CHAPTER 1
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NATURE VERSUS NURTURE
◦ Nature: idealists, rationalists
 Knowledge is inborn
◦ Nurture: empiricists
 The mind is a blank slate – tabula rasa
◦ Behaviourism
 Behaviour changes are caused by environmental
factors
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STAGES & SEQUENCES
◦ Continuity-discontinuity issue
 Quantitative – continuous in nature
 ie. number of friends increase from zero to many
 Qualitative – discontinuous
 ie. the quality of friendships increases
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INTERNAL & EXTERNAL INFLUENCES ON
DEVELOPMENT
◦ Maturation: genetically programmed sequential
patterns of change
 Universal – appearing in all children across cultures
 Sequential – a pattern of unfolding skill or
characteristics
 Impervious – relatively to environmental influence
◦ However, maturational theorists agree that
experience plays a role
◦ The Timing of Experience:
 Critical period – any time period during development
when an organism is especially responsive to and
learns from a specific type of stimulation
 The same stimulation at other points has little or no effect
 ie. a duck at around 15 hours after hatching
 Sensitive period – a period during which particular
experiences can best contribute to proper
development.
 Similar to the critical period, but deprivation effects during
this period are not as severe
◦ Inborn Biases and Constraints
 Pre-existing conceptions and contraints on
understanding of behaviour
 ie. very young babies knowing that unsupported objects
will move downwards; moving objects will continue to
move in the same direction
◦ Behaviour Genetics
 Heredity affects a broad range of behaviour
 Seen through studies of identical and fraternal twins
◦ Gene-Environment Interaction
 Child inherits genes, parents create environment
 Inherited qualities affect behaviour, affecting reactions
◦ Internal Models of Experience
 Creating by the child -- A set of core ideas or assumptions
about the world, about himself and about relationships with
others through which all subsequent experience is filtered
◦ Aslin’s Model of Environmental Influence
 Maturation – no environmental effect
 Maintenance – some environmental input is necessary to
sustain a skill or behaviour that has already developed
maturationally
 Facilitation – a skill or behaviour develops earlier because of
experience
 Attunement – when a particular experience leads to
permanent gain or enduring high level of performance
 Induction – a pure environmental effect – a behaviour does
not develop at all in the absence of experience
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THE ECOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE
◦ The importance of context in which child develops
◦ Emphasizes that each child grows up in a complex
social environment
 Culture – system of meanings, customs, values,
attitudes, beliefs, morals
 Individualism vs. collectivism
 Individualism: individual persons whose achievement and
responsibility is individual (Europe, North America)
 Collectivism: emphasis is on the collective (the whole),
group solidarity, shared duties and obligations, group
decision making (Asia, Africa, South America)

VULNERABILITY AND RESILIENCE
◦ Long-term study of children
 Only 2/3 of children in poverty turned out to have
serious problems
 The other third – resilient – turned out competent,
confident, caring
 Similar environment  different outcomes
◦ Vulnerabilities – every child born with them
 Temperment, abnormality, allergy, genetic tendency
◦ Protective factors – every child born with them also
 Intelligence, coordination, smile,
◦ Vulnerabilities and Protetive Factors interact with
the environment  produce results
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PSYCHOANALYTIC
◦ Behaviour is governed by conscious and unconsious
processes
◦ Freud: argued that libido (sexual drive) is the
motive force behind virtually all human behaviour
 Personality has a structure, which develops over time
 The id (source of libido), ego (the “executive”, more
conscious element), superego (centre of conscience
and morality)
 Infant/todder is al Id, ego develops 2-5, superego
begins to develop just before school age
 Psychosexual stages: oral, anal, phallic, genital
◦ Erikson: proposed psychosocial stages
 Influenced more by common cultural demands for
children of a particular age
 ie. toilet training at age 2, school skills by 6 or 7
 Each child moves fixed sequence of tasks
◦ Both theorists believe though that meeting the
stages depend on interactions with people and
objects in the world.
◦ When a stage is not completed, it carries forward
affecting ability to handle future tasks or stages
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COGNITIVE-DEVELOPMENTAL AND
INFORMATION-PROCESSING THEORIES
◦ Emphasize primarily cognitive development rather
than personality
◦ Piaget: the central figure
 All children seem to go through same discoveries,
same mistakes, same solutions
 The environment does not shape the child – the child
actively seeks to understand his environment
 Sub-processes: assimilation, accommodation,
equilibration
◦ Vygotsky
 Complex forms of thinkking have their origins in social
interactions
 Learning is guided by an adult who models or structures the
learning experience – scaffolding
 New learning is best achieved in the zone of proximal
development – too hard to do alone but can manage with
guidance
◦ Information-Processing Theory
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Use the computer as a model of human thinking
“encoding” – organizing info to be stored in memory
“storage” – “retrieval” –
Sensory memory – short-term memory – long-term memory
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LEARNING THEORIES
◦ Emphasis on the way environment shapes the child
◦ Classical Conditioning
 ie. Pavlov – acquisition of new signals for existing
responses (salivating dog)
 Learning occurs when new stimulus is introduced
 Other stimuli that are present around the same time as
the unconditional stimulus will trigger the same
responses
 Become “conditional stimuli”
◦ Operant Conditioning
 The process by which the frequency of a behaviour
increases or decreases because of the consequences
the behaviour produces
 Reinforced vs. Punished
 Positive reinforcement:
 An added stimulus or consequence increases behaviour
 Negative reinforcement:
 Increases a behaviour because the reinforcement involves
the termination or removal of unpleasant stimulus
 Punishment:
 Weakens behaviour (ie. grounding, taking away privileges)
◦ Bandura’s Social Cognitive Theory
 Learning may also occur merely as a result of watching
someone else perform an action (observational,
modeling
 Intrinsic (internal) reinforcements:
 ie. pride, a child feels when figuring out how to raw a star
 Satisfaction you experience after exercise
 Through modeling, a child acquires attitudes, values,
ways of solving problems, self-evaluation standards
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COMPARING THEORIES
◦ Assumptions about Development
 Is the Theory active or passive?
 Is Nature or Nurture more important?
 Is development Stable or Changing?
◦ Usefulness
 Can the theory generate predictions that can be
measured or tested?
 Heuristic value: does the theory stimulate thinking and
research?
 What kind of practical value does a theory have?
◦ Eclecticism: the use of multiple theoretical
perspectives to explain and study human
development