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HUMAN DEVELOPMENT 1
PSYCHOLOGY 3050:
Introduction
Dr. Jamie Drover
SN-3094, 864-8383
e-mail -- jrdrover@mun.ca
Winter Semester, 2015
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Cognition
 Cognition: the processes by which knowledge is
acquired and manipulated – i.e., thinking
 All mental activities involved in acquiring,
understanding, and modifying information.
 Separates humans from other species
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Cognition
 A reflection of what
is in the mind
 Not observed
directly – inferred
from behavior
 Includes
unconscious and
non-deliberate
processes involved
in routine activity
(e.g., reading).
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Cognitive Development
 Development: Changes in structure or function over
time.
Structure: a substrate of the organism
 e.g., nervous system tissue, muscle, limbs (physical structures)
or
 mental knowledge that underlies thinking
e.g., schemas or concepts
 hypothetical
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Cognitive Development
Function: actions related to the structure
 Most commonly, something that the child does
 e.g., retrieving a memory, pressing a computer key, firing of
a neuron, etc.
 Cognitive development; assimilation of info into schemas,
performing addition.
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Structure and function are bi-directional
 Structures enable function, and function (e.g.,
activity) feeds back to drive further development of
structure
 Function maintains the structure and allows for
proper development.
 For example: Newborn infants have very poor vision
 Growth of cells in the visual cortex (structure) leads to better
visual acuity
 Better acuity (sharpness) leads the baby to look at more
patterns, objects (function)
 More looking stimulates further cell growth (structure)
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Development of the Infant Visual Cortex from Birth to 6 months
From Conel (1939-1963)
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Visual Acuity is poor at birth
The Newborn
At 2 months
At 6 months
An Infant’s View of the Child’s Face at a Distance of 2 feet:
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Structure and function are bi-directional
 Failure of bi-directionality results in visual dysfunction
 e.g., cataracts restrict seeing – poor function, structural loss
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Five Truths of Cognitive Development
 Dynamic and reciprocal transaction of internal and
external factors.
 Constructed within a social context.
 Stability and plasticity over time.
 Changes in the way information is represented.
 Increasing intentional control over behavior and
cognition.
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Dynamic and reciprocal transaction of internal and
external factors.
Nature (biology) and Nurture (environment):
 Oldest, most fundamental issue in psychology
 Which one drives development?
 Genes or environment
Currently, not an either-or issue
 genetic potential for development established at conception
 genotype is not a “blueprint”
 sets a range of potential outcomes
 phenotypic (observed) outcome depends on interaction with
environment
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Historically: Heredity or Environment
 Nativists: human intellectual abilities are innate
 Development “constrained” by inherited genetic material
 Empiricists: nature provides only a species-general
learning mechanism (brain)
 cognitive development arises from experience
 Context and culture (family, peers, school, media) are key
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Current View
 There is no dichotomy between nature and nurture,
i.e., they can not be separated because the two
continuously interact.
 How do they interact?
 Perhaps genetic constitution influences how one
experiences the environment.
 E.g., A sickly lethargic child seeks less stimulation and gets
less cognitively facilitating attention from adults than does a
more active, healthy child. The result is a slower or less
advanced child.
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What does innate mean?
 There are genetically based constraints on behavior
or development.
1. Representational Constraints: Representations
that are hard-wired into the brain.
 E.g., the nature of objects, mental math.
 We enter the world able to make sense of these
aspects of the environment.
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What does innate mean?
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What does innate mean?
2. Architectural Constraints: Refers to the ways in
which the architecture of the brain is organized at
birth.
 Certain neurons/areas of the brain can only process
certain types of information and pass it along to
other brain areas.
 These constraints allow a high degree of learning to
occur (e.g., language areas).
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What does innate mean?
3. Chronotopic Constraints: limitations on the
developmental timing of events.
 E.g., certain brain areas develop before others,
implying that early developing brain areas would
likely have different processing responsibilities than
later developing areas.
 E.g., some brain areas are receptive to certain types
of experience at specific times
 Language Development
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What does innate mean?
Critical (sensitive) periods:
 time windows in development in which organisms are
optimally sensitive to particular experiences or stimuli
 the same experience before or after critical period less
effective
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Dynamic Systems Approach
 Dynamic system: a set of elements that undergo
changes over time due to interactions among the
elements.
 The child’s mind, body, and physical and social
worlds form an integrated, dynamic system that
guides the mastery of new skills.
