Hot answers tagged developmental-psychology
15
It's theorized that there is a Critical Period of language development in children below the age of five (roughly, as age ranges always are in Developmental Psychology).
Probably the most significant and readily verifiable finding is that a critical period exists for the learning of Phonemes. Research has suggested children readily differentiate phonemes ...
12
This effect is referred to as Piaget's Theory of Conservation.
Piaget constructed an experiement where children would be shown a tall, narrow glass of colored water (to make it clearly visible in a clear glass) and two shorter, wider glasses of the same exact size.
A single amount of water would be distributed in both small glasses. If a child is asked ...
11
Wikipedia on time perception
The Wikipedia article on "time perception". In particular, the section on long-term time perception cites a couple of articles.
* The articles makes the common point that a unit of time as a proportion of one's life decreases with age. A few empirical studies are also cited.
Ukraintseva (2001)
Ukraintseva (2001) wrote an ...
9
Seattle Longitudinal Study:
You might want to have a read about The Seattle Longitudinal Study of Adult Intelligence.
There's a summary of the study on this website.
To quote the website:
The Seattle Longitudinal Study of Adult Intelligence has followed a
group of more than 5000 people for well over four decades. The program
began in 1956 and ...
8
There is "hard evidence" regarding how timing and the subjective experience of intervals changes as a function of age. McAuley et al. (2006) ran a battery of different timing and time perception tasks on participants of ages ranging from 4 to 95 years. One finding that relates to your question was that children in the range of 4 to 7 years preferred and, ...
8
Heritability estimates of Extraversion (and other Big 5 factors)
The introduction section of Loehlin et al (1998) provides a narrative review of heritability estimates of big 5 personality traits (i.e., one of which is extraversion).
A brief extract gives a flavour of some of the research that has been conducted:
A recent heritability analysis of the ...
8
This is a partial answer suggesting a possible causal mechanism.
One of the factors leading to birth defects and autism is mutations in the parent's genetic material. In a recently published article, Sun et al. (2012) observed that:
The paternal-to-maternal mutation rate ratio is 3.3, and the rate in fathers doubles from age 20 to 58, whereas there is ...
8
Kramer et al 2008 is an excellent study of this question because it utilizes intervention, thus lending strength to the claim of causation, concluding that IQ was "significantly higher in the experimental group for both reading and writing".
But is it the milk itself? Some argue that it's also the skin-to-skin contact, and the mother-child bonding. ...
7
I am by no means any sort of expert at the French mental health system, but I was curious and found a few reasons that may indicate why such a philosophy is prevalent.
In this blog, an American psychologist analyzes the differences between the American and French schools of thought on ADHD, but the observations hold for other conditions as well. While ...
7
The classic reference for exactly what you are describing is Gilovich & Medvec, 1995 (LINK), the primary thesis of which is that "Actions, or errors of commission, generate more regret in the short term; but inactions, or errors of omission, produce more regret in the long run" (from the abstract). The authors explain that there are many factors that ...
7
The preference for mother's voice over a stranger's voice has been show in utero by Kisilevsky et al. (2003) by measuring the fetus' heart rate. It increased in response to mother's voice and decreased in response to a stranger's voice compared to baseline. Kisilevsky and Hains (2011) followed up the earlier study, and determined that the onset of ...
7
I don't know of any NN algorithms that match your definition entirely, and I have looked for them (previously and recently). Here are some papers that I think are close or in the direction that you are exploring.
Using theoretical models to analyze neural development (review)
An Instruction Language for Self-Construction in the Context of Neural Networks
...
6
Another reason for reduced plasticity in adults is that learning something different in the presence of an existing knowledge structure is more difficult than learning from a "blank slate". In a sense, you get interference from the known language (for example). One person who has developed this argument computationally is Jay McClelland in the context of ...
6
For an introduction to neurotransmitters (and the field of neuroscience) a good book to start with is Principles of Neural Science (Kandel, Schwartz, and Jessel, 2000). It is a standard reference used by many undergraduate and graduate courses in neuroscience/related fields. The next edition is due for publication in October. During development ...
6
To learn about other twins reared apart, investigate the earlier Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart and the ongoing Minnesota Twin Family Study.
