Development:

- What is the origin of moral thought? One view, looked at by Freud and Hobbes is that

we start off with unrestrained appetites, or like animals. Another view, held by

Rousseau is that we start off good and what happens is through culture.

- Next we will look at continuity, and the relationship between children and adults.

There's a lot of interest in the extent to which our adult natures, who we are was set in

stone, either at birth, because of genes or at least by the age of 3. Studies showed that

by 3, a 90 min interview can predict personality on standard scales, the quality of

personal relationships etc.  

- Finally, the question of cognitive development, which is, how much of what we know

now we're born with. Psychologists talk about three different views, one is empiricism

(starting off empty and learning through experience), nativism (we are born with a

rich powerful structure system in our brain), and constructivism (the idea of learning

and interaction with the environment makes us who we are).

Piaget:

- Jean Piaget was the founder of the modern study of developmental psychology. His

research program was genetic epistemology. Piaget wasn't interested in children,

rather, he was interested in the development of knowledge. Piaget believed that the

development of the species is repeated and recapitulated. He thought of children as

active thinkers and he described these understandings as schemas (mental

systems) which were frameworks that we build upon to acquire knowledge. For

Piaget, there were two psychological mechanisms: assimilation (the process of taking

in new information and new experiences and matching it up with an already existing

 schema) and accommodation (the process by which existing schemas are changed,

or new schemas are created, in order to fit the new information and new experience). 

- Piaget's method was to talk to children. He had interviews with them where he asked

them to solve problems and then question them thoroughly about the reasoning behind

their solutions. And this is an interesting view that children think in entirely different

ways than adults. Piaget believed that children have theories of the world, and

children's theories are very different from ours and so, he proposed that theories

transform and that you could capture development in terms of a series of stages.

Piaget Stages of Development:

- For Piaget, there were four distinct stages. The first is the sensorimotor stage (birth –

2). The baby gains information through the senses and through activities. The child

perceives and manipulates, but doesn't have any reasoning, sense of time or object

permanence (knowing an object exists even when out of sight). 

- The second stage, preoperational (ages 2 – 7). The baby is now a child and starting to

reason, they have object permanence, they can think and differentiate themselves

from others and they have a rudimentary understanding of time. They can reason, but

they can't reason into higher order away that we can. One illustration of this, is what

Piaget called egocentrism (meaning that children do not understand that other people

perceives things differently from them) which is one limitation. Another is that

children lack the concept of conservation (they are unable to see that if I have water in

a glass and I pour it into a bottle, that it’s the same amount).

- The next stage (7 – 12) is the concrete operational stage. At this point, the kid is pretty

sophisticated, less egocentricity, more logical thought, you don't have problems with
 conservation, but there's an inability to reason fully abstractly or fully

hypothetically. The child isn’t quite capable of scientific reasoning.

- Finally, formal operation (12 – adult). Unlike Freud, Piaget didn't believe that there

were further traumas, or troubles, or developments, or transformations as an adult. 

- In regard to Freud and Skinner that there were all sorts of concerns, including the

concern of falsifiability. But this is not a problem for Piaget, he made interesting and

falsifiable claims, he had a rich theoretical framework and he had striking findings.

But as science develops and we move away from initial theories as we get a better

understanding and Piaget's theories have some limitations. One limitation is

theoretical. So he talked about development in terms of assimilation and

accommodation, but he didn't really provided the theory of how, not at the

neurological level or a computational level, or at a structural level. Another critique is

methodological. Piaget interviewed children and but there are limitations of

Q&A. Children are not very verbal, they may say things to please an experimenter

and they really may not know the workings of their own mind. Finally, there's now a

large consensus within developmental psychology that Piaget may well have just been

mistaken about what children know. And if you test them in different ways you'll

discover that children, even babies, are far smarter than Piaget understood.

Methods for Studying Infants:

- We can make discoveries about the minds of babies by scanning the baby’s brain as

the baby is looking at some display or ruminating about something. Other methods

that don’t require scanning employs the use of things babies can do; sucking and

looking. For instance, if you want to know what a baby prefers to hear, you can give

them a pacifier to suck while listening to different sounds. The dominant method that
 people have used is looking. This works similarly to adults in that if something is

interesting, we tend to stare, whereas if something is boring or repetitive

(habituation), we lose interested and get distracted. By perking up when something

new or different happens, this indicates that we can distinguish this occurrence is not

the same as before. Babies also make inferences the same way adults do. Babies also

have some understanding of numbers.

