1.) Describe and critically discuss the Piagetian theory of child development. Please ensure you
discuss the experimental methods used to test the theory and Speke’s experiments on possible vs.
impossible events.
Piagetian theory of child development describes stages of cognitive ability children go through as
they mature. These stages describe how a child’s intellect and knowledge is acquired, constructed
and used at different periods in their life cycle. These stages include: the sensorimotor stage, the
preoperational stage, the concrete operational stage, and the formal operational stage.
The sensorimotor stage starts at birth and continues on to around age 2. It is called the
sensorimotor stage, because, at this level of development, the child’s knowledge only consist of
what the senses provide and their own motor activities. Given this, object permanence, is a key
understandings come to at this stage of development. Object permanence being the knowledge
that objects continue to exist even when they move out of our sensory experience, or, in other
words, when we are no longer perceiving them.
Spelke, and colleagues, carried out a series of experience to indicate when object permanence, as
a way of understanding the world developed in children. They utilized the length of babies gaze
as an experimental measure to point at this construct. A child would be show an animation in
which an object would disappear behind and reappear. In some of the animations, the way the
object reappeared was impossible given the way objects behave in our world. In other animations,
it was possible. According to Spelke, when babies gazed longer at animations that were
impossible it was because they defied their expectations, and, thereby, they had come to develop
object permanence as a conceptual framework for understanding their world.
The next stage is the preoperational stage. This stage starts around 2 and ends around 7. This
stage is ‘pre’, because children have not yet developed the ability to understand and use concrete
logic and manipulate information inside of their heads. It is at this stage the start developing
language and understanding themselves as a person. Or, in other words, they have developed a
first person perspective view of the world. They, however, have not yet developed the ability to
see the world through another’s eyes. Or, in other words, understand a second person perspective.
Evidence was provided to support this this first person egocentric viewpoint using an experiment
called the “Three Mountain Task.” In this task, children are shown a mountain scene. The, they
are show three pictures. Then the experimenters, first, shows the mountain from the perspective
that they had already viewed the scene in. They, usually, at this stage of development have no
problem the mountain identifying the mountain from this perspective. Then, they are shown it
from different perspectives than their own. They have considerable more difficult identifying the
mountain from these other, second person, perspectives.
After reoperation, comes concrete operation. Children go through this stage roughly between the
ages of 7 and 11. At this stage, children can start using logic to operate on concrete events, hence
the stages name. For example, they can use inductive reasoning to move from a series of
observations about the world to a generalized understanding. The sun has come up every day so
far, so I induce that it will also rise tomorrow. The ability to take a second person perspective
also develops at this stage, as they can recognize the difference between their thoughts and
perceptions about the world and others. Therefore, the move from ego to sociocentric.
The last stage is known as formal operational stage. This stage starts around 12 and continues on
into their adult lives. This stage moves from logically operating on concrete objects to formal, or
abstract, objects. Abstraction is the process of subtracting the particulars from a situation and
creating a mental model out of what is left. These mental models allow children to use deductive
reasoning to solve problems in a systematic, logical, and methodological way. Using these
methods, children can move into a third person, more objective, perspective to understand the
world they exist in.
2.) Describe some of the physiological correlates to psychopathy linked to emotional deficits.
Which brain theories of psychopathy are used to explain this data (Abbott, 2001)?
Psychopathy is understood as an inability to empathize or feel emotions regarding others. It is a
sub-set of people suffering from anti-social personality disorder. There are many psychological
correlates that go along with psychopathy. Psychopath, as opposed to normal people, don’t show
signs of anxiety when repeatedly exposed to jarring stimuli such as loud noises. Similarly, they
don’t startle, when put in a threating environment. This show by an absence of blinking when
they are exposed to stimuli, such as angry faces, that indicate a threat to most people. Also, when
show emotionally charged words such as ‘joy’ or ‘kill’ psychopaths don’t have emotional
responses at a greater rate than when shown neutral words such as ‘rug’.
Two main brain theories support this understanding of psychopathy as being one of emotional
deficit. One puts the orbitofrontal cortex at the front and center. This is part of the pre-frontal
cortex, and it has been shown that people that have it damaged early in life are more likely to be
very aggressive and show severe social behavioral problems. The second theory things the
problem lies in the amygdala. The amygdala helps process both emotion and mediate fear. If it is
not functioning correctly, it could help explain why psychopaths don’t startle easily and shoe a
lack of empathy for others. It might be the case that these theories can be integrated to fully
explain the cause of psychopathy. This is because there is a high number of neural connections
between these two areas of the brain.