To pique your curiosity:
Jim Lewis and Jim Springer stand out in the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart because some of their two histories were strikingly identical; several notable examples:
1st wife: ...
6
Much evidence suggests children do not show as much top down processing as adults. This depends on your definition so I'll state that I generally mean that use of top-down processing appears to increase as a child develops.
Here is the abstract explaining the results of the study Developmental increase in top-down and bottom-up processing in a phonological ...
5
There is indeed research done on the topic. Some links:
http://www.thinkchildsafe.org/thinkbeforevisiting/
http://www.hsrc.ac.za/HSRC_Review_Article-195.phtml
http://www.thinkchildsafe.org/thinkbeforevisiting/resources/Misguided_Kindness.pdf
http://www.thinkchildsafe.org/thinkbeforevisiting/resources/UN%20Guidelines%20Alternative%20Care.pdf
...
5
This question is difficult to answer if you do not specify what kind of pattern recognition you refer to. In the context of human development, pattern recognition can be as simple as recognizing a row of dots as a line (Gestalt perception) or experiencing the pop-out effect (see Treisman's feature integration theory), but it can also be as complex as face ...
5
In general, parental involvement/engagement has lots of positive social, emotional, cognitive, and academic effects for a child's development. Some evidence suggests that the positive effects of relatively general factors like improved parent-child relationship, increasing motivation and (positive) expectations, etc., are stronger than the specific benefits ...
5
Here's something I dug up for language: a Computer Science Thesis from Boulder:
The Sensorimotor Foundations of Phonology: A Computational Model of Early Childhood Articulatory and Phonetic Development (1994)
it discusses what it calls HABLAR (Hierarchical Articulatory Based Language
Acquisition by Reinforcement learning).
From the reductionist/biology ...
4
Traveling waves are a developmental mechanism to "prime" neural circuits. In a mature adult, certain mechanisms allow the strengthening and weakening of synapses (LTP/LTP, dendritic spine growth, etc...). These same mechanisms are used during development to achieve initial connectivity. For these to work however, spiking activity must be present. Experience ...
4
Many parts of the fetus brain begin showing neural activity before the senses that feed them are sufficiently developed to provide actual sensory information. In other words, it is unlikely that spiking activity in the brain is initiated by the senses. Some of the cells that become sensory organs, however, often fire in very specific patterns similar to the ...
4
General literature on training and educational program evaluation
In general, you would want to read up about program evaluation in general, and educational program evaluation, and training evaluation in particular.
With regards to the educational context I found this article online.
With regards to training evaluation, you could check out Kraiger et al ...
4
To answer your first question, I am fairly certain that those afflicted with this disorder, or more directly, a person who cannot tolerate a particular sound at a particular volume but react differently (find tolerable) to another sound even at the same volume, is definitely possible. For example, to provide a concrete example, let's assume an individual ...
4
Yes, phobias appear to be partly hereditary. This encompasses both genetic and environmental factors.
Kendler et al. (1999) review some work in this area:
We have previously reported, from a population-based sample of female twins, that the liability
to agoraphobia, social phobia and animal
phobia was modestly infuenced by genetic
factors with ...
3
Many tasks can be decomposed into subtasks. And in a similar way the skills required to perform a task can be decomposed into component skills. For more detailed discussion, check out discussion of task analysis.
A few examples:
Driving a manual car requires an additional component skill (using the clutch and gearshift) over and above all the skills ...
3
The best review of experience sampling tools I've found is here.
Specifically, to answer you question, check out "MyExperience". To quote the website:
MyExperience is a BSD-licensed open source mobile data collection tool
developed for Windows Mobile devices (including PDAs and mobile
phones) using .NET CF 2 and Microsoft SQL Compact Edition.
...
3
I believe motherese exists to teach the infant to discriminate phonemes in the native language. Kuhl et al. (2005) show that during the first year language critical period, infants gain an increased ability to discriminate between phonemes of the native language, while their ability to discriminate between phonemes of non-native languages declines. ...
3
Fonagy and Target, although they do not specifically cite the term 'Motherese', believe that what they call 'Marking'- signalling an unreality or playfulness in mirrored displays of affect can play a crucial role in the development of a faculty they call 'Mentalization'.
According to their model, newborns experience affect as all-pervading, and do not see ...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
