The Life-Span Perspective

What is fluid intelligence?

"Nuts and bolts" of intelligence, memory, problem-solving ability

What age is the prenatal period?

0-9 months.

What age is early childhood AKA play years?

2-5/6 years

What age is middle childhood?

6-11 years.

How many stages of human life according to Erikson? What happens at each stage?

8. At each stage, a crisis or conflict manifests that in turn points to a number of developmental tasks which are to be mastered.

Piaget divided the principle of adaptation into what two things? Define them.

Accommodation - individuals adjust their existing knowledge to take in something new. Assimilation - individual incorporates new information into what is known.

Part of ethical research is debriefing. What is this?

After the study, participants should be informed of the study's purpose and methods that were used.

Describe Piaget's sensorimotor stage.

Age 0-2 Infant constructs an understanding of the world by coordinating sensory experience with physical actions. Progress from reflex and instinct to symbolic thought.

Describe Piaget's Formal Operational Stage.

Age 11 to adulthood. Adolescent reasons in more abstract, idealistic, and logical ways.

Describe Piaget's Preoperational Stage.

Age 2-7 Child begins to represent the world with words and images. Increases symbolic thinking.

Describe Piaget's concrete operational Stage.

Age 7-11 Child can reason logically about concrete events and classify objects into different sets.

What does descriptive research look like?

Aims to observe and record behavior.

Part of ethical research is informed consent. What is this?

All participants must know what their research participation will involve and what risks might develop.

Development has a contextual relationship, including *normative age-graded* development - what does that mean and what is an example?

Biological and environmental influences that are events that are similar for all individuals; have a strong relationship with chronological age. Ex. going to grade school and going through puberty.

What age is infancy?

Birth - 18/24 months

There are many types of development. Describe biological.

Changes in an individual's physical nature.

There are many types of development. Describe socioemotional.

Changes in relationships with other people, changes in emotions, and changes in personality.

There are many types of development. Describe cognitive

Changes in thought, intelligence, and language.

What are the four conceptions of age?

Chronological age - years Biological age - condition of organs Psychological age - adaptive capacities Social age - connectedness to others

What is the cross-sectional approach?

Compares individuals of different ages, each observed *once* at one point in time.

Describe Skinner's Operant conditioning.

Consequences of a behavior produce changes in the probability of the behavior's occurrence. rewards increase and punishments decrease likelihood of behavior

Part of ethical research is minimizing bias. What is this?

Consider gender and cultural and ethnic bias.

Explain continuity and discontinuity.

Continuity is refers to quantitative, gradual, additive change, like physical growth more height and weight. Discontinuity involves distinct stages, where each stage is qualitatively different from the last. is terms of stages. E.g., infants go from babbling to talking.

According to psychometric theory, what are the two types of intelligence?

Crystallized intelligence and fluid intelligence.

What does correlational research do? How is it reported?

Describes the strength of the relationship between two or more events using a correlation coefficient. Range from -1.00 - 1.00.

What does the experience/nurture view assert?

Development is a consequence of external events; experience is dependent on environment.

Maturation and experience = nature and nurture. What does the nature/maturationist point of view assert?

Development proceeds in an orderly fashion and is explained by an organism's biological inheritance.

What is the group of psychologists that take an intermediate view of nature and nurture? What do they assert?

Developmentalists. Assert that complex human attributes such as personality, temperament, and intelligence are processes involving a complex interplay between biology (nature) and environment (nurture).

What is the cohort effect?

Differences due to a person's time of birth, era, or generation, but not to actual age.

Give a brief overview of Piaget's cognitive developmental theory.

Emphasizes the process of organization and adaptation. Determined four stages of cognitive development.

According to Piaget, reorganization of schemes takes place through the processes of assimilation, accommodation, and ____________________.

Equilibration Equilibration is when there is a balance between assimilation and accommodation.

Give a brief overview of Erikson's psychosocial theory.

Focused on our desire to affiliate with other people. Proposed 8 stages of development; each stage has a crisis which must be resolved.

Give a brief overview of Freud's psychoanalytic theories as they relate to development.

Freud. Focus on changing sexual impulses. Five stages: oral, anal, phallic, latency, genital.

Development has a contextual relationship, including *normative history-graded* development - what does that mean and what is an example?

Historical, cultural, and social events that are experienced by a given culture in a particular historical time. Influences are common within a birth cohort. Ex. witnesses of the Vietnam war.

List the developmental issues (3 sets of 2).

Maturation and experience, continuity and discontinuity, and early and later experience

What is the orderly sequences of changes we all go through called?

Maturation.

Define experiment.

One or more factors are manipulated while all others are held constant.

What part of psychology did Erikson focus on?

Personality development that encompasses both the psychological functioning of the individual and the social expectations placed on an individual across the life course.

