term paper for developmental psychology

Term Paper, Developmental Psychology

Postgraduate course, course description, objectives and content.

Term paper - on a topic in developmental psychology.

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• Main features of a scientific report in the field of psychology;
• References in accordance with the APA format;
• Special genre of scientific texts;
• Academic writing style;
• Publishing culture in various fields of psychology;
• Guidelines of co-authorship;
• Guidelines for the publication of scientific findings;
• Plagiarism and fraud in academic writing.

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Ects credits, level of study, semester of instruction, place of instruction.

A series of lectures will be arranged for the APA course.

Material for the term paper will be the students' own responsibility.

Teaching material for the APA course will be made known to the students before the start of each semester.

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16 Cognitive Development: An Overview

David F. Bjorklund, Developmental Evolutionary Psychology Lab, Department of Psychology, Florida Atlantic University.

• Published: 16 December 2013
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In this overview, I focus on contemporary research and theory related to five “truths” of cognitive development: (1) cognitive development proceeds as a result of the dynamic and reciprocal transaction of endogenous and exogenous factors; (2) cognitive development involves both stability and plasticity over time; (3) cognitive development involves changes in the way information is represented, although children of every age possess a variety of ways to represent experiences; (4) children develop increasing intentional control over their behavior and cognition; and (5) cognitive development occurs within a social context. Cognitive development happens at a variety of levels, and developmental scientists are becoming increasingly aware of the need to be cognizant of this and the interactions among the various levels to produce a true developmental science.

Cognitive development proceeds as a result of the dynamic and reciprocal transaction of endogenous and exogenous factors.

Cognitive development involves both stability and plasticity over time.

Cognitive development involves changes in the way information is represented, although children of every age possess a variety of ways to represent experiences.

Children develop increasing intentional control over their behavior and cognition.

Cognitive development occurs within a social context.

Human infants and children have strong dispositions/intuitive information-processing biases, but our species’ thinking is highly sensitive to context and highly plastic, and this is particularly true early in life, when developmental trajectories are put in motion.

The ability to represent the intentions and goals of other people allows children to learn through observation and direct teaching, permitting the acquisition of knowledge and skills that were foreign to our ancestors.

The development of executive function involves age-related changes in working memory, inhibition, and cognitive flexibility and plays a central role in the development of higher-level cognition and the regulation of one’s emotions and behaviors.

Background knowledge, or knowledge base, has a significant influence on how children think.

Cultural “explanations” for cognitive development do not provide alternative interpretations to those based on biology (e.g., neurological factors, evolutionary explanations) or specific experience (e.g., how mothers talk to their babies); rather, cognitive development must be seen as the result of interacting factors at multiple levels of organization, with the social environment being a critical ingredient in this mix.

Although there are many characteristics of human beings that make us distinct from our simian cousins, our cognition is high among them. Humans’ abilities to represent relationships, contemplate the past, anticipate the future, and adapt to a broader range of environments than any other mammal make us intellectually distinct in the animal kingdom. We are not the only “thinking” animal, of course, and our impressive suite of cognitive abilities has deep evolutionary roots, some of which can be inferred by studying our close genetic relatives, the great apes. But Homo sapiens ’ intellectual wherewithal has resulted in our species attaining ecological dominance over the globe, for better or worse, making the study of cognition perhaps the most central topic in attaining an understanding of humankind. Most critical for the current handbook, human cognition develops, emerging over infancy and childhood as a result of a continuous interaction of species-typical abilities and environment, broadly defined, and becoming adapted to the specific cultural environment in which children grow up. An understanding of cognitive development is not only of great theoretical importance but also has some obvious practical implications, especially with respect to the education of children and the modification of intellectual deficits attributed to deleterious early environments.

The field of cognitive development is a vast and varied one, and, on the surface, some of the topics classified under the rubric of “cognitive development” seem quite disparate and unrelated. For instance, many psychologists focus on lower-level mechanisms, such as developmental differences in speed of processing or memory span, which can seem light years away from topics such as theory of mind, metacognition, and scientific reasoning. The disparity is due, in part, to the exceptional range over which human cognition extends. Human cognition is affected by basic-level processes that influence how information is encoded, stored, and processed, much as the cognition of other animals with complex brains is. However, these basic-level abilities also develop in conjunction with a representational system that is far different from those of other animals, permitting the development of symbolic thought and forms of thinking and problem solving that require explanations beyond those afforded solely via basic-level analyses. Yet, despite the difference in levels of analysis (and other differences, such as examining developmental function vs. individual differences), the field of cognitive development is unified by some basic beliefs and themes. Some of the themes represent points of controversies as opposed to areas of agreement (e.g., the extent to which cognitive development is influenced by endogenous vs. exogenous factors), and each scientist will have his or her own pet issues that may not be shared with the same level of enthusiasm by others in the field.

I have not attempted in this chapter to provide a complete description of all issues, controversies, or topics of modern cognitive development; any overview chapter by necessity must be incomplete. Rather, I have organized the chapter around what I see as five general “truths” about cognitive development. These truths are actually generalizations, and I make no pretense that they have the authority of scientific law. Other researchers may have a different set of “truths,” and I might (and in fact have; Bjorklund, 1997 , 2005 ) generate a different list depending on the audience or points I wish to address. In the process of discussing these truths, I have slipped in other issues that I believe are important to understanding cognitive development (my set of pet issues), including the importance of taking an evolutionary perspective, the use of comparative animal data, and the distinction between domain-general and domain-specific mechanisms. The five “truths” are as follows:

I believe these “truths” will be familiar to most cognitive developmental psychologists and at least some of the topics will be central to the theoretical and research questions that stimulate all developmental scientists’ quest for knowledge.

Cognitive Development Proceeds as a Result of the Dynamic and Reciprocal Transaction of Endogenous and Exogenous Factors

One issue central to all of psychology is that of nature versus nurture. Traditionally, this has been posed as a dichotomy: Is human thought and behavior genetically/biologically determined or is it shaped by learning/experience/culture? This is dealt with in a more sophisticated way today, in that everyone is an interactionist, with the issue being better expressed as “how do biological/endogenous factors interact with environmental/exogenous factors to produce the adult phenotype?” From this perspective, cognitive development does not simply mature, or bloom, over time, nor is it solely a product of a child’s culture; rather, it emerges over the course of ontogeny as a result of the dynamic and reciprocal transaction between a child’s biological constitution, including genetics, and his or her physical and social environment ( Bjorklund, Ellis, & Rosenberg, 2007 ; Gottlieb, 2007 ). This can be seen in a wide range of research in cognitive development, from the ontogeny of the brain ( Greenough, Black, & Wallace, 1987 ) and the development of perceptual systems ( Lickliter, 1990 ), to the interaction between specific genes associated with intelligence and whether a child is breastfed or bottle-fed ( Caspi et al., 2007 ).

Developmental Systems and Cognitive Development

At the crux of cognitive development (in fact, of development in general) is the idea that development is not simply “produced” by genes, nor constructed by the environment, but emerges from the continuous, bidirectional interaction between all levels of biological and environmental factors ( Gottlieb, 2007 ; Gottlieb, Wahlsten, & Lickliter, 2006 ; Oyama, 2000 ; see chapters by Lickliter and by Moore in this handbook). From this perspective, even phenomena usually identified as innate, such as imprinting in precocial birds, result from the interaction of genetic and environmental factors. For example, research by Gottlieb (1992) demonstrated that ducklings required auditory experience prior to hatching—hearing their mother’s call, the call of brood mates, or even their own vocalization—in order to approach the appropriate (i.e., same-species) maternal call hours after hatching. In other research, birds that received visual experience prior to hatching showed enhanced visual discrimination abilities shortly after hatching, but species-atypical experiences interfered with auditory attachment behaviors ( Lickliter, 1990 ). Bobwhite quail that were exposed to patterned light days before hatching generally failed to approach the species-typical maternal call in a subsequent test, with some approaching the call of a chicken! In other words, even for usually reliably developing phenomena, experience necessarily interacts with genes to affect their expression.

Such interactions are seen in the development of individual differences in intelligence in children (see the chapter by Flynn & Blair in this handbook). For example, it is well established that children growing up in emotionally supportive homes and receiving cognitively rich experiences tend to have higher IQs than do children growing up in high-risk homes who receive less intellectual stimulation ( NICHD Early Child Care Research Network, 2005 ). However, the adverse effects of a nonstimulating environment are often exacerbated for children with medical problems. For example, classic research by Zeskind and Ramey (1978 , 1981 ) revealed that children from impoverished homes who were given educational daycare beginning in their first year of life showed enhanced IQs relative to control children. However, the effects of the intervention were moderated by the biological constitution of the infants at birth. By chance, approximately half of the infants in their rural, poverty sample were fetally malnourished. Fetal malnourishment is associated with slower development, more aversive cries, and less responsiveness in infants. Whereas fetally malnourished babies in the educational daycare group displayed normal IQs comparable to nonfetally malnourished infants in the educational group by 18 months, the fetally malnourished infants in the control group showed the lowest IQ (71 at 36 months of age), 14 points less than the IQs of the biologically normal children in the control group. Some of the differences in the cognitive outcomes of the fetally malnourished children were attributed to ways mothers interacted with their children and how this changed over time. The general lethargy shown by fetally malnourished infants in the control condition did not evoke much in the way of social interaction from their impoverished, highly stressed mothers, which set the stage for future interactions. Mothers tended to initiate little in the way of interaction with their infants, and their infants, in turn, reciprocated. This pattern of less attention and social give-and-take between infant and mother persisted long after children had “recovered” from the poor prenatal diet. In contrast, the social interaction received by the fetally malnourished children in the educational daycare resulted in increased responsiveness, behaviors that they brought home with them. These more outgoing children affected their mothers and set the stage for a more positive interactional style, which, by 18 months of age, was associated with significantly higher IQs.

Gene–Environment Interactions and the Development of Intelligence

Genetic versus environmental effects on the development of intelligence have been the topic of controversy for nearly 100 years (see Gould, 1981 ). Most behavioral genetic accounts put the heritability of intelligence as measured by IQ between 0.50 and 0.60 (i.e., between 50% and 60% of differences in IQ among people can be attributed to differences in genetics), with shared environmental effects (mainly home environment) being significantly less ( Plomin et al., 2008 ). However, estimates of heritability and shared environmental effects vary as a function of the family in which children grow up ( Rowe, Jacobson, & der Oord, 1999 ; Turkheimer et al., 2003 ). For example, in one study of 3,139 adolescent sibling pairs, Rowe and his colleagues reported a heritability of IQ of 0.57 and an effect of shared environment of 0.13. When the sample was divided into adolescents who came from homes where parents had greater than a high-school education versus those with a high-school education or less, the pattern changed substantially. For the high-education group the heritability of IQ was now 0.74 and the effect of shared environment was 0; in contrast, for children from the low-education families, heritability of IQ was reduced to 0.26 and the effect of shared environment was 0.23 (see also Turkheimer et al., 2003 ). Consistent with earlier theorizing ( Bronfenbrenner & Ceci, 1994 ; Scarr, 1993 ), these findings indicate that heritability of IQ varies with environmental conditions. When the environment is “good enough” to support intellectual accomplishments, as presumably the high-education homes were, individual differences in genes presumably contribute more to IQ level than individual differences in environment; when environmental conditions are less than optimal for supporting IQ, however, individual differences in genes are less predictive of IQ, with shared-environment effects increasing in significance.

More straightforward gene × environment interactions are found in contemporary behavioral genetics studies that have identified specific genes associated with intelligence, but only under certain environments. For example, Caspi and his colleagues (2007) identified a variant of a gene associated with higher IQ, but only for children who were breastfed. The gene, located on chromosome 11, is associated with the processing of fatty acids. In two large-scale samples, one from New Zealand and the other from Great Britain, people who had either of two variants of the gene, and were breastfed as infants, had significantly higher IQs (between about 5 and 10 points) than people with the gene who were not breastfed, and people with a third variant of the gene. For this latter group of people, adult IQ did not vary as a function of whether they were breastfed as infants or not. This is a typical type of finding from recent behavioral genetics literature; individual genes have small effects that are usually mediated by the environment, with likely many genes being associated with complex psychological characteristics, such as the development of intelligence ( Plomin, Kennedy, & Craig, 2006 ).

Fleshing Out of Skeletal Competencies

Debates among contemporary researchers often revolve around the extent to which infants enter the world “prepared” by natural selection to encounter a species-typical environment and are constrained to process some information more efficiently than others, with some arguing that infants and young children inherit skeletal competencies ( Geary, 2005 ) or core knowledge ( Baillargeon, 2008 ; Carey, 2009 , 2011 ; Spelke & Kinzler, 2007 ) in specific domains (folk physics, folk biology, and folk psychology), with these competencies being fleshed out over the course of development as children explore, play, and engage in social interactions. Consider the case of processing human faces. In adults, portions of the right frontal cortex appear to be specialized for processing human faces, and adults are especially skilled at processing upright faces, although these special face-processing skills do not apply to upside-down faces or extend to faces of animals from other species—monkeys, for instance. This general pattern is evident by 9 months of age, with infants displaying an upright-face advantage for human faces but not for monkey faces. However, 6-month-old infants process both human and monkey upright faces more efficiently than upside-down faces, displaying a more general “face-processing” bias. This is consistent with the suggestion that infants’ brains are biased to process faces, but that the processing of human faces becomes more specialized with age and experience (e.g., de Haan, Oliver, & Johnson, 1998 ; Johnson & de Haan, 2001 ; Pascalis, de Haan, & Nelson, 2002 ). According to Pascalis and his colleagues (2002 , p. 1321), “the ability to perceive faces narrows with development, due in large measure to the cortical specialization that occurs with experience viewing faces. In this view, the sensitivity of the face recognition system to differences in identity among the faces of one’s own species will increase with age and with experience in processing those faces.”

Even perspectives that have been labeled as neo-nativism (e.g., Spelke, 1991 ; Spelke & Kinzler, 2007 ) do not attribute fully formed “innate ideas” to infants and children, but argue instead that infants inherit a small set of knowledge systems, shaped by natural selection, that serve as the basis for the development of flexible skills and belief systems (e.g., mathematics, knowledge of the properties of objects, reasoning about other people’s thoughts). For example, Geary (1995) proposed that children possess sets of universal biologically primary abilities that have been shaped by natural selection over our species’ phylogeny that children use spontaneously and that will emerge in a species-typical fashion if children experience a species-typical environment. Language and simple quantitative abilities are examples of biologically primary abilities. These are contrasted with culturally determined biologically secondary abilities that do not have an evolutionary history, often require external motivation for their mastery, and are based on biologically primary abilities. Reading and more advanced forms of mathematics are examples of biologically secondary abilities. Although children may be prepared by natural selection to acquire language, for instance, appropriate environmental input is necessary (social interaction in a language-using culture), and when learning to read children require substantial adult support and instruction in applying a series of biologically primary abilities to achieve mastery.

Intuitive mathematics . As an example of biologically primary abilities, consider those Geary proposed for mathematics: numerosity, ordinality, simple arithmetic, and counting. Numerosity refers to the ability to determine quickly the number of items in a set without counting. Using looking-time procedures, 6-month-old infants have been shown to be able to make discriminations between arrays of three versus four items ( Starkey, Spelke, & Gelman, 1990 ; van Loosbroek & Smitsman, 1990 ), as have many mammal and bird species (see Davis & Pérusse, 1988 ), including cats, chimpanzees, and an African grey parrot. Ordinality refers to a basic understanding of more than and less than relationships, and there is evidence for this late in infancy. In one study, Strauss and Curtis (1981) conditioned infants to point to either the larger or smaller array of dots. For instance, infants may have been shown arrays of three and four dots and trained to point to the smaller array. After training, infants were shown two new arrays, in this case two versus three dots. If they had learned merely to point to the array with three dots, they should continue to point to the three-dot array on the new trials. However, if they had learned an ordinal relation (i.e., point to the smaller array), they should point to the two-dot array on the new trial. Infants did the latter, suggesting they had learned an ordinal relationship.

With respect to simple arithmetic, some researchers have interpreted patterns of infants’ attention to unexpected events (using the violation-of-expectation procedure ; see the chapter by Rakison & Lawson in this handbook) as evidence that they can add and subtract small quantities (e.g., 1 + 1 = 2; 2 − 1 = 1). In an experiment by Wynn (1992) , on one set of trials, 5-month-old infants saw a doll placed on a stage, and a screen was raised to hide the object. Infants watched as a hand holding a second doll moved behind the screen and then exited the stage, empty-handed. If infants have some notion of simple arithmetic, they should infer that there are now two dolls behind the screen. When the screen was then lowered, the possible outcome revealed exactly this, two dolls; for the impossible outcome, only one doll was behind the screen. Infants increased their looking time to the impossible condition, consistent with the idea that they expected two dolls to be behind the screen, and they expressed surprise (reflected by increased looking time) when their expectation was violated when only one doll appeared. This phenomenon has been replicated numerous times (e.g., Simon, Hespos, & Rochat, 1995 ; Walden et al., 2007 ), although some question whether this finding reflects not simple addition but rather a more perceptually based phenomenon (e.g., Clearfield & Westfahl, 2006 ).

