Developmental Psychology:
Development Through the Life Span
Topics:
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Definition of development
Learning Vs genetics
Factors influencing development
Questions posed by developmental psychologists
Conception and prenatal development
Motor development in humans
Stage theory
Critical periods
Theories of development:
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Psychoanalytic
Behavioural
Humanistic
Cognitive Developmental
Piaget:
 Schemas
 Assimilation and accommodation
 Stages:
Sensori motor
Preoperational
Concrete operational
Formal operational
 Temperament
 Attachment
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 Adolescent Development
 Aging
Development – definition
 The study of changes in an organism’s thinking and behaviour
which occur over a life span (pre-natal, childhood, adolescence,
adulthood, aging)
 We are always in a state of becoming – developmental
psychology is concerned with when and how we change
 Developmental psychologists study:
 Physical development (growth, strength, motor
coordination)
 Cognitive development (changes in ways that
information is processed)
 Sensory/perceptual development
 Personality development
 Social development
 Of all mammals, humans have:
 The longest time to full physical development
 The longest period of learning
 The longest time to self sufficiency
 Primary factors influencing development:
 Biological maturation
 Experience
 Internal drives (motivation)
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Developmental psychologists are concerned with 3 main
questions:
1)
How biological determinants and environment interact?
Pre-natal: uterine environment is critical for child
development – German measles (1st 3 months), smoking,
drugs, alcohol (FAS and retardation)
Post-natal: environment Vs genetics
2)
Is development gradual or does it take place in discrete
stages?
3)
Stability Vs change: Are dispositions such as personality
stable over one’s life or are they subject to change?
Conception and pre-natal development:
 In the womb, the child learns such stimuli as the mother’s voice,
the sound of her respiration and heart beat
 When born, children have reflexes for rooting, sucking, aversion
to pain
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Motor development:
 Motor development occurs in the same sequence with all
children over the entire world but at different rates (considerable
variation in terms of rate of development)
 Sequence of motor development:
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Rolling over
Sitting
Standing holding onto something
Crawling
Walking
 Much of motor development is tied to the process of maturation
 Maturation includes physical development (strength &
coordination) as well as the expression of biological
determinants during development such as: sex, skin colour, eye
colour, hair colour
 Note: extra stimulation can accelerate motor development (e.g.,
holding a child upright can help induce stepping movements)
 Also, there is some evidence that speech development can be
accelerated (studies on pre-natal stimulation)
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Stages of development:
 What do we mean by the term “stages of development”?
 Behaviours at any stage are organized around a
common theme or set of characteristics
 Behaviours that develop at one stage are different
from those that develop at other stages
 All children go through the same stages in the same
order but the duration of each stage can vary
Critical periods:
 The concept of critical period is closely related to the concept of
stages in development
 Definition: Crucial time periods during development when an
organism must be exposed to specific events or types of stimuli
in order for development to occur normally
 The brain starts off with an abundance of neurons and becomes
sculpted by early experiences (plastic)
 Neural connections develop in response to specific types of
experience
 We know a fair bit about critical periods in visual development
 Initially, children are near sighted and show preferences for
curved lines, high contrast and interesting shapes
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 Binocular vision develops during early childhood as a result of
receiving the same visual information through 2 eyes
 If eyes are patched during the critical period for human visual
development (5-7 yr.) no visual cortical cells will develop with
sensitivity to binocular cues
 Visual and motor experience (e.g., locomotion) must occur
together during early childhood or problems will develop with
visual/motor coordination
 Exposure to varied visual stimuli (e.g., edges of different
orientation) must occur in early childhood or the ability to see
full range of visual stimuli is restricted (David Hubel &
Thurston Wiesel)
 Prior to the age of about 5 yr., the child’s brain changes a lot as
it is sculpted by experience – this is why we are unable to recall
early childhood memories
 Note: The term critical period usually refers to aspects of
physiological development (e.g., perceptual motor work of
Stewart Anstis in colour vision)
 In cognitive development, psychologists usually refer to
sensitive stages in a child’s development
 Language development shows sensitive stages (6-7 yr.). If a
child is not exposed to language by or during this time,
language ability may not develop properly
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 Difficulty experienced by researchers when trying to measure
infant abilities before language has developed (e.g., habituation
studies in vision)
Theories of Development:
Psychoanalytic (Freud):
 We develop as a result of conflicting biological and social
forces
 How these conflicting forces are reconciled at different stages of
development affects how the child psyche unfolds (dynamic
aspect of development)
Freud’s stages of development
Age
0 – 1.5 yr.
