a bad girl!" (shame) (Hoffman, 2000; Tangney & Dearing, 2002)

What about inanimate objects? Do infants treat them differently?

Habituation event, New location Test event, New object Test event Method: - same events, but with a stick instead of an arm - 5-month-old infants (Woodward, 1998) Infants distinguish human actions from inanimate object motions; only human actions are seen as directed to particular goal objects 5 mo understand a lot... 3 mo fail At 5 & 8 months, infants represent a human actor's reach as directed to a particular goal object. At 3 months, no difference. why?

Harlow's monkey studies

Harry Harlow (1905-1981) Challenged Behaviorist view that biological needs (e.g., hunger) are primary Asked: Is there more to mother-infant relationship than just getting fed?

Semantic Development

How do children learn word meanings? Step #1: Find the words

Object Perception

How do you tell where one object begins and another ends? Possible cues include: - Color - Shape - Texture - Gaps Motion: e.g. common motion: if things move together they are likely part of the same object

Learning

How does it work? What cognitive "tools" do we have for learning? 6 different types of learning...

Do I.Q. scores tell us anything useful?

How well do they predict individual differences in success? I.Q. scores predict success at mentally complex jobs - Intellectually complex professions: Predicts 36-64% of the variance in success - Assembly line job performance: Predicts only 4% of the variance in success I.Q. scores and later success - I.Q. test scores correlate with GPA in high school & college, job success, salary, stability of marriage, staying out of jail, longevity - I.Q. test scores predict about 25% of the variation in academic success across people The best single predictor of academic success that we have - But still — 75% of variation is not explained by I.Q.

Adoptive-Twin Studies

Incredibly powerful Compare the similarity of identical twins raised together to those raised apart They start with the same genes, but experience different environments Are identical twins raised apart still more similar than any other random two people? (If so: It's due to genes!) Are identical twins raised together more similar than identical twins raised apart? (If so: It's due to shared environment!)

#5 - Rational Learning

Infants make rational inferences from things they observe (Xu & Garcia, 2008) Draw some marbles from a box. Do 8-mo infants infer the ratio of red/white marbles in the box, from that sample? Show the contents of the box: Infants look longer when the ratio doesn't match the sample (violates their expectation) AND! they don't have this expectation if the balls were pulled from the woman's POCKET (not the box) AND! if the ratio doesn't match what's in the box, infants infer that the woman has a preference

Sensorimotor Stage

Infants only know their world through their direct senses and actions Piaget thought: no 'object permanence' until ~9 months, & still incomplete until ~2 years

Take-home message

Infants start out knowing a lot about the physical world Object permanence Objects are solid & continue to exist Support Core knowledge

Other things matter too

Infants' temperament may affect parenting: - Differences in temperament make it more difficult for parents of some infants to maintain sensitivity - Also plays a role in attachment Genes may affect infants' sensitivity to quality of care: - Certain genes = more likely to be affected by quality of caregiving - 'Differential susceptibility'

Is language innate?

Innate abilities AND experience with the input Several findings support nativism (Chomsky, Pinker): - All human children and no domestic pets learn language - There are strong similarities in how all languages are structured - These properties emerge even in languages that children create, without observing them in the input Others argue for constructivism (M. Tomasello) - Language could be learned/ built without innate, language-specific learning mechanisms - General-purpose learning mechanisms & need for effective communication leads to construction of language Ongoing scientific debate!

