Developmental Psychology Essay
Developmental Psychology
Developmental Psychology
• The study of physical, cognitive, and social changes throughout the life cycle.
Three Major Problems • Nature/Nurture: How do genetic inheritance (our nature) and experience (the nurture we receive) influence our development? • Continuity/Stages: Is development a gradual, continuous process like riding an escalator or does it proceed through a sequence of separate stages, like climbing rungs on a ladder? • Stability/Change: Do our early personality traits persist through life or do we become a different person as we age?
Conception
• Sperm, released during intercourse, approach the egg cell, which is 85000 times its own size and only a handful make …show more content…
Experience has little influence over this sequence, but maturation enables these events.
Maturation and Infant Memory
• “Infant amnesia” in the memories of a toddler’s first 3.5 years of life is due to the fact that memory organization changes after age three or four. The brain cortex matures and the toddler begins to gain a sense of self and long-term storage increases. In addition, young children’s preverbal memories are not easily transformed into language.
Cognitive Development
• Piaget proposed that children’s reasoning develops in a series of stages, and that children actively construct and modify their understanding of the world as they interact with it. They form schemas, which are concepts or frameworks for organizing experiences. They then assimilate or interpret information by means of these schemas. But if the information does not conform to the schema, they accommodate or adjust the schema to incorporate the new information.
Piaget’s Theory and Current Thinking Cognition refers to all mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating.
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Sensorimotor …show more content…
Piaget tested this theory by showing young infants a very appealing toy and then flopping his beret over it to see if the infant would search for it. Babies under six months did not. • They lack object permanence, or the awareness that objects continue to exist when not perceived. • By eight months, infants begin exhibiting memory for things no longer seen. • Recently, scientists have taken Piaget’s theory and tested the continuity of the development of object permanence. Infants look longer at an unexpected scene of a car passing through something it’s not supposed to, or a ball stopping in midair. (Baillargeon, 1995, 1998, 2004; Wellman & Gelman, 1992) Babies seem to have more of a grasp of simple laws of physics than Piaget realized. • Babies also have a mind for numbers. Karen Wynn (1992, 2000) showed five-month-olds one or two objects. Then she hid the objects behind a screen, and then visibly removed or added one. When she lifted the screen, the infants sometimes did a double take, staring longer when shown the wrong number of
Developmental Psychology
• The study of physical, cognitive, and social changes throughout the life cycle.
Three Major Problems • Nature/Nurture: How do genetic inheritance (our nature) and experience (the nurture we receive) influence our development? • Continuity/Stages: Is development a gradual, continuous process like riding an escalator or does it proceed through a sequence of separate stages, like climbing rungs on a ladder? • Stability/Change: Do our early personality traits persist through life or do we become a different person as we age?
Conception
• Sperm, released during intercourse, approach the egg cell, which is 85000 times its own size and only a handful make …show more content…
Experience has little influence over this sequence, but maturation enables these events.
Maturation and Infant Memory
• “Infant amnesia” in the memories of a toddler’s first 3.5 years of life is due to the fact that memory organization changes after age three or four. The brain cortex matures and the toddler begins to gain a sense of self and long-term storage increases. In addition, young children’s preverbal memories are not easily transformed into language.
Cognitive Development
• Piaget proposed that children’s reasoning develops in a series of stages, and that children actively construct and modify their understanding of the world as they interact with it. They form schemas, which are concepts or frameworks for organizing experiences. They then assimilate or interpret information by means of these schemas. But if the information does not conform to the schema, they accommodate or adjust the schema to incorporate the new information.
Piaget’s Theory and Current Thinking Cognition refers to all mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating.
[pic]
Sensorimotor …show more content…
Piaget tested this theory by showing young infants a very appealing toy and then flopping his beret over it to see if the infant would search for it. Babies under six months did not. • They lack object permanence, or the awareness that objects continue to exist when not perceived. • By eight months, infants begin exhibiting memory for things no longer seen. • Recently, scientists have taken Piaget’s theory and tested the continuity of the development of object permanence. Infants look longer at an unexpected scene of a car passing through something it’s not supposed to, or a ball stopping in midair. (Baillargeon, 1995, 1998, 2004; Wellman & Gelman, 1992) Babies seem to have more of a grasp of simple laws of physics than Piaget realized. • Babies also have a mind for numbers. Karen Wynn (1992, 2000) showed five-month-olds one or two objects. Then she hid the objects behind a screen, and then visibly removed or added one. When she lifted the screen, the infants sometimes did a double take, staring longer when shown the wrong number of