Developmental Review最新文献

The Nurture Assumption by Judith Rich Harris was a revolutionary book that called into question the family socialization literature and the conventional ways in which parenting is typically studied by social scientists. In the 25 years since it was first published, the key arguments set forth in The Nurture Assumption still remain on the margins of most fields of study and not fully integrated into individual research agendas. In this paper, I focus on how Judith Rich Harris has impacted my scholarly thinking and my academic career as a criminologist. In doing so, I discuss the ways in which Judith Rich Harris’ views can guide criminological thinking and the reasons why the field of criminology has been and continues to be resistant to her and The Nurture Assumption.

If children are socialized less by their parents than their peer group, psychology may fruitfully adapt social psychology’s exploration of group processes for understanding how children develop. Concerns with self-presentation, reputation, and learning subtle norms may emerge earlier and more strongly than would be the case if children were primarily interacting with their parents. The peer group culture of childhood may be a self-perpetuating culture that is somewhat independent of and possibly in opposition to the adult culture and parents’ attempts to prepare children for adulthood. Modern trends such as increasing age segregation and play-dates with adult supervision may hamper the transmission of children’s and adolescents’ peer culture.

Increased lifespan in the population was historically driven by reductions in infant mortality but is now driven by reduced mortality in older adults. Research is beginning to show reduced incidence of many age-related diseases, but there have been some mixed trends observed in assessment of cognitive ability in healthy ageing research. Across three studies, time-based trends in older adults’ cognition were assessed. In a meta-analysis of literature largely studying different waves of longitudinal data, Study 1 showed cognitive improvement in later-recruited waves of older adults compared to earlier-recruited waves. In a second meta-analysis of studies comparing young and older adults’ cognition, Study 2 showed that age-related cognitive deficits were becoming smaller over time. Finally, in an analysis of historic data from a single laboratory, Study 3 confirmed the findings of Study 2 and demonstrated that time-based reductions in age-related cognitive deficits were largely driven by improvement in cognition over time in older groups, whilst young adults’ cognition remained relatively flat across time. It is argued that later tested groups of older adults are benefiting from environmental advantages to cognition (e.g., education, healthcare, nutrition) that might previously have mainly applied to young adult groups in research. These results have implications for cognitive ageing research which will likely yield smaller age differences than historic work. It is also argued that definitions of cognitive impairment related to dementia diagnosis may need to be periodically revised.

The approximate number system (ANS) is a hypothesized mechanism responsible for the representation and processing of numerical information in an imprecise fashion. According to the predominant theory, the ANS is essential in solving simple numerical tasks such as comparing which of two quantities is numerically larger, and some research has indicated that individual differences in its acuity influence higher-level mathematical performance. Because of this far-reaching role of the ANS, it is essential to assess its acuity with measures that are reliable, and valid. The present work reviews and synthesizes many of the methodological problems that are relevant for measuring ANS acuity in young children. We discuss issues related to task comprehension, the role of non-numerical perceptual properties of the stimuli, the role of inhibition, and the appropriateness and reliability of the ANS acuity indices. Recommendations and open questions are summarized.

Cumulative science hinges on consolidating empirical evidence. However, both narrative reviews and meta-analyses often restrict integration by using construct labels in searches, which vary greatly across traditions and eras in psychology. A complementary approach is the mapping review, more common in other disciplines, which focuses on operational definitions and experimental design. Here, we pioneered using this approach in experimental psychology, applying it to memory development. We classified 506 publications in the last 5 decades using 16 design features and identified methodologically convergent work that originated from different theoretical frameworks. New insights emerge from this approach. First, characterizing the relative data density along each dimension of experimental design identifies where future research is most necessary. Second, we linked relevant evidence previously separated by nonoverlapping construct labels. Third, we illustrated the potential application of this technique as a precursor to subsequent research syntheses with an analysis of the development of pattern separation (also called mnemonic discrimination). To facilitate the process of literature integration and identification of methodological overlap, we have created a freely available interactive web application using the current database.

Judith Harris’ theory of child socialization spans developmental periods and has interdisciplinary implications. Though broad and adaptable, her theory has not been readily adopted by criminologists, and its discussion is often limited to its biosocial implications. The purpose of this essay is to discuss how Harris’ theory can help to explain the relationship between exposure to adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and negative outcomes in childhood and adolescence. Using Harris’ framework, I discuss how ACEs may reflect adversity in the home and community environment, how this exposure to adversity may impact child behavioral development and lead to school-based consequences, and how these consequences may ultimately shape child outcomes. I conclude by discussing the policy implications of Harris’ work, as well as directions for future research testing and/or informed by Harris’ arguments.

