- biologist 

-animal behavior 

-active and discontinous development 

-child plays an active role in their own development at all stages 

-constructivism- the active child 

-child as a scientist 

-stages: qualitative changes in ways of thinking with fast transitions 

-domain-generality- "broad applicability"

-invarient sequence: don't change the order 

1. sensorimotor

2. preoperational

3. contrete operational 

4. formal operational 

sensorimotor 

-birth to age 2 

-only sensory and motor abilities, no representation 

-increasingly interested in the world 

-lack of object permenance: "out of sight, out of mind"

-object permanence arrives 

-representations are "fragile"

-A not B error 

-disappearance of AB search error 

-active experimentation 

-mental representations: internal images of objects and events that persist over time 

-deferred imitatation

-pretend play 

- 2-7 years 

-major accomplishment: increase in symbol activity 

-pretend play 

-language 

-representational drawing 

-maps 

-some limitations 

-lack of logical operations that can be applied to any situation

-egocentrism- ex: 3 mountains problem 

-centration/lack of conservation 

- 7- 12 years 

-logical reasoning about concrete features of the world 

-operations/transformations 

-conversation appears 

-limitations:

-reasoning limited to observable and specific situations 

-lack of experimentation to solve problems 

(ex: the pendulum problem)

- 12+

-hypothetical reasoning and abstract thinking 

-new abilities: systematic approach to problem solving (ex: pendulum problem) and propositional thought

-not universal 

making the world fit your current conceptual structure 

(ex: horses are dogs)

equilibrium

- not so much consistency within a stage

-infants have more mental life than he realized

-understates contribution of social world

-vague about processes of change 

(assimilation and accomodation are difficult to quantify or predict)

-the child as computer 

-limited by: 

-hardware: memory/capacity/efficency of basic operations 

-software: startegies and knowledge 

-emphasis on mechanisms of development/change 

-development: improvement of both hardware and software 

-maturation --> hardware

-experience --> software 

-continuous change 

-gradual maturation (biological) and learning (from experience)

-emphasis on how change occurs (mechanism)

1. improvement in basic processes and processing speed

2. improvement/acquisitions of strategies 

3. acqusisition of content knowledge 

- basic processes:

associating events with each other 

encoding specific features of objects and events 

recognizing objects as familiar 

generalizing one instance to another 

-apply to all domains 

-processing speed:

biological maturation and experience

myelination

increased/more effiecient connectivity 

-recall arithmetic strategies

-rehersal (improvement over mid childhood)

-selective attention

ex: coy, soil, enjoys, voice

-new strategies can take time to work

-utilization deficiency 

-domain specificity/modularity

-nativism (opposite of empircism)

-core domains (modules)

objects, numbers, language, living things, faces, spatial navagation

-knowledge in these domains is innate and the distinction between them is innate 

-connection to evolution

child is a well equipted product of evolution

continuity with other animals- specialized learning mechanisms are uncontroversial 

- basic knowledge is innate or very early 

-3 month olds- suprised when objects move through one another

-2 month olds- surprised when objects jump

-stress development taking place through interactions with other people

child as social beings, not scientists 

-stress importance of culture

artifacts, symbols, skills, values 

specific to culture 

-children are intent on participating in activities in their local setting

-children are products of a culture 

1. intersubjectivity

2. social scaffolding

3. zone of proximal development 

-mutual understanding people share during communication

-begins in infancy

-joint attention: intentionally focusing on a common referent 

-range of performance between what children can do unsupported and what they can do with optimal support

- support has to be challenging but not too challenging 

receiving basic information from external world through the sensory receptors 

-different ccone of cells in retina respond to different frequencies of light 

-what do newborns do? how do they learn more?