- So, we've talked about babies understanding of the physical world and of number, but

now consider babies understand is social world of other people. We've long known

that babies have some sort of social adaptations. At Yale University, scientists have

designed an ingenious experiment that showed babies a morality play to determine

which stuffed animal they preferred. Keep in mind that the stuffed animals are

identical and the experimenter who allows the babies to choose between the stuffed

animals does not know which animal was good and which was bad. They wanted to

see if babies are born, good or bad. The fact is that about 70 percent of babies chose

the good animal. Paul believe that this is a sign that these babies are drawn

towards kindness and that this is a glimmer of a moral feeling.

How are children different from adults:

- In any adequate theory of development has to explain what kids know and what they

don't know. Also, there's other work since Piaget finding some really interesting

limitations on the part of children, and in particular on the part of children's social

reasoning. From about four and a half to five, children suddenly and rapidly get that

knowledge. They begin to think about other people's thoughts. They begin to think

that somebody can think something different from what they know, that people's

thoughts very are private and maybe incorrect. People can have false thoughts about
 something that they know to be true. Once you understand that, then you can explain

all sorts of things about why people do things which seem strange to you. It also

means then that you can understand how to surprise people, how to trick people

because once you've met the split between the mind and the world, then you can think

about people's minds and manipulate the way the world is. The gist of this is that up

until the age of about four or five, children don't understand something really

important about the minds of other people. They don't understand that other people

can have false beliefs. 

- So to test this, consider the Sally & Anne test. So first I introduced you to the

characters. This is Sally. Sally has a basket. This is Anne. Anne has a box. Sally has a

marble and Sally's going to put it in the basket. There's Anne, Anne's watching her put

into the basket. Then Sally leaves. Then Anne gets up, takes the marble out of the

basket and puts it in the box. Now Sally returns and she wants to play with her

marble. So question, where will Sally look for her marble? 

- Now, I bet what you will say being a sophisticated neurologically intact adult

is, ''She'll look in the basket, that's where she put it.'' But kids don't say that. Kids say,

she'll should look in the box because that's where it is. More generally, children have

a lot of problems realizing that other people could have beliefs about the world that

are false. 

Explanations for development:

- So how do we explain development? One set of explanation appeals to neural

changes, changes in the child's brain. It turns out that there is changes in the number

of neurons that you have through development. So a lot of what goes on in early brain
 development is pruning, the getting rid of neural connections and it's this that

somehow makes more advanced, more mature thought possible. Another aspect of

brain development is modernization. That is the myelin sheath around neurons that

makes them run faster and more effectively takes time to develop. The parts of the

brain are not fully developed until quite late in life. Particularly, the frontal lobes, and

this could be part the part of a child's problem since the frontal lobe has to do with

inhibition. More generally, a lot of the problems with kids behaviour might be

because they can't inhibit absolute dominant response. But then there's a more general

sort of theory compatible of neural development, which is that Piaget was

right, children really do think about the world differently from adults. Now one

criticism about Piaget is that there is vagueness as to how do you characterize this

difference.

- So development psychologists who are interested in developmental change are likely

to want to contrast to general views. One is that there are large scale changes between

childhood and being an adult. This was of course Freud's view and Piaget's view. But

there's an alternative. An alternative focuses on the idea that the brain contains

specific modules that is special systems in the head that are specialized for different

things. These systems have a lot of innate knowledge and they do develop, but their

development is constrained in special ways. 

- Autism, many of you are familiar with this, it is a disorder. People with this disability,

with this syndrome are often boys and the marks of it are a lack of social

connectedness, language impairment, you treat people like objects and so on. And this

has led to the theory that autism is caused by damaged module, is caused by a

damaged capacity for a social reasoning.

 - There's certain aspects of autism that can't be explained or at least can't be explained

easily through this theory. The idea proposed by Simon Baron-Cohen and others, is

that autism is caused by damage to a social reasoning module. And what's interesting

in support of this is that individuals, even who are otherwise high functioning

individuals of autism tend to fail at exactly those tasks that tab social reasoning. So

just like you average four years old or your average three years old will fail at salient

task, your average adult with autism even if he or she is otherwise pretty high

functioning might also fail. So one debate is whether a modular view can best

characterize the course of development as opposed to a sort of more large scale theory

like that of Piaget or Carey. Another question is if there are modules, what are

they? A third question since there are differences between the minds of children and

adults, what role does language play?

Development:

- Since infants and small children cannot communicate like adults, specific research

methods have to be used when studying them. They are classed into three groups:

involuntary or obligatory responses, voluntary responses and psychophysiological

responses.

- Involuntary or obligatory responses refer to the reactions that naturally occurs. For

instance in children, these include their natural heart rate when they hear their

mother’s voice or their tendency to look around. Testing on children can be done

through habituation (children will look away when bored). They also used violation of

expectation paradigm (infants are expected to react in a certain way because some

condition goes against what they believe should happen) to test object permanence
 and the solidity principle (which is that two solid objects cannot occupy the same

space at the same time).

