Annual Review of Developmental Psychology - Volume 2, 2020
Volume 2, 2020
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It's More Complicated
Vol. 2 (2020), pp. 1–26More LessLifespan developmental psychology extends from birth to old age. I describe my research career from studies of newborns through childhood and adolescence to adulthood. I also include reflections from my aging brain on determinants of the life course especially in regard to risk and resilience. Infant learning, toddler temperament, and parental conceptions are highlighted content areas. A number of increasingly complex concepts from transactions to a unified theory are described to capture the ingredients that form development, requiring models of growth, context, regulation, and representation. I conclude by discussing applications to infant mental health and developmental disabilities.
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Children's Socioemotional Development Across Cultures
Vol. 2 (2020), pp. 27–46More LessThe development of socioemotional competencies is central for children's development in general. Infants are equipped with basic predispositions to acquire environmental information. However, contexts and cultures differ with respect to their emphasis on particular developmental domains. Two developmental pathways for which research evidence is available have been characterized: the Western middle-class perspective and the perspective of rural traditionally living farming families. Infants have different social experiences with respect to their caregivers, their behaviors, and their social regulation. The developmental focus of Western middle-class children is on individualistic agency, which implies that socioemotional development is subordinated to self-development. The developmental focus of the rural traditionally living farmer child is on social connectedness and social responsibility. Self-development is part of the development of communal agency. This review discusses the ethical implications of regarding the Western middle-class pathway as universal and normative and emphasizes the need to consider different pathways as normative.
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Bilingual Acquisition: The Early Steps
Vol. 2 (2020), pp. 47–68More LessHow different is the process of language learning in infants exposed to two languages from birth? Not so long ago, the available evidence pointed to a delay in language learning in bilinguals and suggested differences in several linguistic aspects between monolinguals and bilinguals. At present, the bulk of studies indicates the existence of specific adaptations to the process of language learning. In the current review, we discuss the existing evidence in several abilities in language acquisition in young bilingual infants and toddlers. We also examine studies investigating the impact of bilingual exposure in the emergence of cognitive and social abilities beyond language. We analyze the importance of clarifying several methodological issues and challenges, including the definition of bilingualism itself, for the field to advance.
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Children and Screens
Vol. 2 (2020), pp. 69–92More LessSince the advent of television in the 1950s, parents, educators, researchers, and policy makers have been concerned about the effects of screen time on children's development. Then, when computers became widely used, a new wave of interest in the positive and negative effects of this new medium was generated. Within the past 15 years, the development of the smartphone and tablet has completely changed the landscape of screen time. This review examines the current state of the research regarding the relation between children (from infancy to age 8 years) and screens. Using principles from the Science of Learning as a guide, we invite content creators and researchers to create a new wave of the digital revolution, one in which we need to prompt rather than substitute for social interaction.
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The Social Function of Imitation in Development
Vol. 2 (2020), pp. 93–109More LessImitation is a deeply social process. Here, I review evidence that children use imitation as a means by which to affiliate with others. For example, children imitate the actions of others more closely when they seek a positive social relationship with them and respond positively to being imitated. Furthermore, children infer something of the relationships between third parties by observing their imitative exchanges. Understanding the social nature of imitation requires exploring the nature of the social relationships between children and the individuals they imitate. Thus, in addition to discussing children's own goals in imitative situations, I review the social pressures children experience to imitate in particular ways, learning to conform to the conventions and rituals of their group. In the latter part of this article, I discuss the extent to which this perspective on imitation can help us to understand broader topics within social development, including the origins of human cultural differences.
