Child Development Lecture Notes
Fall 2021
Week One
What is developmental psychology?
- The shift in infant preferences for vowel duration and pitch contour
between 6 and 10 months of age
- Pubertal development: relationship between hormonal and physical
development = Biopsych?
- Atypical brain responses to sounds in children with specific
language and reading impairments = Neuroscience? Medicine?
- Direct and extended friendships on minority and majority
children’s interethnic attitudes = Sociology? Social Psych?
Cultural Psych?
The branch of psych devoted to the study of systematic changes in behaviour and
abilities over the lifespan.
- Changes that have importance in the development of a person!
Other definitions:
- A field of psych that examines the impact of maturational
processes and experience on behaviour
- The scientific study of age-related behavioural changes which
occur as a child grows up
- The branch of psychology that us concerned with the study of
progressive behavioural changes in an individual from birth until
death
*Developmental Psychology is NOT child psychology
Focus on Children
- Rapid development, particularly the prenatal, infancy, toddler, and
preschool periods.
*The most rapid development in the human lifespan occurs during these times.
Origins:
1. Experiential (learning).
How you learn from the environment
2. Maturational
Biological
*And the interactions between them
Goals
- Explain Change
o Normative (typical) development
o Ideographic (individual) development
- Seeking optimal development (what is the best route to get to this
skill? Skills that are central to development, what is the best way to
have that developed): can become problematic.
Origins of Dev. Psych
- Eurocentric: Our textbook’s focus is western history (old white
guys)
- One big difference between western and eastern is individual
(Platonic) versus communal (Confucian)
o Platonic philosophy = Plato
o Communal philosophy = Confucians
- Similarly, Indigenous psychology takes the approach of
understanding the individual as part of a larger system (family,
culture, nature)
 If you’re trying to explain the psychological behaviour of a
culture, it’s a different branch of psychology
- Example:
o WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich &
Democratic societies) psych emphasizes happiness and selfesteem in emotional development, other cultures focus on
concern for well-being of others, self-control.
o Highlights that most psychology comes from western,
educated, industrialized, rich, democratic countries.
1. Ancient to Medieval
- Greeks/Romans represented children in art and had distinct stages
(7 years cycles)
- Early Greek philosopher were fascinated by change and the mindbody problem (how does your mind control your body =
psychology)
o Plato: innate knowledge
o Aristotle: knowledge through experience
(Nature vs nurture!)
- Medieval Europe: preformationism, denoted lack of importance for
childhood.
2. Reformation
- Enlighten: emergence of importance of childhood. (Maybe not
because of child labor)
o Puritan doctrine original sin, thus needs to shape children
via limiting natural impulses (how do I control a child and
make them what I want to be?)
- Locke vs. Rousseau = Nature vs Nurture again
o Tabula Rasa (blank slate) vs. Innate Purity
o Rousseau took a maturational point of view
o Environmental vs Nativism
Origins of Dev Psych as a Science
Darwin: Evolution is a development on a macro scale
- Recapitulation: ontogeny (lifespan development) mirrors
phylogeny
o Fetal tail
- Baby biographies
G. Stanley Hall: Father of Child Psychology via his focus on children in research
Week 2 – Research Methods
Why is this important?
- Tools of the trade
- Repeated throughout the course
- Key idea of research = objectivity (everyone can agree on it)
o Find objectivity by?
 Observable and measurable and quantifiable
behaviours
 Replication (repeated study, same result) important
that the same thing is happening over and over
because it gives you confidence that it is true
 Reliable and valid
Starting out
- Start with a question & a prediction (hypothesis)
- Research question drives analyses:
o What is the relationship between X&Y?
o Is group 1 different from group 2?
o Variables…because they vary
Self-Reports
- Interviews
o Face to face or online
o *Structured vs unstructured (clinical method a mix)
 Structured = a set list of questions that is asked to
every participant, very straight forward simple
questions.
 Unstructured = on the fly questions to gain more
information
 Clinical Method = start with the same question and
then follow up with unstructured (unstructured
essentially)
o Issues include: Age restrictions, social desirability (changing
your answers to look more socially desirable during the
interview, racial or ethnic bias, children may lie,etc),
experimenter bias (unstructured, experimenter leads the
participant to where they want the participant to go, asking
leading questions, subconsciously pushing for an answer)
- Surveys and Questionnaires
o Mostly used with parents
*All above notes still in play here
Descriptive Research
- Observations: Naturalistic & Structural
o Naturalistic Observation: Go out into the world and just
watch
o Structural Observation: Researcher sets up the scenario and
then watches, but does not manipulate the scenario
 Pros: Natural behaviour, structural is common
 Cons: naturalistic - has no control, observer influence
(if you know your being observed, you will change
your behaviour), confluence of variables
 Structural - atypical? Observer again
- Case Studies: mostly use in atypical cases
 Pros: very detailed, sometimes it’s the ONLY person
with that disorder/injury/etc. Can inspire experiments!
 Cons: not generalizable (you’ve studied on person,
and this cannot be replicated to another person
because of variables), VERY susceptible to bias (is
the researcher’s presence, questions, relationship
creating a bias?).
