Explains the developmental psychology domain with slides

1. New Semester, New Seat
Choose a new seat
– MUST sit next to new people (on both sides)
– Sit somewhere that will enhance your learning

2. Semester 2- Expectations
• Start strong and be consistent
• Essential Skills- Content & Habits of Mind
• 10 weeks of content
– Developmental Psychology
– Personality & Testing
– Abnormal Psychology
• Senior projects

3. Developmental Psychology
(psychology of the lifespan)

4. Think about the following Q’s and write your
answers down.
Q# 1 What is the ideal age? Why? Explain.
Q# 2 What is the worst age? Why? Explain.
Q# 3 How old do you feel? Why? Explain.

5. Three Fundamental Issues:
#1 - Nature vs. Nurture
How do genetic inheritance (our nature) and
experience (the nurture we receive) influence
our behavior?
Not either/or.
Nature and Nurture
work together.

6. Three Fundamental Issues:
#2 - Is Development Continuous?
Is developmental a gradual, continuous process
or a sequence of separate stages?
 Two views of human development:
 stage theories: there are distinct phases to
intellectual and personality development
 continuity: development is continuous

7. Three Fundamental Issues:
#3 - Stability or Change?
Do our early personality traits persist through
life, or do we become different people as we
age? Can we change?

8. Developmental Psych
• Physical
• Cognitive
• Psychosocial

9. Infancy & Childhood

10. 10
Developing Brain
The developing brain overproduces neurons more or less at
random. Peaking around 2 months before birth, these neurons
are pruned to keep only the ones that are making connections
appropriate to their part of the brain.
After birth, existing
neurons branch out to
make neural networks.
Pruning will happen
again in adolescence.

11. Motor Development: Maturation
First, infants begin to roll over. Next,
they sit unsupported, crawl, and
finally walk. Experience has little
effect on this sequence.

13. 13
Cognitive Development
Jean Piaget was one of the leading
developmental psychologists of his
generation.
Piaget revolutionized our understanding of
children’s cognitive development—all the
mental activities associated with thinking,
knowing, remembering, and
communicating.

14. 14
Until Piaget, most people assumed
children “simply knew less, not
differently, than adults.”
Thanks in part to Piaget, we now
understand that “children reason
in wildly illogical ways about
problems whose solutions are
self-evident to adults.”

15. • Piaget further believed that a child’s mind develops through a
series of stages, in an upward march from the newborn’s simple
reflexes to the adult’s abstract reasoning power.
• Piaget believed that the driving force behind this intellectual
progression is our unceasing struggle to make sense of our
experiences.
• “Children are active thinkers, constantly trying to construct more
advanced understandings of the world.”

16. Schemas
For this reason, the maturing brain builds concepts, which
Piaget called schemas—mental molds into which we pour
our experiences

17. 17
Assimilation and Accommodation
To explain how we use and adjust our
schemas, Piaget proposed two
processes:
1. First we assimilate new experiences—
we interpret them in terms of our
current understandings (schemas).
Jean Piaget with a subject
Bill
Anderson/
Photo
Researchers,
Inc.

18. 18
Assimilation and Accommodation
2. But we also adjust, or accommodate, our schemas to fit the particulars of new
experiences.
• As children interact with the world, they construct and modify their schemas.
Bill
Anderson/
Photo
Researchers,
Inc.

19. Schemas involve 2 processes
Assimilation is the
interpretation of new
experiences in terms of
present schemas
Accommodation is the
modification of present
schemas to fit with new
experiences

20. Practice!
• Reese is 3 and knows how to use a spoon. She’s given a fork
for the first time, and immediately figures out how to use it.
• Tom is 4 and believes that all cars have 4 doors. When his aunt
shows up in a 2 door sports car, he realizes that car door
numbers vary. He changes his idea about car door numbers.
• Mandy calls all men “Dada”. Eventually she learns that only
one man is her dada. She changes her schema to reflect this.
• Think of a personal example of
– Assimilation
– Accommodation

21. 21
Piaget’s Theory and Current Thinking
Piaget believed that children construct their understanding of
the world while interacting with it. Their minds experience
spurts of change, followed by greater stability as they move
from one cognitive plateau to the next, each with distinctive
characteristics that permit specific kinds of thinking.

22. Sensorimotor Stage
Young infants lack object permanence—the awareness
that objects continue to exist when not perceived.
Today’s researchers see development as more continuous
than Piaget did, and they now view object permanence
as unfolding gradually.