Prepared learning

Innate factors affect how easy it is to learn different associations We are "prepared" (by our evolutionary history) to learn that certain things are dangerous

Influential Perspective

Jean Piaget says...At birth, the origins of cognition are VERY minimal: We start with just reflexes "Sensorimotor stage": 0 - 2 years

Reaction: Behaviorist theories (1920's-60's)

John Watson (1878-1958) B.F. Skinner We have to run far, far away from the subjectivity of Freudian psychoanalysis! Main principles of behaviorism: Only talk about observable things: "stimuli", "responses" No vague mental constructs: "thoughts", "concepts", "desires", "beliefs", "consciousness" "The most scientific approach to studying the mind" (... is not to talk about the mind at all?) Behaviorists have a lot to say about development: All behavior is a response to external stimuli — particularly to rewards and punishments We don't need to consider thoughts, emotions, etc. Child behavior can be controlled by consistently rewarding or punishing behaviors The claim (Empiricism): Nurture is all that Matters "Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select--doctor, lawyer, merchant-chief, and yes, even beggarman and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors." - Watson, 1930

Stereotype Threat (Spencer, Steele & Quinn, 1999)

Just reminding people of their gender or race can create stereotype threat effects

Music Perception

LOVE infant-directed singing (even more than infant-directed speech!) Prefer consonance over dissonance (even hearing newborns of deaf parents!) Slowly learn musical "syntax": over childhood (~7 years) Perceive the beat (at birth!)

Challenge = Complexity

Listen to a language you don't speak: - perceive the individual sounds - understand the meaning of the sounds (which sounds are words?) - appreciate how the order of the words affects the meaning - interpret how this was said (the social context, tone etc) How does a developing child accomplish these things?

What about "brain training" apps?

Little evidence that playing brain games improves underlying broad cognitive abilities

Next question

Low functioning ASD and high functioning ASD people are VERY different. Adults with high-functioning ASD will pass false belief tasks What led us to group these individuals as one diagnosis? Do people with high-functioning ASD still have social cognitive deficits?

In humans: MAOA and aggression

MAOA gene inhibits brain mechanisms associated with aggression Does low-activity MAOA gene = aggression? Nature and Nurture (Caspi et al., 2002) No childhood maltreatment = same antisocial behavior, low is actually lower than high Probable = Low is higher than high MAOA Severe = Low is near 1, high is below 0.5 An important implication: - High heritability does not imply that it can't be changed

Understanding differences between people

My preference vs. yours Development? What about understanding other's beliefs? - Beliefs differ across people... and are harder to "see"! How would we test belief understanding? (not this way): Suzie looks in the box. "What does Suzie believe is in the box?" Child: "A cat!" Problem! Is the child thinking about what's in Suzie's mind (i.e., her belief)... or their own knowledge? Solution?

Folk Wisdom

Nature matters: - Selective breeding for domestication (dogs, foxes) Extraordinary cosmetic & psychological changes Selective breeding: Unexpected effects: Foxes & Dmitry Belyaev Environment matters: - diet, type of training, neglect, etc.

Overall

Newborn infants have innate perceptual biases that allow them to find and attend to social stimuli (faces, biological motion) Early attention to social stimuli helps jump-start social learning!

Sleep

Newborns sleep twice as much as young adults The pattern of two different sleep states changes dramatically REM (rapid eye movement) sleep: An active sleep state associated with dreaming in adults and is characterized by quick, jerky eye movements under closed lids Non-REM sleep: A quiet or deep sleep state characterized by the absence of motor activity or eye movements and by regular, slow brain waves, breathing, and heart rate REM = 50% of a newborn's total sleep time; 20% by 3 or 4 years of age... Purpose? - autostimulation theory = brain activity during REM sleep in the fetus and newborn makes up for natural deprivation of external stimuli and facilitates the early development of the visual system

Intuitive theories of biology

People around the world develop mental theories of biology Reminder: - Mental theories are ideas about how something works - May or may not be related to actual scientific evidence about how things work

The 'Mozart Myth'

No evidence that listening to classical music increases cognitive/academic achievement! (lawsuit even led to refund...)

