The Childhood Years: Motor Development

• Basic Principles– Cephalocaudal trend – head to foot– Proximodistal trend – center-outward

• Maturation – gradual unfolding of genetic blueprint

• Developmental norms – median age– Cultural variations

Early Emotional Development: Attachment

• Separation anxiety– Ainsworth (1979)– The strange situation and patterns of attachment

• Secure• Anxious-ambivalent• Avoidant

• Developing secure attachment– Bonding at birth– Daycare– Cultural factors

• Evolutionary perspectives on attachment

Stage Theories of Development: Personality

• Stage theories, three components– progress through stages in order– progress through stages related to age– major discontinuities in development

• Erik Erikson (1963)– Eight stages spanning the lifespan– Psychosocial crises determining balance

between opposing polarities in personality

Figure 11.10 Stage theories of development

Figure 11.11 Erikson’s stage theory

Stage Theories: Cognitive Development

• Jean Piaget (1920s-1980s)– Assimilation/ Accommodation– 4 stages and major milestones

• Sensorimotor – Object permanence

• Preoperational– Centration, Egocentrism

• Concrete Operational– Decentration, Reversibility, Conservation

• Formal Operational– Abstraction

Sensorimotor Intelligence

• Sensoritmotor intelligence—active intelligence causing babies to think while using senses and motor skills

Figure 11.12 Piaget’s stage theory

Sensorimotor Intelligence

• Sensoritmotor intelligence—active intelligence causing babies to think while using senses and motor skills

Stages 1 and 2: Primary Circular Reactions

• The feedback loop involving the infants own body; infant senses motion and tries to make sense of it

• Stage 1 = Reflexes • Stage 2 = First Acquired

Adaptations- adaptations of reflexes, i.e., sucking—new information taken in by senses and responded to

• Assimilation and Accommodation– assimilation—taking in new information

by incorporating it into previous knowledge

– accommodation— intake of new data to re-adjust, refine, expand prior schema or actions

– babies eagerly adapt their reflexes and senses to whatever experiences they have

Stages 1 and 2: Primary Circular Reactions, cont.

• Sucking as a Stage-Two Adaptation– begin adapting at about one month– reflexive assimilation

Stages 1 and 2: Primary Circular Reactions, cont.

Stages 3 and 4: Secondary Circular Reactions

• feedback loop involving people and objects

• Stage 3 = Making Interesting Events Last- repetition - awareness

• Stage 4 = New Adaptation and Anticipation- goal-directed behavior- object permanence

• Feedback loop that involves active experimentation and exploration- involves creativity, action, and ideas

• Stage 5 = New Means Through Active Experimentation– little scientist

Stages 5 and 6: Tertiary Circular Reactions

• Stage 6 = New Means Through Mental Combinations– mental combinations—sequence of

mental actions tried out before actual performance

– deferred imitation—perception of something someone else does (modeling), then performing action at a later time

Stages 5 and 6: Tertiary Circular Reactions, cont.

Figure 11.13 Piaget’s conservation task

Figure 11.14 The gradual mastery of conservation

Concept Check:

According to Piaget, in what stage would a child be if she could remember where a hidden object is, but doesn’t realize that she is her sister’s sister?

Preoperational

Table 10.3 Summary of Piaget’s stages of cognitive development

An Overview of Piaget’s Theory

• The Formal Operations stage– Formal Operations is Piaget’s term for the

mental processes used to deal with abstract, hypothetical situations.

– These are processes that demand logical, deductive reasoning and systematic planning.

– Piaget proposed that children reach this stage just before adolescence (at about age 11.)

– Researchers have found that some people take longer to reach formal operations, and some people never do.

An Overview of Piaget’s Theory

• The Concrete Operations stage– From about age 7 children begin to exhibit

reversible operations and seem to understand the conservation of physical properties.

– According to Piaget, during the stage of concrete operations children can perform mental operations on concrete objects.

– They may, however, have trouble with abstract or hypothetical ideas.

Table 10.2 Typical tasks used to measure conservation

Concept Check:

Which is the clearest example of egocentric thinking?

