Developmental psychology is the scientific study of how and why humans grow,change,and adapt across the course of their lives. Originally concerned with infants and children,the field has expanded to include adolescence,adult development,aging,and the entire lifespan. Developmental psychologists aim to explain how thinking,feeling,and behaviors change throughout life. This field examines change across three major dimensions,which are physical development,cognitive development,and social emotional development. Within these three dimensions are a broad range of topics including motor skills,executive functions,moral understanding,language acquisition,social change,personality,emotional development,self-concept,and identity formation.
Observational learning is learning that occurs through observing the behavior of others. It is a form of social learning which takes various forms,based on various processes. In humans,this form of learning seems to not need reinforcement to occur,but instead,requires a social model such as a parent,sibling,friend,or teacher with surroundings. Particularly in childhood,a model is someone of authority or higher status in an environment. In animals,observational learning is often based on classical conditioning,in which an instinctive behavior is elicited by observing the behavior of another,but other processes may be involved as well.
Linda B. Smith is an American developmental psychologist internationally recognized for her theoretical and empirical contributions to developmental psychology and cognitive science,proposing,through theoretical and empirical studies,a new way of understanding developmental processes. Smith's works are groundbreaking and illuminating for the field of perception,action,language,and categorization,showing the unique flexibility found in human behavior. She has shown how perception and action are ways of obtaining knowledge for cognitive development and word learning.
Stair climbing is the climbing of a flight of stairs. It is often described as a "low-impact" exercise,often for people who have recently started trying to get in shape. A common exhortation in health pop culture is "Take the stairs,not the elevator".
Maturation is a guiding notion in educational theory that argues children will develop their cognitive skills innately,with little influence from their environment. Environmentalism, closely related to behaviorism,is the opposite view,that children acquire cognitive skills and behaviors from their surroundings and environment.
Preferential looking is an experimental method in developmental psychology used to gain insight into the young mind/brain. The method as used today was developed by the developmental psychologist Robert L. Fantz in the 1960s.
Andrew N. Meltzoff is an American psychologist and an internationally recognized expert on infant and child development. His discoveries about infant imitation greatly advanced the scientific understanding of early cognition,personality and brain development.
The visual cliff is an apparatus created by psychologists Eleanor J. Gibson and Richard D. Walk at Cornell University to investigate depth perception in human and other animal species. It consists of a sturdy surface that is flat but has the appearance of a several-foot drop part-way across. The visual cliff apparatus allowed them to conduct an experiment in which the optical and tactile stimuli associated with a simulated cliff were adjusted while protecting the subjects from injury.
Susan Goldin-Meadow is the Beardsley Ruml Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of Psychology,Comparative Human Development,the college,and the Committee on Education at the University of Chicago. She is the principal investigator of a 10-year program project grant,funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development,designed to explore the impact of environmental and biological variation on language growth. She is also a co-PI of the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center (SILC),one of six Science of Learning Centers funded by the National Science Foundation to explore learning in an interdisciplinary framework with an eye toward theory and application. She is the founding editor of Language Learning and Development,the official journal of the Society for Language Development. She was President of the International Society for Gesture Studies from 2007–2012.
Susan A. Gelman is currently Heinz Werner Distinguished University Professor of psychology and linguistics and the director of the Conceptual Development Laboratory at the University of Michigan. Gelman studies language and concept development in young children. Gelman subscribes to the domain specificity view of cognition,which asserts that the mind is composed of specialized modules supervising specific functions in the human and other animals. Her book The Essential Child is an influential work on cognitive development.
Renée Baillargeon is a Canadian American research psychologist. An Alumni Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Baillargeon specializes in the development of cognition in infancy.
Amanda Woodward is Dean of the Division of the Social Sciences and the William S. Gray Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago. Her research investigates infant social cognition and early language development including the understanding of goal-directed actions,agency,theory of mind,and learning from social partners. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Richard N. Aslin is an American psychologist. He is currently a Senior Scientist at Haskins Laboratories and professor at Yale University. Until December,2016,Dr. Aslin was William R. Kenan Professor of Brain &Cognitive Sciences and Center for Visual Sciences at the University of Rochester. During his time in Rochester,he was also Director of the Rochester Center for Brain Imaging and the Rochester Baby Lab. He had worked at the university for over thirty years,until he resigned in protest of the university's handling of a sexual harassment complaint about a junior member of his department.
Robert Lowell Fantz (1925–1981) was an American developmental psychologist who pioneered several studies into infant perception. In particular,the preferential looking paradigm introduced by Fantz in the 1961 is widely used in cognitive development and categorization studies among small babies.
Jana Marie Iverson is a developmental psychologist known for her research on the development of gestures and motor skills in relation to communicative development. She has worked with various populations including children at high risk of autism spectrum disorder (ASD),blind individuals,and preterm infants. She is currently a professor of psychology at Boston University.
Eleanor Jack Gibson was an American psychologist who focused on reading development and perceptual learning in infants. Gibson began her career at Smith College as an instructor in 1932,publishing her first works on research conducted as an undergraduate student. Gibson was able to circumvent the many obstacles she faced due to the Great Depression and gender discrimination,by finding research opportunities that she could meld with her own interests. Gibson,with her husband James J. Gibson,created the Gibsonian ecological theory of development,which emphasized how important perception was because it allows humans to adapt to their environments. Perhaps her most well-known contribution to psychology was the "visual cliff," which studied depth perception in both human and animal species,leading to a new understanding of perceptual development in infants. Gibson was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1971,the National Academy of Education in 1972,and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1977. In 1992,she was awarded the National Medal of Science.
Adriana Galván is an American psychologist and expert on adolescent brain development. She is a professor of psychology at the University of California,Los Angeles (UCLA) where she directs the Developmental Neuroscience laboratory. She was appointed the Jeffrey Wenzel Term Chair in Behavioral Neuroscience and the Dean of Undergraduate Education at UCLA.
Dare Ann Baldwin is a scientist known for her research on learning mechanisms and early social skills of infants and young children. Baldwin is a professor of psychology at Oregon University. Baldwin is the recipient of various awards including the 1994 Boyd McCandless Award from Division 7 of the American Psychological Association,1995 John Merck Scholars Award,1997 APA Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology,2006-2007 James McKeen Cattell Sabbatical Fellowship,2006 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship,2006-2007 University of Oregon Fund for Faculty Excellence Award,and 2018 University of Oregon Faculty Research Award.
Lisa Feigenson is Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins University and co-director of the Johns Hopkins University Laboratory for Child Development. Feigenson is known for her research on the development of numerical abilities,working memory,and early learning. She has served on the editorial board of Cognition and the Journal of Experimental Psychology:General.
Lorraine E. Bahrick is a developmental psychologist known for her research on intermodal perception and effects of inter-sensory redundancy on learning in infancy and early childhood. Her work in these areas involves investigating how the integration of information from various sensory modalities,such as vision,hearing,and touch,contributes to the cognitive,perceptual,and social development of infants and children. She also explores how the redundancy or overlap of sensory information,influences these developmental processes. She is Distinguished University Professor of Psychology at Florida International University and the Director of Infant Development Lab.
