Sociocultural Approaches to Infant Development: Perception, Action, and Cognition - Prof. , Study notes of Developmental Psychology

Download Sociocultural Approaches to Infant Development: Perception, Action, and Cognition - Prof. and more Study notes Developmental Psychology in PDF only on Docsity! 1. Sociocultural Theories-Approaches 2. Focus on the contribution of other people and the surrounding culture to children’s developmentinfluence is continuous 3. Emphasize guided participation 4. Present interactions as occurring in a b roader sociocultural context that includes cultural tools which are continuous influences 5. Vygotskychildren as social beings, intertwined with other people who are eager to help them gain skills and understanding 6. Humans are seen as unique because of their inclination to each other and to learn from each other 7. Social Scaffoldinga process in which more competent people provide a temporary framework that supports children’s thinking at a higher level than children could manage on their own, quality that people provide tends to increase as people become older and gain experience 8. Zone of Proximal Developmentrefers to the range of performance between what children can do unsupported and what they can do with optimal support 9. Dynamic Systems Theories-Child is a well integrated system 10. Emphasize how varied aspects of the child function as a single, integrated whole to produce behaviorrelations among motor activities, attention and other aspects of children’s behavior 11. Centrality of actionpervasive emphasis on how children’s specific actions shape their development 12. Thinking shapes action and action shapes thinking 13. Self organizationview development as a process of self-organization 14. Self organization involves bringing together and integrating components as needed to adapt to a continuously changing environment 15. Organizational process is something called soft assembly because the components and their organization change from moment to moment and situation to situation  Development of Perception and Action  Infants’ initial skills, and the experiences they allow infants to have provide the seeds for the development of the more complex and flexible skills seen by the end of the first year of life  Sensationprocessing of basic information from external world in through sensory organs (eyes, ears, skin etc)  Perceptionprocess of organizing and interpreting sensory information  Studying visual perception:  Habituationrepeatedly present infant with one stimulus until response declines, then present novel stimulus and see if looking time recovers  Preferential lookingshow infant two objects, see if infant has a preference for one over the other, means that infant can discriminate between the two objects and understand they are different, can also attribute preference to previous experience (toy they always play with vs new toy they’ve never seen)  Visual Acuity-like to look at patterns, can see high contrast  Object segregation, pattern perception, perceptual constancy, depth perception, pictorial representations TEXTBOOK  Auditory perception-well develop at birth, approaches adult levels between 5 and 8 years  Can do auditory localization  Can perceive differences in human speech  Tastediscriminate between sweet, bitter and salty tastes  Prefer sweet  Taste buds become more localized with experience  Smellinfants very sensitive to odors  Can discriminate familiar odors with experience  Touchinfants learn about environment through active touch  Intermodal perceptionthe combining of information from two or more senses is present from very early in life  Very young infants link sight and sound, oral and visual experience, tactile experience, etc  Reviewnewborns biologically prepared for sensory stimulation, actual experiences shape development of perceptions  ActionReflexesinnate fixed patterns of action that occur in response to particular stimulation TEXTBOOK  Motor milestonesnormally developing children vary considerably in when they reach motor milestones, experience and genetics play a role  Reachingpre-reaching, intentional reaching, increased precision and accuracy in reaching  Experience plays a rolephysical maturation makes intentional reaching possible, but intentional efforts, practice and experience transform it into a refined motor skill  Locomotionwalking depends on the ability to integrate many systems-upright posture, leg alternation, weight shifting, sense of balance  Previously believe to be an element of neurological maturity  Current theories take a dynamic systems approachemphasize many factors  Action as Organizer of Perception  Locomotion can affect other aspects of development  Perception does not equal understanding (problem solving etc)  Visual cliffself locomotors develop a fear of heights only after they finish crawling  Shows links between perception and locomotion as well as cognitive abilities emotion, and the social context  Onset of walking affects the way babies understand their perceptual understanding and compensating for changes in spatial orientations, using visual information to control posture  Infant Cognition  Learning