Because child-directed speech (CDS) is ubiquitous in some cultures and because positive associations between certain features of the language input and certain learning outcomes have been attested it has often been claimed that the function of CDS is to aid children’s language development in general. We argue that for this claim to be generalisable, superior learning from CDS compared to non-CDS, such as adult-directed speech (ADS), must be demonstrated across multiple input domains and learning outcomes. To determine the availability of such evidence we performed a study space analysis of the research literature on CDS. A total of 942 relevant papers were coded with respect to (i) CDS features under consideration, (ii) learning outcomes and (iii) whether a comparison between CDS and ADS was reported. The results show that only 16.2% of peer-reviewed studies in this field compared learning outcomes between CDS and ADS, almost half of which focussed on the ability to discriminate between the two registers. Crucially, we found only 20 studies comparing learning outcomes between CDS and ADS for morphosyntactic and lexico-semantic features and none for pragmatic and extra-linguistic features. Although these 20 studies provided preliminary evidence for a facilitative effect of some specific morphosyntactic and lexico-semantic features, overall CDS-ADS comparison studies are very unevenly distributed across the space of CDS features and outcome measures. The disproportional emphasis on prosodic, phonetic, and phonological input features, and register discrimination as the outcome invites caution with respect to the generalisability of the claim that CDS facilitates language development across the breadth of input domains and learning outcomes. Future research ought to resolve the discrepancy between sweeping claims about the function of CDS as facilitating language development on the one hand and the narrow evidence base for such a claim on the other by conducting CDS-ADS comparisons across a wider range of input features and outcome measures.

The provocative hypotheses put forth in Harris (1998) spawned a great deal of criticism within the field of child development but far less in the field of behavior genetics, which generally found her arguments quite persuasive. I considered whether 21st century behavioral genetic literature and understandings continued to support her hypotheses, and generally concluded that they did not, at least in regards to child and adolescent psychopathology. Early interpretations of behavioral genetic findings were more limited in scope than they realized at the time, applied only to WEIRD populations, and may have overlooked key etiologic information contained in the mean. What’s more, even when restricting to standard behavioral genetic designs and interpretations in WEIRD data, there is good evidence that parenting behaviors do “causally” shape adolescent mental health outcomes to some degree, and relatively little evidence that peers socialize adolescents via non-shared environmental pathways. Put another way, although group socialization theory remains interesting and worthy of additional study, other key elements of Harris (1998) may have been overstated or have not stood the test of time.

The current article outlines a framework for a developmental hierarchy and the underlying interactions between variant lower-level elements that converge toward invariant higher-level attractors as defined by dynamical systems theory. More specifically, it explores human development in the context of environmental demands by highlighting the bidirectional influence between visual information and cognitive structures integrating these signals. Furthermore, it investigates the organizational structure of a developmental hierarchy and the integration of environmental information at specific stages by employing William Powers's Perceptual Control Theory (PCT) levels as the conceptual foundation. PCT asserts that the nervous system controls increasingly complex aspects of the environment by integrating its patterns into a control system hierarchy through negative feedback mechanisms. In this context, the article follows the progression of objective visual information from light intensity signals in the retina, leading to facial perceptions in the fusiform face area. It further tracks objective perceptual signals transforming into subjective social contingencies, such as parent–child relationships and group affiliation, before reaching areas of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex responsible for processing information about cultural norms at the highest cognitive stages. Thus, by integrating Powers's PCT levels of control into a developmental model, this article establishes a theoretical framework for systematically examining the organism-environment interactions that drive development through variant and invariant control mechanisms at each stage of the developmental hierarchy.

Human perceptual development evolves in a stereotyped fashion, with initially limited perceptual capabilities maturing over the months or years following the commencement of sensory experience into robust proficiencies. This review focuses on the functional significance of these developmental progressions. Specifically, we review findings from studies of children who have experienced alterations of early development, as well as results from corresponding computational models, which have recently provided compelling evidence that specific attributes of early sensory experience are likely to be important prerequisites for later developing skills in several perceptual domains such as vision and audition. Notably, the limitations of early sensory experience have therein emerged as scaffolds, rather than hurdles, being causally responsible for the acquisition of later perceptual proficiencies, while dispensing with these limitations has the perhaps counter-intuitive consequence of compromising later development. These results have implications for understanding why normal trajectories of perceptual development are sequenced in the way that they are, help account for the perceptual deficits observed in individuals with atypical histories of sensory development, and serve as guidelines for the creation of more robust and effective training procedures for computational learning systems.