Adolescence Physical Development Due to earlier maturation and prolonged education, adolescencethe transition years between biological maturity

and social independencehas lengthened in many countries. Adolescence begins with a growth spurt that heralds the period of sexual maturation we call puberty and ends with the achievement of adult independence. Depending on how other people react, early or late maturation can influence adjustment, again illustrating how our genes and our environment interact in shaping us. Cognitive Development Piaget theorized that adolescents develop the capacity for formal operations, which enables them to reason abstractly. Todays developmentalists find the rudiments of formal logic appearing earlier than Piaget believed. Following Piagets lead, Lawrence Kohlberg contended that moral thinking likewise proceeds through a sequence of stages, from a preconventional morality of self-interest, to a conventional morality concerned with gaining others approval or doing ones duty, to (in some people) a postconventional morality of agreed-upon rights or universal ethical principles. But morality also lies in actions, which are influenced by the social situation and inner attitudes as well as by moral reasoning. Moreover, say Kohlbergs critics, the postconventional level represents morality from the perspective of individualist, liberalminded males. The social intuitionist perspective on morality suggests that moral feelings may precede moral judgments and influence our actions. Social Development Erik Erikson theorized that a chief task of adolescence is solidifying ones sense of self ones identity. For many people, this struggle continues into the adult years as new relationships emerge and new roles are assumed. Although adolescence has traditionally been viewed as a time of storm and stress, researchers have found that most teenagers relate to their parents reasonably well and generally affirm their parents beliefs and attitudes. A correlation has been found between a positive relationship with parents and positive peer relationships. Adolescence marks a time when parental influence diminishes and peer influence increases. Emerging Adulthood The window of time between adolescence and fully independent adulthood is now termed emerging adulthood. This refers to people between the ages of 18 and the mid-twenties. With changes in Western society, such as an increase in years of schooling, the marks of adult independence appear later. Emerging adults may be in college managing their own time and activities but still look to their parents for financial and emotional support. On the other hand, sexual maturity begins earlier, thus creating a larger gap between biological maturity and social independence. Adulthood During early life, we sail a narrow channel, constrained by biological maturation. As the years pass, the channel widens, allowing us to diverge more and more. By adulthood, age no longer neatly predicts a persons life experience and traits. Yet in some ways our

bodies, minds, and relationships still undergo predictable changes. As long as we live, we adapt. Physical Development The barely perceptible physical declines of early adulthood begin to accelerate during middle adulthood. For women, a significant physical change is menopause, which generally seems to be a smooth rather than rough transition. For both men and women perceptual acuity, strength, and stamina decline after 65, but short-term ailments are fewer. Neural processes slow, and except for those who suffer brain disease, such as the progressive deterioration of Alzheimers disease, the brain remains healthy. Cognitive Development As the years pass, recognition memory remains strong, although recall begins to decline, especially for meaningless information. Research on how intelligence changes with age has progressed through several phases: cross-sectional studies suggesting a steady intellectual decline after early adulthood; longitudinal studies suggesting intellectual stability until very late in life; and todays view that fluid intelligence declines in later life, but crystallized intelligence does not. Social Development From close study of small samples of individuals, some theorists maintain that adults pass through an orderly sequence of life stages. Some have contended that moving from one stage to the next entails recurring times of crisis, such as the transition to midlife during the early forties. But people are not so predictable. Adult life is influenced in unanticipated ways, not only by events involving love and work but also by chance occurrences. Since 1960, marriage has been in decline, as reflected in later marriages, increased cohabitation, and doubled divorce rates. Although few people grow old gratefully, most age gracefully, retaining a sense of wellbeing throughout life. Those who live to old age must, however, cope with the deaths of friends and family members and with the prospect of their own deaths. Our experience with death is influenced by our experiences in life. Reflections on Two Major Developmental Issues We have touched on two of developmental psychologys pervasive issues: continuity and discrete stages, and stability and change in personality. Although the stage theories of Piaget, Kohlberg, and Erikson have been modified in light of later research, each theory usefully alerts us to differences among people of different ages and helps us keep the lifespan perspective in view. Research findings that reveal how peoples traits continue to change in later life have helped create a new emphasis on lifelong development. Nevertheless, there is also an underlying consistency to most peoples temperaments and personality traits. CH 5