Example: Himalayan rabbit

Normal conditions = only black on feet, tail, ears, nose Cold local environment = new fur grows in black The environment affects the expression of genes for fur color

What helps delay gratification? Distraction (Mischel et al. 1989)

Not thinking about the reward, or covering it up, helps children delay reward Over development: More children use strategies to distract themselves ("I'll sing a song to wait", "I won't look at it") Take-home point for us too: Make your goals easier by setting things up to require less self-control! "How can I set things up to make easiest for myself?" - Want to go to sleep earlier? Charge your phone on the other side of the room... not on your nightstand - Want to eat less junk food? Don't keep it in your cabinet. Make yourself go out and get it when when you decide you want it.

School increases I.Q. (above and beyond age)

Notice: Even for kids of same age, we see big IQ differences depending on grade level

Genetic effects on personality (Lang, Livesley, & Vernon, 1996)

Personality dimensions measured in 168 pairs of identical twins and 132 pairs of fraternal twins - Identical twins far more correlated in Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness traits than fraternal twins

Perceptual Narrowing

Our experiences shape our perceptual abilities — We become less sensitive to stimuli that are not commonly experienced! occurs in many domains: - Face perception - Rhythm perception - Speech perception Why? An effect of "expertise": - Better perception of stimuli that we experience a lot

What does this mean?

Our genes matter — a surprising amount, and more than many people expect! - They explain about half of the variation between people, in middle-class America Our environment also matters — but not always in the ways we expect! - Parenting? Matters more for low- than high-SES Epigenetics!

Children's intuitive theories are the foundation of learning... and this has pros and cons

Our intuitive theories sometimes help, and sometimes get in the way - These mental theories are the basis of children's understanding of the world - When our intuitive theories are right - Learning feels EASY, and ideas feel intuitive When our intuitive theories are wrong - learning is HARD. Can also result in bias Understanding early conceptual development can help shed light on the origins of prejudice

Parental sensitivity predicts infant's attachment

Parental Sensitivity: noticing child's signals, interpreting them correctly, and responding consistently - Only 38% of infants with 'insensitive' parents are securely attached (usually it's ~ 60%) Parents of securely attached infants tend to... - Accurately read infants' signals, and respond consistently - Have many positive exchanges (contingent interactions; coordinated play) Parents of insecure/resistant infants tend to... - Respond inconsistently to infants' distress - Be anxious, overwhelmed Parents of insecure/avoidant infants tend to... - Be indifferent and emotionally unavailable - May reject infant's efforts to cuddle

Social Pragmatics

Paying attention to social cues/context Referencing adult's - attention - emotions - intentionality (e.g., assume labels refer to intentional rather than accidental actions) Social understanding is often important in language acquisition

New York Longitudinal Study (Thomas, Chess, & Birch, 1968, 1977)

Repeatedly interviewed parents in depth about infants' specific behaviors, identified characteristics of children's behavior: 1. Activity level 2. Rhythmicity 3. Approach/withdrawal 4. Adaptability 5. Intensity of reaction 6. Threshold of responsiveness 7. Quality of mood 8. Distractability 9. Attention span Categorized babies into 3 groups: - Easy (40% of babies) - Difficult (10% of babies) - Slow-to-warm-up (15% of babies) - remaining 35% didn't fit well into these categories Did fussy babies turn into fussy adults? - Yes (to some extent) Some dimensions were surprisingly stable: - Higher "fearful distress" in infancy => More fear in novel situations at age 2, More social inhibition at age 4.5 Greater ability to focus attention in preschool —> Greater ability to focus attention at ages 11 and 12 Some dimensions were less stable: - activity level less stable than levels of positive emotionality, fear, and distress/anger - Amount of reactivity can change drastically during childhood

Babbling

Repeating strings of sounds with a consonant followed by a vowel (e.g., "ba ba ba") 3-10 mos. old conforms to sounds, rhythm, intonation of language Not just about sound, though: Manual babbling occurs in sign language Also, not just humans - Birds babble like babies - Babbling behavior in the sac-winged bat Babbling is an important part of the learning process