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Developing an Understanding of Science
Vol. 2 (2020), pp. 111–132More LessYoung children are adept at several types of scientific reasoning, yet older children and adults have difficulty mastering formal scientific ideas and practices. Why do “little scientists” often become scientifically illiterate adults? We address this question by examining the role of intuition in learning science, both as a body of knowledge and as a method of inquiry. Intuition supports children's understanding of everyday phenomena but conflicts with their ability to learn physical and biological concepts that defy firsthand observation, such as molecules, forces, genes, and germs. Likewise, intuition supports children's causal learning but provides little guidance on how to navigate higher-order constraints on scientific induction, such as the control of variables or the coordination of theory and data. We characterize the foundations of children's intuitive understanding of the natural world, as well as the conceptual scaffolds needed to bridge these intuitions with formal science.
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Toward Realizing the Promise of Educational Neuroscience: Improving Experimental Design in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience Studies
Vol. 2 (2020), pp. 133–155More LessThis review presents a critical appraisal of high-quality studies in the field of developmental cognitive neuroscience, focusing on design issues that are critical for establishing effective educational neuroscience. I argue that cognitive neuroscience studies of cognitive development need to respect important experimental constraints. The use of longitudinal and intervention designs is key. The field needs to move beyond simply studying patterns of brain activation to studying brain mechanisms of information encoding and information processing. Indeed, studies at multiple levels of description are required, combining the assessment of individual differences in neural learning, sensory processing, cognitive processing, and children's behavior. Current evidence suggests that the child brain has essentially the same structures as the adult brain, carrying out essentially the same functions via the same mechanisms. This review demonstrates that neural systems that learn the patterns or regularities in environmental input (via statistical learning) can, in principle, acquire complex cognitive structures like language and conceptual knowledge.
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Knowing What Others Think and Feel: Empathic Accuracy Across Adulthood
Vol. 2 (2020), pp. 157–176More LessEmpathic accuracy is the ability to infer another person's inner states. While early findings suggested older adults to be less empathically accurate on average than younger individuals, the context dependency of such age differences was emphasized more recently. Comparable empathic accuracy was observed in older and younger empathizers when conversational topics were positive or personally relevant or when empathic judgments were solely based on prior knowledge of the target. Motivational and cognitive mechanisms are assumed to underlie this context-dependent pattern of findings. A refined future understanding of the sources of variation in empathic skills within and across age groups will require unraveling the contributions of the empathizer, the target person, and their relationship. Moreover, improved insights into the implications of empathic skills in various phases of adulthood, including older adults’ social functioning and health, will require joint consideration of cognitive and affective components of empathy and their accompanying physiological processes.
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Media and the Development of Gender Role Stereotypes
Vol. 2 (2020), pp. 177–199More LessThis review summarizes recent findings (2000–2020) concerning media's contributions to the development of gender stereotypes in children and adolescents. Content analyses document that there continues to be an underrepresentation of women and a misrepresentation of femininity and masculinity in mainstream media, although some positive changes are noted. Concerning the strength of media's impact, findings from three meta-analyses indicate a small but consistent association between frequent television viewing and expressing more stereotypic beliefs about gender. Concerning the nature of these effects, analyses indicate significant connections between young people's screen media use and their general gender role attitudes; their beliefs about the importance of appearance for girls and women; their stereotyping of toys, activities, and occupations; and their support for traditional sexual roles. We offer several approaches for moving this field forward, including incorporating additional theories (e.g., stereotype threat), focusing more on boys and ethnic minority youth, and centering developmental milestones.
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Language Development in Context
Vol. 2 (2020), pp. 201–223More LessYoung children learn to communicate in the language(s) of their communities, yet the individual trajectories of language development and the particular language varieties and modes of communication children acquire vary depending on the contexts in which they live. This review describes how context shapes language development. Building on the bioecological model of development, we conceptualize context as a set of nested systems surrounding the child, from the national policies and cultural norms that shape the broader environment to the particular communicative interactions in which children experience language being used. In addition, we describe how children's developing sensory-motor, perceptual, and social-cognitive capacities respond to and are tuned by the surrounding environment. Closer integration of research on the mechanisms of language learning with investigation of the contexts in which this learning takes place will provide critical insights into the process of language development.
