Developmental psychology is the scientific study of how and why human beings change over the course of their life. 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: 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.
Educational psychology is the branch of psychology concerned with the scientific study of human learning. The study of learning processes, from both cognitive and behavioral perspectives, allows researchers to understand individual differences in intelligence, cognitive development, affect, motivation, self-regulation, and self-concept, as well as their role in learning. The field of educational psychology relies heavily on quantitative methods, including testing and measurement, to enhance educational activities related to instructional design, classroom management, and assessment, which serve to facilitate learning processes in various educational settings across the lifespan.
Jean Piaget was a Swiss psychologist known for his work on child development. Piaget's theory of cognitive development and epistemological view are together called "genetic epistemology".
Object permanence is the understanding that objects continue to exist even when they cannot be seen, heard, or otherwise sensed. This is a fundamental concept studied in the field of developmental psychology, the subfield of psychology that addresses the development of young children's social and mental capacities. There is not yet scientific consensus on when the understanding of object permanence emerges in human development.
Piaget's theory of cognitive development is a comprehensive theory about the nature and development of human intelligence. It was originated by the Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget (1896–1980). The theory deals with the nature of knowledge itself and how humans gradually come to acquire, construct, and use it. Piaget's theory is mainly known as a developmental stage theory.
Cognitive development is a field of study in neuroscience and psychology focusing on a child's development in terms of information processing, conceptual resources, perceptual skill, language learning, and other aspects of the developed adult brain and cognitive psychology. Qualitative differences between how a child processes their waking experience and how an adult processes their waking experience are acknowledged. Cognitive development is defined as the emergence of the ability to consciously cognize, understand, and articulate their understanding in adult terms. Cognitive development is how a person perceives, thinks, and gains understanding of their world through the relations of genetic and learning factors. There are four stages to cognitive information development. They are, reasoning, intelligence, language, and memory. These stages start when the baby is about 18 months old, they play with toys, listen to their parents speak, they watch tv, anything that catches their attention helps build their cognitive development.
Conservation refers to a logical thinking ability that allows a person to determine that a certain quantity will remain the same despite adjustment of the container, shape, or apparent size, according to the psychologist Jean Piaget. His theory posits that this ability is not present in children during the preoperational stage of their development at ages 2–7 but develops in the concrete operational stage from ages 7–11.
Peekaboo is a form of play played with an infant. To play, one player hides their face, pops back into the view of the other, and says Peekaboo!, sometimes followed by I see you! There are many variations: for example, where trees are involved, "Hiding behind that tree!" is sometimes added. Another variation involves saying "Where's the baby?" while the face is covered and "There's the baby!" when uncovering the face.
In psychology, centration is the tendency to focus on one salient aspect of a situation and neglect other, possibly relevant aspects. Introduced by the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget through his cognitive-developmental stage theory, centration is a behaviour often demonstrated in the preoperational stage. Piaget claimed that egocentrism, a common element responsible for preoperational children's unsystematic thinking, was causal to centration. Research on centration has primarily been made by Piaget, shown through his conservation tasks, while contemporary researchers have expanded on his ideas.
Genetic epistemology or 'developmental theory of knowledge' is a study of the origins (genesis) of knowledge (epistemology) established by Jean Piaget.
Domain-general learning theories of development suggest that humans are born with mechanisms in the brain that exist to support and guide learning on a broad level, regardless of the type of information being learned. Domain-general learning theories also recognize that although learning different types of new information may be processed in the same way and in the same areas of the brain, different domains also function interdependently. Because these generalized domains work together, skills developed from one learned activity may translate into benefits with skills not yet learned. Another facet of domain-general learning theories is that knowledge within domains is cumulative, and builds under these domains over time to contribute to our greater knowledge structure. Psychologists whose theories align with domain-general framework include developmental psychologist Jean Piaget, who theorized that people develop a global knowledge structure which contains cohesive, whole knowledge internalized from experience, and psychologist Charles Spearman, whose work led to a theory on the existence of a single factor accounting for all general cognitive ability.
Infant cognitive development is the first stage of human cognitive development, in the youngest children. The academic field of infant cognitive development studies of how psychological processes involved in thinking and knowing develop in young children. Information is acquired in a number of ways including through sight, sound, touch, taste, smell and language, all of which require processing by our cognitive system.
Renée Baillargeon is an Alumni Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Baillargeon specializes in the development of cognition in infancy.
Neo-Piagetian theories of cognitive development criticize and build upon Jean Piaget's theory of cognitive development.
Susan Kay Nolen-Hoeksema was an American professor of psychology at Yale University. Her research explored how mood regulation strategies could correlate to a person's vulnerability to depression, with special focus on a construct she called rumination as well as gender differences.
The Mental and Social Life of Babies is a 1982 book by Kenneth Kaye. Integrating a contemporary burgeoning field of research on infant cognitive and social development in the first two years of life with his own laboratory's studies at the University of Chicago, Kaye offered an "apprenticeship" theory. Seen as an empirical turning point in the investigation of processes in early human development, the book's reviews welcomed its reliance on close process studies of a large sample of infants and mothers (50) recorded longitudinally. It was republished in England, Japan, Spain, Italy, and Argentina.
Atkinson & Hilgard's Introduction to Psychology is an introductory textbook on psychology written originally by Ernest Hilgard, Richard C. Atkinson and Rita L. Atkinson and edited and revised by Edward E. Smith, Daryl J. Bem, Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, Barbara L. Fredrickson, Geoff R. Loftus and Willem A. Wagenaar. Sixteen editions of Introduction to Psychology have been published between 1953 and 2014. The text is organized around the major discoveries of psychology research and is strongly biological in its approach to psychology. Eventually the book was translated into French, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Czech, Croatian, Persian, Chinese and Japanese.
Horizontal and vertical décalage are terms coined by developmental psychologist Jean Piaget. He is credited with delineating Piaget's stages of cognitive development: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operations, and formal operations. According to Piaget, horizontal and vertical décalage generally occur during the concrete operations stage of development.
The Three Mountains Task was a task developed by Jean Piaget, a Swiss developmental psychologist. Piaget came up with a theory for developmental psychology based on cognitive development. Cognitive development, according to his theory, took place in four stages. These four stages were classified as the sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational and formal operational stages. The Three Mountain Problem was devised by Piaget to test whether a child's thinking was egocentric, which was also a helpful indicator of whether the child was in the preoperational stage or the concrete operational stage of cognitive development.
Early theories in child psychology were advocated by three famous theorists: John Locke, Jean Jacques Rousseau and Charles Darwin. They represent three famous schools of thought, namely the influence of the child’s environment, the role of the child’s cognitive development and the relationship with evolutionary origins of behavior. These three schools formed the basis of modern developments in Child Psychology.