A related issue: Prison and separation

Separating children from mothers in prison: good or bad for children's outcomes? Studies by Austrian psychoanalyst & physician René Spitz, 1946-1948 At the time it was believed that if the child remained in prison with the "felon mother", the infant would learn to become a felon and end up a criminal themselves. Orphanage vs. Prison w/mom: By age 1 year: - 25% of kids in orphanage died, avg IQ = 72 for kids in orphanage vs - 0 died in mom's care, avg IQ = 105 in mom's care By age 2 years: - 37% of kids in orphanage died vs - 0 died in mom's care only 5 of 21 kids in orphanage walked unassisted, only 1 of 21 spoke at least 12 words, only 3 of 21 were normal weight Prison separation is a modern-day issue Should prisons have nurseries? Now there is foster care, which is not as harmful as old institutions. But still, separation from parents, and possibility of moving from home to home = no stability in caregiver

Long-term outcomes

Securely Attached: - Closer relationships with peers - Better able to understand others' emotions - Less anxious or depressed - More likely to respond well to stress - More likely to have positive romantic relationships in adolescence and adulthood Insecurely Attached: - More socially/ emotionally withdrawn - Less curious, less interested in learning - In adolescence: Fewer close friendships, more aggressive and disruptive behaviors Caveat... - Are these differences really due to infant attachment? - Alternative: Whatever is causing differences in infant attachment... may also cause other differences, later in childhood What causes differences in attachment?

Basic aspects of 'self'

Self- concepts involve: - Physical being (e.g. I have a body!) - Internal/mental characteristics (I have beliefs, values, personality traits, etc) - Social characteristics (social roles, relationships) Self-concepts in infancy? 3-5 months: Evidence of some understanding of physical self 3-5 mo infants detect when their own movements control an object (like a balloon tied to wrist) Look longer at "flipped" video of own legs vs. correct orientation - some recognition of body? (Rochat & Morgan, 1995) ~8 months: Separation anxiety - a sign of developing awareness of self and others one way to test: when do we recognize ourselves in mirror?

Lecture 4: Baby perception Sensation vs. Perception

Sensation: getting information from the external world from sensory receptors (e.g., eyes, ears, skin, nose, tongue) The 'output' of our senses alone is not enough information to create an accurate perception of the world... Perception: The process of organizing and interpreting sensory information about the objects, events, and spatial layout you don't see things how they really are... The mind makes educated guesses!

Paiget's Stages of Cognitive Development

Sensorimotor (birth-2 years): Experience the world through senses Pre-operational (2-7 years): Representing things with words and images, more intuition, less logic Concrete operational (7-11 years): Thinking logically about concrete events, math Formal operational (11- adulthood): Abstract reasoning

#2: High-functioning ASD - still show social cog. deficits?

Show Heider & Simmel's 1944 animation to teens with ASD & Aspergers "Describe what you saw" Coded for social & mentalistic content Social Attribution Task: Normally-Developing adolescent: "What happened was that the larger triangle - which was like a bigger kid or a bully - and he had isolated himself from everything else until two new kids came along and the little one was a bit more shy, scared, and the smaller triangle more like stood up for himself and protected the little one. The big triangle got jealous of them, came out, and started to pick on the smaller triangle. The little triangle got upset and said like "What's up? Why are you doing this?" Adolescent with autism: "The big triangle went into the rectangle. There were a small triangle and a circle. The big triangle went out. The shapes bounce off each other. The small circle went inside the rectangle. The big triangle was in the box with the circle. The small triangle and the circle went around each other a few times. They were kind of oscillating around each other, maybe because of a magnetic field. After that, they go off the screen. The big triangle turned like a star - like a Star of David - and broke the rectangle.

Emerging Theories of Development

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939): Behavior is motivated by unconscious, instinctual drives The type of drive changes over development Universal developmental stages Psychosexual drives change with each stage Good stuff about Freud: Pointed out the mystery of infantile amnesia Emphasized early experience We have an unconscious mind Bad stuff about Freud: Overemphasis on sexuality Little or no evidence Claims too vague to test

Summary:

Some cognitive skills - even very deep ones, like Executive Function - can be trained, or else maintained, depending on what we do - Accessible, high quality early education is important! - Big "return on investment" for society and life outcomes• In terms of executive function, what we are born with may be more changeable than we think!

