Eeh, yeah, I'm still wearing the T-shirt, it's not the next day though, it's the same day. So, you, you can wear the same T-shirt twice on the same day, that's. Okay. Anyway, lecture four. want we're going to do, and what we're kind of doing a little bit in week eight is, you know, playing off of the vibe of, of your requests. I'm trying to organize some of this material according to, in a way, things that you might finds as complete chapters in a full psychology course. So, for example, we just did the, Altered States of Consciousness. There is typically a consciousness chapter. For the next two lectures, we're going to talk about issues that would be in what would be called a developmental psych chapter. So, I mean just to give you a, a general, bigger picture of developmental psych. It's really focused on how, the mind and, and how a human's interaction with the world, develops in both the infant to adult. Stages you know, how do we actually grow to have the capabilities we have and, and the ability to think about the world as we do. And also more and more recently, on the let's say the other side of the over the hill, hill. as you know people reach older adulthood what sort of changes occur as they move into old age. So, it's really about the transition, or changes in mind. In cognitive abilities. at both the young and the older level. Now, we're [SOUND] not going to spend so much time talking about the older level. But I mean, just to give you a sense. Issues like Alzheimer's disease or what's called normal dementia. We all have a normal tendency we all have to become forgetful. [INAUDIBLE] you were older especially if you are retired. You'll probably forgetful mostly because. You don't have to pay attention to things the way you used to. When you were working and you had to pick up the kids after work and you had to remember to get x, y and z at the groceries. And oh, pay this bill or that and [INAUDIBLE] you know, when, when you are in the full throws of adulthood. Your memory is kept constantly busy by all these things you have to remember but once you retire, those pressures kind of leave. and your style of interacting with the world seems to change sometimes in some positive ways. Generally older people become much more creative. and, and they enjoy aesthetics and beauty a lot more. But one of the costs are that they often have memory, failures memory problems. They don't encode information as well anymore. So, its a transition its a trade off. Alright so, that's a sense of the older side. Alright, in the next two lectures we are going to spend more time though focusing on the younger side of things. partly because that's perhaps where our theories are most well developed. plus there's some really cool, interesting, neat examples, and I know a lot of you have children. Heck, some of you are children. Um, [LAUGH] I looked at the demographics the other day and the number of under 14 year olds in this class is surprising. It's, it's very cool. Welcome. so we'll be talking a little bit about that younger stage of things. Alright? And we're going to do it across two lectures. This first lecture is really going to focus on cognitive development. The next lecture will focus on the link between parent and child. what sometime's called attachment. Alright? So, here we are, week 8, lecture 4, Stages of Development. Alright, so, the face of developmental psychology is this gentleman right here, Jean Piaget. a Frenchman, a psychologist. educator. In fact, a lot of his work, a lot of his driving force, and I have great respect for him because of this, was, was about enhancing education. he really wanted to understand how we could better educate the masses. but that led him to developmental psychology because he started to. He came to the realization that, children view the world differently than we do. And, there seemed to be stages you could look at where the way they view the world changes in some systematic way. In fact he had this notion that, they have to reach. A certain ability. The, there's a certain ability with each of these stages that they have to grasp, and until they grasp that, they can't reach the next level. And so that they're, they're going through these distinct stages of development, and he felt you had to understand what stage a child was at, in order to properly educate them. You could not just treat them like little adults. it just won't work, because they don't think like little adults. So, he spent a lot of his life describing these stages. But unlike, for example, Sigmund Freud, he also tried to come up with very clear objective tests and you're going to see some children doing some of these tests in the, in the links that I give you at the end of this. And it's really kind of fascinating, it's really kind of cool. It's like we've seen all this, but we never really appreciated what we were seeing, and, and Piaget really made us appreciate that. So, Piaget ultimately felt there were four stages, and, and many of us remain, and it says 12 to15, but, hey, many of us are still in this final stage, so, we will get to that. He had one stage which he called the sensory motor, at ages birth to two years old. preoperational from two to seven, concrete operational from seven to 12 and then formal operational, which should just say 12 on, it shouldn't really have that 15 year old [SOUND] boundary. Now he, he named these based on what he saw as the primary challenges that a child faces in these different ages. So, let's just kind of go through these a little bit. Sensory motor. Piaget thought the main challenge facing an infant and you know, up to a toddler is interacting with the world around it. I mean literally from infancy a child's vision is very poor for example. One of the first things they have to learn, their system has to learn is how to operate their pupils properly. as, as you know now when bright lights [INAUDIBLE] our pupils constrict and let less eye, less light in the eye. When it's darker they dilate, almost lost that word, letting more light in the eye. But that reflex, is not a reflex from birth. The eye has to kind of learn how to do that and before it does that, the, the child is, child's vision is very blurry. As its whole optic tract is developing, its vision becomes sharper and sharper and sharper. So, the sensory stuff is important. obviously sounds are very important. a child at birth know its mother's voice. It already has a memory. It's heard the mother resonating through her body so often. that it knows that voice and will orient to the mother. right away so has, has a auditory abilities but those abilities also develop. And of course, slowly, as it starts to get its motor abilities developed, as a child learns to grasp. And, and reach for things and then eventually crawl towards things and walk towards things. It starts to explore the world and so the claim is that in this stage, its priority is about learning about the world, the objects in it, its ability to manipulate. Those objects, so you know walking around a table to get to something. and, and so this is a very important stage now, what's some of the peculiarities of this stage are that the child in this stage really kind of views the world as what it sees. As what's around. and so, actually I think I have a slide on this so will kind of walk through these maybe I'll bounce back to this one every now and then. One of the critical things it has to learn, and one of these critical test it has to pass according to Piaget, is the notion of object permanence. That when it understands object permanence, it's made a cognitive. Leap. What's that mean? Object permanence is, well when you lack it, what that means is, if you don't see it, it isn't there. Okay? The idea you know, kind of think of it this way. That when you're in a room and somebody leaves the room, you and I don't think that person who left the room has ceased to exist. You know, we think they're just in the other room and they're going to come back however, the child, when you leave it's world, you're not in it's world. Okay, its like things do not have this permanency that we now, at our age, believe they have. Something only exists if the child can see it, smell it, touch it, etc. now in, in this slide I'm showing the, the mother playing this peekaboo, you know, peekaboo oh where'd I go, where'd I go, I'm not here, here I am. No I'm not. You know, sorry. [LAUGH] [INAUDIBLE] but, but that idea is that simply by covering. Your face, to the child, you have disappeared. You the person, I mean, you, there's a person still there, but that, the identity of that person is now gone. Oh, where's mommy? There she is. Daddy. Daddy, not mommy. There he is. Okay, daddies don't do these games very well. now there'll been some kind of interesting tests of object permanence. One of them is, is a quite a simple one. You take a toy that a child really likes. And if you put that, and this would be, okay, this child is very young. But when this child gets a little older. And is able to grasp and reach and maybe even crawl a little bit for things. If you take a toy that they want, and you just leave it out, the child will probably. Crawl after it, and go after it. But sometimes, if you take that toy. Put it out somewhere, and put a blanket over it. Then the child is not drawn to it, okay? As soon as you put the blanket over it, it's gone. The child isn't interested in it. It's only interested in the things it can see. And, in fact, an important stage is when the child does go after. Even when you've covered it. So, when the child shows you, oh no, I know it's there okay it's, it's, it's. It's there, it's just under that thing, it still exists. So, they crawl towards it, they pull the blanket off, and I take the toy. At that point we think they have grasped the concept of object permanence, and that kind of marks the end of the sensory motor. Stage. So, that means they've kind of passed through that. They are now, let me go back, entering the preoperational phase. So, keep in mine just like, you know, walking or anything, these years are just sort of rough boundaries, different children reach them at different points. Now if you think of this preoperational [UNKNOWN] okay, what operational means. When you think of it this way, is your ability to manipulate, operate on something, and preoperational means kids can't really do that yet. I'm going to have to ask you to just kind of hold on to that for a second because that'll make more sense once we talk about concrete operational, and formal operational. So, for now just say preoperational, they can't do this yet. But they're getting the, the building blocks for operating. And those building blocks are the notions of, Are symbolic representations. language really. So, as children hit around age two, then the focus is less about learning to control their bodies and learning about the world. They [INAUDIBLE], they now have a pretty good sense of what they can do. They're fully mobile. They can manipulate just about, as, as you know, richly as they want to manipulate. They have a pretty good understanding of objects in the world. now is when they begin to learn language. Now, thing about language is. It's, it's a symbolic representation, so we can take something like this. Okay, and a child might understand what this is, might be able to use this, you know, imagine it's a crayon, might be able to draw with it. So, when they see a crayon, they know what it is, but in order to be able to, to say, mommy, crayon, to be able to ask for the crayon, crayon, trying to do my best two year old, crayon. I can't do a two year old, but anyway, uh, [INAUDIBLE] you have to of associated that sound, crayon, what a weird sound now that I hear it, crayon. you have to have associated that sound