1. An exceptionally wealthy man gives no money to charity.

2. A woman assumes that all her friends will want to see the same movie that she does.

3. At student council meeting, a student takes credit for someone else’s ideas.

#2 – selfishness (1) and dishonesty (3) are not the same as egocentrism.

Difficulties of Inferring Children’s Concepts

• Symbolic thought– Do children in the early preoperational

stage lack an ability to think symbolically?• 2 ½ year old children cannot use a

model room as a “map” when trying to locate a hidden toy in a regular sized room.

• But when told that the toy was hidden in the model room, and a special machine has “expanded” the model to a full size room, the children have little difficulty finding the hidden toy.

Figure 10.22 If an experimenter hides a small toy in a small room and asks a child to find a larger toy “in the same place” in the larger room, a 21/2-year-old searches haphazardly. (a) However, the same child knows exactly where to look, if the experimenter says this is the same room as before, except that a machine has expanded it (b).

Figure 10.21 Then that adult and another (who had not been present initially) point to one of the cups to signal where the surprise is hidden. Many 4-year-olds consistently follow the advice of the informed adult;3-year-olds do not.

Figure 10.21 A child sits in front of a screen covering four cups and watches as one adult hides a surprise under one of the cups.

Difficulties of Inferring Children’s Concepts

• Understanding other people’s thoughts– Are young children more cognitively

egocentric than adults are?• What Piaget meant by this is that a child

cannot easily understand the perspectives of other people.

• Various experiments show that preschool aged children make errors of thought that are typical of egocentric thinking.

• However, adults can make the same mistakes according to other studies.

Difficulties of Inferring Children’s Concepts

• Distinguishing appearance from reality– Do children in the early preoperational

stage fail to distinguish appearance from reality?• It’s not entirely clear whether a child’s

inability to do so has more to do with lacking a concept or inadequate language skills.

• For example children may seem to confuse a rock and a sponge that looks like a rock, but when asked to bring to an adult something to wipe up spilled water, they have no problem identifying the sponge as the correct object for that purpose.

Difficulties of Inferring Children’s Concepts

• There may be a fundamental weakness in the assumption made by Piaget that a child either “has” or “lacks” a concept.

• Concepts develop gradually and may appear using some methods of testing but not others.

An Overview of Piaget’s Theory

• The Preoperational stage– Another example of a concept that

preoperational children lack is conservation.

– The inability to conserve results in a failure to recognize that changes in shape and arrangement do not always signify changes in amount or number.

An Overview of Piaget’s Theory

• The Preoperational stage– Piaget called the second stage of cognitive

development the preoperational stage because the child lacks operations.

– The term “operations” refers to reversible mental processes.

– The lack of operations leads to errors in cognition such as egocentric thinking – the child for example knows that he has a brother, but doesn’t understand that he is his brother’s brother.

An Overview of Piaget’s Theory

• The Sensorimotor stage– As infants progress through the

sensorimotor stage, they seem to develop a concept of self.

– At about 1 year of age, they begin to show signs that they recognize themselves.

– They also begin to show self-conscious emotions such as embarrassment.

An Overview of Piaget’s Theory

• The Sensorimotor stage– Recent research by Baillergeon suggests

that infants 6-8 months old who are tested differently from methods used by Piaget do have a limited ability to understand object permanence.

– Baillergeon’s research results suggest that infants can differentiate between possible and physically impossible events.

An Overview of Piaget’s Theory

• The sensorimotor stage– Object Permanence

• Jean Piaget believed that infants lacked a concept of object permanence during the early months of life.

• Object permanence is the idea that objects continue to exist even when one cannot see them or otherwise sense them.

• According to Piaget, an infant does not know that a hidden object is still there until about 8-9 months of age.

An Overview of Piaget’s Theory

• The sensorimotor stage– Piaget called the first stage the

sensorimotor stage because at this early age behavior consists primarily of simple motor responses to sensory stimuli.

– Examples of these would be the grasping and sucking reflexes.