Do kids learn syntactic rules?

Syntactic Rule: - a general grammatical principle - For example: - To make it plural, add an "s" - To make it past-tense, add "-ed" e.g., The 'Wug' Test Jean Gleason (Jean Berko-Gleason) - Asked kids to generate correct endings to novel words (~4 years) "This is a Wug" "Now there is another one. There are two of them. There are two ____"

What about individual differences in emotionality?Temperament & Personality

Temperament - "constitutionally based individual differences in emotional, motor, and attentional reactivity and self-regulation" Rothbart & Bates (1998) Questions: - biological basis? - consistent across contexts? - stable over time? Do infants have temperaments? Infant temperaments? (Alexander Thomas, Stella Chess,) 1950's: Two psychiatrists notice — It's striking how much we blame mothers for their children's bad behavior! - Even young infants seem to have different emotional patterns... maybe it's not the moms' nurture, but the babies' nature!

How does prenatal experience affect us later? Learning & memory Teratogens

Teratogens: Environmental agents that have the potential to cause harm during prenatal development - "dose-response" relation - sensitive period...

Do infants have "mental models" of attachment? How do infants understand the attachment relationship themselves?

Testing for mental models of attachment at 12-16 months (Johnson, Dweck, & Chen 2007): First: Assess attachment in "strange situation" Second: administer looking time study (Violation of expectation task) Habituate to Parent and infant characters Test Video 1: Infant cries, parent moves away Test Video 2: Infant cries, parent approaches Different expectations of caregiver behavior in securely vs. insecurely attached infants: - Securely attached infants expect adults to move toward the crying infant (they look longer when this does not occur) - Insecurely attached infants do not have this expectation - Different mental models of attachment in infancy

Heritability only captures reasons for differences between individuals

Things can be genetic without being heritable - In a group of people: Number of legs is not heritable What causes differences in number of legs in people? - Accidents/injuries (environment) The group you look at really, really matters - Can see low or high heritability of the same thing, depending on the population you look at Why does this matter for psychology? - Our estimates of heritability will depend on: The amount of variation in the group and the amount of variation in their environment If you test people who all have a pretty similar environment... most of the differences between them are due to genes If you test people with a wide range of different environments... most of the differences between them are due to environment What if we looked at a group that included not just people (2 legs), but also dogs (4 legs), and centipedes (many legs)? - In this group, number of legs would be VERY heritable!

A Cognitive Revolution (1940's and 50's)

To explain behavior, we HAVE to think about the mind! Noam Chomsky: Chomsky: Kids produce all sorts of speech they never hear, and are never rewarded for: " I braked it", "I want somes" Development is not just a product of experience, reward & punishment "Nativist": Some knowledge is built in, babies are not a "blank slate" Jean Piaget, the father of modern developmental psychology (1896 -1980): Founded the field of Cognitive Development Provided one of the broadest theories ever to account for changes in children's thinking 1907 Publishes first paper at age 10 1918 Obtains doctorate in zoology, studies psychoanalysis 1923 First of nearly 60 scholarly books published (before 30!) 1929 Appointed director, International Bureau of Education Tested his children and neighbors' children Invented simple and clever tasks to test his ideas Lots of his ideas were wrong, but lots were right (or at least helpful!) Jump-started the scientific study of child development Piaget finds: Kids are surprisingly bad at some things...(Conservation of liquid quantity) Piaget's theory: Development happens in stages The claim: A child's capacity to understand concepts is limited by their stage of development We all go through the same stages, in the same order Learning is an active, constructive process! - Child as a 'little scientist'