-what knowledge is aquired (nature-nurture)

-visual acquity- the sharpness of vision and clarity with which details can be discerned 

-testing visual acquity

-gratings 

-sinusodial

-the higher the frequency of the lines you can see the better your discrimination

eye movement

following moving stripes

newborn acquity: 20/600 

-rapidly moves: 20/120 by 2 months

nearly 20/20 by 8 months 

packaging of cones on fovea 

cones: visual receptors on retina 

-newborn's cones are less densly backed (fovea is larger)

-muscles of lens weak 

3 types of cones 

-short/blue 

-medium/green

-long/red 

may take up to 4 months for color vision to be adult-like

green and red function @ 8 weeks

blue up to 3-4 months 

- 1st month: infants focus on area with most contrast

outside boundaries 

acuity and contrast are related

-2-3 months- able to explore inner features 

simple patterns 

ex: square 

-physical separation

-motion (common motion and independent motion)

-top down knowledge 

-physical separtation

-motion 

-Spelke: common motion experiement

-4 month olds percieve single rod easily

-Johnson and Aslin

-2 month olds can do it if rod is wider or box is narrower 

-visual cliff experiments (Gibson and Walk 1960)

-age they are afraid is linked to their crawling age 

-the greater the binocular disparity, the closer the object

-stereopisis- depth cue 

-3-7 months 

-occulsion: covering on object with another (3-4 months)

-perspective: assume that lines are parallel, must move in the distance (6-7 months)

-texture: further away things are, less detailed 

-touch cheek, turn head to open mouth

-disappears at ~3 weeks 

-touch palm, grab 

-disappears 3-4 months 

-loss of support, arms go out and in

-disappears ~6 months

-when you touch the bottom of the foot, toes fan out

-later in life, they curl in

-changes at 12 months 

-brain damage --> goes back to infant reflex 

-5-11 months 

(average is 5)

-depends on muscle, motivation, weight 

ex: reaching, grasping

-smaller movements 

-"head" to tail

-head before arms and trunk, then legs 

-center out 

-control head and trunk before arms and legs 

-based on observation

-Gesell

-Water study (E Thelen)

stepping reflex reappeared in water 

-Added weight study (E Thelen)

-ankle weights- stepping reflex went away 

-urban china/rural paraguay vs West Africa and West Indes 

-stretching/suspension exercises --> walk earlier 

• behavior is an integrated system
• CNS development
• synaptogensis/myelination
• movement possibilites of body 
• prexisiting skills
• sitting, reaching, walking
• motivation
• goal/personality
• environment supports 
• cultural differences 
• America: dresses, back to sleep
• orphanage studies 

genetically determined emergence of 

-prereaching

-ulnar grasp

-transfer- move things from 1 hand to another 

-pincer grasp- between thumb and forefinger 

piaget's egocentric representation: for infants object locations are coded relative to own position when location is first learned

-connection to self-locomotion

-crawling versus being carried to toy 

kids who crawled remembered where toy was 

-visual cliff studies

-crawlers show more fear than noncrawlers 

-noncrawlers with walker manipulation learned fear quickly 

-representations appear to be built through action

-is learning specific to each posture or motor  skill

-noitice microgenetic approach

-once crawl they don't care about depth 

-stranger anxiety/separation anxiety and crawling

-new, adversial relationship with adults 

-new opportunities for positive interactions 

classiscal- associating between an intially neutral stimulus and one that elicits a reflexive response 

babies do this early 

-learning an associating between one's own behavior and the consequences that result

-infant acts on environment

-outcome changes the probability that behavior will occur again

-reinforcer: increases occurrance

-punishment: decreases ocurrance 

ex: Cat in the Hat Study and sucking 

-noticing regularities, patterns 

-sounds and sights that go together

-affordances- learning what you can do with various objects 

-unconscious/implicit

-noticing more nuanced contingencies: what things occur often, even if not all the time 

-includes attention to probailistic details: what percentage of questions are "b"

-unconscious/implicit 

faciliates learning 

-diminishes attention to what is old 

-allows infant to pay attention to what is new 

-imitation

from 2 days? -Meltzoff

-by 6-9 months, imitate facial expressions, verbalizations, body actions, and actiongs involving objects 

