{"id":33585,"date":"2017-10-15T01:00:37","date_gmt":"2017-10-15T05:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=33585"},"modified":"2017-10-04T07:52:51","modified_gmt":"2017-10-04T11:52:51","slug":"qotd-developmental-psychology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2017\/10\/15\/qotd-developmental-psychology\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Developmental psychology"},"content":{"rendered":"

Developmental psychology describes how children go from helpless infants to reasonable adults. Although a lot of it has to do with sensorimotor skills like walking and talking, the really interesting stuff is cognitive development. Children start off as very buggy reasoners incapable of all but the most superficial forms of logic but gradually go on to develop new abilities and insights that allow them to navigate adult life.<\/p>\n

Maybe the most famous of these is \u201ctheory of mind\u201d, the ability to view things from other people\u2019s perspective. In a classic demonstration, researchers show little Amy a Skittles bag and ask what she thinks is inside. She guesses Skittles, but the researchers open it and reveal it\u2019s actually pennies. Then they close it up and invite little Brayden into the room. Then they ask Amy what Brayden thinks is inside. If Amy\u2019s three years old or younger, she\u2019ll usually say \u201cpennies\u201d \u2013 she knows that pennies are inside, so why shouldn\u2019t Brayden know too? If she\u2019s four or older, she\u2019ll usually say \u201cSkittles\u201d \u2013 she realizes on a gut level that she and Brayden are separate minds and that Brayden will have his own perspective. Sometimes the same mistake can extend to preferences and beliefs. Wikipedia gives the example of a child saying \u201cI like Sesame Street<\/em>, so Daddy must like Sesame Street<\/em> too.\u201d This is another theory of mind failure grounded in an inability to separate self and environment.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s another example which tentatively sounds like a self-environment failure. Young children really<\/em> don\u2019t get foreign languages. I got a little of this teaching English in Japan, and heard more of it from other people. The really young kids treated English like a cipher; everybody started out knowing things\u2019 real<\/em> (ie Japanese) names, but Americans insisted on converting them into their own special American-person code before talking about them. Kids would ask weird things like whether American parents would make an exception and speak Japanese to their kids who were too young to have learned English yet, or whether it was a zero-tolerance policy sort of thing and the families would just not communicate until the kids went to English school. And I made fun of them, but I also remember the first time I visited Paris I heard somebody talking to their dog, and for a split second I was like \u201cWhy would you expect your dog<\/em> to know French?<\/em>\u201d before my brain kicked in and I was like \u201cDuuhhhh\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n

The infamous \u201cmagical thinking\u201d which kids display until age 7 or so also involves confused self-environment boundaries. Maybe little Amy gets mad at Brayden and shouts \u201cI HATE HIM\u201d to her mother. The next day, Brayden falls off a step and skins his knee. Amy intuits a cause-and-effect relationship between her hatred and Brayden\u2019s accident and feels guilty. She doesn\u2019t realize that her hatred is internal to herself and can\u2019t affect the world directly. Or kids displaying animism at this age, and expecting that the TV doesn\u2019t work because it\u2019s angry, or the car\u2019s not starting because it\u2019s tired.<\/p>\n

Scott Alexander, “What Developmental Milestones Are You Missing?”, Slate Star Codex<\/em><\/a>, 2015-11-03.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Developmental psychology describes how children go from helpless infants to reasonable adults. Although a lot of it has to do with sensorimotor skills like walking and talking, the really interesting stuff is cognitive development. Children start off as very buggy reasoners incapable of all but the most superficial forms of logic but gradually go on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[41,16],"tags":[374,139],"class_list":["post-33585","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-quotations","category-science","tag-children","tag-psychology"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8JH","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33585","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33585"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33585\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33586,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33585\/revisions\/33586"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}