Sensing the World: Some Basic Principles

To study sensation is to study an ageless question: How does the world out there get represented in here, inside our heads? Put another way, how are the external stimuli that strike our bodies transformed into messages that our brains comprehend? Thresholds Each species comes equipped with sensitivities that enable it to survive and thrive. We sense only a portion of the sea of energy that surrounds us, but to this portion we are exquisitely sensitive. Our absolute threshold for any stimulus is the minimum stimulation necessary for us to detect it 50 percent of the time. Signal detection researchers report that our individual absolute thresholds vary with our psychological state. Experiments reveal that we can process some information from stimuli too weak to recognize. But the restricted conditions under which this occurs would not enable unscrupulous opportunists to exploit us with subliminal messages. To survive and thrive, an organism must have difference thresholds low enough to detect minute changes in important stimuli. In humans, a difference threshold (also called a just noticeable difference, or jnd) increases in proportion to the size of the stimulusa principle known as Webers law. Sensory Adaptation Sensory adaptation refers to our ability to adapt to unchanging stimuli. For example, when we smell an odor in a room weve just entered and remain in that room for a period of time, the odor will no longer be easily detected. The phenomenon of sensory adaptation focuses our attention on informative changes in stimulation by diminishing our sensitivity to constant or routine odors, sounds, and touches. Vision Each sense receives stimulation, transduces it into neural signals, and sends these neural messages to the brain. We have glimpsed how this happens with vision. The Stimulus Input: Light Energy The energies we experience as visible light are a thin slice from the broad spectrum of electromagnetic radiation. The hue and brightness we perceive in a light depend on the wavelength and intensity. The Eye After entering the eye and being focused by a camera-like lens, light waves strike the retina. The retinas light-sensitive rods and color-sensitive cones convert the light energy into neural impulses, which are coded by the retina before traveling along the optic nerve to the brain. Visual Information Processing In the cortex, individual neurons called feature detectors, respond to specific features of a visual stimulus, and their information is pooled for interpretation by higher-level brain cells. Sub-dimensions of vision (color, movement, depth, and form) are processed separately and simultaneously, illustrating the brains capacity for parallel processing.

The visual pathway faithfully represents retinal stimulation, but the brains representation incorporates our assumptions, interests, and expectations. Color Vision Research on how we see color supports two nineteenth-century theories. First, as the Young-Helmholtz trichromatic (three-color) theory suggests, the retina contains three types of cones. Each is most sensitive to the wavelengths of one of the three primary colors of light (red, green, or blue). Second, as opponent-process theory maintains, the nervous system codes the color-related information from the cones into pairs of opponent colors, as demonstrated by the phenomenon of afterimages and as confirmed by measuring opponent processes within visual neurons of the thalamus. The phenomenon of color constancy under varying illumination shows that our brains construct our experience of color. Hearing The Stimulus Input: Sound Waves The pressure waves we experience as sound vary in frequency and amplitude, and correspondingly in perceived pitch and loudness. The Ear Through a mechanical chain of events, sound waves traveling through the auditory canal cause minuscule vibrations in the eardrum. Transmitted via the bones of the middle ear to the fluid-filled cochlea, these vibrations create movement in tiny hair cells, triggering neural messages to the brain. Research on how we hear pitch supports both the place theory, which best explains the sensation of high-pitched sounds, and frequency theory, which best explains the sensation of low-pitched sounds. We localize sound by detecting minute differences in the intensity and timing of the sounds received by each ear. Hearing Loss and Deaf Culture Hearing losses linked to conduction and nerve disorders can be caused by prolonged exposure to loud noise and by diseases and age-related disorders. Those who live with hearing loss face social challenges. Cochlear implants can enable some hearing for deaf children and most adults. But Deaf Culture advocates, noting that Sign is a complete language, question the enhancement. Additionally, deafness can lead to sensory compensation where other senses are enhanced. Advocates feel that this furthers their view that deafness is not a disability. Other Important Senses Touch Our sense of touch is actually four sensespressure, warmth, cold, and painthat combine to produce other sensations, such as "hot." One theory of pain is that a "gate" in the spinal cord either opens to permit pain signals traveling up small nerve fibers to reach the brain, or closes to prevent their passage. Because pain is both a physiological and a psychological phenomenon, it often can be controlled through a combination of physical and psychological treatments.

