 I'm studying. Don't attempt to read it all you'll be wasting your time. (Unless you want some education in developmental psych and can decipher my thinking patterns you're more than welcome to try.)...Not that many ppl read anything more than a paragraph... just making a disclaimer for those ppl who like a challenge. What dumbasses.  Deprivation and Enrichment in children (lecture 11) So in the nature nuture debate of developmental psychology, psychologists wondered if enrichment or deprivation had an effect on a child's development. (kind of a stupid question in my opinion) Well. I guess the ultimate gainwould have beento find the "ideal" condition to raise a child. Every mom wants a super baby. So there are several studies conducted. Cotwin studies are good because having monozygotic (identical) twins rules out the possibilties of genetic differences in a measured development over time. A big study by Myrtle Mcgraw involved two children Jimmy and Johnny. (Her own sons!) Basically the life of these two boys was recorded from birth to age 22. But more importantly one of the sons, Johnny gets intensive training, like ... at age 1, he learns to roller blade, bike, swim, dive from ages birth - 2.5. Jimmy on the other hand is supposed to serve as a control, meaning he does nothing so he can be used as a neutral comparison. This is the big plus to co-twin studies, you can manipulate one and see what the difference would be. andoff topic i'mwondering if playing the piano is making the way i type ont he keyboard anymore different. i can't grasp the concept of having my wrists being more flexible.... anyway. so for 2.5 years they had one in intensive training andthe other with no training. but after all that they found the results to be inconclusive. 1. turns out they were fraternal twins 2. ... it hink that was the only reason. but we have to questiont he ethics of such a study. 1. one boy gets intensive training for 8 hours a day for 2.5 years upon birth? that''s crazy (actually in class they showed us a clip of johnny roller blading...it was weird to see a little kid rollerblade) And the other boy gets nothign. Actually he doesn't get nothign he gets DEPRIVATION!!! He was left in a crib for 8 hours a day to do nothing. Now that' snot even normal! 2. Also both children seemed to show similar timings of early developmental milestones. 3. when it came to doing tasks, Johnny could do them (like scaling a 70 degree incline) and Jimmy couldn't. Butyou have to wonder was it because Johnny was more developed? Or is it because Johnny is simply a professional test taker. I mean if you were left in a crib all day, then asked to scale a mountain would you know what to do? So maybe the problem was that Jimmy simply didn't know how to deal witht he obstacle he was confronted with. 4. Also it is unethical to try to get participants to join a study for the rewards. Basically parents in twin studies are told, Yeah you're children willl be taken care of and given special training while you work blahbalhbalh. It's kind of misleading. But 22 years of studying wasn't all to waste. On the upside, they managed to get a very good descriptions of early motor development. Wow that was a lot for Jimmy and Johnny. ________________________ in another cotwin study: for Del and Rey. The idea was that development was natural and was going to happen whether or not you gave children enrichment. So what they did was, they took two twins, Del and Ray (this is going to be a tragic story in case you didn't see it coming) and basically deprived them of anything. They strapped them down and left them supine in a crib all day long. They had no contact w/ them, but gave them sunlight and food (like a plant). And this went on for a year (2-14 months) At the end of the study, researchers claimed that they still developed at a normal pace, BUT in actuality, it was only for the first two months of motor development. But then at 6 months, they show decreased IQ. BOOO They were made stupider. MOREOVER, when the study was done, the mother didn't want her kids, so they were sent to an orphanage. And that was the sad ending to del and ray. The poitn was that not giving them any enrichment wa definitely a deprivation. The independent variable = lack of care. dependent variable = measures of development and IQ. AND ON TO SADDER THINGS. The Bucharest Early Intervention Project... takes place in... an orphanage in Russia i believe. (still going on now) Basically in this study, they managed to get 75 children into foster homes, and they wanted to watch the development of the kids as compared to normal kids (control) (DV: IQ, EQ, Physical devel, and brain Devel) of these children in different settings (IV) The conditions of the