Counting is a later-emerging ability, with children acquiring the various principles of counting (e.g., each item in an array is associated with one and only one number name; number names must be in a stable, repeatable order; the final number in a series represents the quantity of the set; the order in which things are counted is irrelevant) over the preschool years ( Gelman & Gallistel, 1978 ). Preschool children spontaneously count things, gradually acquiring the principles of counting and the number names used in their culture before they enter school.

Young children’s tool use . Infants and young children also seem prepared to assume that tools are designed for an intended function, referred to as the design stance ( Dennett, 1990 ). That is, once children see a tool being used, or use a tool themselves, for a specific purpose, they assume the tool is “for” that purpose. This is illustrated in a study in which 12- and 18-month-old children watched an experimenter use the straight end of a spoon or a novel spoonlike object to insert into a hole in a box to turn on a light ( Barrett, David, & Needham, 2007 ). When infants were given the opportunity to turn on the light, they used the novel tool appropriately (i.e., grabbed the spoonlike end and inserted the straight end) most of the time, but did so less than 25% of the time when the familiar spoon was used as a tool. By 12 months of age, infants had apparently formed the category “spoon” and knew how this tool should be used. Although such a design stance can lead to less effective problem solving, it also functions to constrain learning in a way that, on average, likely results in infants and children learning the utility of tools from watching other people use them, greatly facilitating their understanding and use of tools, something that is ubiquitous in human cultures. This is something that other tool-using primates seem not to realize. For example, when selecting a tool to solve a problem, tool-using monkeys are not influenced by having used a tool before, as human children are, but will use any equally useful but novel tool ( Cummins-Sebree & Fragaszy, 2005 ; see also Buttelmann et al., 2008 , for similar studies with great apes).

There has always been debate among developmentalists about the extent to which ontogeny is governed by biological versus environmental factors. Contemporary research and theory has changed substantially the nature of this debate, however. The nativists and empiricists of the old days are gone. Advances in genetics and brain research make it clear that biological development always occurs in an environmental context, and this extends to the expression of genes. The cognition of infants and children is constrained by biological factors, yet there is sufficient neuronal plasticity for the considerable influence of experience, broadly defined. Development is a transaction between endogenous and exogenous factors, with hormones and the firing of neighboring neurons being microenvironmental factors for other neurons, and thus for cognition and its development. Debates related to the old nature/nurture issue persist among cognitive developmentalists, but they are framed differently than in the past, and today’s “extremists” share far more ground than their arguments often seem to suggest.

Cognitive Development Involves Both Stability and Plasticity over Time

Cognitive development is about change over time—yet once a level of cognitive competence is established, will it remain stable over time? Will infants with good visual memories grow up to be children and adults with superior memory abilities? Will high-IQ 4-year olds retain their intellectual advantage relative to their peers by high-school graduation? To what extent can patterns or levels of cognition be changed once established? That is, how plastic, or modifiable, is cognition?

There is evidence that some basic-level processes are relatively stable over development, beginning in infancy. For example, in one study, measures of visual reaction times (the time it takes infants to begin an eye movement toward a picture after it appeared) at 3.5 months of age correlated significantly with visual reaction times 4 years later ( r = 0.51; Dougherty & Haith, 1997 ). In other research, measures of visual recognition memory at 7 months of age were significantly correlated with perceptual speed at age 11 years ( Rose & Feldman, 1995 ). Perhaps more compelling, measures of basic information processing in infancy, as assessed by visual recognition memory (usually determined by infants showing a preference for novel pictures) and rate of habituation (how quickly infants tire of attending to a repeated stimulus), have been found to correlate significantly with childhood IQ (e.g., Bornstein et al., 2006 ; Dougherty & Haith, 1997 ; Rose & Feldman, 1995 ; Rose, Feldman, & Wallace, 1992 ; see Bornstein, 1989 ; McCall & Carriger, 1993 ; Fagan & Singer, 1983 , for reviews), which tends to remain highly stable across childhood and into adulthood ( Bayley, 1949 ; Honzik, MacFarlane, & Allen, 1948 ).

The significant relation between mechanisms for basic information processing in infancy and childhood IQ has caused some theorists to propose these infant abilities, as tapped by recognition memory and habituation tasks, are the basis for intelligence, arguing that cognitive development can be best expressed as reflecting continuity of cognitive function with stability ( Fagan, 1992 ). That is, developmental changes in cognitive abilities are quantitative in nature (e.g., increases in speed of processing, working memory), with individual differences being stable over time. The origins of this stability seem to lie both within children themselves and their environments, as measures of both the home environment (e.g., aspects of mother–child interaction) and habituation rate independently predict childhood IQ (e.g., Bornstein et al., 2006 ; Tamis-LeMonda & Bornstein, 1989 ).

But cognition is multifaceted, and other aspects of children’s thinking do not show levels of stability over time. For example, although some aspects of memory, such as memory span and story recall, show moderate to high degrees of stability over childhood (between 4 and 10 years), the cross-age correlations for other aspects of memory, such as free recall and use of memory strategies, are quite low and usually nonsignificant ( Schneider & Weinert, 1995 ). In other research, cross-age correlations of performance on psychometric tests in infancy tended to be high when infants were within a Piagetian-defined stage (e.g., between 8 and 12 months, corresponding to Piaget’s substage of the coordination of secondary circular reactions) but low when measures were taken between stages ( McCall, Eichorn, & Hogarty, 1977 ). This suggests that when there is discontinuity of cognitive change (as reflected by qualitative changes in cognition as in stage theories such as Piaget’s), there is instability of individual differences.

Although some aspects of cognition show high levels of stability over childhood into adulthood, this does not mean that once some level of cognitive accomplishment has been established it is “permanent.” Rather, intellectual functioning once established must be maintained and in some circumstances can be drastically modified, either for the better or worse. The plasticity of cognition is perhaps best exemplified by research examining changes in IQ levels of children originally reared in stultifying institutions and later placed in intellectually stimulating foster or adoptive homes. Research dating back to the 1930s has demonstrated significant and long-lasting enhancements of IQs for such children (e.g., Beckett et al., 2006 ; Nelson et al., 2007 ; O’Connor et al., 2000 ; Skeels, 1966 ; Skeels & Dye, 1939 ; St. Petersburg-USA Orphanage Research Team, 2008 ; Windsor et al., 2011 ). Not surprisingly, the degree of recovery is related to the age at which children are removed from the deleterious environment and placed in supportive homes. For example, recent research examining the IQs of children removed from Romanian orphanages and placed in British adoptive homes revealed no deficits in IQ at ages 6 or 11 years for children adopted within their first 6 months ( Beckett et al., 2006 ). IQs were lower for children adopted at later ages, particularly those adopted after 24 months. However, the 11-year IQs (83) were higher than the 6-year IQs (77) for these late-adopted children, suggesting a catch-up effect for the children who experienced the longest deprivation.

One methodological problem has plagued all of these “natural experiments,” in that children are not randomly assigned to “institution” and “adoptive” conditions. Perhaps the brighter or more maturationally advanced children are more likely to be selected for adoption than less-advanced children, for example. This problem was overcome in a recent study by randomly assigning Romanian infants who had been abandoned at birth to either foster care or to continued institutional care. These infants were followed to 54 months of age and also compared to a group of never-institutionalized infants who were being reared by their biological families in Bucharest, Romania ( Nelson et al., 2007 ). Similar to other studies, Nelson and colleagues reported higher IQs for children in foster care than for those who remained institutionalized, with IQ levels of the foster children being higher the earlier they were removed from the institution (IQs at 0 to 18 months = 85.8; 18 to 24 months = 86.7; 24 to 30 months = 78.1; 30-plus months = 71.5). In fact, children placed in foster care after 30 months of age had IQs similar to those of children in the institutionalized group (72 vs. 73).

It is not surprising that the brains of once-institutionalized children show signs of dysfunction in structure and processing in several areas ( Chugani et al., 2001 ; Eluvathingal et al., 2006 ). Nelson (2007) proposed that the stimulus-poor environments in which these children spend their early lives fail to provide the species-typical experiences human infants have evolved to expect, including sensory stimulation, social stimulation from a caregiver, and language, among others. Nelson suggested that the normal process of selective cell death may go awry in these children, resulting in excess neurons and synapses being lost, most of which can never be replaced.

Institutionalization studies indicate that patterns of cognitive growth can be facilitated when children experience a change from a nonstimulating to a stimulating intellectual environment. Similar changes can also occur in the opposite direction, however, when the supportive environments responsible for the establishment of intellectual accomplishment are changed. For instance, infant and preschool enrichment programs provided intellectually stimulating environments for children at risk for mental retardation, usually through kindergarten. These programs typically resulted in significant gains in IQ and academic performance relative to control children who did not experience educational enrichment (e.g., Bradley, Burchinal, & Casey, 2001 ; Klaus & Gray, 1968 ; Ramey et al., 2000 ). However, with only a handful of exceptions ( Campbell et al., 2002 ; Reynolds et al., 1996 , 2011 ), the gains shown by children in these enrichment preschool programs dwindled with time, with average IQs and school achievement of children attending these programs being comparable to those of control children by fourth grade (see Barnett, 1995 ; Lazar et al., 1982 , for reviews).

The children who attended preschool enrichment programs did, of course, get smarter with age (i.e., showed gains in cognitive development); however, as they returned to their homes and schools, they lost the supportive environment responsible for establishing intellectual accomplishments, and thus lost their intellectual edge relative to control children. Not surprisingly, at-risk children who stay in compensatory education programs once they begin formal school continue to maintain an academic advantage over their peers, but these gains, too, diminish after the completion of the program (e.g., Becker & Gersten, 1982 ).

Human intellectual plasticity is one of our species’ greatest claims to fame (see the chapters by Markant & Thomas in this handbook, and the chapter by Maurer and Lewis on sensitive periods). It permits us to adapt to a broad range of environments and to perform complex cognitive tasks, such as reading and calculus, that our ancestors never faced. Homo sapiens ’ cognitive flexibility is as much a part of our evolved nature as is our upright stance. Human infants and children have strong dispositions/intuitive information-processing biases, but our species’ thinking is highly sensitive to context, and this is particularly true early in life, when developmental trajectories are put in motion. This plasticity early in life is afforded by humans’ slow-developing brain that permits children to adjust to a wide range of circumstances. From this perspective, cognition is always expressed in an environment (usually a social environment, see discussion below), and when the conditions supporting the expression of those intellectual abilities change, one can expect corresponding changes in patterns of cognitive development. This makes humans the most educable of animals—that is, able to learn through experience.

Cognitive Development Involves Changes in the Way Information is Represented, Although Children of Every Age Possess a Variety of Ways to Represent Experiences

Central to all major theories of cognitive development are age-related changes in how objects, people, and experiences are represented (e.g., Brainerd & Reyna, 2002 ; Bruner, 1966 ; Case, 1992 ; Fischer, 1980 ; Karmiloff-Smith, 1991 ; Piaget, 1983 ). Piaget’s stage theory is the classic example in which major changes in how children represent the world reflect qualitative changes in cognition. According to Piaget, infants during their first 18 months or so represent objects and events by means of self-produced action (including sensory “action” such as looking at things), termed sensorimotor intelligence. Beginning around their second birthdays, children are able to represent objects and events symbolically, as reflected by their use of language, mental imagery, deferred imitation, and symbolic play, among other expressions of the symbolic (or semiotic) function. Although symbolic, the thinking of children in this preoperational stage (ranging from about 2 to 7 years) is intuitive and lacks logical operations, such as reversibility (e.g., a cognitive operation can be reversed, as in the case of subtraction, the effects of which can be reversed by addition). The thinking of children in the next state, concrete operations (ranging in age from about 7 to 11 years), although logical, is limited, as the stage name denotes, to concrete entities; abstract reasoning comes on line beginning around 11 or 12 years of age with the advent of formal operations .

Piaget’s stage theory has served as the jumping-off point for other theories proposing developmental differences in representational abilities (e.g., Case, 1992 ; Fischer, 1980 ; Fischer & Bidell, 1998 ; Pascual-Leone, 1970 , 2000 ). It has been critiqued widely (e.g., Brainerd, 1978 ; see papers in Brainerd, 1996 ), and I will not provide a detailed examination of this influential theory here. Rather, I devote most space to what is perhaps the most studied and controversial transition reflected in Piaget’s theory, the change from sensorimotor to symbolic representation. The advent and widespread use of symbolic representation marks a major milestone in cognitive development, and although humans may not be the only species capable of representational thought (see, e.g., Parker & McKinney, 1999 ), the extent to which humans apply such thinking differentiates us from all other species.

As I noted, Piaget believed that the symbolic function was expressed via children’s language, mental imagery, deferred imitation, and symbolic play, among others, each emerging around 18 to 24 months of age. For example, although children typically speak their first words around 10 months of age, they usually don’t put them into sentences until around 18 months, and Piaget (1962) observed, and others confirmed (e.g., Kaye & Marcus, 1981 ), that children display deferred imitation (copying the actions of a model some significant time after observing the behavior) late in the second year of life. However, more recent research indicates that infants show signs of symbolic representation much earlier than Piaget proposed when simplified and age-appropriate tasks are used.

Perhaps the best-documented case of infants displaying symbolic representational abilities much earlier than Piaget proposed is for deferred imitation (see Bauer, 2007 , and the chapters by Bauer and Meltzoff & Williamson in this handbook for reviews). Although infants’ ability to imitate multistep actions increases with age, infants as young as 9 months old will imitate simple actions for up to 5 weeks (e.g., Carver & Bauer, 1999 ); 6-month-olds have been shown to imitate simple behaviors after a 24-hour delay ( Collie & Hayne, 1999 ); and preverbal toddlers have shown evidence of deferred imitation for as long as 1 year (e.g., Bauer, 2002 , 2007 ; Bauer et al., 2000 ). Other research indicates that infants in their first year of life may be able to add and subtract small quantities (e.g., Wynn, 1992 , discussed earlier) and may possess some precocious problem-solving strategies based on analogical reasoning ( Chen, Sanchez, & Campbell, 1997 ; Willatts, 1990 ), and newborns have been shown to copy facial expressions (e.g., Meltzoff & Moore, 1977 ) and integrate information from multiple senses (e.g., Meltzoff & Borton, 1979 ). These and other findings lead Meltzoff (1990 , p. 20) to conclude that “ in a very real sense, there may be no such thing as an exclusively ‘sensorimotor period’ in the normal human infant ” (italics in the original).

Although there are alternate interpretations of some of the findings purported to reflect infant representational abilities (e.g., infant “addition” may actually be the result of perceptual, not conceptual, processes, Clearfield & Westfahl, 2006 ; neonatal imitation may have a communicative and/or affiliative function and is not related to the imitation observed later in infancy, Bjorklund, 1987 ; Byrne, 2005 ), most contemporary theorists concur that representational cognition does not suddenly appear around children’s second birthdays, but rudimentary abilities are seen late in the first and early in the second year of life.

Representing Others as Intentional Agents

In addition to evidence from studies of deferred imitation in infancy (see Bauer, 2007 ), representational competency in infancy is supported by research examining children’s understanding of seeing both themselves and other people as intentional agents —as beings whose behavior is based on what they know and what they want, and who act deliberately to achieve their goals (i.e., they do things “on purpose”; see Bandura, 2006 ; Tomasello & Carpenter, 2007 ).

On the surface, viewing others as intentional agents may not appear to be a major intellectual accomplishment, but it serves as the basis for human social cognition, which includes social learning and teaching, the foundation for culture—the nongenetic transmission of information between generations. Although the first signs of intentional representation appear late in the first year, children’s understanding of others as intentional agents develops over childhood, culminating in the ability to pass false-belief tasks around 4 years of age, the benchmark for attaining theory of mind (see the chapter by Astington & Hughes in this volume 2).

The earliest sign of infants’ understanding of others as intentional agents is seen in shared (or joint ) attention , which involves a triadic interaction between the child, another person, and an object ( Tomasello & Carpenter, 2007 ; Tomasello et al., 2005 ). For example, parents often draw children’s attention to an object by pointing or gazing at the object, a form of referential communication , which indicates that the “pointer” understands that he or she sees something that the observer does not. Despite parents’ actions, infants do not engage in shared attention until about 9 months of age, although they do display some biases toward social stimuli from birth. For example, newborns orient to human faces and learn to seek their mothers’ faces ( Feldman & Eidelman, 2004 ), and by 3 or 5 months infants can recognize self-produced biological motion ( Bertenthal, Proffitt, & Cutting, 1984 ) and turn to look in the same direction of another person ( Tomasello et al., 2005 ).

