PSYC 112 PSYCHOLOGY FOR EVERYDAY LIVING

1. PSYC 112PSYCHOLOGY FOR EVERYDAY LIVING Lecturer: Dr. Paul NarhDoku, Dept of Psychology, UG Contact Information: pndoku@ug.edu.gh SESSION SEVEN – DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY PART I

2. Session Overview • This session introduces learners to the principles of learning and behavior by surveying relevant theoretical and empirical approaches within learning psychology. The following topics will be reviewed: Meaning and scope of learning, classical conditioning and its practical applications, operant conditioning and its applications, observational learning and its applications, cognitive learning and its applications, transfer of learning and the factors that affect transfer of learning. Understanding these learning theories and principles is an integral part of psychology and other domains of human behavior, such as marketing, sports, health, education and relationships

3. Session Outline The key topics to be covered in the session are as follows: • Topic One – Developmental Psychology and fundamental Issues • Topic Two – Research Designs used in human development studies • Topic Three – Prenatal Development and Teratogens • Topic Four – Cognitive Development • Topic Five – Two Types of intelligence

4. Reading List • Refer to students to relevant text/chapter or reading materials you will make available on Sakai

5. Topic 1 - Developmental Psychology and fundamental Issues

6. What is Developmental Psychology? • Study of changes in people from conception until death Human • a branch of psychology that studies physical, cognitive and social change throughout the life span Development • a branch of psychology that studies physical, cognitive and social changes throughout the life span

7. Fundamental Issues: Nature vs. Nurture • What is role of heredity vs. environment in determining psychological makeup? • Is IQ inherited or determined early environment? • Is there a ‘criminal’ gene? • Is sexual orientation a choice or genetically determined? • These are some of our greatest societal debates • Mistake to pose as “either/or” questions

8. Nature versus Nurture • Nature - the influence of our inherited characteristics on our personality, physical growth, intellectual growth, and social interactions. • Nurture - the influence of the environment on personality, physical growth, intellectual growth, and social interactions. • Behavioral genetics – focuses on nature vs. nurture.

9. Nature Versus Nurture Most developmental psychologists agree that development is a product of an interaction between nature and nurture.

10. Fundamental Issues: Is Development Continuous? • Development means change; change can be abrupt or gradual • Two views of human development • stage theories: there are distinct phases to intellectual and personality development • continuity: development is continuous

11. Topic 2 - Research Designs used in human development studies

12. Cross-section Research Design

13. Same Time Different Participants Different Participants Different Participants Cross-Sectional Design Same Time Compare Compare 1-year-olds 4-year-olds 7-year-olds

14. Longitudinal Research Design

15. Same Participants Different Times Different Times Different Times Longitudinal Design Compare Compare Tested at 1 year (Time 1) Again at 4 years (Time 2) Again at 7 years (Time 3)

16. Topic 3 – Prenatal Development and Teratogens

17. Prenatal Development and the Newborn Life is sexually transmitted

18. Fertilization and Twinning • Identical twins • Fraternal twins

20. Prenatal Development and the Newborn Periods of Pregnancy • Zygote • the fertilized egg • enters a 2 week period of rapid cell division • develops into an embryo • Embryo • the developing human organism from 2 weeks through 2nd month • Fetus • the developing human organism from 9 weeks after conception to birth

21. Prenatal Development Conception 30 Hours 6 weeks 4 months

22. special molecule that contains the genetic material of the organism DNA • section of DNA having the same arrangement of chemical elements gene science of inherited traits genetics • tightly wound strand of genetic material or DNA chromosome • referring to a gene that only influences the expression of a trait when paired with an identical gene recessive • referring to a gene that actively controls the expression of a trait dominant

23. Dominant and Recessive Genes

24. Influences • Prenatal development is mainly a function of the zygote’s genetic code (nature), but the environment (nurture) also plays a role • Teratogens are environmental agents (such as drugs or viruses), diseases (such as German measles), and physical conditions (such as malnutrition) that impair prenatal development and lead to birth defects or even death

25. Prenatal Development and the Newborn • Teratogens • agents, such as chemicals and viruses, that can reach the embryo or fetus during prenatal development and cause harm • Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) • physical and cognitive abnormalities in children caused by a pregnant woman’s heavy drinking • symptoms include misproportioned head • Critical Period • an optimal period before and shortly after birth when an organism’s exposure to certain stimuli or experiences produces proper or adverse development

27. Topic 4 – Cognitive Development

28. Cognitive Development • This field is Dominated by a man named Jean Piaget. • He was developing IQ tests and noticed that many children got the same answers wrong. • Thought to himself, “maybe these kids are not stupid, but instead think differently than adults.”

29. Piaget’s important concepts • Children are active thinkers, always trying to make sense of the world. • To make sense of the world, they develop schemas. • Schema- a concept or framework that organizes and interprets information.

