According To Piaget, For Children To Learn Something They Need Which Of The Following?

Chapter 7. Growing and Developing

7.2 Infancy and Childhood: Exploring and Learning

Learning Objectives

1. Draw the abilities that newborn infants possess and how they actively interact with their environments.
2. Listing the stages in Piaget'south model of cognitive development and explain the concepts that are mastered in each stage.
3. Critique Piaget'due south theory of cognitive evolution and describe other theories that complement and expand on it.
4. Summarize the important processes of social development that occur in infancy and childhood.

If all has gone well, a baby is built-in sometime around the 38th week of pregnancy. The fetus is responsible, at least in part, for its ain nascence because chemicals released past the developing fetal encephalon trigger the muscles in the female parent'southward uterus to start the rhythmic contractions of childbirth. The contractions are initially spaced at about fifteen-minute intervals only come more rapidly with fourth dimension. When the contractions reach an interval of two to 3 minutes, the female parent is requested to aid in the labour and help push button the baby out.

The Newborn Arrives With Many Behaviours Intact

Newborns are already prepared to face the new world they are virtually to experience. Every bit you can see in Table seven.2, "Survival Reflexes in Newborns," babies are equipped with a diversity of reflexes, each providing an ability that will assistance them survive their commencement few months of life every bit they proceed to learn new routines to help them survive in and manipulate their environments.

Table 7.2 Survival Reflexes in Newborns.

[Skip Table]
Proper noun	Stimulus	Response	Significance	Video Case
Rooting reflex	The infant'due south cheek is stroked.	The infant turns its head toward the stroking, opens its oral fissure, and tries to suck.	Ensures the baby's feeding volition be a reflexive habit	Watch "The Rooting Reflex" [YouTube]
Blink reflex	A low-cal is flashed in the baby'due south eyes.	The babe closes both eyes.	Protects eyes from strong and potentially dangerous stimuli	Watch "Baby Blinking" [YouTube]
Withdrawal reflex	A soft pinprick is practical to the sole of the baby's pes.	The baby flexes the leg.	Keeps the exploring infant abroad from painful stimuli	Lookout "Babe Withdraw Reflex" [YouTube]
Tonic neck reflex	The babe is laid down on its back.	The babe turns its head to one side and extends the arm on the aforementioned side.	Helps develop mitt-eye coordination	Watch "Tonic Cervix Reflex" [YouTube]
Grasp reflex	An object is pressed into the palm of the baby.	The baby grasps the object pressed and can even hold its own weight for a cursory period.	Helps in exploratory learning	Sentry "Grasp reflex" [YouTube]
Moro reflex	Loud noises or a sudden drib in meridian while property the baby.	The baby extends artillery and legs and quickly brings them in equally if trying to grasp something.	Protects from falling; could take assisted infants in holding on to their mothers during rough travelling	Spotter "Moro Reflex" [YouTube]
Stepping reflex	The baby is suspended with blank feet just above a surface and is moved forwards.	Babe makes stepping motions as if trying to walk.	Helps encourage motor development	Scout "Stepping Reflex" [YouTube]

In addition to reflexes, newborns have preferences — they like sweetness-tasting foods at kickoff, while becoming more open to salty items past four months of age (Beauchamp, Cowart, Menellia, & Marsh, 1994; Blass & Smith, 1992). Newborns also prefer the smell of their mothers. An infant only six days quondam is significantly more than likely to turn toward its ain mother'southward chest pad than to the chest pad of some other infant'south mother (Porter, Makin, Davis, & Christensen, 1992), and a newborn also shows a preference for the confront of its own female parent (Bushnell, Sai, & Mullin, 1989).

Although infants are built-in set up to appoint in some activities, they also contribute to their own evolution through their own behaviours. The child'due south knowledge and abilities increase equally information technology babbles, talks, crawls, tastes, grasps, plays, and interacts with the objects in the surround (Gibson, Rosenzweig, & Porter, 1988; Gibson & Pick, 2000; Smith & Thelen, 2003). Parents may assistance in this process past providing a variety of activities and experiences for the kid. Research has found that animals raised in environments with more novel objects and that engage in a variety of stimulating activities have more encephalon synapses and larger cerebral cortexes, and they perform amend on a variety of learning tasks compared with animals raised in more impoverished environments (Juraska, Henderson, & Müller, 1984). Similar effects are likely occurring in children who have opportunities to play, explore, and interact with their environments (Soska, Adolph, & Johnson, 2010).