Beginning around 9 months of age, infants will gaze in the direction adults are looking or pointing, engage in repetitive interaction with an adult and an object, imitate an adult’s action, and point or hold up objects to another person (see Carpenter et al., 1998 ; Tomasello, 1999 ). Shared attention and related abilities increase over the next year. For example, 12-month-olds will point to objects and events that others are unaware of ( Liszkowski, Carpenter, & Tomasello, 2007 ); between 12 and 18 months infants learn to use where others are looking to inform their own attention ( Brooks & Meltzoff, 2002 ) and to point to objects to direct an adult’s attention to something he or she is searching for ( Liszkowski et al., 2006 ).

Although shared attention may seem to reflect a low-level form of representation, it may be unique to humans. For example, although chimpanzees and even monkeys will follow the gaze of another individual in some contexts (e.g., Bering & Povinelli, 2003 ; Bräuer, Call, & Tomasello, 2005 ) and point out things to other individuals (e.g., Leavens, Hopkins, & Bard, 2005 ), there is little evidence that chimpanzees engage in shared attention (e.g., Herrmann et al., 2007 ; Tomasello & Carpenter, 2005 ).

The importance of seeing others as intentional agents can be seen in social learning. The most sophisticated forms of social learning, including teaching, require that the observer not only copy significant aspects of a model’s behavior, but also understand that the model has a specific goal, or intention, in mind. That is, behavior is not copied just for the sake of reproducing the actions of another individual, but to achieve some specific outcome. This is seen early in the second year of life. For example, 14- and 18-month-old infants will copy the behavior an adult intended to perform (e.g., pulling the ends off a dumbbell), even if the adult failed to complete the action (e.g., Meltzoff, 1995 ; see also Carpenter, Akhtar, & Tomasello, 1998 ). In fact, preschool children will generally reproduce most of an adult model’s actions even if all the actions are not necessary to achieve a goal ( Gardiner, Greif, & Bjorklund, 2011 ; Horner & Whiten, 2005 ; Nagell, Olguin, & Tomasello, 1993 ; Nielsen & Tomaselli, 2010 ). For instance, in one study 3- and 4-year-old children were shown a transparent puzzle box and an adult demonstrated a series of three actions, two of which were necessary and one of which was not, to retrieve a gummy bear from inside the box ( Horner & Whiten, 2005 ). Children copied all of the adult’s actions, even those that were obviously irrelevant for attaining the goal. One interpretation of findings such as these is that young children may believe that all of an adult’s actions are goal-directed, making imitation of those actions a reasonable course to take ( Lyons, Young, & Keil, 2007 ).

Although chimpanzees and the other great apes clearly engage in sophisticated forms of social learning, passing information from one generation to the next, the minimal criterion for culture (e.g., van Schaik et al., 2003 ; Whiten, 2007 ; Whiten et al., 1999 ), they tend not to engage in true imitation (understanding the model’s goal and copying most behaviors to achieve that goal) as young children do. Rather, they are more apt to engage in emulation , attaining the same goal as the model but using different, and sometimes more effective, actions in doing so (e.g., Call, Carpenter, & Tomasello, 2004 ; Horner & Whiten, 2005 ; Nagell et al., 1993 ). Thus, despite being apparently able to represent the goals of a model, chimpanzees seem not possess the same degree of recognition of other beings as intentional agents as human preschoolers do, perhaps accounting for the greater effectiveness of social learning in humans than in great apes.

Another major representational change in understanding others as intentional agents seems to occur around 4 years of age when children can pass false-belief tasks. Much before this time, children have great difficulty attributing a false belief to others. For example, if a 3-year-old knows that a cookie, originally hidden in a cupboard, has been moved to a jar, he or she believes that another person, although not privy to the change in location, will also know the correct whereabouts of the cookie (e.g., Baron-Cohen et al., 1985 ; Wimmer & Perner, 1983 ). Although performance on false-belief tasks is affected by task characteristics and by basic-level processes such as executive function (e.g., Flynn, O’Malley, & Wood, 2004 ; Henning, Spinath, & Aschersleben, 2011 ; Hughes & Ensor, 2007 ; see the chapter by Carlson, Zelazo, and Faja in this handbook), 3-year-olds seem to truly lack the conceptual/representational competence to solve such tasks that most 4-year olds possess ( Wellman, Cross, & Watson, 2001 ).

Representational Insight

Most aspects of mental representation and symbolic functioning would seem to require the knowledge that one entity can stand for something other than itself, termed representational insight ( DeLoache, 1987 ; DeLoache & Marzolf, 1992 ). This can be seen in how children interpret pictures or photographs. In one study, children between 9 and 19 months of age in the United States and the Ivory Coast were given photographs of objects to inspect ( DeLoache et al., 1998 ). Most of the youngest children treated the photos as if they were real objects, sometimes even trying to pick them off the page. In contrast, most of the older children pointed at the depicted objects rather than trying to manipulate them, realizing they were representations of things.

In other studies, researchers showed children scale models or photographs of rooms, including the location of a hidden toy. Children were then given the opportunity to find the toy in a “real” room (e.g., DeLoache, 1987 ; DeLoache & Marzolf, 1992 ; Kuhlmeier, 2005 ; Suddendorf, 2003 ). Somewhat surprisingly, children were first able to use the photograph as a cue to where the toy was hidden in the real room (at around 2.5 years of age), but only later were able to find the object when a scale model was used (about 3 years of age). One explanation for this pattern was that the scale model was an interesting object itself, making it difficult for children to treat it as a representation for something else, or what DeLoache (2000) referred to as dual representation . In support of this explanation, when the model was made less interesting (e.g., by having children look at it through a window), 2.5-year-old children were able to use it to find the toy in the real room ( DeLoache, 1991 ).

Implicit/Explicit Representation

One distinction frequently made in cognitive psychology is that between implicit and explicit cognition. Implicit cognition refers to cognition without awareness, whereas explicit cognition refers to cognition with conscious awareness. Generally, human infants and all nonhuman animals may be limited to implicit cognition (but see Bjorklund & Rosenberg, 2005 , for discussion of possible explicit cognition in chimpanzees), and the evolution of conscious awareness, with a well-developed sense of self, has been proposed to be essential for evaluating the causes of one’s behavior and the behavior of others—that is, treating other people as intentional agents ( Bering & Bjorklund, 2007 ). Although implicit cognition may lack the important ingredient of self-awareness, it can be quite sophisticated, as reflected by the knowledge spiders have for building webs, birds have for building nests, or people have for complicated motor tasks, such as skiing down a twisting slope.

Karmiloff-Smith (1991 , 1992 ) developed a theory of representational redescription in which implicit representations are transformed, or redescribed, into various forms of explicit cognition. According to Karmiloff-Smith, redescription permits children to use their representations more flexibly, including taking one piece of information (watching mother as she points in the distance) and making some inferences (perhaps she wants me to look at the object she’s pointing at). With redescription , knowledge that was once implicit becomes explicit, allowing children to generate new insights by reflecting on what they already know.

As with other aspects of cognitive development, there seems not to be a definitive point in time before which self-awareness is not present and after which it is. Perhaps the classic demonstration of self-awareness is mirror self-recognition , in which children realize that it is themselves and not another child that they see in the mirror. Children “pass” this task, usually by pointing to a mark on their face that was surreptitiously placed there rather than pointing at the mirror, around 18 months of age (e.g., Brooks-Gunn & Lewis, 1984 ; Nielsen, Suddendorf, & Slaughter, 2006 ), as do chimpanzees, orangutans, and a few gorillas ( Gallup, 1979 ; Suddendorf & Whiten, 2001 ), dolphins ( Reiss & Marino, 2001 ), elephants ( Plotnik, de Waal, & Reiss, 2006 ), and magpies ( Prior, Schwarz, & Güntürkün, 2008 ). However, when researchers placed stickers on children’s heads, most 2- and 3-year-old children failed to reach for the stickers when shown photographs or videos of themselves (e.g., Povinelli, Landau, & Perilloux, 1996 ; Povinelli & Simon, 1998 ), suggesting that children’s sense of self develops gradually over the preschool years, as their ability to deal with different modes of representation (mirrors, photos, videos) develops (see also Skouteris, Spataro, & Lazaridis, 2006 ; Zelazo, Sommerville, & Nichols, 1999 ).

Other research suggests that some aspects of self-awareness and explicit cognition develop much earlier. For example, as I mentioned previously, infants as young as 9 months old display deferred imitation (see Bauer, 2007 ), which has been proposed to be a nonverbal form of explicit memory. This is seen in studies of adults with hippocampal damage, who are unable to acquire new explicit knowledge but can learn new implicit knowledge. For instance, when given a mirror-drawing task (trace figures while watching one’s hand in a mirror), patients with hippocampal damage don’t remember performing the task from day to day (explicit memory) but nonetheless improve their performance as a result of practice (implicit memory) ( Milner, 1964 ). When these patients are given deferred-imitation tasks similar to those used with infants (observe a novel behavior and then reproduce it a day later), they behave much as they do on verbal explicit memory tasks—they are unable to remember seeing the task performed and fail to reproduce the modeled behavior ( McDonough et al., 1995 ).

Children of all ages beyond infancy (and perhaps during) have both implicit and explicit representations available to them, and operations involving both systems are used in processing information. However, tasks that tap mostly explicit representations show larger development differences than tasks that tap mostly implicit representations (e.g., Billingsley, Smith, & McAndrews, 2002 ; Newcombe et al., 1998 ). For example, in one study, 4-, 5-, and 6-year-old children saw a series of pictures and were asked to identify them or to answer some questions about them (for example, “What would you use an X for?”) ( Hayes & Hennessy, 1996 ). Two days later children were shown a series of fragmented pictures, some of which they had seen earlier and some of which were new. The initial picture in each series was substantially degraded and gradually more detail was provided until children identified the picture. Children were also asked if they remembered each picture from 2 days ago. Recognition memory, a measure of explicit cognition, improved with age; however, children of all ages identified the fragmented “old” pictures (i.e., those they had seen with less detail provided) earlier than the fragmented “new” pictures, a measure of implicit memory. This effect held regardless of whether children remembered seeing the pictures 2 days earlier or not.

Infants and children often display greater cognitive competence on tasks when their knowledge is assessed by implicit rather than explicit measures ( Keen, 2003 ). For example, in a false-belief task, after a piece of cheese is moved from its original container to a new one, children were asked where Sam, who saw where the object was hidden initially but did not see it moved, will look. Most 3-year-olds stated, erroneously, that Sam will look for the cheese in the new location. This is a measure of explicit representation. However, when 3-year-olds were asked this question, they first gazed at the original location, where Sam saw the cheese being hidden ( Clements & Perner, 1994 ; Clements, Ruffman, & McCallum, 2000 ). Looking behavior is a nonverbal and implicit measure, and when it is used as an indication of children’s knowledge, it appears that even 3-year-olds understand (at least implicitly) the possibility that others can hold a false belief.

Other research using infants’ implicit looking behavior (e.g., increasing looking time to an unexpected event, such as a screen that continues to descend when its trajectory should be stopped by an object) indicates that babies possess knowledge of physical objects, such as object permanence ( Baillargeon, 1987 ), months earlier than observed by Piaget using more explicit reaching behaviors as measures (e.g., reaching and retrieving a covered object). Other research using similar looking-time measures has shown that 5- and 6-month-old infants realize that items that are unsupported will fall ( Baillargeon, 1994 ; see Baillargeon, 2008 ; Spelke & Kinzler, 2007 , for reviews). In contrast, 2-year-old children fail to show this knowledge when explicit searching behavior is used as a measure ( Berthier et al., 2000 ; Hood, Carey, & Prasada, 2000 ). For example, after watching a ball dropped onto a stage behind a screen and seeing the resting ball on the floor, 2- and 2.5-year-old children watched as the experimenter placed a cup on the floor of the stage, a shelf over the cup, and then a second cup on that shelf ( Hood et al., 2000 ). The screen was then replaced and the ball dropped again. If the children understood the solidity of objects, as 6-month-old infants presumably do, they should search in the cup on the top shelf. Most 2.5-year-old children did so (93%), but only 40% of the 2-year-old children searched in the top cup, suggesting that, when using explicit measures, their understanding of solidity was tenuous. These and other findings (see Keen, 2003 ) suggest that implicit knowledge develops before explicit knowledge, and we must be cautious when we state that infants or children either possess, as reflected by implicit knowledge, or don’t possess, as reflected by explicit knowledge, a particular concept.

Dual-Process/Representation Theories of Cognitive Development

The implicit/explicit distinction just discussed suggests that children have multiple ways of representing information. Such theories are often referred to as dual-process theories , and most theorists postulate that people have (at least) two basic ways of representing information (e.g., implicit vs. explicit; experiential vs. analytic; exact, verbatim traces vs. inexact, “fuzzy” traces) and that there are developmental differences in how children use these various forms of representation (e.g., Barrouillet, 2011 ; Brainerd & Reyna, 2002 , 2005 ; Klaczynski, 2009 ). One dual-process theory that has been widely applied to children’s cognition is fuzzy-trace theory (e.g., Brainerd & Reyna, 1993 , 2002 , 2005 ). Brainerd and Reyna propose that people represent experiences on a fuzzy-to-verbatim continuum . At one extreme are verbatim traces , which are elaborated, exact representations of recently encoded information. At the other extreme are fuzzy traces , or gist, which are vague, degenerated representations that maintain only the sense or pattern of recent experiences.

Although people of all age process information along the entire continuum, young children are biased to represent experiences in terms of verbatim traces, with this bias shifting in middle childhood. This has implications for children’s performance on a host of tasks, because verbatim and fuzzy traces are processed differently. For example, verbatim traces are more likely to be forgotten and are more susceptible to output interference than fuzzy traces. Although space prevents me from providing a detailed description of research performed following fuzzy-trace theory, it has been applied to a wide range of domains within cognitive development, including memory (e.g., Brainerd & Reyna, 2005 ), arithmetic (e.g., Brainerd & Gordon, 1994 ), and reasoning (e.g., Reyna & Farley, 2006 ), and has generated a number of counterintuitive predictions that have been confirmed by research. For example, under some circumstances, children’s false memories (e.g., remembering an event that didn’t happen) are more resistant to forgetting than true memories (e.g., Brainerd & Mojardin, 1999 ; see Brainerd & Reyna, 2005 ). This was predicted premised on the fact that correct recognition is based, in part, on literal, or verbatim, memory traces. Because there are no verbatim memory traces for falsely remembered events, they are based solely on the more durable fuzzy traces. As a result, true memories are more likely to be forgotten than false memories.

Representation has been one of the most investigated and theorized-about aspects of cognitive development. Counter to Piaget’s original proposal, children, beginning in infancy, have multiple ways of representing information, although their ability to mentally represent people, objects, and events increases in sophistication over infancy and childhood. The ability to represent the intentions of other people, a form of social cognition, may be of special significance, for with it children can represent the goals of other people and are able to learn through observation and direct teaching, permitting the acquisition of knowledge and skills that were foreign to our ancestors. In fact, many theorists propose that humans’ exceptional intelligence, which affords scientific, artistic, and technological accomplishments, is derived from our social intelligence, evolved for cooperating and competing with fellow conspecifics (e.g., Alexander, 1989 ; Dunbar, 1995 , 2010 ; Geary & Ward, 2005 ; Humphrey, 1976 ), and the result of the confluence of a big brain, an extended juvenile period, and living in socially complex groups (e.g., Bjorklund, Cormier, & Rosenberg, 2005 ; Dunbar, 1995 ). Human representational ability is seemingly unique in the animal world. Although hints of representational thought can be seen in other big-brained animals, including the great apes (e.g., Herrmann et al., 2007 ; Whiten, 2007 ), dolphins (e.g., Bender, Herzing, & Bjorklund, 2009 ; Krützen et al., 2005 ), and elephants (e.g., Plotnik et al., 2006 ), no other species makes use of symbolic representation to the extent that humans do. Although I’ve emphasized that there does not seem to be a single point in development when we can say children “have” representational thought versus when they do not, the change of thinking between the mainly sensorimotor infant and the child who possesses language and theory of mind is substantial, giving the appearance, if not the reality, of a stagelike transformation in cognition.