30. Infancy and Childhood: Cognitive Development • Schema • a concept or framework that organizes and interprets information

31. Infancy and Childhood: Cognitive Development • Assimilation • interpreting one’s new experience in terms of one’s existing schemas • Accommodation • adapting one’s current understandings (schemas) to incorporate new information

32. Schemas • For example, a child may call all four-legged creatures “doggie” • The child learns he needs to accommodate (i.e., change) his schemes, as only one type of four-legged creature is “dog” • It is through accommodation that the number and complexity of a child’s schemes increase and learning occurs

33. Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development

34. Typical Age Range Description of Stage Developmental Phenomena Birth to nearly 2 years Sensorimotor Experiencing the world through senses and actions (looking, touching, mouthing) • Object permanence • Stranger anxiety About 2 to 6 years Preoperational Representing things with words and images but lacking logical reasoning • Pretend play • Egocentrism • Language development About 7 to 11 years Concrete operational Thinking logically about concrete events; grasping concrete analogies and performing arithmetical operations • Conservation • Mathematical transformations About 12 through adulthood Formal operational Abstract reasoning • Abstract logic • Potential for moral reasoning Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development

35. Infancy and Childhood: Cognitive Development • Object Permanence • the awareness that things continue to exist even when not perceived

36. 4. Possible outcome: Screen drops, revealing one object. 3. Object is removed. 1. Objects placed in case. 2. Screen comes up. 4. Impossible outcome: Screen drops, revealing two objects. Infancy and Childhood: Cognitive Development • Baby Mathematics • Shown a numerically impossible outcome, infants stare longer (Wynn, 1992)

37. Infancy and Childhood: Cognitive Development • Conservation • the principle that properties such as mass, volume, and number remain the same despite changes in the forms of objects

38. Tests of Conservation

39. Infancy and Childhood: Cognitive Development • Egocentrism • the inability of the preoperational child to take another’s point of view • Autism • a disorder that appears in childhood • Marked by deficient communication, social interaction and understanding of others’ states of mind

40. Sensorimotor Stage • Infant learns about the world through their sensory and motor interactions (including reflexes) • Lack object permanence, the knowledge than an object exists independent of perceptual contact • Symbolic representation of objects and events starts to develop during the latter part of the sensorimotor stage (e.g., use of telegraphic speech)

41. Preoperational Stage • The child’s thinking becomes more symbolic and language-based, but remains egocentric and lacks the mental operations that allow logical thinking • Egocentrism is the inability to distinguish one’s own perceptions, thoughts, and feelings from those of others • Cannot perceive the world from another person’s perspective • The child, however, can pretend, imagine, and engage in make-believe play

42. Preoperational Stage • Conservation is the knowledge that the quantitative properties of an object (such as mass, volume, and number) remain the same despite changes in appearance • Some grasp of conservation marks the end of the preoperational stage and the beginning of the concrete-operational stage • The liquid/beakers problem is a common test of conservation ability

43. Preoperational Stage • A major reason why a preoperational child does not understand conservation is that the child lacks an understanding of reversibility, the knowledge that reversing a transformation brings about the conditions that existed before the transformation • Child’s thinking also reflects centration, the tendency to focus on only one aspect of a problem at a time

44. Tests of Conservation

45. Concrete Operational Stage • Children gain a fuller understanding of conservation and other mental operations that allow them to think logically, but only about concrete events • Conservation for liquids, numbers, and matter acquired early, but conservation of length acquired later in the stage • Develops transitivity (e.g., if A > B, and B > C, then A > C) • Develops seriation, the ability to order stimuli along a quantitative dimension (e.g., a set of pencils by their length) • The reasoning of concrete operational children is tied to immediate reality (i.e., what is in front of them and tangible) and not with the hypothetical world of possibility

46. Formal Operational Stage • The child gains the capacity for hypothetical-deductive thought • Can engage in hypothetical thought and in systematic deduction and testing of hypotheses

47. Formal Operational Stage • In one scientific thinking task, the child is shown several flasks of what appear to be the same clear liquid and is told one combination of two of these liquids would produce a clear liquid • The task is to determine which combination would produce the blue liquid • The concrete operational child just starts mixing different clear liquids together haphazardly • The formal operational child develops a systematic plan for deducing what the correct combination must be by determining all of the possible combinations and then systematically testing each one

48. Formal Operational Stage • The formal operational child can evaluate the logic of verbal statements without referring to concrete situations • For example, the formal operational child would judge the statement “If mice are bigger than horses, and horses are bigger than cats, then mice are bigger than cats” to be true, even though in “real life” mice are not bigger than cats

49. Piaget

50. Evaluation of Piaget’s Theory • Recent research has shown that rudiments of many of Piaget’s key concepts (e.g., object permanence) may begin to appear at earlier stages than Piaget proposed • For example, research that involved tracking infants’ eye movements has found that infants as young as 3 months continue to stare at the place where the object disappeared from sight, indicating some degree of object permanence