- Researchers study voluntary responses of children in many ways. For instance, they

test recall memory by using elicited imitation. The infant is shown two or three steps,

and different aged infants are tested to see how long and how well they recall the

steps.

- The psychophysiological method is placing a stretchy cap with electrodes on the

subject’s head to measure tiny electrical signals (event related potentials) on the

infant’s scalp when shown different stimuli. These signals are amplified in order to be

analysed. Psychophysiological methods can also include measuring heart rate or

hormone levels.

- Since infants are limited in the developmental information they can provide about

themselves, their parents/guardians usually complete parent report forms to indicate if

their child has any behavioural, sleep or aggression problems.

- Interviews with children allow them to describe the world as their own experiences.

- Longitudinal studies can be used to study infants. One disadvantage of longitudinal

studies is the possibility of attrition, which is that some participants may drop out of

the study. In addition, the practice effect may occur where participants who repeat the

same activity over time naturally become good at it, hence the results are skewed.

Finally, cohort effects may occur where results are influenced based on the time in

history that the study was done.

- Cross sectional research design is where participants who are different ages are

studied at the same time. The practice effect does not occur here, however results

from these tests cannot be used to explain development.

- Sequential research designs refer to using both longitudinal and cross-sectional.

Language

- What do I mean by language? And when I talk about language, at least for this

beginning phase, I mean systems like English and Dutch and French and Navajo and

Mandarin and so on. Now, you could use language in other ways. You could use the

word language to describe animal communication or music or any communication

system you want. 

Basic facts about knowledge:

- Languages share their extraordinary expressive power. On the other hand, something

which is also obvious is the languages are different, they sound different. One

observation about language comes from Charles Darwin who wrote, “Man has an

instinctive tendency to speak as we see in the babble of our young children, while no

child has an instinctive tendency to bake, brew, or write." 

- Every human society has language. One interesting source of evidence here is a

phenomenon known as creolization, and so creolization in its standard case involves

people who are involved in the slave trade who would bring together and mix slaves

and labourers from different language backgrounds. What often happens is they

develop a makeshift jargon which is called a pidgin, which involve strings of words

borrowed from the language of the plantation owners, often from people's own native

tongues. Now, the question which arises is, what would the children in these societies

come to know? And you might imagine well, you're exposed to a pidgin, you'll learn a

 pidgin. But this isn't actually what happens. What's interesting is children are built so

that they take this non-linguistic system as rudimentary system and transform it into a

real language with syntax and morphology and phonology.

- So, what else can we say about language? Well, when linguists talk about

language, they say that language has the property of creativity and this can mean

different things. It is often used to describe special abilities and that's not what we're

talking about here. If asked to say a sentence that nobody has ever said before, you

would understand it and you've never heard it before. This suggests that language

understanding, language comprehension, language production, can't just be a matter

of rote memory. You have to have some way of taking strings of words that are put

together in order you've never heard before and making sense out of them. 

- So how do we do this? Well, we do this through rules and principles. We have these

abstract and unconscious rules in our heads that let us take strings of words and make

sense of them. You don't even know you have them that allow you to figure out the

virtually infinite strings of sentences you could be exposed to. 

Phonology –

- Phonemes are the building blocks of language. Phonology is the branch of linguistics

that studies them. English has about 44 phonemes. As you can tell, since there's only

26 letters in the English written language, therefore, phonemes and letters don't match

up one-to-one. It turns out there's a universal body of phonemes, and different

languages select from them. Now, when you learn a language, you have to learn what

phonemes your language has and the rules and principles through which the
 phonemes can combine. This helps you know what in your language is a possible

word and what isn't. You have to figure out how to segment speech into words. 

- But the problem is that when you listen to a language right now or as a baby, there are

no obvious cues to where one word begins and another one ends. There's an illusion

caused by the fact that you already know the words. So, once you know what the

words are when people say them in a stream, your mind inserts gaps between

them. This is one reason why language learning is so difficult, and it's one reason why

phonology, even the most basic aspect of language, poses some very interesting

puzzles.

Morphology –

- Morphology is the aspect of language that deals with words, or more precisely with

morphemes. The idea is that language works on a principle where anything can

connect to anything else. A sign is arbitrary in that sense. A morpheme is the smallest

meaningful unit. You can't infer the meaning of a morpheme, it's arbitrary and you

have to learn it. You can combine morphemes to make words. 