Taste Taste, a chemical sense, is likewise a composite of five basic sensationssweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umamiand of the aromas that interact with information from the taste buds. The influence of smell on our sense of taste is an example of sensory interaction. Smell Like taste, smell is a chemical sense, but there are no basic sensations for smell, as there are for touch and taste. Unlike the retinas receptor cells that sense color by breaking it into component parts, the 5 million olfactory receptor cells with their 1000 different receptor proteins recognize individual odor molecules. Some odors trigger a combination of receptors. Like other stimuli, odors can spontaneously evoke memories and feelings. Body Position and Movement Finally, our effective functioning requires a kinesthetic sense, which notifies the brain of the position and movement of body parts, and a sense of equilibrium, which monitors the position and movement of the whole body. Chapter 6: Perception Selective Attention At any moment we are conscious of a very limited amount of all that we are capable of experiencing. One example of this selective attention is the cocktail party effect attending to only one voice among many. Another example is inattentional blindness, which refers to our blocking of a brief visual interruption when focusing on other sights. Perceptual Illusions Visual and auditory illusions were fascinating scientists even as psychology emerged. Explaining illusions required an understanding of how we transform sensations into meaningful perceptions, so the study of perception became one of psychologys first concerns. Conflict between visual and other sensory information is usually resolved with the minds accepting the visual data, a tendency known as visual capture. Perceptual Organization From a top-down perspective, we see how we transform sensory information into meaningful perceptions when we are aided by knowledge and expectations. The early Gestalt psychologists were impressed with the seemingly innate way we organize fragmentary sensory data into whole perceptions. Our minds structure the information that comes to us in several demonstrable ways: Form Perception

To recognize an object, we must first perceive it (see it as a figure) as distinct from its surroundings (the ground). We must also organize the figure into a meaningful form. Several Gestalt principlesproximity, similarity, continuity, connectedness, and closuredescribe this process. Depth Perception Research on the visual cliff revealed that many species perceive the world in three dimensions at, or very soon after, birth. We transform two-dimensional retinal images into three-dimensional perceptions by using binocular cues, such as retinal disparity, and monocular cues, such as the relative sizes of objects. Motion Perception Our brain computes motion as objects move across or toward the retina. Large objects appear to move more slowly than smaller objects. A quick succession of images, as in a motion picture or on a lighted sign, can also create an illusion of movement. Perceptual Constancy Having perceived an object as a coherent figure and having located it in space, how then do we recognize itdespite the varying images that it may cast on our retinas? Size, shape, and lightness constancies describe how objects appear to have unchanging characteristics regardless of their distance, shape, or motion. These constancies explain several of the well-known visual illusions. For example, familiarity with the size-distance relationships in a carpentered world of rectangular shapes makes people more susceptible to the Mller-Lyer illusion. Perceptual Interpretation The most direct tests of the nature-nurture issue come from experiments that modify human perceptions. Sensory Deprivation and Restored Vision For many species, infancy is a critical period during which experience must activate the brains innate visual mechanisms. If cataract removal restores eyesight to adults who were blind from birth, they remain unable to perceive the world normally. Generally, they can distinguish figure from ground and can perceive colors, but they are unable to recognize shapes and forms. In controlled experiments, animals have been reared with severely restricted visual input. When their visual exposure is returned to normal, they, too, suffer enduring visual handicaps. Perceptual Adaptation Human vision is remarkably adaptable. Given glasses that shift the world slightly to the left or right, or even turn it upside down, people manage to adapt their movements and, with practice, to move about with ease. Perceptual Set Clear evidence that perception is influenced by our experienceour learned assumptions and beliefsas well as by sensory input comes from the many demonstrations of

perceptual set and context effects. The schemas we have learned help us to interpret otherwise ambiguous stimuli, a fact that helps explain why some of us "see" monsters, faces, and UFOs that others do not. Perception and the Human Factor Perceptions vary, and may not be what a designer assumes. Human factors psychologists therefore study how people perceive and use machines, and how machines and physical environments can be better suited to that use. Such studies have improved aircraft safety and spawned user-friendly technology. Is There Extrasensory Perception? Many believe in or claim to experience extrasensory perception (ESP). To believe in ESP is to believe that the brain can perceive without sensory input. Most US scientists are skeptical, yet five British universities have parapsychology departments. Examples of ESP include astrological predictions and communication with the dead. Three forms of ESP, telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition, are deemed the most testable. However, parapsychologists have tried to documents several forms of ESP but for several reasons, especially the lack of a reproducible ESP effect, most research psychologists remain skeptical.