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Dynamic Systems Approach
 Development involves continuous and bidirectional
interaction between all levels of organization from
molecular to cultural, and complex cognitive or
behavioral characteristics emerge from these
interactions.
 A change in any part of the system (e.g., brain
growth, changes in physical or social surroundings)
disrupts the organism-environment relationship. The
entire system is changed.
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Dynamic Systems Approach
 Self-organization: The process whereby pattern and
order emerge from interactions of the components of
a complex system.
 The child must actively reorganize her behavior so
that the components of the system work together in a
more complex, effective way.
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Dynamic Systems Approach
 E.g., Stepping reflex: a newborn makes stepping
movements.
 This reflex disappears completely after 2 months of age.
 What causes the disappearance?
 There is a change in one of the components.
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Dynamic Systems Approach
 The change from one state to another is a phase
transition.
 These changes are abrupt and discontinuous, but
predictable.
 attractors
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Cognitive development is constructed within
a social context
 Development always occurs within a social context.
 Vygotsky viewed development as being a
sociocultural process where development is guided
by adults interacting with children, where cultural
context determines how, where, and when these
interactions take place.
 This implies that development will be different across
cultures.
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Cognitive development involves both
stability and plasticity over time
 To what extent do characteristics remain constant
over time? How critical is early experience?
 Stability: the degree to which children maintain their
relative rank order in comparison to their peers over
time.
 Plasticity: the extent to which children can be
shaped by experience.
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Cognitive development involves both
stability and plasticity over time
 For most of the 20th century, individual differences in
intelligence were seen as being stable over time.
 Some researchers believed that early experience
played a key role in the stability of individual
differences.
 Kagan (1976) proposed the tape recorder model in
which our early experience was recorded and could
not be erased.
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Cognitive development involves both
stability and plasticity over time
 Evidence for this was found in
institutionally raised children
reared in nonstimulating
environments (Dennis, 1973).
 Show signs of retardation that
were exacerbated the longer
they were institutionalized.
 These delays were present long
after they left the institution.
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Cognitive development involves both
stability and plasticity over time
 A number of exceptions to stability were found.
 Skeels (1966) removed infants with signs of mental
retardation from orphanages to an institution for the
mentally delayed.
 They received lavish attention from women inmates
and later demonstrated normal intelligence.
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Cognitive development involves both
stability and plasticity over time
 Kagan (1976) explained that in some cases,
development is transformational, with drastic
changes occurring between stages.
 The “tapes” are changed during these
transformations and the earlier codes of the tapes are
lost.
 Plasiticity should be the rule.
Fall, 2005
Increasing Attentional Control Over
Behavior and Cognition
 There is interest in the degree to which children of
different ages guide their problem solving.
 Strategy use.
 Strategies: deliberate, goal-directed mental
operations aimed at solving a problem.
 Used intentionally to solve a problem.
 Even infants will use strategies, but strategies
change with development.
Fall, 2005
Increasing Attentional Control Over
Behavior and Cognition
 Developmental psychologists are interested in
children’s increasing ability to use strategies.
 Goal-directed problem solving is especially evident in
technologically advanced societies.
 Strategy use involves regulating thoughts and
behavior.
 Executive Function: Processes involved in
regulating attention and in determining what to do
with information gathered or retrieved from long-term
memory.
Fall, 2005
Increasing Attentional Control Over
Behavior and Cognition
 Comprised of working memory – the structures and
processes for temporarily storing and manipulating
information, selectively attending to relevant info,
and inhibiting responding, etc.
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Change in Both Domain-General and
Domain-Specific Abilities
 Domain-General Abilities: A child’s thinking is
influenced by a single set of factors, with these
factors affecting different aspects of cognition
equally.
 Domain-Specific Abilities: A child’s ability for one
specific aspect of cognition may reveal nothing about
his/her level of cognitive abilities on other aspects of
thinking.
Fall, 2005
Change in Both Domain-General and
Domain-Specific Abilities
 Fodor proposed the concept of modularity – certain
areas of the brain are dedicated to performing
specific cognitive tasks.
 These modules are independent and may be innate.
 True development is probably a compromise
between these concepts.
 Schneider looked at soccer experts in grades 3, 5,
and 7 (p. 26)
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Change in Both Domain-General and
Domain-Specific Abilities
 They were presented with a soccer narrative text and
were later asked to recall it.
 Soccer experts were better than novices.
 There was no difference between successful learners
and unsuccessful ones.
 The performance of experts may be due to their use
of domain-general mechanisms.