Syntax -

- Syntax was described as the infinite use of finite media. What we have in language is

a set of distinct symbols, say words or phrases and rules that order these

symbols, giving rise to the possibility of infinite production of symbol strings, what's

called a recursion. The fact that our language is governed by rules that generate

different possibilities leads to all sorts of things leads to ambiguity. A lot of linguists
 are interested in the legal implications of language and interpretation of language as in

the interpretations of legislation.

Language Acquisition -

- How is it that we get from a baby who doesn't know any language, all the way

through an adult who does know language? Now, one radical perspective proposed by

the linguist Noam Chomsky is nativism which is the idea that we're born with a lot of

knowledge, a lot of knowledge is innate. It's clear that language development does

involve learning, that is, it's impossible to explain how we come to know

language without accepting that we pick up the way others around us speak. This has

to be the case, because language differs. 

- So, consider in English, there's a phonetic distinction between L and R. The other

languages don't make this distinction. Some languages have a sound that will

distinguish certain words. Other languages just use tonal distinctions to make

distinction in words and English doesn't have those. Another thing is part of what is to

know a language is to learn the meanings of words, morphology. Finally, there's

syntax. So, in English, if you wanted to say that Bill hit John, you'd say in this order,

Bill hit John. But in fact, other languages just do it differently. Some languages would

say, Bill hit John, by saying, Bill John hit, or even John hit Bill, where the phrases are

in different order to capture the same meaning. All of this phenology, morphology

and syntax has to be learned. 

- More interestingly, there are specific impairments of language. Things can happen

like brain damage, or trauma, or stroke, or as a child as an a developmental

 disorder, or a genetic disorder, that could leave you bereft of language. This supports

the idea that language is to some degree special, it is not reducible to other human

capacities. 

- Also, on the theme of learning, language is learned, children learn language by

absorbing the language around them, that much has to be true. But, it doesn't seem as

if any teaching, certainly any reinforcement or punishment plays a critical role. So,

what do we know about language development? 

- So, the child's born and when a child is born, he or she likes listening to his or her

own language. What's particularly cool is very early on, children can discriminate all

the Phonemes of natural language. What's really cool is, this capacity goes away. A

baby can make distinctions, can hear distinctions that you can't. This capacity you

start off oversensitive and then we whittled down our sensitivity until we're

just understanding the distinctions made in their own language. Around age seven

months starts babbling. Fascinatingly, deaf children learning sign language also

babble,they babble with their hands.Around a year and a half, the kid starts to increase

the rate of learning words, produces two word sentences, what's called a telegraphic

speech. Telegrams used to be ways to communicate where each word you used was

very expensive, so you wouldn't say, "Oh, I'm traveling through Spain and I've lost

my wallet please send me money right now", you'd say, "Spain-lost-wallet-need-

money." That's how kids talk early on, as if words are very expensive. 

- Language continues to develop, then at some certain point, it becomes more difficult

to learn a language and people are rarely fully successful. This is true both for second

languages and also studies of deaf children learning sign language for first

languages. The older you start, past about age three, the less good you are. 
Language and Thought -

- Do other animals possessed the same sort of language? In my own sense and I think

I'm capturing the sense of the feel here is that the answer's no. Other creatures have

rich communication systems, but they're different from human communication

system. You have animals that have a finite list of calls, like verve monkeys, you have

animals that use a continuous analogue signal like bees, and then you have random

variations on the theme as in birdsong. But what you don't find is phonology,

morphology, syntax, arbitrary names, recursive syntax, and so on. I think a theory

more grounded in evolution would predict that each animal would have its own

evolve communication system. 

- A further topic is language processing. The issue is, how much does your knowledge

of language and your expectation of language influence your perception of it? We

actually spoke about this before when we talked about word segmentation that is the

gaps aren’t really there.

- Finally, the relationship between language and thought. So, plainly, language can be

used to convey our thoughts. "Does the language you learn change the way you

think? The second question is a more general one, is language necessary for abstract

thought? So, think about all the things that are uniquely human; logic, rich

mathematics, complicated social structures, cultural learning, extraordinary

technology and humans also have language. My perspective is this. There are a lot of

studies looking at false belief tasks, The Sally-Anne task, which involved inferring

that other people have knowledge of the world that's false. 

- I'll quote Stanislas Deheane who's one of the world's leading scholars in the study of

number, who writes, "Without symbols, we may not discriminate eight from

nine." But with the help of our elaborate numerical notations, that is language, we can

express thoughts as precise as the speed of light. Therefore without language, we

couldn't just express the thoughts we can't even think them. Here's what creatures

without language such as babies and chimpanzees don't know. They don't know

precise numerical relationships. They don't know for instance, that 8 plus 8 equals

16. It might be, in order to understand that 8 plus 8 equals 16, you need a symbol

system that allows you to reason about the specific high numbers. That is a creature

without language could never come to such a conclusion.