with this, which would be wrong, because this is actually a pen. But, anyway you know. Throw that away. that's what the child is beginning to learn. So, it's all about verbal skills. But cognitively, when you think about what verbal skills is, it's mapping these arbitrary sounds and eventually scribbles you know, these, these shapes of lines. Mapping those onto concepts. Onto things the child has learned about in the sensory motor stage. So, you know, it's seeing ducks, it's seeing dogs, it's seeing crayons, it's seeing chairs, but it just thought of them for what they were. Now it's learning that these things have these symbolic representations. and that that's very important. Okay, so now, let's take that, and let's talk about conservation. So, this is, when we talk about preoperational, the idea is this child will know about, you, you can show pictures of things like this, like water. And it will know and understand things, but it has a real problem operating on those things, so here is a classic Piaget example. You take two little beakers of water and you show the child that first. See, they contain the same amount of water, right? And the child say's yes, I see that. I agree. Equal amounts of water. Now we bring in this long [SOUND] skinny container. And we take the water from this vessel and pour it into this one. Right in front of the child's eyes. And we now say, of these two which one has more water in it? And a child will almost always, immediately, a child in this stage, two to seven years old, will almost always immediately point to the tall one and say that has more water. They're confusing the height of the water with the amount of the water. Okay, they have trouble doing those operations, those sort of math things. They fall back on very simplistic indicators like how tall is the, the, the height of the water. Here's my favorite example of conversation and, and those of you with young kids this, this is an example I heard a psychologist give where, where he, he had ordered pizza and he had two kids. One of them at the stage let's say a four year old girl. Um, [SOUND] the other one, older than that, let's say an 8 year old. and the pizza had three left. There were three slices of pizza left and one of the kids, started to grab for two and the other one got all upset, you can't have two, that's not fair, blah blah blah. So, what the psychologist, knowing his Piaget did was, go into the kitchen with the three slices, cut one into two, come back out, give the younger child the two smaller slices. And the older child the two big slices and said, there now you both have two. And the younger child was happy with that, of course the older child was happy with that [LAUGH]. [LAUGH] The older child knew they were getting more pizza, the younger child knew they were getting two slices of pizza, as was the older child. That was sort of the depth of their cognitive ability. Okay so, these children show that lack of conservation but at some point they start to realize this. They start to realize that, you know, cutting a big slice of pizza into two slices of pizza does not make more pizza. and so they learned to do a lot of these maths, these operations on things okay? And that shows once they can do that. That they've entered this next stage the stage we call the period of concrete operations. Now concrete because they can do it with things like a pizza, really well. but they have trouble if things get a little abstract, if things get weird, and we all [UNKNOWN]. but. Okay. All right. Yeah. I can come here. but let me hold off for a second. If, if it's a question of, you know, two, two pizzas versus, two big pieces of pizza versus two small pieces of pizza, something they can see that clearly. Then they've very good at it. But if it becomes, well, there was, imagine a logic problem of a sort, where we had cards laid down. There's a good examples of this one online and I, I should've grabbed a copy of it. But an example where we say on one side of the card is an even or odd digit. And on he other side of the card is, a vowel or a consonant. And you see two of the cards say 2 and 7. And then another card say's, A and P. And you say, here's a rule. If it has a vowel on one side then it must have an even number on other side. Which cards do you have to flip over to test that rule? When it's an arbitrary thing like that children at this age have a really hard time dealing with those abstract kinds of concepts. It has a vowel and it has to be, I can't remember what I said. But when it's a very concrete thing, they can handle. Okay, and so they reach that point of concrete operations. Now, there is something that's still very characteristic of that stage. And that's what I'm going to be talking about here, is that children in this concrete operational stage, they can do the operations. But another characteristic of their thinking is they tend to be very egocentric. Okay? Very much still focused on, they see the world as they see the world. Okay? Their perspective on things to them seems like the only perspective. And they have trouble understanding why other people can't see the world the way they do because they think that's the way the world is. Okay. they have trouble escaping this. So if they. You know, this is often when a child will take things from other children just because they want them. and they always feel justified. They will cheat in sports but they think it's okay when they cheat. They don't think it's okay when somebody else cheats. and so they have this real problem seeing the world through other people's eyes. And in fact there are tests for that, that are used to mark the transition from the concrete to the formal operational style, at that stage. And it's just things like this. Very simple ones. So, you have, you place a child on one side of. Anything. Okay, here it's mountains, this is one of the things Piaget