Children Develop Increasing Intentional Control over Their Behavior and Cognition

The purpose of cognition is to solve problems. Although adult human minds can ponder esoteric questions concerning the meaning of existence, cognition evolved to help animals solve the problems they encounter in everyday life. The ability to solve problems increases with age, and one important issue for developmental psychologists concerns the degree to which children of different ages can intentionally guide their problem solving. Much research on this topic has addressed the use of strategies , usually defined as deliberate, goal-directed mental operations that are aimed at solving a problem (e.g., Harnishfeger & Bjorklund, 1990 ; Pressley & Hilden, 2006 ). However, central to using strategies and intentional control of behavior is self-regulation , the ability to guide not only one’s problem solving but also one’s emotions (e.g., Cole, Martin, & Dennis, 2004 ; Posner, Rothbart, & Sheese, 2007 ).

Several basic-level cognitive abilities are involved in self-regulation, which collectively are referred to as executive function ( Jones, Rothbart, & Posner, 2003 ; Wiebe, Espy, & Charak, 2008 ; Zelazo, Carlson, & Kesek, 2008 ). Executive function refers to the processes involved in regulating attention and in determining what to do with information just gathered or retrieved from long-term memory. It plays a central role in planning and behaving flexibly, particularly when dealing with novel information. It involves a related set of basic information-processing abilities, including working memory , the structures and processes used for temporarily storing and manipulating information; selectively attending to relevant information; inhibiting responding and resisting interference; and cognitive flexibility, as reflected by how easily individuals can switch between different sets of rules or different tasks (see Garon, Bryson, & Smith, 2008 ; McAuley & White, 2011 ; Zelazo et al., 2008 ). In this section, I review the development of various aspects of executive function and then look briefly at children’s development of strategies, topics that will both be examined in more detail later in this handbook (see the chapters by Rueda & Posner; and Carlson, Zelazo, & Faja).

The Development of Executive Function

Executive function seems to include at least three factors—working memory, inhibition, and cognitive flexibility—each of which develops. Working memory is measured by performance on working-memory span tasks. Working-memory span can be contrasted with the more familiar measure of memory span , found on the Stanford-Binet and Wechsler IQ tests. Memory span is typically measured by asking children to recall in exact order a list of items that are presented at a rate of about 1 per second. In contrast, in working-memory span tasks, children are asked to perform simple cognitive operations in addition to remembering the items. For example, in a counting-span task children may see arrays of blue circles and yellow triangles and be asked to count the number of circles. Children must then recall the number of circles in that array and in each prior array. Both memory and working-memory span show regular increases with age, with working-memory span usually being about two items less than a child’s memory span (e.g., Alloway, Gathercole, & Pickering, 2006 ; Case, 1985 ; Dempster, 1981 ).

One popular account of working memory and its development was presented by Baddeley and Hitch ( Baddeley, 1986 ; Baddeley & Hitch, 1974 ), who proposed that working memory consists of a central executive that stores information and two temporary systems, one for coding verbal information called the articulatory , or phonological , loop , and another for coding visual information, referred to as the visuospatial scratch pad , or visuospatial working memory . Developmental differences in verbal memory span are primarily due to age differences in the articulatory loop. Age differences in the rate of decay of verbal representations held in the articulatory loop and/or the rate that that information can be rehearsed contribute to developmental differences in memory and working-memory span (see Cowan & Alloway, 2009 ). Support for this contention comes from research reporting a relationship between the speed with which individual words can be articulated and memory span. Researchers have found reliable age differences in speed of processing , with younger children taking more time to process information and make decisions than older children ( Kail & Ferrer, 2007 ; Miller & Vernon, 1997 ). With age, children are able to read or say words at a faster rate, and memory span increases accordingly (e.g., Chuah & Maybery, 1999 ; Hulme et al., 1984 ). When adults’ speed of processing is slowed down to be comparable to that of 6-year-olds (e.g., by making them remember digits using a foreign language), their memory and working-memory spans are similarly reduced to be comparable to those of 6-year-olds (e.g., Case, Kurland, & Goldberg, 1982 ).

The relationship between speed of enunciating individual items and memory span is nicely illustrated by some cross-cultural research. For example, Chinese-speaking children have longer memory spans than English-speaking children ( Chen & Stevenson, 1988 ; Geary et al., 1993 ), and this is related to the fact that the digits 1 through 9 can be articulated more rapidly in Chinese than in English. A similar effect has been found for bilingual Welsh children, who have longer digit spans in English, their second language, than in Welsh, their first language. This counterintuitive effect is attributed to the fact that number words can be articulated more rapidly in English than in Welsh ( Ellis & Hennelley, 1980 ).

Children’s familiarity with the to-be-remembered items also affects span length (e.g., Dempster, 1981 , 1985 ). For example, in a much-cited study, Chi (1978) reported that a group of 10-year-old chess experts had longer memory spans for game-possible positions on a chessboard than a group of adults who knew how to play chess but were not experts. However, their greater memory span was limited to their area of expertise; the adults had longer memory spans than the children for digits (see also Schneider et al., 1993 ). Memory and working-memory span, then, should not be viewed as absolute limits of children’s information-processing abilities, but rather they are influenced by factors including the speed with which individual items can be processed and children’s knowledge for the to-be-remembered information.

Yet there is evidence that there may be some absolute limits in how much information children of different ages can hold in working memory ( Cowan et al., 1999 , 2011 ). For example, Cowan and his colleagues (1999) evaluated age differences in span of apprehension ( Sperling, 1960 ), which refers to the amount of information that people can attend to at a single time. The span of apprehension of adults is about four items, compared to memory span, which is 7 ± 2 items. In the study by Cowan and colleagues, first- and fourth-grade children and adults heard series of digits over headphones, which they were to ignore, while simultaneously playing a video game. Occasionally and unexpectedly, however, they were asked to recall, in exact order, the most recently presented set of digits they had heard. The average span of apprehension increased with age: about 2.5 digits for first graders, about 3.0 for fourth graders, and about 3.5 digits for adults. Cowan and his colleagues interpreted these significant age differences as reflecting a true developmental difference in the capacity of the short-term store that serves as the foundation for age differences on memory-span tasks.

Individual differences in children’s working memory are related to a host of higher-order cognitive abilities. For example, working memory correlates moderately with IQ (see Fry & Hale, 2000 ) and is significantly associated with the speed and accuracy of arithmetic computation (e.g., Adams & Hitch, 1997 ; Zheng, Swanson, & Marcoulides, 2011 ), reading comprehension (e.g., Daneman & Blennerhassett, 1984 ; Daneman & Green, 1986 ), writing ability (e.g., Swanson & Beringer, 1996 ), and the use of arithmetic (e.g., Berg, 2008 ) and memory strategies (e.g., Lehmann & Hasselhorn, 2007 ; Woody-Dorning & Miller, 2001 ). Children with math (e.g., Geary et al., 1991 ) and reading (e.g., Gathercole et al., 2006 ; Swanson & Jerman, 2007 ) disabilities have smaller working memories than nondisabled children, and children with precocious mathematical skills have higher levels of executive function (e.g., working memory, inhibition) than typically devleoping children ( Johnson, Im-Bolter, & Pascual-Leone, 2003 ; Swanson, 2006 ).

A second basic-level ability included in executive function is inhibition , which refers to the ability to prevent making some cognitive or behavioral response. Researchers have proposed that children’s abilities to inhibit preferred or well-established responses plays an important role in cognitive development (e.g., Bjorklund & Harnishfeger, 1990 ; Dempster, 1992 ; Diamond & Taylor, 1996 ; Harnishfeger, 1995 ). Related to inhibition is resistance to interference ( Dempster, 1993 ), which refers to “susceptibility to performance decrements under conditions of multiple distracting stimuli” ( Harnishfeger, 1995 , pp. 188–189). Resistance to interference is seen in dual tasks, when performing one task (watching television) interferes with performance on a second task (comprehending a story one is reading), or in selective attention, when one must focus on “central” information (reading a story) and ignore “peripheral” information (the plot of a television sitcom).

Inhibition and the ability to resist interference increase with age. For example, in Piaget’s A-not-B object permanence tasks, infants much younger than about 12 months continue to search at location A, where they had retrieved a hidden object several times previously, despite seeing it hidden at a new location (B). One factor hypothesized to be related to performance on this task is infants’ ability to inhibit their previous correct responses, which improves over the latter part of the first year ( Diamond, 1985 ; Holmboe et al., 2008 ).

Inhibition abilities continue to develop over childhood and adolescence (see, e.g., Kochanska et al., 1996 ; Luria, 1961 ) and are assessed by a variety of simple tests. For instance, in the tapping task children must tap once each time the examiner taps twice and tap twice each time the examiner taps once; in the day-night task , children must say “day” each time they see a picture of the moon and “night” each time they see a picture of the sun; and in Simon Says , children must perform an action only when Simon says so (“Simon says, touch your nose”). These tasks require children to inhibit a prepotent response and execute another, and individual and development differences are found on these and other tasks (e.g., Baker, Friedman, & Leslie, 2010 ; Diamond & Taylor, 1996 ; Sabbagh et al., 2006 ). More complicated tasks, appropriate for older children and adolescents, include variants of the Wisconsin Card Sorting Task, in which participants sort cards by one dimension (e.g., shape of object), which is then switched to another dimension (e.g., color). The number of perseverative errors (i.e., continuing to sort by the previously correct category) is used as a measure of inhibition (e.g., Chelune & Baer, 1986 ).

Children’s performance on inhibition and resistance to interference tasks is associated with a host of higher-level cognitive abilities, including false-belief tasks assessing theory of mind (e.g., Sabbagh et al., 2006 ), selective attention (e.g., Ridderinkhof, van der Molen, & Band, 1997 ), selective forgetting (e.g., Harnishfeger & Pope, 1996 ; Lehman et al., 1997 ), incidental learning (e.g., Schiff & Knopf, 1985 ), and intelligence (see Harnishfeger & Bjorklund, 1994 ; McCall & Carriger, 1993 ). Behavioral inhibition has also been identified as the principal cause of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD; Barkley, 1997 ).

A third basic-level component hypothesized to be involved in the development of executive function is cognitive flexibility , as reflected by the ability to shift between sets of tasks or rules (e.g., Garon et al., 2008 ; Zelazo et al., 2003 ). Many of the tasks used to assess inhibition abilities also require children to shift, or change, between a set of rules. For example, in the Wisconsin Card Sorting Task participants must switch from following one rule (it’s the shape of the object that’s important) to another (it’s the number of objects on a card that’s important). Relatedly, Zelazo and his colleagues have argued that the development of executive function involves the increasing ability to formulate and maintain rules, as illustrated on simplified “shifting tasks,” in which children must change from following one criteria (sort by color) to another (sort by shape) ( Zelazo et al., 2003 , 2008 ).

Developmental differences in executive function have been related to age-related differences in brain development, particularly the frontal lobes (see Zelazo et al., 2008 ). For example, myelination of neurons, which promotes a faster rate of neuronal processing, is not fully developed in the frontal cortex until adolescence or young adulthood (see Lenroot & Giedd, 2007 ; Yakovlev & Lecours, 1967 ). There is substantial research with infants (e.g., Bell, Wolfe, & Adkins, 2007 ) and older children and adults (e.g., Luna et al., 2001 ) pointing to the frontal lobes as the locus of inhibitory control. For example, neuroimaging studies reveal relations between infants’ performance on A-not-B object-permanence tasks and frontal lobe activity (e.g., Baird et al., 2002 ; Segalowitz & Hiscock, 2002 ), and young children’s performance on the Wisconsin Card Sorting Task is similar to that of adults with frontal lesions ( Chelune & Baer, 1986 ). Research by Luna and colleagues (2001) found that inhibition abilities develop gradually between the ages of 8 and 30 years and are associated with activity in the frontal cortex. However, rather than showing a linear relation between age and brain functioning on inhibition tasks, they reported that the prefrontal cortex was more active on these inhibition tasks in adolescents than in either children or adults.

Most accounts of executive function hold that the various processes are domain-general in nature. That is, developmental and individual differences in working memory and inhibition influence children’s performance on a host of tasks in a similar way (e.g., Case, 1992 ). Despite this, one should not expect executive function to be uniform across all tasks, as differences in motivation and knowledge base will influence levels of children’s performance on different tasks, and some aspects of executive function are likely domain-specific in nature. For example, although reading comprehension seems to be associated with a domain-general set of processing resources, the relation between working memory and writing ability appears to be specific to that domain only ( Swanson & Berninger, 1996 ).

Developmental changes in working memory, inhibition, and cognitive flexibility are all related to one another and to changes in neurological development, particularly the frontal cortex. Few higher-level cognitive tasks can be performed without adequate control of one’s attention, and it is difficult to emphasize too much the importance of executive function to the development of higher-level cognition and to the regulation of one’s emotions and behaviors. Some have even speculated that the evolution of executive function may have been an important component in the emergence of the modern human mind (e.g., Geary, 2005 ). The abilities to inhibit inappropriate behavior, resist distraction, and control one’s actions in general are critical to effective function in any social group, as well as for activities such as hunting, preparing meals, or constructing tools, among many others. These abilities are better developed in humans than in other primates and in older children than in younger children, and may be a key to understanding both human cognitive development and evolution.

Becoming Self-Directed Learners: Strategy Development

Once children have sufficient cognitive and behavioral self-control, they can reflect on the problems they face and approach them strategically. Strategies are usually defined as deliberately implemented, nonobligatory (one doesn’t have to use them to perform a task), mentally effortful operations that are aimed at solving a problem and are potentially available to consciousness ( Harnishfeger & Bjorklund, 1990 ; Pressley & Hilden, 2006 ). Children become self-directed learners by using deliberate information-processing operations to achieve specific goals that could not be achieved “without thinking” (i.e., automatically or with implicit cognition).

It should not be surprising that children become better problem solvers with age. What is important is the way in which they become better problem solvers. As I mentioned in the previous section , children’s strategy use is affected by processes such as working memory and inhibition (e.g., Lehmann & Hasselhorn, 2007 ; Woody-Dorning & Miller, 2001 ). However, even young preschool children use simple strategies in some contexts. For example, 18- and 24-month-old children playing a modified game of hide-and-seek looked at the hiding location of a toy or repeated the toy’s name during a delay period between the time the toy was hidden and they were permitted to search for it ( DeLoache & Brown, 1983 ; DeLoache, Cassidy, & Brown, 1985 ). With age, the sophistication of children’s strategies increases. For example, preschool children perform simple addition problems by counting on their fingers; they use counting strategies that involve enunciating all numbers in each addend (e.g., for 5 + 3 = ?, saying “one, two, three, four, five…six, seven, eight,” called the sum strategy ), later using counting strategies in which only the numbers in the smaller addend are enumerated (e.g., for 5 + 3 = ?, saying “five…six, seven, eight,” called the min strategy , because the minimum number of counts is made), to retrieving the answer directly from memory (e.g., for 5 + 3 = ?, saying “eight” immediately after the problem is posed) (see Ashcraft, 1990 ). Use of increasingly sophisticated strategies with age is observed for most other complex cognitive tasks, including memory (see Bjorklund, Dukes, & Brown, 2009 ), problem solving and reasoning (see DeLoache, Miller, & Pierroutsakos, 1998 ), attention (see Miller, 1990 ), and reading (see Garner, 1990 ), among others.

However, it would be misleading to believe that strategies develop in a stagelike fashion, with a less sophisticated strategy being replaced by a more sophisticated one. Rather, children of all ages have multiple strategies available to them at any one time. The number of strategies available to a child increases with age, as does the effectiveness of the modal strategy that is used on any particular task. This is best reflected by Robert Siegler’s (1996 , 2006 ) adaptive strategy choice model . Using Darwin’s metaphor of natural selection as a guide, Siegler proposes that children generate a broad range of strategies to solve a particular class of problem and then select among those strategies. Depending on the child’s goals and the nature of the task, some strategies are selected and used frequently, whereas others that are less effective are used less often and eventually decrease in frequency (and may eventually go “extinct”). Early in development or when a child is first learning a new task, relatively simple strategies “win” most of the time. With practice and maturation, children use other, more effortful (i.e., requiring more mental effort and greater executive control) and effective strategies.

Siegler conceives of development as occurring via as a series of overlapping waves, with the pattern of those waves changing over time. Thus, extending the example of the development of addition strategies, individual preschool and early school-age children actually use multiple strategies that vary with age (older children make greater use of the more sophisticated strategies; see Siegler, 1996 ), specific problems (fact retrieval is more apt to be used on doubles, e.g., 5 + 5 = ?, Siegler & Shrager, 1984 ), and context (e.g., children used less sophisticated strategies in the context of a game using dice than when given problems in a standard format; e.g., Bjorklund & Rosenblum, 2002 ). Multiple and variable strategy use has been found for children for a wide range of tasks, including arithmetic (e.g., Alibali, 1999 ), memory (e.g., Coyle & Bjorklund, 1997 ), spelling (e.g., Kwong & Varnhagen, 2005 ), scientific reasoning ( Schauble, 1990 ), and conservation ( Church & Goldin-Meadow, 1986 ), among others (see Siegler, 1996 , 2006 ).