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The Origins of Social Knowledge in Altricial Species
Vol. 2 (2020), pp. 225–246More LessHuman infants are altricial, born relatively helpless and dependent on parental care for an extended period of time. This protracted time to maturity is typically regarded as a necessary epiphenomenon of evolving and developing large brains. We argue that extended altriciality is itself adaptive, as a prolonged necessity for parental care allows extensive social learning to take place. Human adults possess a suite of complex social skills, such as language, empathy, morality, and theory of mind. Rather than requiring hardwired, innate knowledge of social abilities, evolution has outsourced the necessary information to parents. Critical information for species-typical development, such as species recognition, may originate from adults rather than from genes, aided by underlying perceptual biases for attending to social stimuli and capacities for statistical learning of social actions. We draw on extensive comparative findings to illustrate that, across species, altriciality functions as an adaptation for social learning from caregivers.
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Learning in Infancy Is Active, Endogenously Motivated, and Depends on the Prefrontal Cortices
Gal Raz, and Rebecca SaxeVol. 2 (2020), pp. 247–268More LessA common view of learning in infancy emphasizes the role of incidental sensory experiences from which increasingly abstract statistical regularities are extracted. In this view, infant brains initially support basic sensory and motor functions, followed by maturation of higher-level association cortex. Here, we critique this view and posit that, by contrast and more like adults, infants are active, endogenously motivated learners who structure their own learning through flexible selection of attentional targets and active interventions on their environment. We further argue that the infant brain, and particularly the prefrontal cortex (PFC), is well equipped to support these learning behaviors. We review recent progress in characterizing the function of the infant PFC, which suggests that, as in adults, the PFC is functionally specialized and highly connected. Together, we present an integrative account of infant minds and brains, in which the infant PFC represents multiple intrinsic motivations, which are leveraged for active learning.
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A Glass Half Full and Half Empty: The State of the Science in Early Childhood Prevention and Intervention Research
Vol. 2 (2020), pp. 269–294More LessIn this article, we review the field of early childhood prevention and intervention science, describe noteworthy achievements over the past half-century by researchers in this area, and comment on current issues in need of ongoing attention. Although there have been many successes and noteworthy achievements in the field, in recent decades there has been little progress toward population-level impacts of early intervention. As such, novel empirical methods and revised standards of evidence are needed to complement (rather than replace) existing best practices for the development, implementation, evaluation, and scaling of effective programs.
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Impact of New Family Forms on Parenting and Child Development
Vol. 2 (2020), pp. 295–316More LessThe structure of families has changed significantly over the last 40 years due to changes in legislation, technology, and societal attitudes. This article examines parenting and child development in new family forms, i.e., family forms that did not exist or were not visible until the latter part of the twentieth century. First, we give an overview of the historical and current context of new family forms. Then, we discuss parenting and child development in six new family types: families with lesbian mothers, families with gay fathers, intentional single-mother families, donor conception families, surrogacy families, and families with trans parents. Next, we discuss how research on the impact of new family forms on parenting and child development can inform our understanding of the relative influence of family processes and family structure on child development and parenting. We conclude with directions for future research.
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Play, Curiosity, and Cognition
Junyi Chu, and Laura E. SchulzVol. 2 (2020), pp. 317–343More LessFew phenomena in childhood are as compelling—and mystifying—as play. We review five proposals about the relationship between play and development. We believe each captures important aspects of play across species; however, we believe none of them accounts for the extraordinary richness of human play or its connection to distinctively human learning. In thinking about play, we are particularly struck by the profligacy with which children set seemingly arbitrary rewards and incur unnecessary costs. We suggest that researchers take the seeming inutility of play seriously and consider why it might be useful to engage in apparently useless behavior. We propose that humans’ ability to choose arbitrary costs and rewards allows us to pursue novel goals, discover unexpected information, and invent problems we would not otherwise encounter. Because problems impose constraints on search, these invented problems may help solve a big problem: how to generate new ideas and plans in an otherwise infinite search space.
