Human Development

Change vs. Growth vs.

Development
 True or False?
Our neurons don’t undergo cell
division
Development

● Involves increasing specialization and increasing integration

● Also involves the idea of continuity and discontinuity
● Understanding of development allows us to predict future behavior based on
individual differences
Nature vs. Nurture Debate

● John Locke
○ Tabula rasa concept
● Rousseau
○ Believed in the essential goodness of children
● Freud
○ Deterministic
● Binet
○ Developed the first intelligence test or children
● G. Stanley hall
○ Drew attention to the need for research into child development
Jean Piaget
Swiss, natural scientist: biologist and epistemologist (the theory of knowledge).
Best known for his research on children’s cognitive development.
Interested in how children learnt and their increasing capacity to understand the
world through the process of maturation (growing up).
Studied children from infancy to adolescence (including his own) through
observation and setting exercises and tests for the children to complete.
Schema
Schema
● Understanding and knowledge of the world.
● How you make sense of and categorise knowledge.
● Representations in the mind of a set of perceptions, ideas, objects and
actions.
● Schemas can be acquired/learnt or innate (e.g. reflex).
● Schemas are not fixed but develop with experience.
● For example, part of an 8 months old baby’s schematic knowledge is that
when a rattle is shook, it will make a noise.
Assimilation
“…is the integration of external elements into evolving or completed structures”
(Piaget, 1970, p.706)
“The process by which a person takes material into their minds from the
environment”. (Atherton 2011)
Accommodation
“The difference made to one’s mind or concepts by the process of assimilation….
assimilation and accommodation go together: you can’t have one without the other.”
(Atherton, 2011)
The adjustment or modification of schemas as new information is assimilated.
Equilibration.
Piaget believed that all human thought seeks order and is uncomfortable with
contradictions and inconsistencies in knowledge structures. In other words, we seek
'equilibrium' in our cognitive structures. Equilibrium occurs when a child's schemas
can deal with most new information through assimilation.
Sensorimotor stage (birth to 1 ½ years)

● The stage where they learn to differentiate self from objects.

● Develop knowledge of touch, smell, sight and taste.
● Develop knowledge of object permanence – children recognise that objects
exist even when they are no longer in their presence.
Preoperational stage 2-6 years old

● Children learn to use language and to represent objects by words and

images.
● Their thinking is egocentric. They have difficulty taking the viewpoint
of others.
● Children have difficulty in adjusting to changes in appearances of
matter – lack of conservation.
● 2 limitations of children’s thinking during this stage:
○ Egocentrism - involved the tendency to see the world from one’s
own viewpoint
○ Centration - focusing on one aspect of a task and ignoring others
 Question:
James is taller than David, and
David is taller than John.
Who is taller, James or John?
Concrete operational stage (7-12 yrs old)
● Children are less likely to be affected by egocentrism or centration
● They can understand reversibility.
● Can think logically about objects and events.
● Can use logical rules to solve problems.
● Objects can be ordered to features such as height, weight or speed.
● Concept of conservation is developed and grasped.
Formal operational (11-15)
● Thinking becomes more flexible.
● Children/teenagers can think logically about abstract concepts.
● Thinking becomes more symbolic. For example: symbols can stand for
numbers in Maths. What is Y in the sum 3 x X = Y, if X is 4?
● Children/teenagers become concerned with the hypothetical and the future.
Erik Erickson
Erik Erikson was born in Frankfurt, Germany. His biological father abandoned the
family before Erik was born. During his childhood, and his early adulthood, he was
Erik Homberger, (named after his pediatrician/step-father) and his parents kept
the details of his birth a secret. So here he was, a tall, blond, blue-eyed boy who
was also Jewish. At temple school, the kids teased him for being Nordic; at
grammar school, they teased him for being Jewish.
After graduating high school, Erik focused on becoming an artist, wandering totally carefree around
Europe with a friend, struggling with the question “who am I?”. He eventually began teaching art at a
school run by a friend of Anna Freud (Sigmund Freud’s daughter), he gathered a certificate in
Montessori education and one from the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. He was psychoanalyzed by
Anna Freud herself, and studied Freud’s work carefully. While Freud believed in “destiny”, Erikson
believed that a child’s “environment” had a great influence on their development.

With the advent of World War II he immigrated to the United States. He later taught at Yale, and
later still at the University of California at Berkeley. It was during this period of time that he did his
famous studies of modern life among the Lakota and the Yurok.
When he became an American citizen, he officially changed his name to Erik Erikson. No-one
seems to know where he got the name! Erikson was known and praised for his theories on
pyschosocial development, personality, and identity crisis.
Sigmund Freud
Oldest of eight children
Married with 3 girls and 3 boys
Physician-Biologist – Scientific oriented and Pathology oriented theory
Jewish-anti-religion-All religion an illusion used to cope with feelings of
infantile helplessness
In Vienna Austria 78 years till 1938
Based theory on personal experiences
Died of cancer of jaw & mouth lifelong cigar chain-smoker
Psychosexual Theory of Development
Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) believed that personality develops during early
childhood. For Freud, childhood experiences shape our personalities and behavior
as adults. Freud viewed development as discontinuous; he believed that each of
us must pass through a serious of stages during childhood, and that if we lack
proper nurturance and parenting during a stage, we may become stuck, or fixated,
in that stage. Freud’s stages are called the stages of psychosexual development.
According to Freud, children’s pleasure-seeking urges are focused on a different
area of the body, called an erogenous zone, at each of the five stages of
development: oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital.