Lecture 1 reading
zondag 3 januari 2021
14:57
2. Theories and issues in child development
Cognitive development and motor development.
Theory of development: a scheme or system of ideas that is based on evidence, an attempts to
explain, describe, and predict behaviour and development.
Theory tries to bring order into chaotic amounts of information.
Major theories: explain large areas of development.
Motor Development
Cognitive development
Social-cognitive development
Evolution and ethology
Psychoanalytic theories
Humanistic theory.
Motor Development
Motor milestones: the basic motor skills acquired in infancy and early childhood, such as sitting
unaided, standing, crawling, walking.
Motor theory needs to explain: Do they early motor activities prepare the way for more complex
voluntary activities that follow an if so how do they do it?
how do new motor patterns appear?
Maturational theories and dynamic systems theory.
Maturational theory:
Motor development proceeds from global to specific in 2 directions.
Cephalocaudal trend: head to foot.
Proximodistal trend: centre of the body outwards. (Head, trunk & pevis first and then the
elbow, wrist etc.)
Gesell thinks that maturation alone shapes motor development.
2 contrapoints against maturational account of motor development
1. Motor skills develop in sequence but this doesnt mean there is a genetic cause (Learning to
play an instrument, you go from simple to difficult).
2. Theory doesnt account for individual differences in the acquistion of motor skills.
Dynamic systems theory (DST)
= a theoretical approach applied to many areas of development which views the individual
as interacting dynamically in a complex system in which all parts interact.
E.g. some infants will crawl sooner than others.
DST: all new motor development is the result of dynamic and continual interaction of (1)
nervous system development, capabilities & (2) biomechanics of the body, and (3)
environmental constraints and support.
,Infant kicking: infants could change their pattern of interlimb coordination to solve a novel,
experimentally imposed task.
Infant reaching: Infants need stable posture before they can reach, new motor skills are learned by
modifying already learned abilities.
Infant walking: changed the point of mass for infants. Researchers saw they were more exploratory
with their new mass. Shows that infants don’t have a fixed and rigid understanding of their own
abilities and are so flexible as to adjust their abilities to approach a new and different motor
problem.
Motor skills are learned.
Cognitive development
Piaget’s theory of development
Before piaget: behaviourism and psychoanalysis —> the child is passive of its upbinging.
Development is the result of potty training, rewarding and punishing.
Piaget thinks
children are active and also shape their own development.
Their development is motivated intrinsically rather than extrinsically.
Children adapt to their environment, and in doing so gruadually construct a more advanced
understanding of the world (cognitive adaptions).
Organismic worldview: children are inherently active and interacting w/ their environment.
Assimilation: we treat new objects as if they were familiar, we assimilate the new to our
already exisiting mental structures (schemas) e.g. meeting a new teacher and treating them
as any other teacher
Accommodation: child has to modify / change schemas to adjust to a new situation. E.g.
larger toy, need to learn how to hold it.
Accomodation & assimilation always happens together during infancy. These processes are
always active and are functional invariants: they don’t change during development. The
thing that changes are the schemas (cognitive structures in the child’s thinking that provide
representations and plans for enacting behaviors)
4 stages of cognitive development
Sensimotor stage (birth to 2 yrs): development of thought in action. Infant learns to solve problems,
and they learn how objects exist.
Preoperational stage (2 to 7 years):
Toddlers can solve problems by means-end problem solving and can communicate. They are
egocentric (= hard to see things from another POV) and display animism (think inanimate objects are
alive) in their thinking. There is lack of a logical framework for thought.
Concrete operations stage (7 to 11 years):
Centration: focusing attention on one aspect of a situation, like numbers.
Preoperational child will take the row of candy that is stretched out the longest. Operational child
will take the row of candy with the most bars, they can focus on a NUMBER.
Can solve many problems, but is limited when thinking about possibilities.
The formal operations stage (from about 11 years)
,Child can reason in the way a scientist does, manipulate variables to find out what causes things to
happen.