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Decision Making Across Adulthood
Vol. 2 (2020), pp. 345–363More LessThis review summarizes research and theory on aging and decision making. We trace the conceptual and historical origins of using behavioral decision-making tasks to identify age differences in decision-making competence. We review cross-sectional and longitudinal studies that suggest that some facets of decision-making competence remain relatively stable across adulthood. We describe how older adults’ decision-making competence may be challenged by complex decisions that tax their fluid cognitive abilities, especially when decisions are not seen as personally relevant. We discuss how relying on life experience can offset declines in fluid reasoning skills and how age-related shifts in motivation and improvements in emotion regulation provide an advantage when decisions involve losses and missed opportunities. We discuss how existing knowledge of the strengths and weaknesses of the aging decision maker might be applied to improve decision-making competence and outline next steps for advancing understanding of decision making across adulthood.
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Neural Development of Memory and Metamemory in Childhood and Adolescence: Toward an Integrative Model of the Development of Episodic Recollection
Vol. 2 (2020), pp. 365–388More LessMemory and metamemory processes are essential to retrieve detailed memories and appreciate the phenomenological experience of recollection. Developmental cognitive neuroscience has made strides in revealing the neural changes associated with improvements in memory and metamemory during childhood and adolescence. We argue that hippocampal changes, in concert with surrounding cortical regions, support developmental improvements in the precision, complexity, and flexibility of memory representations. In contrast, changes in frontoparietal regions promote efficient encoding and retrieval strategies. A smaller body of literature on the neural substrates of metamemory development suggests that error monitoring processes implemented in the anterior insula and dorsal anterior cingulate cortex trigger, and perhaps support the development of, metacognitive evaluationsin the prefrontal cortex, while developmental changes in the parietal cortex support changes in the phenomenological experience of episodic retrieval. Our conclusions highlight the necessity of integrating these lines of research into a comprehensive model on the neurocognitive development of episodic recollection.
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Polygenic Scores in Developmental Psychology: Invite Genetics In, Leave Biodeterminism Behind
Vol. 2 (2020), pp. 389–411More LessPolygenic scores offer developmental psychologists new methods for integrating genetic information into research on how people change and develop across the life span. Indeed, polygenic scores have correlations with developmental outcomes that rival correlations with traditional developmental psychology variables, such as family income. Yet linking people's genetics with differences between them in socially valued developmental outcomes, such as educational attainment, has historically been used to justify acts of state-sponsored violence. In this review, we emphasize that an interdisciplinary understanding of the environmental and structural determinants of social inequality, in conjunction with a transactional developmental perspective on how people interact with their environments, is critical to interpreting associations between polygenic measures and phenotypes. While there is a risk of misuse, early applications of polygenic scores to developmental psychology have already provided novel findings that identify environmental mechanisms of life course processes that can be used to diagnose inequalities in social opportunity.
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The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters: How and When Biased Input Shapes Mathematics Learning
Vol. 2 (2020), pp. 413–435More LessChildren's failure to reason often leads to their mathematical performance being shaped by spurious associations from problem input and overgeneralization of inapplicable procedures rather than by whether answers and procedures make sense. In particular, imbalanced distributions of problems, particularly in textbooks, lead children to create spurious associations between arithmetic operations and the numbers they combine; when conceptual knowledge is absent, these spurious associations contribute to the implausible answers, flawed strategies, and violations of principles characteristic of children's mathematics in many areas. To illustrate mechanisms that create flawed strategies in some areas but not others, we contrast computer simulations of fraction and whole number arithmetic. Most of their mechanisms are similar, but the model of fraction arithmetic lacks conceptual knowledge that precludes strategies that violate basic mathematical principles. Presentingbalanced problem distributions and inculcating conceptual knowledge for distinguishing flawed from legitimate strategies are promising means for improving children's learning.
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