The success of developmental psychology
The success of developmental psychology and its efforts to understand the development of thought in the first year of infancy
In spite of their obvious impotence, newborns come to this world ready to collect the information they need to give sense of their new environment; their heritage which is determined at the time of conception has supply them with the already developed capacities of their own specie as well as a unique set of genes that transforms them into individuals. However to predict the course of life of an individual is not the aim of developmental psychology , but to understand the general rules of development, in this case the development of thought during the first year of life commonly characteristic to the human race. Soon we will see how explanations about this development differ. Although each of them has incremented our understanding of the mysterious process of development , none of them on its own can describe what is the exact mechanism of the first steps given by human mind. The psychology of thought development has been expanded in many directions during the last couple of decades. Old theories have been reinterpreted and new theories have come to clarify what it used to be unexplorable places of development, what makes this area growing in complexity.
It is a real big challenge to try to understand the development of thinking and reasoning and the origins of them. There are many aspects of development involved in this process of thought and all of them must be studied carefully in order to achieve a comprehension of the first steps that the human mind give when it starts to work. Many areas influence this complex machine like biology, sensorial development and perception, attention (like the reason why babies find some things more interesting than others ), basic learning processes and behaviour, memory, human motivation and emotion and finally thought and language.
All the areas of mind development I exposed before have been studied under different theoretical perspectives. It seems partly hard to compare all them since, each one of them focus the areas of development from a rather different point of view. All of them more or less agree that human development is regular and behaviour can be potentially predicted , and that (with the exceptions of empiricists) the infant is relatively active in his own development; but as I said the focus changes. Some times they can be describing the same process in different terms ; as I see it, these terms reflect the vision of their own theory and that can bring to confusion.
I can take as an example for this Piaget's theory of the permanence of objects (Piaget, 1969) and the study of the psychoanalist Melanie Klein who made a study about "the baby's inner world and how it comes to be populated with objects based on the experiences arising in the baby's
relationship with her mother" ( Oates , 1994, p.288).Both theories hold parallel similarities in the explanation of how the child constructs actively his own world based in the relations she has with outside elements. However the purpose of Piaget and the cognitive theories is to ...
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I can take as an example for this Piaget's theory of the permanence of objects (Piaget, 1969) and the study of the psychoanalist Melanie Klein who made a study about "the baby's inner world and how it comes to be populated with objects based on the experiences arising in the baby's
relationship with her mother" ( Oates , 1994, p.288).Both theories hold parallel similarities in the explanation of how the child constructs actively his own world based in the relations she has with outside elements. However the purpose of Piaget and the cognitive theories is to clarify the cognitive abilities of the infant's mind and the way she builds representations in her mind. On the other hand, Melanie Klain inside the psychoanalitic theory studies the development of thought in infants in order to understand future relationships and personality in relation with human emotions.
Secondly, another notable difference in the focus of theories of thought development is the relation between nature and rearing. They all consider both aspects important, but they construct their theories and methods in the basis whether they see more crucial one or the other. In this field we will see Nativist researchers as Meltzoff and Moore (1977) who will take us into the infants ability to imitate. They almost give us the impression that the newborns infants they studied were " native imitators" which assumes the human possession of an "integrated sensory system in which physical behaviour and sensory behaviour share a common form of representation" (Denis Bancroft,1994, p.152); this position is wide apart from Constructivism and Piaget who consider that infants need to learn to integrate actions with the sensorial system through a complicated process of asimilation and accomodation.
As we'll see the interpretations obtained from different theories through observational and experimental methods vary and most of the time contradict each other, but we need to take notice of how enormously difficult it is to study the mind of the baby since it can not be directly observed and the external signs that take us to it are sometimes really difficult to appreciate and they might not be for the reason we believe. At the time to study one aspect of thought, many others are influencing this at the same time and it is hard to distinguish when one or the other is taking action. I think this is one of the mayor reasons for what ,psychologists vary in their observations and interpretations provoking so much confusion and also the weakness of experiments when they try to find out about the same aspects of thought but include the use of different child abilities that might have developed at different stages. To clarify this we can examine the different contributions and methods use in the study of the issues of the object permanence and imitation.
Piaget stated that children during the first nine months of life do not understand that objects continue to exist when they can't see them. Other studies like the one conducted by Baillargeon et al. (1986) however
affirmed the fact that babies 5 months old apparently acknowledge the continuing existence of a completely invisible object. The argument for this is based in the technique of habituation and the amount of time that children spent looking at two different events. The same as the experiment by Bower et al. (1971) , these methods imply the presence of an object that is "moving". It would be interesting to think that the concept of mobility can be understood differently by infants than the presence of a static object which is what Piaget used, so the disagreement of theories could be based not only in the fact that Piaget experiments require the ability of having to grasp the object to be able to show that he knows it exists but also in the implication of different cognitive issues like mobility. Another experiment conducted by Hood and Willats (1986) also acknowledged the existence of objects for babies when they can not see them. Again this experiment could be criticized in the sense that babies' emotions could be affecting the child inclination to turn to the object they had last seen when the lights are off looking for a feeling of security in an uncertain situation, I think this would probably be an interesting issue for psychoanalitic theories.