used, but in other ones he, he would just have objects on the table, laid out in various ways. And he would ask the child first, tell me what you see. What's this look like from your perspective? and the child will, virtually any child will be able to tell you that. But then you stick a doll on the other side. And you ask the child, well what does this look like from the doll's perspective? You're not allowed to move. You have to stay here. But tell me what the doll sees, okay? This is a very difficult thing to do. and, you know, about age 12 is when children start to be able to do this. It's, cognitively, and socially, a really important marker. It's when they begin to have this realization that everybody in the world sees the world a little differently. And they begin to have this ability, that is clearly linked to empathy, theory of mind, other issues we've talked about. This ability to see the world through someone else's eyes and that takes a long time to develop. That's sometimes, the, the biggest source of frustration between parents and children, is that parents. See this easily you know, they see the implications of a child's actions and they say you know don't you see that was hurtful to your sister. The child doesn't see it, okay? And, and I mean they'll believe you if you tell them that it was hurtful, don't repeat it blah, blah, blah. But in their mind they cannot actually experience the events. From the eyes of other people, the way that you can and that's, you know, why a child can see mean or nasty or whatever But they just have not developed that ability and they don't until later on. So, there are tests for [INAUDIBLE], that marks when they're going into the formal operation. alright, now I, I don't really have a thing about formal operations because it's kind of where we are. I'll go back in her for a second. But really the formal operations period is where we start to get pretty good at dealing with even abstract transformations, abstract problems, abstract concepts. We can deal with things called love, justice. you know, those weird world, word problems, like, if it has a consonant on this side, it has a vowel on the other. Math. Okay, math itself basic mathematical ability. How many of you have trouble with math? Math is doing these abstract calc, calculations, especially on variables. You know transform 2a equals 3x times 4b equals 7y. you know, multiply those together and give me another equation and so this is all kind of abstract weird stuff, and we tend to find it very difficult. but some of us get, get pretty good at it and, and some not. And that's why I saw it goes on from 15 that's the hardest thing for us to do. Even this by the way the perspective. I mean we all get the basic ability but I think some people get it much better than other people do. and so those processes continue. Alright. I've just given you a few examples and, and the reason I've just given you a few examples is, these things are, are better seen than explained. and that was actually going to show them in the lecture but that just seems kind of silly in a way. You, you, you can view these on your own but here's, I call it the Piaget channel. Its a YouTube channel and it shows kids going through these various tests, and their reactions to it. And, and it's very cool very interesting and this will bring home what I said you know, much more clearly than. What I said will bring home what I said. So, check out those videos. You'll find them cool. You'll find them interesting. Those of you with, with children, go play with your children. try some of these things out. See what they do. this is a documentary on Piaget himself. Piaget is a fascinating figure. you know, really multifaceted [SOUND] guy but he gets most of the attention for this, cognitive development stuff. But he's, he's fascinating beyond that. by the way, the one knock against Piaget is, is some people think he was too conservative in terms of when children can reach the next stage. but most people believe the stages are, are pretty bang-on. this is a little documentary I liked about Piaget. Talking about Piaget. How he's misunderstood in some cases. His theories are again fascinating. It 's always interesting to hear from the guy himself. and, now this is just almost me feeling guilty. When you talk about child development, yes, Piaget is, is the figure. But not far behind him is Vigotsky. Vigotsky's kind of. Jumped off of Piaget's ideas and took them some, some really new directions. and, you know, I don't really have time for them in the [UNKNOWN] but I certainly would in, in a normal course. And, and I suggest you spend a bit of time learning a little bit about Vigotsky there. a decent blog post, this is yeah, right I do remember this. This is somebody's blog post, I don't know who it is, I think about 300 people have visited it so far, so I always like throwing you guys at stuff like this. but, but this is him trying to explain some of these ideas and comparing Piaget to Vigo, Vigotsky. So, once you've looked at that, check this blog post and you should help bring it all together. This is also a weird, what's called Mindmeister Comparison, I thought it was kind of interesting. [SOUND] I threw it in there, it compares Piaget to Vigotsky, a couple basis, so, check that out and that's it for lecture four. Now, lecture five, you parents, we're going to be talking about. How psychologists measure the attachment between you and your children. Again, a controversial experiment. or controversial procedure, really by many people's opinions. and it, it's really associated with someone named Mary Ainsworth. you know, a very well-known female psychologist that really contributed to the field. so we're talking about her. And we'll also be talking about what the optimal parenting style is. So, a little bit more parenting next lecture and lecture five. See you for that one. Bye-bye.