Research Focus: Using the Habituation Technique to Report What Infants Know

It may seem to you that babies have trivial ability to view, hear, understand, or call back the earth around them. Indeed, the famous psychologist William James presumed that the newborn experiences a "blooming, buzzing confusion" (James, 1890, p. 462). And yous may recollect that, fifty-fifty if babies do know more than James gave them credit for, it might not be possible to find out what they know. After all, infants can't talk or respond to questions, so how would we ever find out? But over the past two decades, developmental psychologists have created new ways to decide what babies know, and they accept found that they know much more than you, or William James, might accept expected.

One mode that we tin can learn about the cognitive development of babies is by measuring their behaviour in response to the stimuli around them. For instance, some researchers accept given babies the chance to control which shapes they go to run across or which sounds they go to hear according to how hard they suck on a pacifier (Trehub & Rabinovitch, 1972). The sucking behaviour is used as a measure of the infants' interest in the stimuli — the sounds or images they suck hardest in response to are the ones nosotros tin assume they prefer.

Some other approach to understanding cognitive evolution by observing the behaviour of infants is through the use of the habituation technique. Habituation refers to the decreased responsiveness toward a stimulus subsequently it has been presented numerous times in succession. Organisms, including infants, tend to exist more than interested in things the first few times they experience them and become less interested in them with more frequent exposure. Developmental psychologists take used this full general principle to help them sympathize what babies remember and understand.

In the habituation procedure,^[1] a baby is placed in a high chair and presented with visual stimuli while a video photographic camera records the babe's eye and face movements. When the experiment begins, a stimulus (due east.k., the face up of an adult) appears in the baby's field of view, and the amount of time the baby looks at the face is recorded past the camera. Then the stimulus is removed for a few seconds before it appears once more and the gaze is again measured. Over time, the baby starts to habituate to the face, such that each presentation elicits less gazing at the stimulus. So a new stimulus (e.thou., the face of a different developed or the same confront looking in a different direction) is presented, and the researchers find whether the gaze time significantly increases. You tin see that if the babe'due south gaze time increases when a new stimulus is presented, this indicates that the baby can differentiate the ii stimuli.

Although this procedure is very simple, it allows researchers to create variations that reveal a great deal about a newborn's cognitive ability. The trick is just to modify the stimulus in controlled means to see if the baby "notices the deviation." Research using the habituation process has establish that babies can notice changes in colours, sounds, and even principles of numbers and physics. For instance, in i experiment reported past Karen Wynn (1995), six-month-old babies were shown a presentation of a puppet that repeatedly jumped upwards and downward either two or iii times, resting for a couple of seconds between sequences (the length of time and the speed of the jumping were controlled). Later the infants habituated to this display, the presentation was changed such that the puppet jumped a dissimilar number of times. As you tin can come across in Effigy 7.2, "Can Infants Do Math?" the infants' gaze fourth dimension increased when Wynn changed the presentation, suggesting that the infants could tell the difference between the number of jumps.

Figure seven.2 Can Infants Practise Math? Karen Wynn found that babies that had habituated to a puppet jumping either two or 3 times significantly increased their gaze when the boob began to jump a dissimilar number of times.

Cognitive Development During Childhood

Childhood is a time in which changes occur quickly. The kid is growing physically, and cognitive abilities are also developing. During this fourth dimension the child learns to actively manipulate and control the environment, and is first exposed to the requirements of society, especially the need to command the bladder and bowels. Co-ordinate to Erik Erikson, the challenges that the child must attain in childhood relate to the evolution of initiative, competence, and independence. Children need to acquire to explore the globe, to get self-reliant, and to make their ain style in the surround.

Effigy 7.3 Portrait of Jean Piaget. Jean Piaget developed his theories of kid development by observing the behaviours of children.