-argued Piaget's test was too hard 

-violation of expectation/looking time 

-we look longer at the unexpected 

-object permanence with 4 month olds 

-much earlier than Piaget said 

subjects in which we have innate concepts 

ex: objects, living things, number, language, minds 

Leslie: 1984

- babies are surprised when ther is no cause for movement at a distance @ 6 months 

-many infants discriminate objects and events by small numerosity 

-habituate to arrangements of same number 

-ex: 1-2, 2-3, 3-4 NOT 4-5

-"subitization"

- 1+1

- 1-1

-only up to 3+1

-principles of counting 

-one to one correspondence 

-stable order

-cardinality- number of objects in my set 

-order irrelevance

-abstraction

-most children get this by age 5 

vegetative sounds 

ex: burping, spitting 

babbling (ba, ba)

-ma, ba, da, ga (voiced sounds)

-always consonant --> vowel

- comprehension as early as 6 months (takes off around 8-10 months)

-production begins 10-15 months, average first word @ 13 months 

-phonetically consistent form 

-18-24 months 

- telegraphic speech: missing function words (ex: prepositions, "the", "a"), missing grammatical morphemes 

-by 3 years, most children producing 4+ word sentences 

-introducing some function words 

-multiclause sentences ("I want to go outside")

-questions ("can he go outside"

-most grammar mastered by age 4 

-over generaliziations- ex: "I ranned"

-Piaget's collective monologue

-5th grade more than 90% of utterances are relevant to conversation 

-Skinner 1957

-language learning as operant conditioning 

-imitation

-reinforcement 

-Chomsky's 1959 Review of Skinner started a revolution

-imitation is not suffiecient 

-input to children is noisy-adults make mistakes

-children produce novel sentences

-infinite number of sentences 

-children and adults produce sentences they have never heard

ex: I holded the baby rabbits

He giggled me 

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously 

-means imitation cannot be sufficient 

generativity

-infinite number of sentences 

-infinite number of sentences is generated by a finite set of grammatical rules 

-if you interrupt a sentence at any given point, there is an average of 10 words that could follow 

-Bolstered by:

-Crucial period @ around 7 years 

-species specificity

-specific language impairment

-dedicated brain areas 

-problem of identifying words in continous speech

-Saffran, Aslin and Newport (1996)

-8 month olds

-familiarized with 2 minutes of continuous speech

-4 different 3-syllable nonsense "words"

-repeated 45 times each, in random order, for 2 minutes

-head turn perference procedure, with 3 stypes of stimuli

--Type 1: "words from strea"

--Type 2: "nonwords" made from the stream with transitional properties of zero

-result: infants listened longer to nonwords 

--Type 3: "non words" made by joining the final syllable of a word to the first two syllables of another 

-result: listened longer to non words 

-newborns prefer faces right side up

-drawn to face

-innate knowledge of face 

-preference for general facial configuration

-"top heavy"

-important for survival (ex: ducklings)

-consistent brain area

-newborns imitate facial expressions 

-self awareness @ 1-2 years 

-awareness of one's own mind could be a prerequisite for understanding other's minds 

-red dot test (15 --> 24 months)

-photographs 

-using words "I" and "me" 

-knowing others have: emotions, desires, perceptions, beliefts, and intentional actions 

-especially difficult when they are different from one's own 

-empathy (primitive): emotional contagion from few weeks 

-social referencing (8-10 months): using someone else's emotional reaction to gauge a situation 

-goldfish/broccoli experiment

-18 month olds give broccoli

-14 month olds give goldfish 

-joint attention (~9 months)

-2 year olds still poor when perceptions differ

ex: hide and seek, hiding apple behind a screen-pass by 3 

-Piaget's 3 Mountains task 

understanding other's beliefs 

-hard if different 

-false belief task 

-candy/penicls task

-pass by 4 

Kovascs, Teglas, and Endress (2010)

-P= baby, A=agent

-P-A-(TB)= baby thinks the ball is not behind the occluder, A thinks the ball is not behind occluder (true belief)

-familiarization will balll behind the occulder, all test trials have NO BALL behind the occulder 

-knowledge of other's bbeliefs are computed as early as 7 months