Behaviorism —> offeed a mchanistic world view: the child is passive until stimulated by the
environment.
Piaget only wrote in French. Piaget is complicated.
Information processing approaching (IPA)
= the view that Cognitive processes are explained in terms of inputs and outputs and that the human
mind is a system through which information flows.
These theories are rooted in 3 innovations
1. Advances in computer technology
2. The view that and organisms behavior cant be understood w/o knowing the structure of the
perceivers environment.
3. Constructivism: perception fills in info that cant be seen or heard directly. Piaget is
constructivist, chil is supposed to construct their knowledge from existing skills.
Constructivism is polar opposite to behaviorism, which doesnt discuss what goes on in someone’s
mind.
IPA says cognitive development proceeds in bottom-up, begininng w/ input of info by the child, and
building complex structures of knowledge from simple info.
Top down = state of a system is specified and then you work to discover the components and their
development.
How do infants perceive causality (when something influences another thing)?
4 months: identify the units (lower-order)
6 months: identify the causal relations (higher-order)
Same for object unity.
Cognitive development in childhood: you learn which strategy is the best to solve a particular
problem through experience.
Connectionism: modern theoretical approach that developed from IPA in which computers are
programmed to simulate brain action and nerve cells (neurons).
Connectionist models can take in info and come up with a response. They have no prior information
and function like a child’s brain.
In short: theory discusses information in multiple forms: available info, processing info, response to
info. Methods: studies of infants & children, connectionist models & recordings of brain activity.
Piaget vs IPA
Similarities:
Active role in development
New levels of understanding develop from simpler ones.
Children learn by doing
Specify children’s limitations as development proceeds
Differences
, Piaget: developmental changes happen bc the child gradually constructs logical frameworks
for thought. Development moves in qualitatively different stages.
IPA: how children process information, limiting children’s thinking, how to overcome these
limitations. Development unfolds in a continuous fashion (capacity expands).
Social-cognitive development
Vygotsky:
social interaction plays a major theme in cognitive development.
Focus on didactic relationships.
Zone of proximal development (ZDP): zone that is just beyond the maximum of what a child
can understand in that stage. Adult can guide the child to solve the problem together.
End of 19th century: introspectionism: observers were asked to reflect on their feelings, thoughts
and perceptions.
—> more objective.
Pavlov: classical conditioning. Learning an association between one stimulating unit and one
normally unstimulating unit, resulting in being stimulated by the normally unstimulating unit.
Law of effect: (Thorndike) action is repeated likely if it is rewarded, decreased if it leads to
punishment.
—> behaviorism: denies the role of the mind as an object of study and reduces all behavior to
environmental influence. Behaviors are built upon foundations of simple, repeated connections
between a stimulus and its response. —> Reductionist: reduces complex ideas to simple core
processes
Operant conditioning (Skinner): children operate on their environments (active role). (baby reacting
to the flashing of a table light by raising its arm). Skinner: it’s possible to shape the child’s behavior
by manipulating th reinforcement received.
Skinner: Mothers should react to acceptable forms of behavior and not to annoying forms of
behavior
Social learning theory: (bandura) Bobo doll experiment.Child mentally assumed the role of the
person they observed. Bandura kept the part where the environment influences the child but added
that humans learn by observing.
Adults are models for children.
Social laerning theory —> social cognitive theory: emphasizes humans’ ability to exercise self-control
over the nature and quality of their lives.
Ethology and evolution
Gene —> chromosomes. Used when talking about inheritable characteristics.
When a certain set of genes is an advantage, the genes will become more frequent in the gene pool.
This applies to behaviors as well as physical characteristics.
Ethological approaches: emphasize the evolutionary origins of many behaviors that are important
for survival.
Lorenz & Tinbergen: certain behaviors are genetic because: 1. Promote survival and 2. Are in almost
all species
Precocial species: where the young can move almost immediately after birth.