Who believed that individuals are active, information-seeking beings who organize our experiences and adapt our thinking to include new ideas?

Piaget

Who's theory is the most complete theory of cognitive development for the first half of the life span?

Piaget

What is crystallized intelligence?

Pragmatics of intelligence; knowledge imparted by one's culture, like language or social competence.

List the four periods of development (not ages)

Prenatal period, infancy, early childhood, and middle/late childhood.

Piaget believed that individuals go through four stages of cognitive development. What is necessary for movement from one stage to another?

Reorganization of schemes - a mental framework that an individual uses to interpret the world.

Part of ethical research is confidentiality. What is this?

Researchers are responsible for keeping the data completely confidential and, if possible, anonymous.

What is the time span of inquiry?

Researchers may be interested in discovering how children of various ages approach problems or how intelligence changes with increasing age.

Part of ethical research concerns deception. What is this?

Researchers must ensure that deception will not harm participants, and that participants are fully debriefed.

According to Piaget, what are the four stages of cognitive development in children?

Sensorimotor (0-2) Preoperational (2-7) Concrete operational (7-11) Formal Operational (11-adult)

What is Vygotsky's theory? Give a brief overview.

Sociocultural cognitive theory. Emphasizes how social interaction and culture guide cognitive development Learning is based upon the inventions of society.

What is a birth cohort?

The generation in which an individual is born. Changes how different historical events, e.g., the great depression, impact them.

Bowlby was an ethnologist. What did he stress?

The importance of human attachment during the first year of life.

Define development.

The pattern of movement or change that begins at conception and continues through the human life span.

How does the life-span approach to development differ form the traditional approach?

The traditional approach emphasizes extensive change from birth to adolescence, little to no change in adulthood, and decline in old age. The life-span approach emphasizes developmental change throughout life.

Development has a contextual relationship, including *nonnormative life events* - what does that mean and what is an example?

Unusual occurrences that have a major impact on a particular individual's life. Examples include divorce, death of a spouse, and career choice. These events are called nonnormative because they are not common to all individuals.

According to Piaget, when does learning take place?

When there is disequilibration or when the processes of adaptation are influx.

Explain early and Later Experience.

Will someone remain stable throughout their life or are we capable of change?

The life-span perspective concerns seven basic elements. Development is:

life-long - no age period is dominant. multidimensional - biological, cognitive, and socioemotional multidirectional - growth, maintenance, regulation of loss plastic - capable of change historically embedded multidisciplinary contextual

What is the difference between correlational and experimental studies?

Correlational studies observe events or characteristics as they occur naturally, i.e., there is no experimental manipulation of events. Developmentalists cannot determine the cause of some event using a correlational strategy. Experimental studies investigate causal relationships by manipulating variables (independent variables, also known as a treatment), and measuring the outcome of the manipulation

Piaget's theory and Erikson's theory are continuous/discontinuous?

Discontinuous. Ex. change from babbling to talking.

Give a brief overview of the information-processing theory.

Emphasizes that individuals manipulate information, monitor it, and strategize about it. We develop a gradually increasing capacity for processing information (no stages).

Who's theory best describes psychological and social changes that occur in adult development?

Erikson

What is ethnology and who brought it to prominence?

Ethnology stresses that behavior is strongly influenced by biology and is tied to evolution. Lorenz brought it to prominence with the geese imprinting study.

Erikson emphasized the ego, what did he define this as?

The structure of the personality whose function is in adjusting to the demands of reality or society. basically we are not just psych or bio, we are also *social*!

List Erikson's 8 stages.

Trust vs. Mistrust (0-1) Autonomy vs. Shame and Doubt (1-3) Initiative vs. Guilt (3-5) Industry vs. Inferiority (6-puberty) Identity vs. Identity Confusion (10-20) Intimacy vs. Isolation (20-30) Generativity vs. Stagnation (40-50) Integrity vs. Despair (60-)

List the six theoretical perspectives.

psychoanalytic theories cognitive theories behavioral and social learning theories ethological theories ecological theories eclectic theoretical orientation.

Give an example of adaptation of knowledge with Piaget's two principles.

A child believes cows, horses, and cats are "doggies." What the child knows is "doggies," which she uses to help her to understand other four-legged creatures of which she has no prior knowledge. This is the process of assimilation. Accommodation - the child comes to understand that there are four-legged animals that are not "doggies," and she correctly represents them with the proper label—horse, cow, etc. Thus, in the process of assimilation, the individual changes objects to fit what is known; in accommodation, the object to be learned changes the individual.

What is the longitudinal approach?

Takes measures from the same individuals over a period of time.

Development is multidimensional and multidirectional. What are some of the dimensions of development (4)?

biological, social, and cognitive or intellectual dimensions.