After babies are 9 months old Piaget thought that their understanding of objects is ruled by egocentrism for which they cannot difference between themselves and the world . They use their bodies as a reference for spacial relations. He thought that this is so after observing that the babies try to find an object in the same place they have last seen in relation with his body. I believe that this would not happen as often if the experiment would be conducted at home rather than in the laboratory since the child has more reference points in his own environment than in a strange place. Other authors like Butterworth (1977) suggested that children have two different ways of coding position (egocentric and allocentric codes)and that "errors in certain tasks are caused by difficulties in coordinating and updating the spacial relations that are commonly involved"(Willats, 1985, p.140). Also other researchers acknowledge the importance of the development of memory in such tasks and they see the errors based in this area of development, (Adele Diamond, 1985).
Another basic learning process studied by psychologists that I already introduced before is the imitation. Early imitation has been a controversial issue after the findings of Meltzoff and Moore since opinions about early cognitive development can change. For the infants to be able to imitate is necessary that they get involved in some type of representation so they can transfer sensorial information into her mouth, lips, tongue or fingers. Many experts of cognitive development have deny that very small children can build representations of the patterns of
human movement and the explanations for these "imitations" (which nativist researchers found) are explained mainly by reflex movements by other theories. I personally believe that this is almost still impossible to know scientifically and that in this case instinct would be the best knowledge to apply.
Piaget is with no doubt the researcher that has given mayor contributions to developmental psychology. He was not only able to interpret a wide set of data but also made possible and encouraged an enormous amount of later studies that have allow us to have a more defined vision of cognitive development. This makes his theory one of the most important scientific productions of the 20th century. You can agree or not with Piaget theory but you definitely need to count with it. There are two general critiques that are commonly cited at the time to mention Piaget theory and that I think at some degree do not make him justice. The first refers to his methodology, the absence of experimental rigor and statistics to control the results, his insistence in qualitative and no quantitative analysis, etc...; this is certainly true but we need to appreciate the sacrifice of this rigor in order to obtain a more observational and qualitative analysis, something that is growing in importance in present time studies and that I think produces much richer results. And secondly, maybe a real weakness of Piaget's conception is his incapacity to give account of the processes , the procedure of resolution that the child uses to pass every stage, probably due to the structural character of his theory.
Since Piaget put the first stone to a new vision of child development many investigations and researches have come out to discover that the child is born with more abilities of comprehension than it was thought and that their mind works within a complex system that is affected by many other developmental areas. I have no doubt that the biggest challenge of developmental psychologists is to organize and synthesize the richness of the investigations and to find new ways to apply methods that allow them to know things like how, why and when exactly children commence to have representations of things and people in their minds and what are the main influences for the achievement of these; or, on the other hand, are they already born with this " declarative knowledge". That is why the studies about object permanence and imitation are so important since they are the first signs of these representations and for what we have seen there is still a big amount of work to be done in this area.
The development of human thought is a big challenge for psychology, we have been trough different theoretical perspectives that approach this matter from different points of view and different methods that try to understand the babies' mind. As we have seen, the interpretations not
always agree and the tremendous ability of some researchers to create new experimental methods are easily shadowed by the ability of other researchers to find weaknesess in the experiments. This is however not a negative thing since new doors are constantly getting opened in the adventure of understanding the developmental processes of human thought.
REFERENCES
Baillargeon et al.(1986), cited in Bancroft, (1994) p.132
Bancroft, D. (1994) "The genesis of thought" , in Oates, J. (ed ) The foundations of development, Oxford, Blackwell/ The Open University.
Bower et al.(1971) cited in Bancroft, (1994) p.131
Butterworth, G. E.(1971) cited in Bancroft, (1994) p.140
Diamond, A. (1985) cited in Bancroft, (1994)p.140
Hood , B. and Willats, P. (1986) cited in Bancroft, (1994) p.136
Meltzoff, A.N. and Moore, M. K. (1977 ) (1983) cited in Bancroft.p146
Oates, J. (1994) "First relationships" , in Oates, J. (ed) The foundations of development, Oxford, Blackwell, The open University.
Piaget, J. and Inhelder, B.(1969) cited in Bancroft.(1994)p.129
Willats, P. (1985) Cited in Bancroft (1994). P.140
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