These skills practice not come overnight. Neurological changes during childhood provide children the ability to do some things at sure ages, and all the same make information technology impossible for them to do other things. This fact was made apparent through the groundbreaking work of the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget (Figure 7.3). During the 1920s, Piaget was administering intelligence tests to children in an attempt to decide the kinds of logical thinking that children were capable of. In the process of testing them, Piaget became intrigued, not so much by the answers that the children got right, but more by the answers they got wrong. Piaget believed that the incorrect answers the children gave were not mere shots in the nighttime but rather represented specific ways of thinking unique to the children'south developmental phase. Just as virtually all babies learn to curlicue over before they larn to sit up by themselves, and learn to crawl before they larn to walk, Piaget believed that children gain their cerebral ability in a developmental order. These insights — that children at different ages think in fundamentally unlike ways — led to Piaget'due south stage model of cerebral development.

Piaget argued that children exercise not just passively learn but as well actively attempt to make sense of their worlds. He argued that, equally they learn and mature, children develop schemas — patterns of cognition in long-term retentiveness — that help them remember, organize, and respond to information. Furthermore, Piaget thought that when children feel new things, they attempt to reconcile the new knowledge with existing schemas. Piaget believed that children use two singled-out methods in doing so, methods that he called assimilation and accommodation (meet Figure 7.4, "Absorption and Accommodation").

Figure 7.4 Assimilation and Accommodation.

When children employ assimilation, they use already adult schemas to empathize new information. If children have learned a schema for horses, then they may call the striped animal they see at the zoo a horse rather than a zebra. In this case, children fit the existing schema to the new information and characterization the new information with the existing knowledge. Adaptation, on the other paw, involves learning new information and thus changing the schema. When a mother says, "No, beloved, that'southward a zebra, non a horse," the child may adjust the schema to fit the new stimulus, learning that at that place are different types of four-legged animals, only one of which is a horse.

Piaget'due south near important contribution to understanding cognitive development, and the primal aspect of his theory, was the idea that evolution occurs in unique and distinct stages, with each stage occurring at a specific time, in a sequential fashion, and in a way that allows the child to retrieve about the world using new capacities. Piaget's stages of cognitive development are summarized in Table 7.three, "Piaget's Stages of Cerebral Evolution."

Table seven.3 Piaget'southward Stages of Cognitive Development.

[Skip Tabular array]
Stage	Approximate age range	Characteristics	Stage attainments
Sensorimotor	Nascency to nearly 2 years	The child experiences the world through the fundamental senses of seeing, hearing, touching, and tasting.	Object permanence
Preoperational	two to seven years	Children acquire the power to internally correspond the globe through linguistic communication and mental imagery. They likewise start to see the world from other people's perspectives.	Theory of mind; rapid increase in linguistic communication power
Concrete operational	7 to 11 years	Children become able to call up logically. They tin can increasingly perform operations on objects that are only imagined.	Conservation
Formal operational	11 years to machismo	Adolescents can think systematically, tin reason about abstract concepts, and can empathize ethics and scientific reasoning.	Abstract logic

The first developmental phase for Piaget was the sensorimotor stage, the cerebral stage that begins at birth and lasts until around the age of 2. It is defined by the directly physical interactions that babies accept with the objects effectually them. During this phase, babies grade their get-go schemas by using their master senses — they stare at, listen to, reach for, hold, shake, and taste the things in their environments.

During the sensorimotor stage, babies' use of their senses to perceive the world is and then cardinal to their understanding that whenever babies do non directly perceive objects, as far every bit they are concerned, the objects exercise not exist. Piaget establish, for instance, that if he first interested babies in a toy and so covered the toy with a blanket, children who were younger than half dozen months of age would deed as if the toy had disappeared completely — they never tried to detect it under the blanket but would still smiling and reach for it when the blanket was removed. Piaget found that it was non until almost viii months that the children realized that the object was merely covered and not gone. Piaget used the term object permanence to refer to the child's ability to know that an object exists fifty-fifty when the object cannot exist perceived.

Children younger than almost 8 months of age do not sympathize object permanence.