Critical period for language

To learn language, children must be exposed to other people using language —spoken or signed—and timing matters! Sometime between age 5 & puberty, language acquisition becomes much more difficult & less successful Particularly: Learning syntax/ grammar Evidence? Feral children (Genie) - Trouble with syntax: Picks the wrong one when told: "Give me the one that is on blue." Second language learners (Newport, 1990; Johnson & Newport, 1989): Does the age you start learning a new language affect your success? - Study: Looked at immigrants from Korea and China, who came to the U.S. at different ages - Independent Variable: Age at arrival in US - Dependent variable: Grammar test (score) Performance on a test of English grammar was directly related to the age at which they came to the U.S. Arrived before the age of 7: Performance is just as good as native English speakers' Even when they compared people who'd been speaking English for the same number of years, the age they started learning mattered

A Test of Intermodal Perception

Touch (tactile) familiarization: one-month-olds were allowed to feel (but not see) either a bumpy or a smooth pacifier. Test (Visual only)! shown two pictures, one of a smooth object and one of a bumpy object. Preferential Looking Test: Infants looked longer at the picture matching how the pacifier felt! Ability to detect correspondence between touch & vision at one month of age!

Early Detection? (Jones & Klin, 2013, Nature)

Typical infants: Sustained eye contact Eye-tracking while watching videos of people Prospective longitudinal study: Infants later diagnosed with ASD show differences at 6 mo (but not at 2 months) Result: Amount of time attending to eyes declines with age, only in infants later diagnosed with ASD

Language is a powerful tool

Using the finite set of words in our vocabulary we can put together an infinite number of sentences, and express an infinite number of ideas!

According to Bowlby

Usual outcome of 4 phases: 1. Enduring emotional tie between child and primary caregiver. 2. Child develops an Internal Working Model of Attachment - Mental representation of self, caregivers, & how relationships work - Affects expectations about relationships throughout lifespan Bowlby's 4 phases of attachment development: 1. Pre-attachment (birth to 6 weeks): - Infant produces innate signals (e.g., crying) that bring caregiver, and the interaction is comforting. 2. Attachment-in-the-making (6 wks to 6-8 months): - Begin attending preferentially to familiar people, especially primary caregiver - Infants learn whether or not caregiver is trustworthy. 3. Clear-cut attachment (6-8 months to 1.5-2 years) - Actively seek comfort from caregivers - Experience distress at parting and happiness at reunion - Mother now serves as secure base 4. Reciprocal relationships (1.5-2 years and on) - Increasing abilities to organize efforts to be near parents - Separation distress declines - Child actively creates reciprocal relationship with parents

How can we improve self-control?

Ways to improve: - Tools of the mind - Montessori education - "Brain training" games? - Entity vs. incremental mindset

How does self-concept change throughout later childhood?

Work by Susan Harter : - Interview a wide array of children on who they are - Make "composite statements" most common ideas, provide representative type of description given by kids at each age How 3-4 year olds describe themselves: - Self-concept focuses on concrete, observable characteristics - Activities, abilities - Basic psychological traits ('happy') - Unrealistically positive Contrast with an 8-11 year old: - Social comparison plays a big role focus on others' evaluations, place in social network - More nuanced concepts of traits (Not just 'smart'; but smart at some things, not at others) - More realistic (and less positive) And at young adolescence (11-13): - Even more abstract self-descriptions (extrovert) - Understand that self can differ depending on context

What does this mean about the role of parenting? Do differences in parenting style cause individual differences in children? Remember: parenting is "shared environment" in a twin study Does parenting style matter?•

YES and NO — Parenting matters — but not in all the ways you might expect It matters for children's happiness / wellness during childhood Parents' sensitivity to their infants' cues matters for attachment to parents during childhood (more on this later) It matters more for children in low-income families (poverty) (Turkheimer et al 2003) It matters in cases of neglect or abuse (by making worse adult outcomes more likely) For middle to high income families: Differences in parenting style do not seem to explain most differences in children once they are adults. It seems to: But correlations are mostly due to genetics!