Children’s strategy use is influenced by a host of factors in addition to executive function, two important ones being knowledge base and metacognition . Knowledge base refers to how much children know about the problems they’re trying to solve. Children over a broad age range for a wide range of tasks use strategies more effectively when they have detailed knowledge for the to-be-processed information. The principal reason for this relationship seems to be that having an extensive knowledge base results in faster processing of information within that domain (e.g., the domain of chess, soccer, or developmental psychology), which in turn results in more efficient processing (see Bjorklund, Muir–Broaddus, & Schneider, 1990 ; Kee, 1994 ). As an example, consider a free-recall task in which children are given lists of words from different categories to remember. Some category members are typical exemplars of their category (e.g., orange, banana, pear for FRUIT), whereas others are atypical category members (e.g., raisin, melon, grapefruit ). Children are more likely to use one or more strategies and to remember more words when recalling the more familiar and more categorically integrated sets of typical items than atypical items (e.g., Best, 1993 ; Schneider, 1986 ; Schwenck, Bjorklund, & Schneider, 2007 ). In general, children’s world knowledge increases with age, and as it does their strategic performance on a host of tasks increases with it.

Metacognition refers to one’s knowledge of one’s cognitive abilities. For each type of cognition there is a corresponding type of metacognition—for example, meta-attention, metamemory, and metalinguistics. Both cognition and metacognition increase with age and are usually (but not always) correlated with one another ( Schneider & Lockl, 2002 ). When problem solving is governed by the use of goal-directed strategies, task performance is considerably enhanced by knowing how well one is doing (i.e., monitoring task performance, procedural metacognition ) and by assessing which strategies will be most effective and when (i.e., declarative metacognition ) ( Schneider & Lockl, 2002 ). This has been found for a host of cognitive domains, including scientific reasoning (e.g., Kuhn et al., 1988 ), arithmetic (e.g., Carr & Jessup, 1995 ), attention (e.g., Miller & Weiss, 1981 ), and memory (e.g., DeMarie et al., 2004 ), among others, although positive relations between cognitive and metacognitive performance are often not found until late childhood (e.g., Hasselhorn, 1990 ; Lange et al., 1990 ), unless simple tasks that involve metamemory questions that are highly related to task performance are used ( Schneider & Sodian, 1988 ). When children are provided metacognitive training, their use of strategies tends to increase, particularly for older children (e.g., Ghatala et al., 1986 ; Ringel & Springer, 1980 ).

The relationship between cognitive performance, strategies, and metacognition is a multidirectional one (e.g., Schneider & Bjorklund, 1998 ). Children’s tendency to use and be aware of the availability and effectiveness of cognitive strategies is related to their level of conceptual development, executive functioning, and familiarity with the materials and tasks. Even very young children use strategies effectively in some situations, but will fail to use them, or use them and fail to enhance task’s performance, in other situations. The latter phenomenon has been referred to as utilization deficiency ( Miller, 1990 ) and has been found for a variety of strategies, including selective attention (e.g., DeMarie-Dreblow & Miller, 1988 ), memory (e.g., Bjorklund et al., 1994 ), reading (e.g., Gaultney, 1995 ), and analogical reasoning (e.g., Muir-Broaddus, 1995 ), among many others. Children who do not use a strategy spontaneously can often be trained to do so, often with increases in task performance (e.g., Flavell, 1970 ; Gelman, 1969 ; see Harnishfeger & Bjorklund, 1990 , for review).

Like most aspects of cognitive development, it is not possible to specify a time in development when children are astrategic and a time when they become strategic. A child who fails to use a strategy on one task may do so given a slightly different context or set of instructions, or a different set of materials. Children’s cognitive functioning is influenced by a host of both endogenous and exogenous factors, and, depending on the amount and type of support children receive for performing a given task, they may display substantial cognitive competence or incompetence. Despite this variability, one can conclude with confidence that children’s problem solving becomes increasingly strategic with age; they have a broad selection of strategies to choose from, and they become more effective with age in their selection and monitoring of problem-solving strategies.

Cognitive Development Is Constructed Within a Social Context

Humans are a social species, and human development can be properly understood only when the influence of social relations and the broader social/cultural environment are considered. Development always occurs within a social context, culturally shaped and historically conditioned, although the specific details of a child’s social environment can vary widely.

This is no less true of cognitive development as it is of social and emotional development. Although the great bulk of cognitive-development research has been conducted in laboratories or quiet rooms in children’s schools, and the topics of study have often been divorced from children’s everyday lives, children’s developing cognitive skills are used to solve everyday problems, and they “learn” to think by interacting with their social environment (see Gauvain, Beebe, & Zhao, 2011 ; Cole, 2006 ; Rogoff, 2003 ; Vygotsky, 1978 ; see the chapter by Gauvain in this volume 2). Acquiring a full understanding of cognitive development requires examining both distal (e.g., evolutionary) and proximal, or immediate (e.g., role of parents, peers, neuronal development) influences. Included in both the distal and the proximal levels of causation is the social environment. First, the opportunities and tools that a culture provides will obviously have an immediate impact on children’s thinking (e.g., learning to read). But many of these tools are products of the sociohistorical context in which a culture developed. The traditions, tools, and languages spoken have deep cultural roots that can influence a child’s intellectual development.

Cultural Contexts for Learning

In all cultures, parents, teachers, siblings, and peers influence children’s cognitive development both by serving as a source of problems (much of humans’ considerable intelligence is used to deal with conspecifics) and by guiding their problem solving. Vygotsky’s (1978) concept of parents and other more cognitively sophisticated people working with children in the zone of proximal development is well known to developmental psychologists and reflects the routine interactions parents and others have with children that fosters cognitive change. Learning is most apt to occur when parents provide children with the appropriate degree of scaffolding ( Wood, Bruner, & Ross, 1976 ), giving neither too little nor too much help with a particular problem. There are cultural and individual differences in the assistance adults give children in solving daily problems, and children learn much about “how to think,” not through explicit teaching by adults, but through what Rogoff (1998 ; Rogoff et al., 1993 ) calls guided participation , “the process and system of involvement of individuals with others, as they communicate and engage in shared activities” ( Rogoff et al., 1993 , p. 6).

Different cultures (and subcultures) construct different experiences for their children, and this has consequences for both what and how children learn. For example, children living in traditional societies are more attentive to what adults do as opposed to what adults say to them, and thus develop a keener ability to learn through observation than children from schooled societies (e.g., Mejia-Arauz, Rogoff, & Paradise, 2005 ; Morelli, Rogoff, & Angelillo, 2003 ). In one study, children of traditional Mexican heritage whose mothers had only basic schooling (on average, a seventh-grade education) and children of Mexican or European background whose mothers had a high-school education or more observed a woman creating origami figures ( Mejia-Arauz et al., 2005 ). When they were later asked to make their own figures, children of traditional Mexican heritage were less likely to request information from the “Origami Lady” than children of the more educated mothers. These findings are consistent with the observations that these “traditional” children pay more attention to the actions of adults and learn more through observation, rather than seeking instructions from adults or learning through verbal instructions (see Cole, 2006 ).

Other research suggests that general cultural perspectives influence some basic aspects of cognitive development. For example, East Asian cultures are proposed to promote a holistic approach to reasoning, whereas Western cultures are hypothesized to promote a more analytic style ( Nisbett et al., 2001 ). Such differences have been hypothesized to affect how children learn to allocate their attention, with East Asians socialized to divide their attention between objects and events in their environments and Westerners socialized to focus their attention on key features of objects ( Duffy & Kitayama, 2007 ). For example, when Japanese and American adults were shown a picture of a box with a line drawn in it and then asked to draw a line in a larger box that is either of the same absolute length or the same relative length as the line in the smaller box, robust cultural differences were found: Japanese adults were more accurate performing the relative task, whereas American adults were more accurate performing the absolute task ( Kitayama et al., 2003 ). This cultural pattern is found as early as age 6 ( Duffy et al., 2009 ; Vasilyeva, Duffy, & Huttenlocher, 2007 ); however, both American and Japanese 4- and 5-year-olds made more errors on the absolute task ( Duffy et al., 2009 ), suggesting that young children from both cultures initially have an easier time dealing with relative information, but, depending on cultural practices, sometime around 6 years of age, some children (in this case, Americans) become socialized to focus their attention, whereas others (in this case, Japanese) become socialized to divide their attention.

Some everyday practices of parents in Western culture serve to prepare their children for life in a schooled and literate society. For example, children attending Western schools are frequently asked questions for which adults already know the answers. They also are asked to learn and discuss things that have no immediate relevance—knowledge for knowledge’s sake. We take such practices for granted, but such context-independent learning is foreign to many cultures, and we are mostly unaware of how evolutionarily novel formal education practices are for our species. Despite the novelty of such practices, children do not enter school totally unprepared for such experiences. For example, Western parents of young children frequently prompt them to name objects or to recall recent events (e.g., “What did we do today? Who did we see? Did you cry? Yes? Who else was there?”) ( Gauvain, 2001 ; Rogoff, 1990 ). In addition to preparing children for the type of discourse they will experience in school, such shared remembering helps children learn how to remember and communicate memories; learn about themselves, which contributes to the development of the self-concept; learn about their own social and cultural history; and learn what is worth remembering. It also promotes social solidarity ( Gauvain, 2001 ).

Sociohistorical Influences

According to Vygotsky (1978) , cultures provide the tools of intellectual adaptation that children learn to use to think and solve problems. These tools include such things as computers, alphabets, abacuses, books, number systems, music, art, and other cultural inventions specifically designed to foster learning and communication, but also more implicit devices that can influence thinking, such as the language spoken and how it represents concepts. Concerning language, something as simple as how a language expresses its numbers can affect important aspects of quantitative development. For instance, we saw earlier that differences in the time it takes to articulate the digit words (one, two, three, etc.) influences digit span (e.g., Geary et al., 1993 ). Differences in how languages name number words have also been shown to be related to aspects of mathematical development. For example, the first 10 digit words have to be memorized in all languages (e.g., one, two, three; eins, zwei, drei ; yee, uhr, shan , in English, German, and Chinese, respectively), but once the teen decade is reached languages differ in terms of how much new vocabulary must be learned and the extent to which one uses the base-10 number system for enunciating number words. For instance, in Chinese numbers from 11 to 19 follow a simple rule: the Chinese word for 10 is shi and the numbers 11 through 19 are made by taking shi and adding the appropriate digit (11 = shi yee , or “ten one”; 12 = shi uhr , or “ten two”; 13 = shi shan , or “ten three,” and so on). In contrast, many of the words denoting the numbers from 11 to 19 in English are arbitrary (e.g., eleven, twelve, thirteen, fifteen), and even for “regular” numbers, the decade name is stated second (nine teen ), unlike numbers beginning with twenty, in which the decade term is stated first (e.g., twenty-one; thirty-two). As a result of these differences, Chinese children learn to count to 20 before English-speaking children, although there are no cultural differences in learning to count to 10 and in counting to 100 once children learn to count to 20 ( Miller et al., 1995 ). Similarly, German children have difficulty when learning how to convert spoken numbers to numerals, because, in German, the decade term follows the unit term (for instance, 42 is said zweiundvierzig , or “two-and-forty”); as a result they frequently invert the order of the numerals (for example, writing “24” instead of “42”) ( Zuber et al., 2009 ).

Other cultures have a limited way of expressing quantities. For instance, the Amazonia languages of the Pirahã and Mundurukú have no number words for quantities larger than five ( Gordon, 2004 ; Pica et al., 2004 ). Adults from these cultures can perform tasks involving small quantities easily, but their performance deteriorates rapidly when attempting tasks with larger quantities. In contrast, Pirahã children who learn Portuguese are able to perform arithmetic calculations with larger quantities, bolstering the interpretation that it is the language’s ability to represent numbers that is responsible for the pattern of numerical thinking in these cultures ( Gordon, 2004 ).

Natural selection has provided humans with a unique nervous system that develops in a species-typical way in all but the most deprived environments. As such, it is easy to think of cognitive development as something that “just happens,” pretty much the same way for children worldwide. Yet intelligence is also rooted in culture, and understanding how cultural practices and technological tools influence cognitive development helps us better comprehend the process of development and our role as adults in fostering that process. Cultural “explanations” for cognitive development do not provide alternative interpretations to those based on biology (e.g., neurological factors) or specific experience (e.g., how mothers talk to their babies); rather, cognitive development must be seen as the result of interacting factors, with the social environment being a critical ingredient in this mix.

Cognitive Development: A Mature and Developing Science

Nearly 20 years ago, a colleague specializing in social development asked me what had happened to cognitive development. It used to “lead the field,” he said, providing a framework for researchers in other areas of development, but now it seemed fragmented. The field was once united behind Piaget’s theory (or united in trying to refute Piaget’s theory), and this provided a framework nearly all psychologists could use to interpret children’s behavior and development. Information-processing approaches replaced Piaget’s account as the dominant metaphor for development, but shortcomings left the field without an overarching metatheory ( Bjorklund, 1997 ).

In the years since I had this conversation, I believe the field of cognitive development has gotten back on track. In place of the theoretical hegemony afforded by Piagetian or information-processing approaches, cognitive developmentalists adopted some principles, many of them based in developmental biology, that served to unify the field. Advances in brain research make it necessary for cognitive developmentalists to provide accounts that are at least not contradictory to what is known about how the brain works and develops (e.g., Lenroot & Giedd, 2007 ; Nelson, Thomas, & de Haan, 2006 ), and in some cases that are usefully informed by neuroscience, as in the case of executive function (e.g., Zelazo et al., 2008 ); new research in genetics points to the complex and bidirectional interactions between genes, environment, and development (e.g., Caspi et al., 2007 ; Rutter, 2007 ); and research and theory in evolutionary developmental biology and psychology (e.g., Bjorklund & Pellegrini, 2002 ; Gardiner & Bjorklund, 2009 ; Ploeger, van der Maas, & Rajimakers, 2008 ; West-Eberhard, 2003 ) make it clear that our ancestors also developed and that an appreciation of human phylogeny can help us acquire a better understanding of human ontogeny without the taint of genetic determinism that was once associated with evolutionary accounts of human behavior. Some researchers are fully aware of these influences on their science, whereas for others they serve as barely noticed background, but influence their thinking nonetheless.

Cognitive developmentalists are not of one mind about development, but they never have been, even when Piaget reigned. Contemporary cognitive-developmental science recognizes the significance of both lower-level and higher-level processes to children’s thinking, that the ontogeny of cognition has both biological and social origins, and that individual differences in cognition and its development are often associated with normative, age-related changes in thought. In brief, cognitive development happens at a variety of levels, and developmental scientists are becoming increasingly aware that we need to be cognizant of this and the interactions among the various levels to produce a true developmental science.

Questions for Future Research

How are patterns of neurological and behavioral/cognitive development coordinated and related?

How does the implicit knowledge/cognition of the infant and young child relate to the subsequent development of explicit knowledge/cognition?

Why do some forms of thinking come easily to children and others do not?

How do children gain intentional control over their thinking and problem solving?

What is the nature of representational change over infancy and childhood?

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50+ Research Topics for Psychology Papers

How to Find Psychology Research Topics for Your Student Paper

Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

Steven Gans, MD is board-certified in psychiatry and is an active supervisor, teacher, and mentor at Massachusetts General Hospital.

• Specific Branches of Psychology
• Topics Involving a Disorder or Type of Therapy
• Human Cognition
• Human Development
• Critique of Publications
• Famous Experiments
• Historical Figures
• Specific Careers
• Case Studies
• Literature Reviews
• Your Own Study/Experiment

Are you searching for a great topic for your psychology paper ? Sometimes it seems like coming up with topics of psychology research is more challenging than the actual research and writing. Fortunately, there are plenty of great places to find inspiration and the following list contains just a few ideas to help get you started.

Finding a solid topic is one of the most important steps when writing any type of paper. It can be particularly important when you are writing a psychology research paper or essay. Psychology is such a broad topic, so you want to find a topic that allows you to adequately cover the subject without becoming overwhelmed with information.

I can always tell when a student really cares about the topic they chose; it comes through in the writing. My advice is to choose a topic that genuinely interests you, so you’ll be more motivated to do thorough research.

In some cases, such as in a general psychology class, you might have the option to select any topic from within psychology's broad reach. Other instances, such as in an  abnormal psychology  course, might require you to write your paper on a specific subject such as a psychological disorder.

As you begin your search for a topic for your psychology paper, it is first important to consider the guidelines established by your instructor.

Research Topics Within Specific Branches of Psychology

The key to selecting a good topic for your psychology paper is to select something that is narrow enough to allow you to really focus on the subject, but not so narrow that it is difficult to find sources or information to write about.

One approach is to narrow your focus down to a subject within a specific branch of psychology. For example, you might start by deciding that you want to write a paper on some sort of social psychology topic. Next, you might narrow your focus down to how persuasion can be used to influence behavior .

Other social psychology topics you might consider include:

• Prejudice and discrimination (i.e., homophobia, sexism, racism)
• Social cognition
• Person perception
• Social control and cults
• Persuasion, propaganda, and marketing
• Attraction, romance, and love
• Nonverbal communication
• Prosocial behavior

Psychology Research Topics Involving a Disorder or Type of Therapy

Exploring a psychological disorder or a specific treatment modality can also be a good topic for a psychology paper. Some potential abnormal psychology topics include specific psychological disorders or particular treatment modalities, including:

• Eating disorders
• Borderline personality disorder
• Seasonal affective disorder
• Schizophrenia
• Antisocial personality disorder
• Profile a  type of therapy  (i.e., cognitive-behavioral therapy, group therapy, psychoanalytic therapy)

Topics of Psychology Research Related to Human Cognition

Some of the possible topics you might explore in this area include thinking, language, intelligence, and decision-making. Other ideas might include:

• False memories
• Speech disorders
• Problem-solving

Topics of Psychology Research Related to Human Development

In this area, you might opt to focus on issues pertinent to  early childhood  such as language development, social learning, or childhood attachment or you might instead opt to concentrate on issues that affect older adults such as dementia or Alzheimer's disease.

Some other topics you might consider include:

• Language acquisition
• Media violence and children
• Learning disabilities
• Gender roles
• Child abuse
• Prenatal development
• Parenting styles
• Aspects of the aging process

Do a Critique of Publications Involving Psychology Research Topics

One option is to consider writing a critique paper of a published psychology book or academic journal article. For example, you might write a critical analysis of Sigmund Freud's Interpretation of Dreams or you might evaluate a more recent book such as Philip Zimbardo's  The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil .

Professional and academic journals are also great places to find materials for a critique paper. Browse through the collection at your university library to find titles devoted to the subject that you are most interested in, then look through recent articles until you find one that grabs your attention.

Topics of Psychology Research Related to Famous Experiments

There have been many fascinating and groundbreaking experiments throughout the history of psychology, providing ample material for students looking for an interesting term paper topic. In your paper, you might choose to summarize the experiment, analyze the ethics of the research, or evaluate the implications of the study. Possible experiments that you might consider include:

• The Milgram Obedience Experiment
• The Stanford Prison Experiment
• The Little Albert Experiment
• Pavlov's Conditioning Experiments
• The Asch Conformity Experiment
• Harlow's Rhesus Monkey Experiments

Topics of Psychology Research About Historical Figures

One of the simplest ways to find a great topic is to choose an interesting person in the  history of psychology  and write a paper about them. Your paper might focus on many different elements of the individual's life, such as their biography, professional history, theories, or influence on psychology.

While this type of paper may be historical in nature, there is no need for this assignment to be dry or boring. Psychology is full of fascinating figures rife with intriguing stories and anecdotes. Consider such famous individuals as Sigmund Freud, B.F. Skinner, Harry Harlow, or one of the many other  eminent psychologists .

Psychology Research Topics About a Specific Career

​Another possible topic, depending on the course in which you are enrolled, is to write about specific career paths within the  field of psychology . This type of paper is especially appropriate if you are exploring different subtopics or considering which area interests you the most.

In your paper, you might opt to explore the typical duties of a psychologist, how much people working in these fields typically earn, and the different employment options that are available.

Topics of Psychology Research Involving Case Studies

One potentially interesting idea is to write a  psychology case study  of a particular individual or group of people. In this type of paper, you will provide an in-depth analysis of your subject, including a thorough biography.

Generally, you will also assess the person, often using a major psychological theory such as  Piaget's stages of cognitive development  or  Erikson's eight-stage theory of human development . It is also important to note that your paper doesn't necessarily have to be about someone you know personally.

In fact, many professors encourage students to write case studies on historical figures or fictional characters from books, television programs, or films.

Psychology Research Topics Involving Literature Reviews

Another possibility that would work well for a number of psychology courses is to do a literature review of a specific topic within psychology. A literature review involves finding a variety of sources on a particular subject, then summarizing and reporting on what these sources have to say about the topic.

Literature reviews are generally found in the  introduction  of journal articles and other  psychology papers , but this type of analysis also works well for a full-scale psychology term paper.

Topics of Psychology Research Based on Your Own Study or Experiment

Many psychology courses require students to design an actual psychological study or perform some type of experiment. In some cases, students simply devise the study and then imagine the possible results that might occur. In other situations, you may actually have the opportunity to collect data, analyze your findings, and write up your results.

Finding a topic for your study can be difficult, but there are plenty of great ways to come up with intriguing ideas. Start by considering your own interests as well as subjects you have studied in the past.

Online sources, newspaper articles, books , journal articles, and even your own class textbook are all great places to start searching for topics for your experiments and psychology term papers. Before you begin, learn more about  how to conduct a psychology experiment .

What This Means For You

After looking at this brief list of possible topics for psychology papers, it is easy to see that psychology is a very broad and diverse subject. While this variety makes it possible to find a topic that really catches your interest, it can sometimes make it very difficult for some students to select a good topic.

If you are still stumped by your assignment, ask your instructor for suggestions and consider a few from this list for inspiration.

• Hockenbury, SE & Nolan, SA. Psychology. New York: Worth Publishers; 2014.
• Santrock, JW. A Topical Approach to Lifespan Development. New York: McGraw-Hill Education; 2016.

By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

Developmental Psychology 101: Theories, Stages, & Research

You can imagine how vast this field of psychology is if it has to cover the whole of life, from birth through death.

Just like any other area of psychology, it has created exciting debates and given rise to fascinating case studies.

In recent years, developmental psychology has shifted to incorporate positive psychology paradigms to create a holistic lifespan approach. As an example, the knowledge gained from positive psychology can enhance the development of children in education.

In this article, you will learn a lot about different aspects of developmental psychology, including how it first emerged in history and famous theories and models.

Before you continue, we thought you might like to download our three Positive Psychology Exercises for free . These science-based exercises explore fundamental aspects of positive psychology, including strengths, values, and self-compassion, and will give you the tools to enhance the wellbeing of your clients, students, or employees.

This Article Contains:

What is developmental psychology, 4 popular theories, stages, & models, 2 questions and research topics, fascinating case studies & research findings, a look at positive developmental psychology, applying developmental psychology in education, resources from positivepsychology.com, a take-home message.

Human beings change drastically over our lifetime.

The American Psychological Association (2020) defines developmental psychology as the study of physical, mental, and behavioral changes, from conception through old age.

Developmental psychology investigates biological, genetic, neurological, psychosocial, cultural, and environmental factors of human growth (Burman, 2017).

Over the years, developmental psychology has been influenced by numerous theories and models in varied branches of psychology (Burman, 2017).

History of developmental psychology

Developmental psychology first appeared as an area of study in the late 19th century (Baltes, Lindenberger, & Staudinger, 2007). Developmental psychology focused initially on child and adolescent development, and was concerned about children’s minds and learning (Hall, 1883).

There are several key figures in developmental psychology. In 1877, the famous evolutionary biologist Charles Darwin undertook the first study of developmental psychology on innate communication forms. Not long after, physiologist William Preyer (1888) published a book on the abilities of an infant.

The 1900s saw many significant people dominating the developmental psychology field with their detailed theories of development: Sigmund Freud (1923, 1961), Jean Piaget (1928), Erik Erikson (1959), Lev Vygotsky (1978), John Bowlby (1958), and Albert Bandura (1977).

By the 1920s, the scope of developmental psychology had begun to include adult development and the aging process (Thompson, 2016).

In more recent years, it has broadened further to include prenatal development (Brandon et al., 2009). Developmental psychology is now understood to encompass the complete lifespan (Baltes et al., 2007).

Each of these models has contributed to the understanding of the process of human development and growth.

Furthermore, each theory and model focuses on different aspects of development: social, emotional, psychosexual, behavioral, attachment, social learning, and many more.

Here are some of the most popular models of development that have heavily contributed to the field of developmental psychology.

1. Bowlby’s attachment styles

The seminal work of psychologist John Bowlby (1958) showcased his interest in children’s social development. Bowlby (1969, 1973, 1980) developed the most famous theory of social development, known as attachment theory .

Bowlby (1969) hypothesized that the need to form attachments is innate, embedded in all humans for survival and essential for children’s development. This instinctive bond helps ensure that children are cared for by their parent or caregiver (Bowlby, 1969, 1973, 1980).

Bowlby’s original attachment work was developed further by one of his students, Mary Ainsworth. She proposed several attachment styles between the child and the caregiver (Ainsworth & Bell, 1970).

This theory clearly illustrates the importance of attachment styles to a child’s future development. Consistent and stable caregiving results in a secure attachment style (Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, & Wall, 1978). In contrast, unstable and insecure caregiving results in several negative attachment styles: ambivalent, avoidant, or disorganized (Ainsworth & Bell, 1970; Main & Solomon, 1986).

Bowlby’s theory does not consider peer group influence or how it can shape children’s personality and development (Harris, 1998).

2. Piaget’s stage theory

Jean Piaget was a French psychologist highly interested in child development. He was interested in children’s thinking and how they acquire, construct, and use their knowledge (Piaget, 1951).

Piaget’s (1951) four-stage theory of cognitive development sequences a child’s intellectual development. According to this theory, all children move through these four stages of development in the same order (Simatwa, 2010).

The sensorimotor stage is from birth to two years old. Behaviors are triggered by sensory stimuli and limited to simple motor responses. If an object is removed from the child’s vision, they think it no longer exists (Piaget, 1936).

The pre-operational stage occurs between two and six years old. The child learns language but cannot mentally manipulate information or understand concrete logic (Wadsworth, 1971).

The concrete operational stage takes place from 7 to 11 years old. Children begin to think more logically about factual events. Abstract or hypothetical concepts are still difficult to understand in this stage (Wadsworth, 1971).

In the formal operational stage from 12 years to adulthood, abstract thought and skills arise (Piaget, 1936).

Piaget did not consider other factors that might affect these stages or a child’s progress through them. Biological maturation and interaction with the environment can determine the rate of cognitive development in children (Papalia & Feldman, 2011). Individual differences can also dictate a child’s progress (Berger, 2014).

3. Freud’s psychosexual development theory

One of the most influential developmental theories, which encompassed psychosexual stages of development, was developed by Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud (Fisher & Greenberg, 1996).

Freud concluded that childhood experiences and unconscious desires influence behavior after witnessing his female patients experiencing physical symptoms and distress with no physical cause (Breuer & Freud, 1957).

According to Freud’s psychosexual theory, child development occurs in a series of stages, each focused on different pleasure areas of the body. During each stage, the child encounters conflicts, which play a significant role in development (Silverman, 2017).

Freud’s theory of psychosexual development includes the oral, anal, phallic, latent, and genital stages. His theory suggests that the energy of the libido is focused on these different erogenous zones at each specific stage (Silverman, 2017).

Freud concluded that the successful completion of each stage leads to healthy adult development. He also suggested that a failure to progress through a stage causes fixation and developmental difficulties, such as nail biting (oral fixation) or obsessive tidiness (anal fixation; Silverman, 2017).

Freud considered personality to be formed in childhood as a child passes through these stages. Criticisms of Freud’s theory of psychosexual development include its failure to consider that personality can change and grow over an entire lifetime. Freud believed that early experiences played the most significant role in shaping development (Silverman, 2017).

4. Bandura’s social learning theory

American psychologist Albert Bandura proposed the social learning theory (Bandura, Ross, & Ross, 1961). Bandura did not believe that classical or operant conditioning was enough to explain learned behavior because some behaviors of children are never reinforced (Bandura, 1986). He believed that children observe, imitate, and model the behaviors and reactions of others (Bandura, 1977).

Bandura suggested that observation is critical in learning. Further, the observation does not have to be of a live actor, such as in the Bobo doll experiment (Bandura, 1986). Bandura et al. (1961) considered that learning and modeling can also occur from listening to verbal instructions on behavior performance.

Bandura’s (1977) social theory posits that both environmental and cognitive factors interact to influence development.

Bandura’s developmental theory has been criticized for not considering biological factors or children’s autonomic nervous system responses (Kevin, 1995).

Overview of theories of development – Khan Academy

Developmental psychology has given rise to many debatable questions and research topics. Here are two of the most commonly discussed.

1. Nature vs nurture debate

One of the oldest debates in the field of developmental psychology has been between nature and nurture (Levitt, 2013).

Is human development a result of hereditary factors (genes), or is it influenced by the environment (school, family, relationships, peers, community, culture)?

The polarized position of developmental psychologists of the past has now changed. The nature/nurture question now concerns the relationship between the innateness of an attribute and the environmental effects on that attribute (Nesterak, 2015).

The field of epigenetics  describes how behavioral and environmental influences affect the expression of genes (Kubota, Miyake, & Hirasawa, 2012).

Many severe mental health disorders have a hereditary component. Yet, the environment and behavior, such as improved diet, reduced stress, physical activity, and a positive mindset, can determine whether this health condition is ever expressed (Śmigielski, Jagannath, Rössler, Walitza, & Grünblatt, 2020).

When considering classic models of developmental psychology, such as Piaget’s schema theory and Freud’s psychosexual theory, you’ll see that they both perceive development to be set in stone and unchangeable by the environment.

Contemporary developmental psychology theories take a different approach. They stress the importance of multiple levels of organization over the course of human development (Lomas, Hefferon, & Ivtzan, 2016).

2. Theory of mind

Theory of mind allows us to understand that others have different intentions, beliefs, desires, perceptions, behaviors, and emotions (American Psychological Association, 2020).

It was first identified by research by Premack and Woodruff (1978) and considered to be a natural developmental stage of progression for all children. Starting around the ages of four or five, children begin to think about the thoughts and feelings of others. This shows an emergence of the theory of mind (Wellman & Liu, 2004).

However, the ability of all individuals to achieve and maintain this critical skill at the same level is debatable.

Children diagnosed with autism exhibit a deficit in the theory of mind (Baron-Cohen, Leslie, & Frith, 1985).

Individuals with depression (psychotic and non-psychotic) are significantly impaired in theory of mind tasks (Wang, Wang, Chen, Zhu, & Wang, 2008).

People with social anxiety disorder have also been found to show less accuracy in decoding the mental states of others (Washburn, Wilson, Roes, Rnic, & Harkness, 2016).

Further research has shown that the theory of mind changes with aging. This suggests a developmental lifespan process for this concept (Meinhardt-Injac, Daum, & Meinhardt, 2020).

1. Little Albert

The small child who was the focus of the experiments of behavioral psychologists Watson and Rayner (1920) was referred to as ‘Little Albert.’ These experiments were essential landmarks in developmental psychology and showed how an emotionally stable child can be conditioned to develop a phobia.

Albert was exposed to several neutral stimuli including cotton wool, masks, a white rat, rabbit, monkey, and dog. Albert showed no initial fear to these stimuli.

When a loud noise was coupled with the initially neutral stimulus, Albert became very distressed and developed a phobia of the object, which extended to any similar object as well.

This experiment highlights the importance of environmental factors in the development of behaviors in children.

2. David Reimer

At the age of eight months, David Reimer lost his penis in a circumcision operation that went wrong. His worried parents consulted a psychologist, who advised them to raise David as a girl.

David’s young age meant he knew nothing about this. He went through the process of hormonal treatment and gender reassignment. At the age of 14, David found out the truth and wanted to reverse the gender reassignment process to become a boy again. He had always felt like a boy until this time, even though he was socialized and brought up as a girl (Colapinto, 2006).

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Contemporary theories of developmental psychology often encompass a holistic approach and a more positive approach to development.

Positive psychology has intersected with developmental disciplines in areas such as parenting, education, youth, and aging (Lomas et al., 2016).

These paradigms can all be grouped together under the umbrella of positive developmental psychology. This fresh approach to development focuses on the wellbeing aspects of development, while systematically bringing them together (Lomas, et al., 2016).

• Positive parenting is the approach to children’s wellbeing by focusing on the role of parents and caregivers (Latham, 1994).
• Positive education looks at flourishing in the context of school (Seligman, Ernst, Gillham, Reivich, & Linkins, 2009).
• Positive youth development is the productive and constructive focus on adolescence and early adulthood to enhance young people’s strengths and promote positive outcomes (Larson, 2000).
• Positive aging , also known as healthy aging, focuses on the positivity of aging as a healthy, normal stage of life (Vaillant, 2004).

Much of the empirical and theoretical work connected to positive developmental psychology has been going on for years, even before the emergence of positive psychology itself (Lomas et al., 2016).

We recommend this related article Applying Positive Psychology in Schools & Education: Your Ultimate Guide for further reading.