Sentinel: Object Permanence [YouTube]: http://www.youtube.com/v/nwXd7WyWNHY

At about two years of historic period, and until most seven years of age, children move into the preoperational stage. During this stage, children begin to apply language and to think more abstractly nearly objects, with chapters to form mental images; however, their agreement is more intuitive and they lack much ability to deduce or reason. The thinking is preoperational, meaning that the child lacks the power to operate on or transform objects mentally. In one study that showed the extent of this inability, Judy DeLoache (1987) showed children a room within a small dollhouse. Inside the room, a minor toy was visible behind a small burrow. The researchers took the children to some other lab room, which was an verbal replica of the dollhouse room, only full-sized. When children who were 2.5 years old were asked to find the toy, they did not know where to look — they were simply unable to brand the transition across the changes in room size. Three-year-old children, on the other mitt, immediately looked for the toy backside the burrow, demonstrating that they were improving their operational skills.

The inability of young children to view transitions also leads them to exist egocentric — unable to readily encounter and understand other people's viewpoints. Developmental psychologists define the theory of mind as the power to accept some other person's viewpoint, and the power to do so increases rapidly during the preoperational stage. In i demonstration of the development of theory of heed, a researcher shows a child a video of another child (let's call her Anna) putting a brawl in a red box. And then Anna leaves the room, and the video shows that while she is gone, a researcher moves the ball from the scarlet box into a blue box. As the video continues, Anna comes dorsum into the room. The child is so asked to point to the box where Anna volition probably await to notice her ball. Children who are younger than four years of age typically are unable to understand that Anna does not know that the ball has been moved, and they predict that she will look for it in the blue box. Afterwards four years of age, yet, children have developed a theory of mind — they realize that different people can have dissimilar viewpoints and that (although she will be wrong) Anna will nevertheless think that the ball is still in the red box.

Later on about seven years of age until 11, the kid moves into the concrete operational stage, which is marked past more frequent and more authentic use of transitions, operations, and abstract concepts, including those of time, space, and numbers. An important milestone during the concrete operational phase is the development of conservation — the agreement that changes in the form of an object practise non necessarily mean changes in the quantity of the object. Children younger than seven years mostly think that a glass of milk that is tall holds more milk than a glass of milk that is shorter and wider, and they go on to believe this fifty-fifty when they see the same milk poured back and forth betwixt the glasses. It appears that these children focus simply on one dimension (in this case, the height of the glass) and ignore the other dimension (width). Yet, when children reach the physical operational stage, their abilities to understand such transformations make them aware that, although the milk looks dissimilar in the unlike glasses, the amount must exist the same.

Children younger than about vii years of historic period do not understand the principles of conservation.

Watch: "Conservation" [YouTube]: http://world wide web.youtube.com/watch?v=YtLEWVu815o&feature=youtu.be

At nigh 11 years of age, children enter the formal operational phase, which is marked past the power to think in abstract terms and to utilise scientific and philosophical lines of idea. Children in the formal operational stage are better able to systematically test alternative ideas to decide their influences on outcomes. For example, rather than haphazardly changing different aspects of a state of affairs that allows no articulate conclusions to be fatigued, they systematically make changes in one matter at a time and observe what difference that item change makes. They acquire to use deductive reasoning, such as "if this, then that," and they become capable of imagining situations that "might be," rather than just those that actually exist.

Piaget'southward theories have fabricated a substantial and lasting contribution to developmental psychology. His contributions include the idea that children are not merely passive receptacles of information but rather actively engage in acquiring new knowledge and making sense of the earth around them. This full general thought has generated many other theories of cognitive development, each designed to assistance us ameliorate sympathize the development of the kid'southward data-processing skills (Klahr & MacWhinney, 1998; Shrager & Siegler, 1998). Furthermore, the extensive research that Piaget'southward theory has stimulated has generally supported his beliefs almost the lodge in which knowledge develops. Piaget's work has besides been applied in many domains — for instance, many teachers brand use of Piaget's stages to develop educational approaches aimed at the level children are developmentally prepared for (Driscoll, 1994; Levin, Siegler, & Druyan, 1990).

Over the years, Piagetian ideas have been refined. For case, it is at present believed that object permanence develops gradually, rather than more immediately, equally a truthful stage model would predict, and that it tin can sometimes develop much earlier than Piaget expected. Renée Baillargeon and her colleagues (Baillargeon, 2004; Wang, Baillargeon, & Brueckner, 2004) placed babies in a habituation setup, having them sentinel equally an object was placed behind a screen, entirely hidden from view. The researchers and so arranged for the object to reappear from behind some other screen in a different place. Babies who saw this blueprint of events looked longer at the display than did babies who witnessed the aforementioned object physically being moved betwixt the screens. These data advise that the babies were enlightened that the object still existed fifty-fifty though it was hidden backside the screen, and thus that they were displaying object permanence every bit early on as three months of age, rather than the eight months that Piaget predicted.