– Piaget believed that infants respond only to what they see and hear, not what they remember or imagine.

An Overview of Piaget’s Theory

• The four stages of intellectual development– Sensorimotor Birth to 2 years of

age– Preoperational 2 to 7 years of age– Concrete Operations 7 to 11 years of age– Formal Operations 11 years of age and

older

An Overview of Piaget’s Theory

• Adaptation of old schemata takes place through two processes.– Through assimilation, a person applies an

old schema to a new object.– Through accommodation, a person

modifies an old schema to fit a new object.– People in all stages switch back and forth

between these two strategies, but ultimately cognitive change is accomplished through accommodation.

An Overview of Piaget’s Theory

• Piaget believed that a child constructs new mental processes as he or she interacts with the environment.– Behavior is based on schemata (singular

- schema.)– A schema is an organized way of

interacting with objects in the world.– New schemata are added, and old

schemata are changed as the child matures.

Jean Piaget’s Views of Development

• Piaget came to believe that children think differently from adults, both quantitatively and qualitatively.

• He believed that children of different cognitive maturity levels react to the same experience very differently.

• Piaget used his own extensive observational studies of children to support his conclusions.

Jean Piaget’s Views of Development

• Piaget believed that the effect of any experience on a person’s knowledge or thinking depended on the person’s maturity combined with previous experiences.

• He began his psychological career administering IQ tests, but found that he was bored with this activity. He was, however, fascinated by the incorrect answers that children would give.

The Development of Moral Reasoning

• Kohlberg (1976)– Reasoning as opposed to behavior

• Moral dilemmas–Measured nature and progression of

moral reasoning– 3 levels, each with 2 sublevels

• Preconventional• Conventional• Postconventional

Figure 11.17 Kohlberg’s stage theory

Adolescence: Physiological Changes

• Pubescence• Puberty

– Secondary sex characteristics– Primary sex characteristics

• Menarche• Sperm production

– Maturation: early vs. late• Sex differences in effects of early

maturation

What About Spanking?

• Reasons for parenting variations– culture, religion, ethnicity, national

origin– parents’ own upbringing

• Developmentalists fear children who are physically punished will learn to be more aggressive– domestic violence of any kind can

increase aggression between peers and within families

Techniques of Discipline, cont.

• In deciding which technique to apply, parents should ask: How does technique relate to child?– child’s temperament, age, and

perceptions crucial considerations

Techniques of Discipline

•Culture is a strong influence- expectations- offenses- punishments

•In United States- time-out is used

•child stops all activity and sits in corner or stays inside for a few minutes

Punishment

•Discipline an integral part of parenting

Baumrind’s Three Styles of Parenting, cont.

• Recent studies have found link between parenting styles and child behavior less direct than Baumrind’s original research indicated– impact of child’s temperament– influence of community and cultural

differences on child’s perception of parenting

– in poor or minority families, authoritarian parenting tends to be used to produce high-achieving, emotionally regulated children: strict and warm can be successful

• 3 Styles– authoritarian—high standards and

expectations with low nurturance•children likely to become

conscientious, obedient, and quiet—but not happy

– permissive—little control, but nurturing•children likely to lack self-control

and are not happy– authoritative—limits and guidance

provided but willing to compromise•children are more likely to be

successful, articulate, intelligent, and happy

Baumrind’s Three Styles of Parenting, cont.

• Baumrind’s 4 important dimensions that influence parenting– expression of warmth or nurturance– strategies for discipline– quality of communication– expectations for maturity

Baumrind’s Three Styles of Parenting

Figure 11.19 Physical development at puberty

Adolescence: Neural Changes

• Increasing myelinization• Synaptic pruning• Changes in prefrontal cortex

The Search for Identity

• Erik Erikson (1968)– Key challenge - forming a sense of identity

• James Marcia (1988)– 4 identity statuses

• Foreclosure• Moratorium• Identity Diffusion• Identity Achievement

The Expanse of Adulthood

• Personality development• Social development• Career development• Physical changes• Cognitive changes