Developmental Psychology

Events that are strongly related to age and therefore fairly predictable in when they occur and how long they last.

Consists of procedures that combine conditioning and modeling to eliminate undesirable behaviors and increase desirable responses.

Directly observable events--stimuli and responses--are the appropriate focus of study.

Bronfenbrenner called the temporal dimension of his model the chronosystem (the prefix chrono means "time"). Life changes can be imposed externally or can arise from within the person, since individuals shape many of their own settings and esperiences.

Researchers use a flexible, conversational style to probe for the participant's point of view.

Brings together a wide range of information on one person, including interviews, observations, and sometimes test scores.

Piaget did not believe that children's learning depends on reinforcers, such as reward from adults. According to his cognitive-developmental theory, children actively construct knowledge as they manipulate and explore their world.

Individuals born in the same time period are influenced by a particular set of historical and cultural conditions. Results based on one cohort may not apply to people developing at other times.

Unique combinations of personal and environmental circumstances that can result in different paths of change.

A process of gradually augmenting the same types of skills that were there to begin with.

A number that describes how two measures, or variables, are associated with each other.

Researchers gather information on individuals, generally in natural life circumstances, without altering their experiences. They they look at relationships between participants' characteristics and their behavior or development.

Groups of people differing in age are studied at the same point in time.

Is the one the investigator expects to be influenced by the independent variable.

It brings together researchers from psychology, biology, neuroscience, and medicine to study the relationship between changes in the brain and the developing person's cognitive processing and behavior patterns.