Another factor that might have surprised Piaget is the extent to which a child's social surroundings influence learning. In some cases, children progress to new ways of thinking and retreat to erstwhile ones depending on the type of chore they are performing, the circumstances they detect themselves in, and the nature of the language used to instruct them (Courage & Howe, 2002). And children in dissimilar cultures show somewhat dissimilar patterns of cognitive evolution. Dasen (1972) found that children in not-Western cultures moved to the next developmental stage virtually a yr later than did children from Western cultures, and that level of schooling too influenced cognitive development. In short, Piaget'south theory probably understated the contribution of ecology factors to social evolution.

More recent theories (Cole, 1996; Rogoff, 1990; Tomasello, 1999), based in large part on the sociocultural theory of the Russian scholar Lev Vygotsky (1962, 1978), argue that cognitive development is non isolated entirely within the child but occurs at least in part through social interactions. These scholars fence that children'due south thinking develops through constant interactions with more competent others, including parents, peers, and teachers.

An extension of Vygotsky's sociocultural theory is the idea of community learning, in which children serve as both teachers and learners. This approach is ofttimes used in classrooms to better learning also every bit to increase responsibility and respect for others. When children work cooperatively in groups to learn material, they can aid and back up each other's learning equally well as learn near each other as individuals, thereby reducing prejudice (Aronson, Blaney, Stephan, Sikes, & Snapp, 1978; Brown, 1997).

Social Development During Childhood

Information technology is through the remarkable increases in cognitive power that children learn to interact with and empathize their environments. But these cognitive skills are just office of the changes that are occurring during childhood. Equally crucial is the development of the kid's social skills — the ability to empathize, predict, and create bonds with the other people in their environments.

Knowing the Cocky: The Evolution of the Cocky-Concept

One of the important milestones in a kid's social evolution is learning about his or her own cocky-existence (Figure seven.5). This self-awareness is known as consciousness, and the content of consciousness is known equally the self-concept. The self-concept is a cognition representation or schema that contains knowledge well-nigh us, including our behavior most our personality traits, physical characteristics, abilities, values, goals, and roles, besides every bit the knowledge that nosotros be equally individuals (Kagan, 1991).

Figure 7.5 Recognizing Oneself in a Mirror. A unproblematic test of cocky-awareness is the power to recognize oneself in a mirror. Humans and chimpanzees tin pass the examination; dogs never practice.

Some animals, including chimpanzees, orangutans, and mayhap dolphins, have at least a primitive sense of self (Boysen & Himes, 1999). In ane report (Gallup, 1970), researchers painted a cherry dot on the foreheads of anesthetized chimpanzees and then placed each animal in a muzzle with a mirror. When the chimps woke up and looked in the mirror, they touched the dot on their faces, not the dot on the faces in the mirror. These actions suggest that the chimps understood that they were looking at themselves and not at other animals, and thus nosotros can assume that they are able to realize that they exist equally individuals. On the other hand, nigh other animals, including, for case, dogs, cats, and monkeys, never realize that it is themselves in the mirror.

Infants who have a like ruby dot painted on their foreheads recognize themselves in a mirror in the same way that the chimps do, and they practise this by well-nigh eighteen months of historic period (Povinelli, Landau, & Perilloux, 1996). The child's knowledge about the self continues to develop as the child grows. By age two, the infant becomes aware of his or her sex, as a male child or a girl. By historic period 4, self-descriptions are likely to be based on concrete features, such every bit hair colour and possessions, and past about historic period six, the child is able to understand basic emotions and the concepts of traits, being able to brand statements such as "I am a nice person" (Harter, 1998).

Soon later on children enter school (at about age five or six), they begin to brand comparisons with other children, a process known as social comparison. For example, a kid might describe himself equally being faster than one boy simply slower than another (Moretti & Higgins, 1990). According to Erikson, the important component of this process is the evolution of competence and autonomy — the recognition of one's own abilities relative to other children. And children increasingly show sensation of social situations — they understand that other people are looking at and judging them the same way that they are looking at and judging others (Doherty, 2009).