Stage
Oral
1.5 – 3 yr.
Anal
3 – 6 yr.
Phallic
6 – 12 yr.
Latent
12 – 18
Genital
Characteristic
Fixation on oral
sensation
Learning to control
body functions
Learning sex role
identification
Repression of
sexuality
Heterosexual interest
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Behavioural Theory:
 Don’t believe in stages
 Development is a function of learning and is directly related to
environmental influences and the sequences with which they
occur
 We learn throughout our entire life time
 Learning is explained by:
 Classical conditioning (respondent learning – controlled
by what comes before)
 Operant conditioning (controlled by what comes after)
 Social learning (learning by observation and imitation)
Humanistic Theory:
 Focus on each person being unique and having free will to make
choices throughout life
 Concepts used include: self, growth, motivation, self
actualization, holistic
Cognitive developmental theory:
 Child not viewed as passive, as with psychoanalytic and
behavioural views
 Also called Piagetian theory after the famous Swiss
psychologist
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 Development is related to states of disequilibrium between an
individual’s current knowledge and the actual state of the world
 Stages of development take place in a fixed order
 Children are not little adults but are in fact very different from
adults in their ways of seeing and thinking about the world
Information Processing:
 Development related to experience, maturation and the
development of cognitive abilities or ways of thinking
 There are no stages, rather there are sensitive times for different
aspects of cognitive development
 Leads to a gradual development or an unfolding of the child
Jean Piaget (1886-1980)
Cognitive Developmental Theory)
 Perhaps the most influential developmental psychologist
 The stages of child development he identified were based
largely on observational studies of his own children (case study)
 The child is viewed as an active participant in their own
development
 Children develop schemas (theories of frameworks) of how the
physical and social worlds work
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 Two processes are involved in the creation, maintenance and
changing of schemas
 Assimilation: Fitting experiences to existing
frameworks or schemas
 Accommodation: Having to change schemas to fit
experiences
(e.g., egocentrism & animism)
Stages of Piaget’s Cognitive Development Theory:
1)
2)
3)
4)
Sensori motor:
Preoperational:
Concrete operational:
Formal operational:
birth to 2 yr.
2 – 7 yr.
7 – 11 yr.
11 to adulthood
Sensori Motor Stage (birth to 2 yr.)
 Development of reflexes, coordination and sensory systems
 Child becomes focused on their actions and the consequence of
their actions
 Child begins to develop a sense that they are separate from the
world
 Develop understanding of “object permanence” by about 9
months. This requires ability to create mental representations of
the missing object – the beginnings of conceptual thinking
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 Language starts to develop and the child starts to use words as
symbols for things
 Beginnings of symbolic play such as riding a broom, pretending
it’s a horse
Pre-operational Stage (2 – 7 yr.):
 The child is talking but does not understand the logical aspects
of language (grammar)
 The concept of conversion is not yet understood
 Around 5 yr., the child starts to develop a sense of obligation to
follow rules that things have to be done a certain way
 Sense of moral responsibility in the world starts to develop
 Animism is central to this stage
Concrete Operational Stage (7-11 yr.):
 Child starts to think and to use language logically
 Understanding develops for concepts of conservation (numbers,
mass, volume)
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Formal Operational (11 yr. to adulthood):
 Children start to think about abstract concepts
 Concern for the hypothetical, the future and ideological
problems
Other issues related to development:
 Babies have different temperaments: happy, easy going, cranky,
fidgety, hyper
 These temperaments are the beginnings of personality
 Some aspects of temperament such as shyness (introversion –
extroversion) can be predicted from the pre-natal environment
 Birth order influences the development of personality – first
born, last born
Attachment:
 Physical interaction between the mother and baby is very
important
 In 1969, Harlow discovered that baby monkeys prefer soft cloth
surrogate mother without milk to a wire mother with milk
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