- Ethnography: Case study of cultural practices (often is studying
families in psych)
Psychophysiological Methods
- fMRI: Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging
o Magnetic imaging based on hemodynamics
o Great spatial resolution
o Non-invasive*
- Criticisms of fMRI
o Would never use with infants because you cannot move,
slightly traumatic for some children, very loud
o Delayed Response, the activity happens which burns the
oxygen off and creates a delayed response, if misjudged can
mislocate where the activity happens
o Does “where” tell us everything?
- NIRS: Near Infrared Spectroscopy
o A headband with diodes that projects infrared light, how the
light refracts back shows blood oxygenation in the brain
o Measures brain activity using infrared light sensors
o More popular with children because their skulls are thinner
than adults
o NIRS can only pick up the cerebral cortex
- ERP: Event Related Potentials (evoked response potential)
o Measures the electrical activity of the brain
o Ties the electrical activity to an event (stimulus is presented
and time locked to the electrical activity in the brain)
o Hat with electrodes (picking up, not producing) connected to
scalp with gel
o MMN Response
 Mismatch (what the stimuli are) Negativity (negative
wave)
 Example: “ba ba ba DA ba” linguistic sound detection
in children.
o Great temporal resolution – great timing, electric activity
happens almost instantaneously
o Hard, if not impossible to localize where the activity comes
from
o Hard to use with kids (any other electrical activity in the
body will wipe out the brain signal- all muscles create
electricity), but doable! (Create simple stimulus 100’s of
times and hope for the best)
 Attrition (loss of data or participants)
- Eye Tracking
o Present visual stimuli to patient, automatically detects where
they are looking.
o Uses infrared to track where the child is looking at on a
screen
o Measures information processing speed,
o Babies who look for shorter durations tend to have higher
IQ’s.
o Video*
o Dot on forehead calibrates things such as eye colour and
whatnot
o Babies tend to look more to the right than the left.
 Make sure the stimuli are on both sides of the screen
- HR (heart rate)
o Much less commonly used
o Decreases HR = Interest/focus
o Using to examine infant’s attention to sound changes (same
ideas as the ‘ba ba ba DA ba ba’ in ERP)
o Has to be discrete trials, longer response otherwise you cant
measure heart rate response.
Correlation Research
- Correlation
o Are changes in one variable related to changes in another?
 Example: # of cigarettes smoked prenatally related to
SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome)?
o Correlation does not equal causation (not manipulating
either variable, looking at two things that are naturally
occurring & you don’t know if a 3rd variable is causing it)
- Sample Correlation
o Is a score on a speech perception test related to vocabulary
size?
 Y axis: the more they’re detecting the difference
 X Axis: Their total combined vocabulary
- Experimental Design
o Manipulate IV to see effect on DV (classic experimental
design)
 Often time groups: more Ss (Subjects), but no
crossover
 ABAB (Introduce something and then take it away):
Less Ss, but no crossover
o Random assignment (when making groups) controls for
confounding variables (is what occurs when there is no
random selection for groups).
o Natural or quasi experiment (studying something that
happened to a group of people)
 Ice storm children
 COVID
- Developmental Designs
o Longitudinal: Study same Ss repeatedly
o Cross-sectional: Take Ss at different ages in discrete groups
o Longitudinal-sequential: take Ss at different ages and track
over a certain time period
o Microgenetic: Study one behaviour being acquired in a very
short time period (daily or weekly tracking of behaviour)
- Pros and Cons
Effects of Experience on Fetal Voice Recognition
o N = 60 term fetuses
o 2 conditions
 Mothers Voice
 Strangers Voice
o Voice stimuli through loudspeaker approximately 10cm
above the maternal abdomen (95dB)
o 3 two-min periods: no stimulus, voice, no stimulus
o Fetal heart rate increased for mother’s voice and decreased
with stranger’s voice; both responses were sustained for 4
minutes.
Bilingual Infants’ Ability to Use Sound Detail in New Words
o Taught infants two new words:
 Bih
 Dih
o Test the words by mislabeling something, infant should look
longer at what is wrong
o Measured looking time to Same and Switch
o Longer switch indicates success
o Cross-sectional design
Ethics: Nuremburg Code
- International Guidelines put forth in the wake of WW2
1. Voluntary consent is essential. Legal capacity to give consent;
sufficient knowledge/comprehension of study
2. Good of society, not random and unnecessary in nature
3. Anticipated results will justify the experiment
4. Avoid all unnecessary physical and mental suffering and injury
5. No experiments where a priori reason to believe that death or
disabling injury will occur (except experimenters)
6. No excessive risk
7. Protect the experimental subject
8. Conducted only by qualified persons
9. Subject at liberty to bring the experiment to an end.
10. The experimenter must be prepared to terminate the
experiment
Ethics: SRCD (Society for Research in Child Development)
- Assent (The child giving you permission, must give child every
opportunity to give consent)
- Parental and additional consent
- Anonymity & Confidentiality
- Reporting results and implications:
o Because the investigators word may carry unintended weight
with parents and children
- Minimal risk
- Equity:
o Consideration of differences, reduce developmental
inequities, equitable recruitment, fair compensation