Successfully Relating to Others: Zipper

1 of the nearly important behaviours a kid must learn is how to be accepted by others — the evolution of close and meaningful social relationships. The emotional bonds that nosotros develop with those with whom we feel closest, and particularly the bonds that an baby develops with the mother or primary caregiver, are referred to equally attachment (Cassidy & Shaver, 1999). Encounter examples in Effigy 7.six.

Figure seven.6 Children'southward Attachment to Caregivers. Children develop advisable zipper styles through their interactions with caregivers.

As late as the 1930s, psychologists believed that children who were raised in institutions such equally orphanages, and who received proficient physical care and proper nourishment, would develop normally, even if they had fiddling interaction with their caretakers. Only studies past the developmental psychologist John Bowlby (1953) and others showed that these children did non develop usually — they were normally sickly, emotionally slow, and generally unmotivated. These observations helped make it clear that normal baby development requires successful attachment with a flagman.

In ane classic study showing the importance of attachment, Wisconsin University psychologists Harry and Margaret Harlow investigated the responses of young monkeys, separated from their biological mothers, to two surrogate mothers introduced to their cages. One — the wire mother — consisted of a circular wooden head, a mesh of cold metal wires, and a canteen of milk from which the babe monkey could drink. The second mother was a foam-rubber form wrapped in a heated terry-cloth blanket. The Harlows plant that although the infant monkeys went to the wire mother for food, they overwhelmingly preferred and spent significantly more fourth dimension with the warm terry-cloth mother that provided no food but did provide comfort (Harlow, 1958).

The studies by the Harlows showed that young monkeys preferred the warm mother that provided a secure base of operations to the common cold mother that provided food.

Watch: "The Harlows's Monkeys" [YouTube]: http://world wide web.youtube.com/watch?v=MmbbfisRiwA

The Harlows's studies confirmed that babies have social too as physical needs. Both monkeys and human babies need a secure base of operations that allows them to feel safe. From this base, they can gain the confidence they demand to venture out and explore their worlds. Erikson (Table 7.1, "Challenges of Development every bit Proposed by Erik Erikson") was in understanding on the importance of a secure base, arguing that the most important goal of infancy was the development of a basic sense of trust in i's caregivers.

Developmental psychologist Mary Ainsworth, a student of John Bowlby, was interested in studying the evolution of zipper in infants. Ainsworth created a laboratory test that measured an babe's zipper to his or her parent. The test is called the strange situation — a measure of attachment in young children in which the child'due south behaviours are assessed in a situation in which the caregiver and a stranger move in and out of the environment — because it is conducted in a context that is unfamiliar to the child and therefore likely to heighten the child'southward need for his or her parent (Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, & Wall, 1978). During the process, which lasts about 20 minutes, the parent and the infant are first left alone, while the babe explores the room full of toys. Then a strange developed enters the room and talks for a minute to the parent, subsequently which the parent leaves the room. The stranger stays with the infant for a few minutes, and and then the parent again enters and the stranger leaves the room. During the entire session, a video camera records the kid's behaviours, which are afterwards coded by trained coders.

In the foreign situation, children are observed responding to the comings and goings of parents and unfamiliar adults in their environments.

Lookout: "The Strange Situation" [YouTube]: http://www.youtube.com/lookout man?v=QTsewNrHUHU

On the basis of their behaviours, the children are categorized into 1 of four groups, where each group reflects a different kind of attachment relationship with the caregiver. A child with a secure attachment style usually explores freely while the mother is present and engages with the stranger. The child may be upset when the mother departs only is also happy to see the mother return. A child with an ambivalent (sometimes called insecure-resistant) attachment manner is wary about the state of affairs in full general, particularly the stranger, and stays close or even clings to the mother rather than exploring the toys. When the mother leaves, the child is extremely distressed and is clashing when she returns. The child may rush to the mother simply then fail to cling to her when she picks upward the child. A child with an avoidant (sometimes called insecure-avoidant) attachment style will avoid or ignore the female parent, showing picayune emotion when the female parent departs or returns. The child may run away from the female parent when she approaches. The child will not explore very much, regardless of who is at that place, and the stranger will not be treated much differently from the mother.