In the classroom, developmental psychology considers children’s psychological, emotional, and intellectual characteristics according to their developmental stage.

A report on the top 20 principles of psychology in the classroom, from pre-kindergarten to high school, was published by the American Psychological Association in 2015. The report also advised how teachers can respond to these principles in the classroom setting.

The top 5 principles and teacher responses are outlined in the table below.

There are many valuable resources to help you foster positive development no matter whether you’re working with young children, teenagers, or adults.

To help get you started, check out the following free resources from around our blog.

• Adopt A Growth Mindset This exercise helps clients recognize instances of fixed mindset in their thinking and actions and replace them with thoughts and behaviors more supportive of a growth mindset.
• Childhood Frustrations This worksheet provides a space for clients to document key challenges experienced during childhood, together with their emotional and behavioral responses.
• What I Want to Be This worksheet helps children identify behaviors and emotions they would like to display and select an opportunity in the future to behave in this ideal way.
• 17 Positive Psychology Exercises If you’re looking for more science-based ways to help others enhance their wellbeing, this signature collection contains 17 validated positive psychology tools for practitioners. Use them to help others flourish and thrive.
• Developmental Psychology Courses If you are interested in a career in Developmental Psychology , we suggest 15 of the best courses in this article.

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Earlier developmental psychology models and theories were focused on specific areas, such as attachment, psychosexual, cognitive, and social learning. Although informative, they did not take in differing perspectives and were fixed paradigms.

We’ve now come to understand that development is not fixed. Individual differences take place in development, and the factors that can affect development are many. It is ever changing throughout life.

The modern-day approach to developmental psychology includes sub-fields of positive psychology. It brings these differing disciplines together to form an overarching positive developmental psychology paradigm.

Developmental psychology has helped us gain a considerable understanding of children’s motivations, social and emotional contexts, and their strengths and weaknesses.

This knowledge is essential for educators to create rich learning environments for students to help them develop positively and ultimately flourish to their full potential.

We hope you enjoyed reading this article. Don’t forget to download our three Positive Psychology Exercises for free .

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Term Paper, Developmental Psychology

Postgraduate course, course description, objectives and content.

Term paper - on a topic in developmental psychology.

Themes in the APA course include:

• Main features of a scientific report in the field of psychology;
• References in accordance with the APA format;
• Special genre of scientific texts;
• Academic writing style;
• Publishing culture in various fields of psychology;
• Guidelines of co-authorship;
• Guidelines for the publication of scientific findings;
• Plagiarism and fraud in academic writing.

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75 Lifespan Development Essay Ideas & Examples

🏆 best lifespan development topics, 📌 simple lifespan development research paper topics, 👍 good lifespan psychology topics, ❓ lifespan development research topics & questions.

• The Significance of Lifespan Development in the Practice of Counseling Psychology The physical aspect of lifespan development is one of the important ones: it is related to the growth and development of the body and changes in the body and the brain.
• Lifespan development and the human servises This is the period when their attachment to parents decreases and they search for new relationships. This is also the period when adolescents find their selves and learn how to be a part of the […]
• Aspects of Lifespan Human Development Thus, I decided not to stop there and continue to build my life in a way that would make my grandmother proud of me.
• Areas That Tied to Lifespan Development Such important problems as health and well-being, parenting, education, socio-cultural context, and social policy are the cause for concern and reflection and are closely related to the development of the life cycle of individuals and […]
• Schizophrenia & Neurosis and Lifespan Development The learning objectives are to comprehend worrying conduct in the scope of the growth missions, series, and procedures that show human development.
• Lifespan Development: Adolescent Psychology Physical changes occur in the child during the period of adolescence as they hit puberty. It is known as the formal operational period and is the fourth stage in the life of the individual.
• Lifespan Development Psychology: Observation at Cosmo Park Finally, the paper will discern the parenting style that the parents were using on the subject being observed.”Life Span is the study of life from the womb to the tomb”.
• Lifespan Development and Learning Disabilities in Childhood Parents in this situation would most likely select the authoritative parenting style to manage children because they are left to make their own choices under a guided framework.
• Lifespan Development and Its Stages in Psychology The choice of this research method is preconditioned by the need to investigate the way cognitive processes among this age group occur and find out factors that result in the appearance of differences between participants.
• Exploring Lifespan Development: Child Perspectives Mesman, van Ijzendoorn, and Bakermans-Kranenburg are the authors of the article about parental sensitivity and its role in the establishment of family relationships and child development.
• Lifespan Perspectives on Human Development This makes it necessary for individuals to understand the human development process, a function that they can achieve using the human lifespan perspective. Finally, because the context of occurrence of different activities is important in […]
• Issues in Lifespan Development Although a strand of existing literature demonstrates that research on human growth and development is a relatively recent endeavor, particularly in reference to the fact that studies involving children did not begin until the late […]
• Lifespan Developmental Theories The article can be considered credible and serve as an illustration to the inappropriateness of contrasting nature and nurture, as the knowledge about the interaction between the hereditary factors and environmental influences is the key […]
• Lifespan Development and Personality Paper The traits that are visible includes; development of hair in the pubic and armpits, onset of menstruation, enlargement of breasts, endometrial development for females due to estrogen and penis enlargement for males and spermarche or […]
• Lifespan Development and Personality In the same way, the genes that a child gets from the parents also affects the way development of the mind.
• Lifespan Development and Its Theories This paper will discuss lifespan development perspective, theories of lifespan development, and the interaction between heredity and environment. Culture and the context in which the changes occur must be considered when analyzing the changes.
• Schizophrenia, Psychosis and Lifespan Development Schizophrenia is a complicated condition not only due to its nature but also due to the fact that it results from a wide range of factors.
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• Development in the Lifespan/Preschool & Elderly
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• Advanced Lifespan and Development by John Santrock
• Physical, Mental, And Psychosocial Development Through Lifespan
• Edgar Allan Poe’s Personality and Lifespan Development
• How Human Lifespan Develops During Emotional Development
• Human Lifespan and Development: The Nature of Children
• The Confusing Issues, Concepts, and Definitions of Development Theories in Essentials of Lifespan Development
• Lifespan Development: Examining Child and Adolescent Development Influence on Adulthood
• Motivational Theory Of Lifespan Development
• The Contribution Of Piaget On The Field Of Lifespan And Development
• Main Developmental Tasks and Milestones Associated with Each Stage in Human Development over the Lifespan
• Schizophrenia and Psychosis and Lifespan Development Matrix
• Adloph Hitler – Lifespan Development and Personality
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• Human Development and Performance Throughout the Lifespan
• Schizophrenia and Disorder of Lifespan Development
• Human Development : The Importance Of Human And Lifespan
• How Does Human Behavior Affect Lifespan Development?
• Are the Lifespan Development and the Development of Communication Related?
• What Are the Psychological Theories of Lifespan Development?
• What Are the Issues Surrounding the Lifespan Development?
• What Is Physical Development in Lifespan Development?
• Which Best Describes the Concept of Lifespan Development?
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101 Best Developmental Psychology Research Topics

Psychologists always strive to understand change. But change is inevitable. They spot potential challenges when studying developmental psychology and provide early solutions for better results. But what does it take to find the best developmental psychology research topics? Although psychology is an exciting course, finding the best ideas for projects can be a hassle. However, HelpForHomework is here to solve the quagmire and provide you with top-quality writing services.

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How Do We Select The Best Developmental Psychology Research Topics?

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Originality: Originality is an integral part of psychological research writing. For that reason, we generate unique topics and highlight the shallowly researched ones. We understand that exhausting research topics can be irrelevant to your audience. Consequently, our writers do extensive reading to expose themselves to new information crucial to the topic formulation.

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Best Developmental Psychology Research Topics

Getting the best developmental psychology research topics is not an easy task. But we have a list of suggestions for you:

• A cognitive approach to child abuse prevention
• A developmental perspective on imitation and social cognition
• Children’s perception of gender-based violence and gender discrimination
• Development of gender stereotypes and prejudice
• Development of social networks in early and middle childhood: How does gender influence the development of social networks
• Developmental implications of prejudice and discrimination
• Developmental psychology perspective on child abuse prevention and treatment
• Developmental psychology: The ecology of development processes
• History, current status and future of developmental psychology
• How do structured leisure activities influence psychological development in middle childhood
• How does delay in gratification and low self-control affect academic achievement
• How does history influence the current status and future of developmental psychology?
• How does self-control influence academic performance?
• How does the media influence instant gratification?
• Influence of culture on marketing and impulsive buying behavior
• Instant gratification and self-control in the adolescent.: A case study for a school near you
• Origin of prejudice and discrimination
• Parenting: The relationship between parenting and developmental psychology
• People and the internet: A developmental psychology perspective
• Prejudice and discrimination in children: Origin and interventions
• Social and developmental psychology: Trends influencing the future of psychology
• Social cognition and academic competence in early childhood education
• Social media influence on self-control and instant gratification
• Substance abuse and violent behavior effects of academic achievement at a school in your country
• The role of psychology professionals in the prevention of child abuse

Interesting Developmental Psychology Research Topics

Are you looking for excellent developmental psychology research topics? We hope you find one from the list below:

• Addressing child abuse and trauma in a developmental context
• Child trauma and mental health indicators among the LGBTQ adults
• Development of cyber violence
• Developmental psychology perspective on children raised in non-traditional families
• Developmental psychology perspective on writing techniques and intellectual growth for college students
• Developmental psychology perspective to the impacts of social media use
• Developmental psychology: Relationship between childhood trauma and adulthood chronic illness and mental health
• Does social media increase children’s tolerance to real-life violence and aggression?
• Dynamics of development and decline: Life-span developmental psychology
• Effects of long-term childhood trauma
• Explain the growth patterns during the early adulthood to old age
• How does social media fuel violence? How can it be controlled?
• Intellectual growth in early childhood development
• Leadership development: Current state and future expectations in your country
• Media effects on violent behavior: Psychological analysis
• Media use among children with autism spectrum disorder and development implications
• Neuropsychological development in the context of childhood abuse and trauma
• Online communication, friendships and social media use in adolescents
• The effects of media on violence, attitudes and emotions: Historical and current status
• The perspective of developmental psychology of money spending on a virtual world
• The psychology of adult development and ageing
• The role of media in social development
• Theoretical proposition on intellectual growth
• Use of older people experience to understand developmental psychology: Challenges and benefits
• Use of social media to facilitate community education and development

Excellent Developmental Psychology Research Topics

If you select one of the excellent developmental psychology topics below, be sure of top grades. Choose one and tell us what you think:

• A developmental perspective on global political marketing
• Correlation between gender, power and developmental psychology
• Development of relationships in adolescence: Social media influence
• Developmental psychology application in the development of children laws
• Developmental psychology perspective of family
• Developmental psychology perspective of human behavior
• Developmental psychology perspective on child psychology and mental health development
•  Developmental psychology perspective on mass persuasion
• Developmental psychology perspective on religious cults
• Developmental psychology perspective on social propaganda and social marketing
• Developmental psychology: Sexual repression, social control and gender hierarchy in Native America
• Does religion promote moral development?
• How does religion influence politics in your country?
• How does religious bias influence moral development? A developmental psychology investigation
• Influence of culture on social control organizations
• Islamist political propaganda: Developmental psychology perspective on political marketing
• Modern responses on cults
• Precursors of attraction, romance and love in young adulthood
• Psychological interventions on improving school discipline
• Relationship between developmental psychology and political psychology in your country
• Social control in significant religions: A developmental psychology perspective
• Social discipline in your country: Prevention, correction and long-term social development
• The psychology of grandparenthood: A developmental psychology perspective
• The psychology of religion: Ethics and implications of moral implications
• The psychology of religion: Social media influence on the development of religion

Professional Developmental Psychology Research Topics

Are you looking for professional psychology research topics for your project? We have the best suggestions for you:

• Biological aspects of the development of human violence behavior
• Can participation in extracurricular activities support psychological intervention programs in schools?
• Development of self-identity through social media
• Developmental difference between children exposed to the internet and media and those who spend more time on playgrounds
• Developmental psychology perspective on emotions and customer experience
• Developmental psychology perspective on happiness
• Does child trauma influence adulthood antisocial personality disorder?
• Does the media influence sexual identity?
• Dynamics of human behavior: Mass panic
• Early identifications of adulthood antisocial behavior
• How does loneliness influence personality across the lifespan?
• Impacts of maternal stress to cognitive development of children
• Infant mental health: Development and significance of early childhood mental health
• Influence of media on sexual development
• Internet addiction and happiness for adolescents
• Internet, sex, and adolescents: Implications on sexual development
• Management of phobia in children and adolescents
• Neuropsychological perspective on evolution of human behavior
• Personality disorders: Tracing the roots through developmental psychology
• Phobia: Fear appeals and security behaviors
• Relationship between emotion-cognition and human development
• Relationship between exposure to sexual content on children and sexual outcomes
• Relationship between happiness and social development
• Relationship between human behavior and psychological development
• School discipline and self-discipline: Psychological interventions to improve student behavior
• The neuropsychological perspective of social bonding

Final Verdict

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• Developmental Psychology

Using the University Library,  browse  through a number of articles from peer-reviewed journals on the topic of developmental psychology. A few examples of appropriate journals are provided below. Read several abstracts and select three articles that address topics that you may want to investigate further in your Week Six paper.

Write  a 1-paragraph summary of each article, explaining what you found most interesting and why. After each summary, provide the full reference for the article in APA format. Possible journals to explore include:

• Psychology and Aging
• Journal of Early Intervention
• Journal of Educational Psychology
• Child Development
• Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology
• Learning and Individual Differences
• Journal of Early Adolescence
• Journal of Research on Adolescence
• Gerontology and Geriatrics Education
• Journal of Cross-Cultural Gerontology

Click  the Assignment Files tab to submit your assignment.

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Psychology Discussion

Term paper on child development | psychology.

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Here is a term paper on ‘Child Development’. Find paragraphs, long and short term papers on ‘Child Development’ especially written for school and college students.

Term Paper Contents:

• Essay on the Factors Influencing Child Development

Term Paper # 1. Meaning and Definition of Development :

Development refers to change in structure form or shape and improvement in functioning, e.g., hands only grow large but they also develop, because they also improve in their functions.

Thus development can be defined as “a progressive series of changes in an orderly coherent pattern. The term progressive signifies that the changes are directional leading forward rather than backward. These changes include change in size, proportions, disappearance of old features and acquisitions of new features at physical, social, emotional and intellectual and of daily living.”

Development can be defined as “the emerging and expanding of capacities of the individual to provide greater facilities in functioning such as development of motor ability from uncertain step to proficiency in games. Development as a matter of fact is achieved through growth.”

“By the term development, we mean the changes in the shape of the parts of the body and the integration of the various parts into the functional units as growth goes on.” —Boring

Development refers to interaction of person and his environmental surroundings whose after-products after existing response tendencies in such a way as to increase:

1. Their strength.

2. The degree of differentiation, and

3. The organization of personality.

It refers to those effects up on the person’s cognitive emotional systems which strengthen or enlarge one or more of them, increase their number or interrelate them in some different way. Development is confined to qualitative changes in the organism.

Term Paper # 2. Main Characteristics of Development :

Development has the following main characteristics:

1. It is an interaction between person and his environment.

2. It is confined to qualitative changes in form and functions of the organism.

3. It involves a progressive series of changes leading forward not backward.

4. In refers to acquisitions of new features at physical, social, emotional and intellectual and daily living.

5. It is the emerging and expanding capacities of the individual.

Term Paper # 3. Development and Maturation :

According to Arnold Gesell, the role of physical change is important in development. He used the word maturation to describe growth processes that are governed by automatic, genetically determined signals. He believed that major changes in the organism are based on maturation. The cognitive growth in each year is characterized by certain behaviour changes rather than biological. Thus development contributes in maturation.

Meaning and Definition of Maturation :

Growth process is described with the help of maturation. It is governed by automatic, genetically determined signals. The major changes in structure and functions of an individual are based on maturation. The term maturation has been defined by several psychologists and child psychologists.

“Maturation is the process by which underlying potential capacity of the organism reach at the stage of functional readiness. This process involves both type of changes-structure and function. The structural changes are with growth and progressive exercise by structures that provide ground work for later performances or functions.” —A. T. Jersild and Others

“Maturation is an autonomous process of somatic physiological and mental differentiation and integration spread over developmental stages and phases which are correlated one another in a course of time, as a result of this process the individual’s growth is completed and consolidated emotionally, mentally and spiritually as well as socially and he can thus adapt life.” —H.S. Eysenck

“Maturation means the growth and development that is necessary either before and unlearned behaviour can occur or before learning of any particular can take place.” —Boring and Others

In the above definitions of maturation, the following characteristics of maturation have been emphasized:

(i) Maturation is the process for describing underlying potential capacity of an individual.

