Videos to help you review

Availability Heuristic

Are planes for dangerous than cars?
Should you change your answer on a test?
Erik Erikson's Stages of Psychosocial Development

Conservation task

Infant temperament

Fa'afafine - Samoan boys brought up as girls

We're Only Human...: The "Super Uncles" of Samoa

Charting the Pacific - Fa'afafine - Samoan boys brought up as girls

Intelligence

Intelligence Testing

Alfred Binet developed the first intelligence test in 1904 (for what purpose?)

Original formula for calculating IQ

(Why would this formula underestimate the intelligence of older children?)



Normal distribution – Bell-shaped curve describing the spread of a characteristic throughout a population

Normal range – Scores falling in (approximately) the middle two-thirds of a normal distribution



Mental retardation –Often conceived as representing the lower 2% of the IQ range

Giftedness –Often conceived as representing the upper 2% of the IQ range

Savant syndrome: can be seen in individuals who have a remarkable talent in one area, while often mentally slow in others

Spearman's "g" (general intelligence)

Sternberg's Triarchic Theory

• Practical Intelligence
  
• Logical Reasoning


• Experiential Intelligence

Gardner's Multiple Intelligences

• Linguistic


• Logical-mathematical


• Spacial


• Musical


• Bodily-kinesthetic


• Interpersonal


• Intrapersonal

Heritability – Amount of trait variation within a group that can be attributed to genetic differences

Eugenics: a philosophy and a political movement that encouraged biologically superior people to intervreed and sought to discourage biologically inferior people from having offspring

Black Intelligence Test of Cultural Homogeneity

Nature versus Nurture

Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select – doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors. I am going beyond my facts and I admit it, but so have the advocates of the contrary and they have been doing it for many thousands of years.

John B. Watson

This statement expresses John Watson's belief that environment was everything in human development. He was saying could take any (essentially normal) baby and determine who and what that child would become--provided that he was able to have complete control over all elements of that child's environment.

Do you agree or disagree with Watson's idea that if it were possible (legal, ethical, etc.) to have complete control over all aspects of an infant's environment, you really could raise any child to enter whatever profession you chose for him or her?

This is going to be a discussion board topic. One thing I'd like you to start to think about is how one might go about Watson's unlikely experiment. If you wanted to raise a child to be a doctor--or a thief--what kind of environment would you set up? Think about things that might be done at the family level, choice of school, wider community and role models, and anything else you think might shape a child's destiny.

Developmental Psychology

Theoretical Issues: Ongoing Debates

• Nature versus Nurture
• Continuity versus Stages






• Stability versus Change

Prenatal development

• Germinal period





• Embryonic period

Fetal period

Early motor development

Cognitive Development

Schema –cognitive structures or patterns consisting of a number of organized ideas that grow and differentiate with experience

Assimilation – absorbing new information into existing schemas

Accommodation – adjusting old schemas or developing new ones to better fit with new information

Piaget's Stages of Cognitive Development

Sensorimotor stage

Birth to about age 2
Child relies heavily on innate motor responses to stimuli
Mental representations


Object permanence

Preoperational stage

--About age 2 to age 6 or 7
--Marked by well-developed mental representation and the use of language

Egocentrism (video)

Animistic thinking




Concrete Operational Stage
--About age 7 to about age 11
--Child understands conservation but is incapable of abstract thought


Conservation

Formal Operational Stage

--From about age 12 on
--Abstract thought appears


Theory of Mind

Imprinting (Konrad Lorenz)

Harlow's attachment study

Mary Ainsworth's Strange Situation

Temperament –An individual’s characteristic manner of behavior or reaction

Socialization –The lifelong process of shaping an individual’s behavior patterns, values, standards, skills, attitudes and motives to conform to those regarded as desirable in a particular society

Most approaches to child rearing fall into one of the following four styles:

Authoritarian parents: parenting style emphasizing control and obedience

Authoritative parents: parenting style blending respect for a child's individuality with an effort to instill social values

Permissive parents: parenting style emphasizing self-expression and self-regulation

Uninvolved parents

Erikson’s Psychosocial Stages (see handout)

Kohlberg’s Stages of Moral Reasoning

I. Preconventional morality
II. Conventional morality
III. Postconventional (principled) morality

Thinking

Concept: mental representation of a group or category that shares similar characteristics