So.. What do infants know about people? Do infants have social concepts, before they can talk?

Yes Infants distinguish between things that are ANIMATE (people, animals...), and inanimate objects How do infants decide whether something is animate? They use: - Visual features: Has a face - Dynamic cues: Moves on its own (self-propelled), responds to its environment (contingent behavior)

Does identity status relate to well being?

Yes: People who are committed to an identity tend to be higher in well-being, self-esteem, emotional stability This is true whether commitment is through foreclosure, or exploration! Caveat: All of this work was done in Western societies Differences in identity development in Non-Western cultures?

Epigenetics Regulator Genes

control the continuous switching on and off of genes that underlie development across the lifespan A given gene influences development and behavior only when it is turned on activation is affected by the genes environment Before: Genes don't change Epigenetics: The environment can change your genes (i.e., how they're expressed) An Analogy Computer Hardware: Genome Computer Software: The Epigenome

Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart (Bouchard, 1990)

extensive study of identical twins (> 100) separated early in life (many had not met until study!) give extensive battery of physiological and psychological tests (e.g., measuring IQ, reaction to stress, aggression, traditionalism, reaction time, religiosity etc) Strong heritability: - some personality (e.g., temperament, leadership) - life expectancy - certain attitudes Weak heritability: - some personality: e.g., need for intimacy - spouse similarity Overall, twins reared apart are much more similar than any other two random people. Genetics must play a big role! This result has held up, across a large number of studies: - In ~middle-class families, with no child maltreatment, malnutrition or neglect: - Almost all individual differences are substantially heritable (30 - 80%): Intelligence Personality Life outcomes (divorce, crime, alcoholism, smoking...) Differences/similarities in most traits are explained: ~50% by heritable factors (genetics) ~50% by unique environment 0-10% by shared environment

Perception

extremely complex yet automatic innate abilities shaped by experience & the environment the building blocks for everything else!

Remember: "Core Knowledge" of Objects in Infancy

object permanence/continuity solidity cohesion (objects don't break apart spontaneously) support (basics only) The beginning of an intuitive theory of physics. Are there limitations? Piaget noticed some limitations on kids' understanding of physical things: - Conservation of liquid quantity - Conservation of solid quantity - Conservation of number 4 & 5 year olds fail these 'conservation' tasks!

Lecture 5: Infant cognition - Understanding the physical world Origins of Knowledge?

objects (e.g., physical laws?) people (e.g., moral laws?) symbols space (e.g., navigation) numbers on and on... Where do these concepts come from and how do they develop?

Pragmatics & word learning (Tomasello, Strosberg, & Akhtar, 1996)

paying attention to where the speaker is attending Toddlers use the speaker's gaze to determine what a novel word refers to

Lecture 8: How do children learn language? Part 2 Phonological Development

phonemes: the units of sound that distinguish meaning English uses just 45 of 200 sounds found in all languages - minor sound differences have big consequences (e.g., /l/ & /r/ in 'lake' vs 'rake') cross-cultural variation in which sounds are important (e.g., no different meaning of /l/ & /r/ in Japanese)

Components of Language

phonology semantics syntax pragmatics

Taste Aversions i.e., The "Garcia Effect"

we are prepared to learn a link between illness and food (more than illness & non-food experiences) Garcia also found: After rats got sick, they selectively avoided what they had eaten, not what they had seen or heard at the time Similarly, after children/people get sick, they develop negative associations with the food they ate (more so than non-food stimuli that were also present)

The 'A not B' error

~9-12 months = tendency to reach to where objects have been found before, rather than to where they were last hidden. Lack of object permanence? Alternative Explanations? Why else might babies show so little understanding? What are they missing here? Competence (knowledge) vs Performance (requires other abilities) A-not-B test also requires motor control, and inhibition of a previous action Babies still make the A not B error with transparent boxes - the challenge is reaching for objects, not object permanence (Smith, Thelen, Titzer, McLin, 1999)