23. 23

24. Social Development:
Stranger Anxiety
24
Stranger anxiety is the fear of
strangers that develops at
around 8 months. This is the
age at which infants form
schemas for familiar faces and
cannot assimilate a new face.

25. Social Development:
Separation Anxiety
25
Separation anxiety peaks at 13 months of age, regardless
of whether the children are home or sent to day care.

26. 26
Preoperational Stage
During the preschool period and up to about age 6 or 7, children are
in a preoperational stage—too young to perform mental operations.
Ontario
Science
Center

27. The preoperational child lacks the concept of conservation—the
principle that quantity remains the same despite changes in shape.

28. Tests of Conservation

29. 29
Egocentrism
Piaget also contended that preschool children are egocentric—they have
difficulty perceiving things from another’s point of view.
A 2-year-old whose mother asks her to show her a picture, will hold up the
picture facing her own eyes.
When these youngsters block your view of the television, they assume that you
see what they see.

30. 30
Egocentrism
The egocentric
preschoolers are not
intentionally “selfish”
or “inconsiderate”,
they simply have not
yet developed the
ability to take
another’s viewpoint.

31. 31
Theory of Mind
Preschoolers, although still
egocentric, develop this ability to
infer others’ mental states when
they begin forming a theory of
mind.
The preschooler’s growing ability to
tease, empathize, and persuade
stems from this growing ability to
take another’s perspective.

32. 32
Theory of Mind
• Researchers showed Toronto children a
Band-Aids box and asked them what was
inside.
• Expecting Band-Aids, the children were
surprised to discover that the box actually
contained pencils.
• Asked what a child who had never seen
the box would think was inside, 3-year-
olds typically answered “pencils.”
• By age 4 to 5, the children’s theory of
mind had leapt forward, and they
anticipated their friends’ false belief that
the box would hold Band-Aids.

33. Social Development:
Self-Concept
33
Self-concept, a sense of
one’s identity and personal
worth, emerges gradually
around 6 months. Around
15-18 months, children can
recognize themselves in the
mirror. By 8-10 years, their
self-image is stable.

34. 34
Concrete Operational Stage
At about 6 or 7 years of
age, children enter the
concrete operational
stage—given concrete
materials, they begin to
grasp conservation (that
change in shape does not
mean change in quantity).

35. 35
Concrete Operational Stage
This is also the time that children begin to enjoy jokes because
they understand the punch lines.
Q: What does a nosey pepper do?
A: Gets jalapeno business!
During this stage, children fully gain the mental
ability to comprehend mathematical
transformations and conservation.

36. 36
Formal Operational Stage
By age 12, our reasoning expands from the purely concrete
(involving actual experience) to encompass abstract
thinking (involving imagined realities and symbols).

37. 37
Formal Operational Stage
Many children become capable of solving
hypothetical propositions and deducing
consequences: If this, then that.
If John is in school, Mary is in school.
John is in school. What can you say
about Mary?
This systematic reasoning is what Piaget
called formal operational thinking.

38. 38
Reflecting on Piaget’s Theory
Piaget identified significant cognitive milestones and stimulated
worldwide interest in how the mind develops.
His stage theory has been very influential throughout the world
and many have supported his idea that human cognition
unfolds basically in the sequence that he proposed.

39. Design a game or a toy for a kid at each stage
Work with the kids’ limitations and imagination of the
cognitive stage they’re in!
• Sensorimotor
• Preoperational
• Concrete operations
• Formal operations

40. Quiz next Tues/Wed

41. Activity
1. I have 2 identical glasses. 1 glass with 100 red
m&m’s and 1 glass with 100 white m&ms’s
2. I will scoop out 20 white m&m’s and put them
in the red glass.
3. Shake glass, mixing the m&m’s
4. I will scoop 20 m&m’s at random from the
mixed glass and put them into the white glass.

42. Q: Which glass has more of the other color?
___ The mostly red glass has more white.
___ The mostly white glass has more red.
___ Both glasses have the same amount of the
other color.
___ You can not know because of chance.

43. Answer:
Both glasses have the SAME amount of
the other color.

44. Explanation:
• The quantity in each glass is restricted. We
started with 100 red and 100 white.
• I did not add any in and I did not take any
away. So for every white in the mostly red
glass, I must have moved a red into the mostly
white glass.
• The idea of complimentary