(ii) Maturation means the growth and development.

(iii) Maturation is an automatic process of somatic, physiological and mental differentiation and integration.

(iv) Maturation involves both type of changes—Structural and function or performance.

(v) Maturation helps an individual with structural change to reach as the stage of functional readiness.

(vi) Maturation is stage of completion of growth and consolidating of emotional, mental and social development.

Characteristics of Maturation :

Some of the characteristics of maturation have listed above and some other characteristics have been described in the following part as:

1. Maturation is the Basis of Learning:

It is an essential condition for learning process.

“If we analyze learning process carefully without regard to its different forms, we shall discover first of all that it is a continuous process of modification of behaviour involving changes and development in the mental and behavioural patterns of an individual.” —S. Alexander

2. Factors of Maturation Influencing Learning:

The basis of learning is process of maturation which involves several factors but its following factors influence learning:

i. Acquisition capacity of the learner.

ii. The retention power of the learner.

iii. The potential of recall of the learner.

iv. The necessary skills of learning.

3. Maturation is the Complete Behaviour of an Individual:

It is the stage of completion of growth and consolidating the social, emotional and mental development.

4. Maturation is the complete change in a development which assist him to reach at the stage of functional readiness.

Growth and development are the both aspects of maturation and they help in learning.

Term Paper # 4. Development and Learning :

Development is the result of maturation and experience. The maturation concerns with growth, while experience concerns with learning.

Gesell has defined development as:

“Behaviour change which requires programming and programming requires time or duration but not enough of it to call it age.”

Programming refers here to sequence of learning may be arranged in the life of an individual. Development is a collection of learning experiences.

Term Paper # 5. Development and Synthesis :

The development is the essential process, and each element of learning occurs as a function of development rather being an element which explains development.

There are four basic elements in development according to the Jean Piaget:

1. Maturation,

2. Experience,

3. Social transmission, and

4. Equilibration.

Thus, the process of development integrates maturation, experience, social transmission through schooling and by parents and maintains equilibration. It is a process of synthesis.

Term Paper # 6. Principles of Child Development :

There are some psychologists who emphasize the environmental influence in the growth and development of a child, and there is another group of psychologists who claim the superiority of heredity over environment in the development of children. There is no definite line of demarcation can be drawn between the contribution of heredity and environment in the by-product of constant interaction of heredity and environmental factors. It may be stated that the heredity factors are more important for growth whereas environmental factors are essential for developmental processes. Genetic factors are basic that determine the development of an individual.

There are three basic principles of the development:

1. Principle of Maturation,

2. Principle of Instinct approach, and

3. Principle of Reflex approach.

1. Principle of Maturation:

Maturation and learning are the two main aspects of development; they are very close to each other. The maturation is highly influenced by the heredity and learning is the result of environment but depends on the individual potentialities. Any specific task is performed by the individual with his abilities and maturation. Maturation is usually stable. Learning is also influenced by maturation level of an individual.

2. Principle of Instinct Approach:

McDugall has analyzed the instinctive behaviour with reference to the development of an individual. He believes that there are some basic instincts which influence the development of a person. The learning does not occur in the absence of the basic instincts. The social behaviours are also governed by the hormones of male and female. Thus, development of an individual is caused by the development of basic instinct.

3. Principle of Reflex Approach:

Watson believes that all the children are equal at the time of birth. They have definite structure of their bodies. They have three emotions love, fear and anger and have manipulative tendencies. The child uses them according to his environment. These functions and activities help in his development and also indicate the direction of his developmental process. Thus, environment contributes significantly in the development of a child.

Term Paper # 7. General Characteristics of Development :

The variation or individual difference is universal in nature and is known as the principle of variability of inheritance. There are two principles, one is of resemblance and another is of variability. The development process is governed by both the principles.

It has the following main characteristics:

1. It is a product of the interaction between person and the environment.

2. It is a continuous and life-long process.

3. It is individual process but takes place in a group.

4. Different aspects of development are inter-related.

5. It proceeds from general to the specific.

6. It is cumulative and positive process.

7. It is bilateral to unilateral trend.

8. It follows an orderly sequence.

9. It has a uniform pattern.

10. It is an integrated process.

11. It has the variation of differentiation.

It is based on maturation and experiences:

1. Product of the Interaction between Person and Environment:

It is a process resultant from a constant interaction between the potentialities of a child and his environment. Heredity forces inherent in the genetic constitution or structure of the individual and environment factors influence the development of an individual.

2. Continuous and Life-Long Process:

It is a continuous process from the time of conception and up to the end of life. There are spirits in physical growth and psychological, functioning as increase in height and weight; acquiring vocabulary during pre-schooling and sudden rise in problem solving abilities during adolescence.

3. Individual Process but takes Place in Group:

Each child has his own rate of physical, social, emotional and intellectual development. At different age-levels children have different rate of development. The rate of growth is very high in infancy.

4. Different Aspects of Development are Inter-Related:

The physical, social, emotional and mental developments are inter-related. If a child is physically handicapped then his social behaviour will be retorted. The motor development has the positive effect on mental development of children. Different aspects are inter-dependent and assist on another.

5. Development Proceeds from General to Specific:

Development of an individual is based on the principle of mass-differentiation and integration. The behaviour emerges more differentiated, refined behaviour and purposive responses and functions. The child acquired vocabulary of many words and the skill of communication develops.

6. Cumulative and Positive Process:

Certain changes are based on the earlier development. During early age the children are encouraged for certain behaviour but latter on they are discouraged for the same. He begins to believe in different way, because developments always refine behaviours.

7. Development is Bilateral to Unilateral Trend:

There are two aspects of development physiology and function. During early period of life both are observed separately but gradually both the aspects integrate in the process of development.

8. Development follows a Systematic Sequence:

There is difference in the rate of growth and development among the individuals, but the development follows a systematic sequence among all individuals.

There are several directional trends in the developmental process:

(i) It starts from head and proceeds towards heel.

(ii) It starts from the centre line of the body to the outer parts, more distant from it.

(iii) Locomotion develops in a sequence in all infants of different culture of the world.

9. Development has Uniform Pattern:

There are various human races in the world, but there is uniform pattern of development in their physical, social, intellectual and emotional development. The rate of the development is also uniform.

10. Development as Integrated Process:

There are various dimensions or aspects of development—social, emotional, physical and mental. The changes occur in these aspects integrality. It means at different age-levels emotional, social and mental development is of same nature. There is simultaneous development in these aspects.

11. Variation in Development:

The nature of development in all the aspects is similar or uniform pattern but the variation exists in the extent and intensity of the development in different aspects.

Term Paper # 8. Stages of Child Development :

There is great dispute among psychologists and scientists regarding the stages of human life. The age group is for class organization in schools, but it is system of solving problems of different age group subjects. A person tries to solve his problems by inventing ways and means. Development is process which has various stages.

According to Saily:

1. Infancy (1 to 5) years

2. Childhood (5 to 12) years

3. Adolescence (12 to 18) years

According to Ross:

1. Infancy (1 to 3) years

2. Pre-childhood (3 to 6) years

3. Post-childhood (6 to 12) years

4. Adolescence (12 to 18) years

According to Kolsnik:

1. Prenatal period

2. Neonatal 3 or 4 weeks before birth

3. Early infancy (1 to 15) months

4. Middle infancy (15 to 30) months

5. Early childhood (3 to 5) years

6. Middle childhood (6 to 12) years

7. Adolescence (12 to 18) years

Thus, there are various stages of development, but from educational point of view four stages are taken into consideration:

1. Prenatal period up to birth

2. Infancy stage from birth to 5 years

3. Childhood stage 6 to 12 years

4. Adolescence stage 13 to 19 years also known as ‘Teen Age’

The last two stages are most important for a teacher to understand the nature of development with regard to physical, social, emotional and mental development. The first two stages are most significant for parents specially for mother to understand the nature of development of prenatal period and infancy of the children.

Term Paper # 9. Forms of Development :

Development is a process and it has some specific characteristics. The characteristics of development help or guide to understand nature of development of a child.

The following changes are observed during the process of development:

1. Structural Change:

Growth concerns with the changes in height, weight, form of the body. It can be observed and measure.

2. Changes in Proportion:

The child is the miniature of the adult. There is a proportionate change or growth in structure of an adult. The proportion is also noted in mental, social and emotional development.

3. Changes in Old Features:

Some changes are observed in old features of an individual. These changes are caused by thymus and pineal glands.

4. Acquisition of New Features:

The old features gradually vanish and new features are acquired. There is change in teeth and growth in sexual organs. Maturation is the stage that an individual is ready to function.

5. Predictability of Development:

The rate and speed of development provide the basis for the prediction of development.

6. Definite Pattern of Development:

What-so-ever the form of development but it has definite pattern. It is the law of nature.

7. Development has Specific Characteristics:

Each stage of development has some traits or specific characteristics. The most effective traits of each stage emerge in process of development. Every individual has to go through these stages. The behaviour which appears unique behaviour during the process of development, are normal.

Term Paper # 10. Methods of Studying Development :

Growth and development processes have been studied by psychologists, biologists and anthropologists to identify the trends and patterns. Some of the scientists have studied the problems of development. They have employed different methods and techniques. The important methods and techniques have been listed here.

Approaches for studying developmental process:

(a) Longitudinal Approach, and

(b) Cross-section Approach

(a) Longitudinal approach takes into account the observations since the birth up to the desired age level or adolescence.

(b) Cross-section approach takes into account the observations for a group of particular age-level regarding their structure and function.

Under these approaches the following methods are employed:

1. Genetic method

2. Case study method

3. Survey method

4. Experimental method

5. Clinical method, and

6. Statistical method.

The following techniques are used for collection of evidences or data for drawing conclusions or results:

(i) Psychological and Educational tests

(ii) Physical tests and social tests

(iii) Introspection or Subjective appraisal

(iv) Questionnaire, interview and schedule and check list

(v) Situational analysis, and

(vi) Clinical tests and devices.

These methods and techniques have their own merits and demerits. Genetic and case study obtain genuine data. Secondly, the obtained results cannot be generalized for the general features of development.

The experimental method cannot be applied to human subjects because we cannot impose the controls. In survey method, it is difficult to collect real data. The child psychologists have used case study and clinical method for analyzing the process of development.

Term Paper # 11. Nature of Child Development:

Behaviouristic and cognitive theories have given main stress on functional aspects of the child development. Under these the following characteristics have been enumerated.

Piaget has used the term schemas or cognition terms of five operations—sensorimotor, symbolic, concretes, initiative thoughts and general operations under the process of development.

Havinghurst emphasized tasks in two stages. He has enumerated list of tasks of different stages from walking to develop attitudes and values towards life.

Freud’s theory is known as psycho-sexual development. He has explained the function or role of libido at different stages. In the process of development he considered, ego, super-ego and informations.

Erikson’s theory is psycho-social theory of child development. He has considered four stages relation four type of development a sense of trust, autonomy, initiative and industry.

The functional theories of child development have educative value. A teacher can plan and organize his teaching activities to develop the operations and can provide situations for performing the tasks at different stages of development by the students.

Term Paper # 12. Factors Influencing Child Development :

Growth is natural and automatic process but development is planned and deliberate efforts to bring desirable changes among children. Development process depends on heredity and environmental factors.

Thus, it is influenced by these factors:

(i) Heredity factors are intelligence, sex, race, secretion of glands, height, weight, structural features.

(ii) Environmental factors are nutrition, fresh air and light, open environment, family status, culture, diseases and injuries.

1. Intelligence:

The most important aspect of development refers to mental development. It depends on the intelligence of child. All other type of development are also influenced by the intelligence. An intelligent child acquires new behaviours of a child reflect his level of intelligence.

There is difference between boys and girls with regard to their growth and development. The body constitution and structural growth of girls are different from boys. The functions of boys and girls are also of different nature.

3. Secretion of Glands:

The para-thyroid glands make the body more sensitive and more emotional. The thymus glands influence the mental and chest development. It brings an early maturity among children.

The racial factor has great influence on height, weight, colour feature and body constitution. A child of white race will be white, tall and smart. Even hairs and eyes colour are governed by the concerning race.

5. Nutrition:

Growth and development of a child mainly depends on his food nutrition. The mal-nutrition has adverse effect on their structural and smartness. Even hairs and eyes colour are governed by the concerning race.

6. Family Status:

Nutrition and family status have similar influence. The poor family cannot provide balance diet to their children. It will effect adversely.

7. Social and Cultural Factors:

The behaviour and functional aspect is greatly influenced by social and cultural environment in which a child lives. They acquire values, feelings and attitudes.

8. Disease and Injuries:

The mental injuries and other type of long disease have adverse effect on the development of children.

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Term Paper , Psychology , Developmental Psychology , Child Development

Man or bear? Hypothetical question sparks conversation about women's safety

Women explain why they would feel safer encountering a bear in the forest than a man they didn't know. the hypothetical has sparked a broader discussion about why women fear men..

If you were alone in the woods, would you rather encounter a bear or a man? Answers to that hypothetical question have sparked a debate about why the vast majority say they would feel more comfortable choosing a bear.

The topic has been hotly discussed for weeks as men and women chimed in with their thoughts all over social media.

Screenshot HQ , a TikTok account, started the conversation, asking a group of women whether they would rather run into a man they didn't know or a bear in the forest. Out of the seven women interviewed for the piece, only one picked a man.

"Bear. Man is scary," one of the women responds.

A number of women echoed the responses given in the original video, writing in the comments that they, too, would pick a bear over a man. The hypothetical has people split, with some expressing their sadness over the state of the world and others cracking jokes. Some men were flabbergasted.

Here's what we know.

A bear is the safer choice, no doubt about it, many say

There were a lot of responses, more than 65,000, under the original post. Many wrote that they understood why the women would choose a bear.

"No one’s gonna ask me if I led the bear on or give me a pamphlet on bear attack prevention tips," @celestiallystunning wrote.

@Brennduhh wrote: "When I die leave my body in the woods, the wolves will be gentler than any man."

"I know a bear's intentions," another woman wrote. "I don't know a man's intentions. no matter how nice they are."

Other TikTok users took it one step further, posing the hypothetical question to loved ones. Meredith Steele, who goes by @babiesofsteele , asked her husband last week whether he would rather have their daughter encounter a bear or a man in the woods. Her husband said he "didn't like either option" but said he was leaning toward the bear.

"Maybe it's a friendly bear," he says.

Diana, another TikTok user , asked her sister-in-law what she would choose and was left speechless.

"I asked her the question, you know, just for giggles. She was like, 'You know, I would rather it be a bear because if the bear attacks me, and I make it out of the woods, everybody’s gonna believe me and have sympathy for me," she said. "But if a man attacks me and I make it out, I’m gonna spend my whole life trying to get people to believe me and have sympathy for me.'"

Bear vs. man debate stirs the pot, woman and some men at odds

The hypothetical has caused some tension, with some women arguing that men will never truly understand what it's like to be a woman or the inherent dangers at play.

Social media users answered this question for themselves, producing memes, spoken word poetry and skits in the days and weeks since.

So, what would you choose?

The International Journal of Indian Psychȯlogy

Effect of Counselling Programme on Emotional Functioning and Social Interaction of Children of Divorced Parents: A Psychological Perspective

| Published: May 10, 2024

Divorce is a significant life events that can have profound effects on children wellbeing, including emotional distress and challenges in social relationships. This research paper examines the effectiveness of Counselling interventions for children of divorced parents from a psychological standpoint. Drawing on empirical research, theoretical frameworks, and clinical evidence, the paper explores how Counselling programs can mitigate emotional distress and improve social interaction in children affected by parental divorce. Attachment theory explains here the adverse effect of parental separation on children growth. This systematic review explores the effect of Counselling interventions on the emotional functioning and social interaction of children of divorced parents. Many research Findings support this review that Counselling intervention have a positive impact on the emotional functioning of children, leading to improved coping skills, increased self-esteem and reduced symptoms of anxiety and depression. Additionally, counselling programme facilitate positive social interaction by enhancing communication skills, fostering peer support and promoting healthy relationship dynamics with in the family. However, the effectiveness of counselling may ever be depending on factors such as the child’s age, gender and level of parental conflict. Further research is needed to explore the long-term effect of Counselling intervention and optimal strategies for supporting the wellbeing of children of divorced parents. This review underscores the importance of Counselling as the valuable resource in promoting the emotional resilience and social integration of children facing the challenges of parent’s divorce.

Parental Divorce , Counselling , Emotional Functioning , Social Interaction

This is an Open Access Research distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any Medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

© 2024, Chaudhary, N. & Bala, M.

Received: April 29, 2024; Revision Received: May 06, 2024; Accepted: May 10, 2024

Dr. Neetu Chaudhary @ [email protected]

Article Overview

Published in   Volume 12, Issue 2, April-June, 2024