Finally, a kid with a disorganized zipper style seems to have no consistent mode of coping with the stress of the strange situation — the kid may cry during the separation merely avoid the female parent when she returns, or the child may approach the female parent just so freeze or fall to the floor. Although some cultural differences in zipper styles accept been institute (Rothbaum, Weisz, Pott, Miyake, & Morelli, 2000), inquiry has besides found that the proportion of children who autumn into each of the attachment categories is relatively constant across cultures (see Figure 7.7, "Proportion of Children With Different Attachment Styles").

Effigy 7.7 Proportion of Children With Different Zipper Styles. The graph shows the approximate proportion of children who have each of the 4 attachment styles. These proportions are fairly abiding across cultures. [Long Description]

You might wonder whether differences in attachment way are determined more by the child (nature) or more by the parents (nurture). Most developmental psychologists believe that socialization is primary, arguing that a child becomes securely attached when the female parent is available and able to run across the needs of the child in a responsive and appropriate manner, but that the insecure styles occur when the mother is insensitive and responds inconsistently to the child'south needs. In a direct test of this idea, Dutch researcher Dymphna van den Boom (1994) randomly assigned some babies' mothers to a training session in which they learned to improve respond to their children's needs. The research constitute that these mothers' babies were more likely to show a secure attachment style compared with the babies of the mothers in a command group that did not receive training.

Just the attachment behaviour of the child is also likely influenced, at least in function, by temperament, the innate personality characteristics of the infant. Some children are warm, friendly, and responsive, whereas others tend to be more than irritable, less manageable, and difficult to console. These differences may besides play a part in zipper (Gillath, Shaver, Baek, & Chun, 2008; Seifer, Schiller, Sameroff, Resnick, & Riordan, 1996). Taken together, information technology seems safe to say that attachment, like most other developmental processes, is affected by an interplay of genetic and socialization influences.

Inquiry Focus: Using a Longitudinal Research Design to Appraise the Stability of Zipper

You lot might wonder whether the zipper style displayed past infants has much influence later in life. In fact, research has found that the attachment styles of children predict their emotions and their behaviours many years afterwards (Cassidy & Shaver, 1999). Psychologists have studied the persistence of attachment styles over time using longitudinal inquiry designs — inquiry designs in which individuals in the sample are followed and contacted over an extended flow of time, oftentimes over multiple developmental stages.

In i such study, Waters, Merrick, Treboux, Crowell, and Albersheim (2000) examined the extent of stability and change in zipper patterns from infancy to early on adulthood. In their research, 60 middle-class infants who had been tested in the strange state of affairs at one year of age were recontacted twenty years afterward and interviewed using a measure of developed zipper. Waters and colleagues constitute that 72% of the participants received the same secure versus insecure zipper classification in early adulthood as they had received as infants. The adults who inverse categorization (usually from secure to insecure) were primarily those who had experienced traumatic events, such as the death or divorce of parents, severe illnesses (contracted by the parents or the children themselves), or physical or sexual abuse by a family member.

In addition to finding that people more often than not brandish the aforementioned zipper style over time, longitudinal studies have also found that the attachment classification received in infancy (as assessed using the strange situation or other measures) predicts many childhood and adult behaviours. Securely attached infants have closer, more harmonious relationships with peers, are less anxious and aggressive, and are amend able to understand others' emotions than are those who were categorized as insecure every bit infants (Lucas-Thompson & Clarke-Stewart, 2007). And deeply fastened adolescents also take more positive peer and romantic relationships than their less securely attached counterparts (Carlson, Sroufe, & Egeland, 2004).

Conducting longitudinal research is a very difficult task, but one that has substantial rewards. When the sample is large enough and the time frame long enough, the potential findings of such a written report can provide rich and important information about how people modify over time and the causes of those changes. The drawbacks of longitudinal studies include the cost and the difficulty of finding a big sample that can exist tracked accurately over time, and the fourth dimension (many years) that it takes to get the data. In addition, because the results are delayed over an extended menses, the enquiry questions posed at the start of the report may become less relevant over time as the research continues.