orphanage are TERRIBLE. not enough caregivers/child. Basically a lot of children are just crying...deprived of love... sitting in their filth. Some simply die from these conditions. And like i said, this is happening now. But in short the baseline of development for these kids were all very low. But those lucky few that got adopted (random selection) showed improvement across allt he conditions even though they were disadvantaged at baseline as compared to normal kids. On an upnote. it's not too late to change. all you need is an normal and stable environment. This leads onto the next question. Is there a critical period of development? Cuz it seems like these kids were deprived at some part, and they showed improvement, but will they ever be 100% normal? and to the big Q: CAN WE MAKE A SUPER BABY. ANSWER: No. You'd think that there would be a way right? With all those baby einstein toys... and all those asian parents sending their school to esl and math classes at age 2? (actually language is better if enforced early) well there was a myth that from ages 0-3 that there is a critical period, in which the baby is like a sponge and can absorb things at an amazing rate. This myth spawned off.... not rumors but from NEUROSCIENCE, maybe that's why it's so hard to extinguish. So in a study by Huttenlocher, who took the brains of LOTS OF DEAD PEOPLE over a span of ages and counted how many synapses they had in their brain, he found that there were significantly more synapses in children from age 0-3 than any other age. Infact it decreases steadily as we get older and finally plateus at age 16. (no more synapses for us) HOWEVER: there is absolutely no evidence that synapses are tied with intelligence or learning. if anything, having too many synapses has been tied with BAD things like fragile x syndrome. We are born with more synapses than we'll ever need and having the unneeded ones die out is completely normal....also i think this statement has been disproved by the fact that we are still learning things at this age, when we're clearly not developing more synapses. MOREOVER... the subjects for these basis are DEAD. Clearly development has failed them... Being compared to rats is one thing, but being compared to something DEAD, is a completely different thing. (i believe this is a correlational study?) -------------------------- So from jimmy andjohnny study and this hutenlocher study, i think it's pretty clear that super enrichment does not = super learning. If anything just normal stuff is good enough. In a study by Greenough, (he uses rats. still better than the dead) he finds that a normal envi is probably enriched enough. So he puts rats into 3 different conditions. (each condition is an independent variable) 1. isolation: alone in a cage (all of you with pets... maybe you should make a yard for your pet) 2. social: w/ other rats 3. complex: has the whole big foshizzle dealio in which they can do more than just...eat, sleep, run wheel, and so on and so forth. Resutls show that the complex rats had the best outcome. They were sacrified for the good of science, and their synapse count was better than the others. (DV)(i know i just said synapses don't matter.. i dunno what my teacher means by this) I mean, i think that in most studies, ppl would have thought that complex = enrichment and thus, more stimulation = more development. But Greenough's point is that, what most other studies consider "a complex" and enriching setting is actually just barely comparable to what would be a normal environment. So alot of studies that have claimed that this extra training = better development but their operational definitions are actually OFF. cuz think about it. A rat in this study is okay...gettin' the works... (wow that sounds sexual) BUT in real life, a rat lives in a freaking subway (okay or in NY) it doesn't need those gerbil tubies to run thru. It's got subways whooshing by, mole ppl to avoid, alligators that got lost from the sewers... it's exciting! It' silke "AHH what's that who's that?" *think hansel when he was describing the orgy in zoolander* So the take home message here is: 1. DONT" KEEP YOUR PETS IN CAGES. THEY'LL HAVE LESS SYNAPSES. 2. A normal friendly environment is good enough for good development in most children. Just DON'T DEPRIVE them of stimuli. If you treat them like a plant, they WILL BE STUPIDER. 3. There is no critical period of rdevelopment. (except for maybe language. so speak to them in as many languages asyou know) ______________________________________ (jamie takes a bathroom break)______________
