Developmental Psychology’s Theories of Learning and Development

In a nutshell, developmental psychology is a discipline that focuses on the social and emotional development of children. The four primary categories into which the characteristics of development may be divided are behavior, socialization, communication, and cognition. The strategy involves using a systemic approach to intervention and healing while guiding the person through the developmental steps required to create the indicated new behavior. The majority of changes occur throughout childhood, thus this often happens then.

In other words, a lot of experts who research developmental psychology think that an individual’s development from birth relies only on who and what they become later in life. They look at how nature and nurture affect human development, as well as how context affects changes that occur over the course of a person’s lifetime. Many of these developmental psychologists feel that many of the issues people currently experience as adults would not exist if people knew the precise breakdown and facts of how to take care of a kid while they were still in the developing period.

The biological approach to developmental psychology holds that a child’s development is made up of distinct, pre-programmed phases that can only be reversed later in life. This is the first viewpoint of developmental psychology that I shall explore. It is founded on ideas, actions, and emotions that have physical and biological roots. Arnold Gesell, an American psychologist, specialized in the study of child development, particularly how genes and environment affect a person’s development. Gesell argued against the notion that a child’s development was at any related to outside events, instead emphasizing internal variables like the development of the child’s central nervous system.

The following viewpoint is cognitive; it is a particular strategy that focuses on the mind and, more specifically, how it processes information.

Theorist Piaget was fascinated by the way a youngster could reason rationally since he had also studied the biological method. In contrast to previous theories, Piaget’s is centered on children and their learning rather than thinkers of all ages. Piaget built his hypothesis on how an individual’s contextual experiences and biological development interact.

Through his research, Jean Piaget came to the conclusion that children’s intelligence developed in stages. He identified four phases, the first of which is known as the Sensorimotor stage and normally lasts from birth to about the age of two years.

This stage is defined as the time when the person starts to interact with the environment by acts like staring, touching, and mouthing. The person is also intended to experience object permanence at this stage, which means they start to comprehend that things exist and that things happen in the world, whether they are natural or abnormal. For instance, if you were to conceal anything from the person by placing it on a shelf, covering it with something, or tucking it under a pillow, they would be able to see that it was concealed but was still there.

The “Blanket and Ball Research” was a study on this hypothesis conducted by Piaget in 1963. The research is based on the idea of object permeance, in which Piaget would cover an item with a blanket to see whether the subject would notice that it was still there but was simply veiled or respond as if it had vanished. According to Piaget’s findings, babies as young as eight months old could mentally construct an image of the item and were aware that it was being concealed.

Stranger anxiety, a kind of tension that people, mainly newborns, suffer while in the company of people they consider strangers, is another aspect of the sensorimotor stage. This is a result of their emotional and intellectual growth toward their parents or other major caregivers. They naturally become afraid of people they do not know, but this dread normally vanishes on its own.

The second stage I’ll talk about is called Preoperational, and it typically lasts from two to six years old. Typically, at this point, the person starts to communicate by using words and visuals, but their ability to reason logically and critically is still lacking. The kid is unable to distinguish between others and himself at this time, which coincides with the induvial’s beginning to become more egocentric. This is characterized by Piaget as the youngster believing that their feelings, perceptions, and sounds are identical to those of others around them. Language development is also intended to happen at this period. The following stage, known as Concrete Operational, occurs between the ages of seven and eleven and is when the child starts to reason rationally about concrete occurrences, such as mathematical transformations, discussions, and principles. They also start to understand tangible analogies and conduct mathematical operations at this time.

The third stage, known as formal operational, starts when a child reaches the age of twelve and lasts until they reach adulthood. In this stage, abstract reasoning—the capacity to absorb complex thoughts and concepts, including those grounded in language—takes center stage. This may be shown by possible moral reasoning and abstract logic.

However, a lot of people hold the view that psychology, particularly developmental psychology, is still in the midst of the cognitive revolution. It focuses on information processing and looks for common brain processes and is motivated by the “computer metaphor” This has now resulted in a progressive decrease and/or disregard of concepts and paradigms that are not at the core of the cognitive “revolution,” as some may put it. This comprises the processing of emotions and motivations, the processing of the body (which is now resurfacing under embodiment), individual variations, and many other things.

For instance, very few people understand the fundamental ideas of cognitive psychology, such as attention, memory, perception, action control, and so on. In a normal book on individual differences, you can discover anything; in such texts, it almost seems as if individual distinctions in those cognitive processes vanish. They do, however, sometimes appear and are crucial in the subsequent diagnosis of cognitive and developmental problems.

Furthermore, since they are searching for universal causes, cognitive psychologists are not particularly fascinated or concerned by individual variances in their conceptions. In his book, “Mechanisms in Cognitive Psychology: What are the Operations,” William Bechtel explores this.

Individual variations The lack of interest in cognitive ideas among psychologists may be attributed to historical factors. Personally, I think that many psychologists who identify as researchers in cognitive development only really care about individual variations and instead explore for general cognitive principles underpinning growth.

According to developmental psychology, it also provides answers to the question “why am I the way I am,” fosters understanding of oneself and others, and instills self-awareness that may help one improve as a person.

Developmental psychology is seen as being a crucial and essential aspect of a child’s existence since it is believed that children automatically adopt the parenting style of their parents until they develop self-awareness and decide to be different from them. However, some kids never do.

However, some researchers do think that normative distinctions between people are brought about by developmental psychology. These distinctions are between “good” and “bad,” not between “normal” and “abnormal.”