Cross-sectional research designs represent an culling to longitudinal designs. In a cross-sectional inquiry design, age comparisons are fabricated between samples of different people at different ages at one fourth dimension. In one example, Jang, Livesley, and Vernon (1996) studied two groups of identical and nonidentical (congenial) twins, 1 group in their 20s and the other group in their 50s, to determine the influence of genetics on personality. They found that genetics played a more significant role in the older group of twins, suggesting that genetics became more than pregnant for personality in later on adulthood.

Cross-sectional studies have a major advantage in that the scientist does non have to await for years to pass to get results. On the other hand, the estimation of the results in a cross-exclusive study is not equally clear as those from a longitudinal study, in which the same individuals are studied over time. Virtually of import, the interpretations drawn from cross-exclusive studies may be confounded past accomplice effects. Cohort effects refer to the possibility that differences in cognition or behaviour at two points in time may exist caused by differences that are unrelated to the changes in age. The differences might instead be due to environmental factors that affect an entire age grouping. For instance, in the report by Jang, Livesley, and Vernon (1996) that compared younger and older twins, accomplice furnishings might be a trouble. The 2 groups of adults necessarily grew up in different time periods, and they may have been differentially influenced by societal experiences, such every bit economic hardship, the presence of wars, or the introduction of new engineering science. As a result, it is difficult in cross-exclusive studies such as this one to determine whether the differences between the groups (e.g., in terms of the relative roles of environment and genetics) are due to historic period or to other factors.

Key Takeaways

• Babies are born with a variety of skills and abilities that contribute to their survival, and they also actively acquire by engaging with their environments.
• The habituation technique is used to demonstrate the newborn'south ability to remember and learn from experience.
• Children use both absorption and accommodation to develop functioning schemas of the world.
• Piaget's theory of cerebral development proposes that children develop in a specific series of sequential stages: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational.
• Piaget's theories take had a major touch on, only they accept also been critiqued and expanded.
• Social development requires the development of a secure base from which children feel gratuitous to explore. Attachment styles refer to the security of this base of operations and more than more often than not to the blazon of relationship that people, and especially children, develop with those who are of import to them.
• Longitudinal and cross-sectional studies are each used to test hypotheses about evolution, and each arroyo has advantages and disadvantages.

Exercises and Critical Thinking

1. Give an case of a situation in which you or someone else might testify cognitive absorption and cerebral accommodation. In what cases do you think each process is most likely to occur?
2. Consider some examples of how Piaget'due south and Vygotsky's theories of cognitive development might be used past teachers who are didactics young children.
3. Consider the attachment styles of some of your friends in terms of their relationships with their parents and other friends. Practice you recall their mode is secure?

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Image Attributions

Figure 7.ii: Adjusted from Wynn (1995).

Effigy 7.three: Jean Piaget past Anton Johansson, http://www.flickr.com/photos/mirjoran/455878802 used under CC By 2.0 license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/).

Effigy 7.5: "Toddler in mirror" past Samantha Steele (http://www.flickr.com/photos/samanthasteele/3983047059/) is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND two.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/two.0/act.en_CA). In that location'due south a monkey in my mirror" past Mor (http://world wide web.flickr.com/photos/mmoorr/1921632741/) is licensed under CC BY-NC ii.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/past-nc/2.0/deed.en_CA). "mirror mirror who is the most beautiful canis familiaris?" by rromer (http://www.flickr.com/photos/rromer/6309501395/) is licensed under CC Past-NC-SA 2.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/deed.en_CA).

Figure 7.6: Source: "Maternal Bail" past Koivth (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MaternalBond.jpg) is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike three.0 Unported (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/past-sa/3.0/human activity.en_CA). "An admirable dad" past Julien Harneis (http://world wide web.flickr.com/photos/julien_harneis/6342076964/in/photostream/) is licensed under CC BY-SA two.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/past-sa/2.0/deed.en_CA). "Szymon i Krystian" past Joymaster (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Szymon_i_Krystian_003.JPG) is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/human action.en_CA).

Long Descriptions:

Figure seven.7 long clarification: Childrens' Attachment Styles. lx% are secure. fifteen% are disorganized. 15% are avoidant. 10% are clashing. [Return to Effigy 7.7]

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Source: https://opentextbc.ca/introductiontopsychology/chapter/6-2-infancy-and-childhood-exploring-and-learning/

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