Natural concepts: formed by everyday experiences "I know one when I see one"

Prototype: a "good example" of a concept--one that comes to mind easily

Artificial concepts: formed by logical, specific rules

We organize much of our declarative memories into concept hierarchies


Algorithms: Problem-solving procedures or formulas that guarantee a correct outcome if applied correctly



Heuristics: Cognitive strategies used as shortcuts to solve complex mental tasks; do not guarantee a correct solution (some examples include working backwards, searching for analogies, and breaking the problem into smaller problems)

Obstacles to problem solving

Mental set: Tendency to respond to a new problem in the manner used for a previous problem

Functional fixedness: Inability to perceive a new use for an object associated with a different purpose



Confirmation bias: Ignoring or finding fault with information that does not fit our opinions, and seeking information with which we agree

Hindsight bias: tendency, after learning about an event, to believe that one could have predicted the event in advance

Availability heuristic: Faulty heuristic strategy that estimates probabilities based on information that can be recalled from personal experience

Links from the Web Resources for this chapter from the Student Companion Site to Psychology in Action

Concept Mapping Homepage

Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition

Memory

Memory – Any system – human, animal, or machine – that encodes, stores, and retrieves information

Human memory is good at

• Information on which attention is focused
• Information in which we are interested
• Information that arouses us emotionally
• Information that fits with our previous experiences
• Information that we rehearse

Encoding: Involves modification of information to fit the preferred format of the memory system

Elaboration: Type of encoding in which meaning is added to information in working memory so that it may be more easily stored and retrieved

Storage: Involves retention of encoded material over time

Access and retrieval: Involves the location and recovery of information from memory



Sensory memory: Preserves brief sensory impressions of stimuli, also called sensory register

Testing sensory (iconic) memory
George Sperling's study



Iconic (visual) and echoic (auditory) sensory memory

Chunking: organizing pieces of information into a smaller number of meaningful units (or chunks)



Maintenance rehearsal: Process in which information is repeated or reviewed to keep it from fading while in working memory

Elaborative rehearsal: Process in which information is actively reviewed and related to information already in LTM

Levels-of-processing theory: Explanation for the fact that information that is more thoroughly connected to meaningful terms in LTM will be better remembered
(deeper processing=better memory)

Long term memory - Stores material organized according to meaning, also called LTM



Anterograde amnesia –Inability to form memories for new information

Retrograde amnesia –Inability to remember information previously stored in memory



Flashbulb memory: a clear and vivid long-term memory of an especially meaningful and emotional event



Implicit memory – Memory that was not deliberately learned or of which you have no conscious awareness

Explicit memory – Memory that has been processed with attention and can be consciously recalled

Recall – Technique for retrieving explicit memories in which one must retrieve previously presented information (example: fill in the blank test, seeing a picture of someone and remembering his/her name)

Recognition – Technique for retrieving explicit memories in which one must identify present stimuli as having been previously presented or learned (example: multiple choice test)

Encoding specificity principle –The more closely the retrieval clues match the form in which the information was encoded, the better the information will be remembered

Mood congruent memory: A happy moods is likely to trigger happy memories, depression perpetuates itself through biased retrieval of depressing memories

Forgetting

Transience: long-term memories gradually fade in strength over time

Absent-mindedness: Forgetting caused by lapses in attention

Proactive interference: previously stored information prevents learning and remembering new information

Retroactive interference: newly learned information prevents retrieval of previously stored material



Serial position effect: items in the middle of a sequence are less well remembered than items presented first or last (includes primacy effect and recency effect)

Persistence: difficulty putting unwanted memories out of one’s mind

Mnemonics – Techniques for improving memory, especially by making connections between new material and information already in long-term memory

Natural language mediators: words associated with new information to be remembered

Flash presentation
(on recall, recognition, and relearning)

Links from the Web Resources for this chapter from the Student Companion Site to Psychology in Action

Improving your memory

Tips and techniques for memory enhancement

Using memory principles to enhance your study skills

Elizabeth Loftus Homepage

New links (as of February 14)

Lecture on the classic study of eyewitness testimony by Loftus and Palmer

When Memory Lies (Elizabeth Loftus creates a false memory in Alan Alda)

Language and Intelligence Videos

Scientific American Frontiers