Next on to the man of the moment. PIAGET!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! He's some what controversial. But he was a good observer (i think...he's dead now...?) and he observed his 3 children and came out to several conclusions about several substatges in development. Keep in mind, his point was not very age focused, so lets let that slip. And like freud he made quite strong and controversial claims about children, but his results are all very testable and reliable. So even though his work may not be conceptually flawless, it inspired a lot of other studies. At this time the US was a bit behind on developemental psyc, but once his works were translated into english, there was a big boom. So yeah he's kind like freud in that he inspired a lot of controversy and by doing so shed more light on the stages of development of sensorimotor cogniton. He came up with a big big thign called stage theories. In brief it's basically goes as... 4 stages. 1. sensorimotor stages 2. preoperational stages 3. concrete operations 4. formal operations 1. mental reps 2. manipulate multiple mental reps. 3. manipulate logical/abstract mental rep 4. now you can do it all. You have logical thinking. you are a piaget. (sensorimotor has 6 substages) Sensorimotor is roughly 0-2 ages. But wait! How do we measure children's responses. I mean children are difficult as subjects. Well, basically you have to figurre them out with 1. observations 2. concentric clinical methods. That is, if the kids give you an answer, you have to ask them to explain themselves and tailor your responses to their answers. (it can't be too cold.) Stage theories are very.... abrupt and discontinuous. it's very distinctive and qualitative cuz it has a start-end poitn. Each stage can be substaged. So ti's very like, one day you can't do it, the next day you can do it all! And when you can do one thing, it applies across the board! And while the ages for development doesn't matter, the order in which it happens is critical, you cannot skip stages or revert back to stages. Waht's developing is the structure ofyour mind, the content you're learning doesn't reallly matter in the long run. It also brings about equilibrium, when you don't understand something, you'll be conflicted and youll deal with the problem. If you encounter new info it wil be assimilated to your schemes and if it doesn't work,you will try to accomodate your scheme to the new info, and if it dstill doesn't work then you'll adopt a new scheme (this is when you progress to the next level) and studdenly your world will make sense again. (motto: If it ain't broke, dont' fix it) Of course there are argumetns against it. LIke the mali babies for example. these babies could walk before they could crawl. And clearly stages can overlap! You can walk and crawl or go back and forth depending on yoru need. The goal is to beable to holda mental representations and manipulate them, so you can construct the reality around you and make sense of the world around you. back to the first stage: sensorimotor stage = bundle of reflexes the goal of this stage is to obtain mental representations. studies usually use object permanence as the construct. (or deferred imitation) cuz if you can remember waht happened, or know somethignh is there once it's gone, the concept is still in your head. 1. out of sight out of minds. reflex blob. no idea what's going on. just react birth - 1 mo 2. primary circular reaction. egocentric: all about own body. 1- 4 3. secondary circular reaction. Contingent reinforcement. (i'll start doign things cuz i like it!) Tapping into outside world with self 4-8 4. old secondary circular reation in new scheme. beginning to understand some schemes = some consequences. 8-12 5. tertiary reaction. "baby scientist" beginning to see what happens when you throw your sppoon ont he floor. 12 - 18 6. has true mental representatoins 18-24 Mental representations: how do we represent them? well 1. object permanence 2. deferred imitation are ways to measure them. so these following studies will be as. DEFERRED IMITATION: 1. Field, Meltzoff, and Jones. Field's study had kids in substage...1? (neotnatal) exhibit imitation. (which means they do have mental representatiosn) the independent variable is making various faces the dependent variable is whether or not the children will copy and match produce the results. It's not neonatal imitation, but they still copy them. ?? not deferred imitation.... somehow. (id ont' really get this actually.) then by meltzoff, they took this dude with a bizzarly long tongue. i'm going to look for an image now.
Oh she made it sound obscenely long. (also she showed us videos where this study was not THAT explicit. infact somtimes kids barely stuck their tongue out and they counted it.... so yeah. i doubt those faces were the actual results) OKAY I"m gonna study off notes now. getting lazy. | 
