Week+1

All activities and content, including timing, will be depicted on this page for all classes in week 1. What content that needs to be covered in the first week for psychology unit 1 - Development of individual behaviour - will be described here.

Lesson 1 (100mins) - Tuesday 28 April @ 10.50 am
Meet and Greet the class (10mins):

In order of numbers on the bottom of plates, explain to students that as a teacher in training, ‘I would like to know what you think is a good teacher’, so I can get a good idea of what I should be like. Write ideas about good teaching up on the board, to the side to copy down later.
 * The entre'>
 * Greet the students; introduce self, write name on board and occupation.
 * The plates from the entre will be numbered. In order of sequence, ask students feedback, specifically:


 * We will be studying the Development of Individual Behaviour for the time that I am with you.

- get students to write their names at the top and indicate the completion date.
 * Hand around yellow worksheets; unit outline and '//LA6: Development of Individual Behaviour SAQs',// and take a look (2min).

Begin Lesson Content

- An //electrocardiogram// aka ECG, which is used to detect heart rate. - An //electroencephalograph// aka EEG, which can be used to detect the brain's electrical activity and brainwave patterns. - //Position emission tomography// (PET), and //functional magnetic resonance imaging// (fMRI) detect and record areas of high and low brain activity. - An //electro-oculargram// aka EOG, is used to track eye movement patterns. - sucking activity can also be measured by various 'electronic dummies' developed by psychologists.
 * **Developmental Psychology** is the branch of psychology which specialises in the study of the changes that occure in humans from conception to death.
 * **Perception** is defined as the process of organising and interpreting sensory information in a meaningful way.
 * Young infants are very difficult research participants and studying their perceptual skills or abilities provides a unique challenge for researches.
 * One problem is that infants are asleep most of the time. Neonates (infants up to two weeks of age) sleep for about 16 hours each day. When they're not sleeping they are either drowsy, crying, awake and active or awake and inactive. It is only in this last state, which occures infrequently for only a few minutes that researches can assess an infants abilities.
 * Infants can't talk! this meens that an infant still can not //tell// the researcher what sensory information they can detect, or how they percieve or interpret this information.
 * Psychologists can use specialised equipment to accurately measure infants' physiological responses, these include;

Lesson 2 (60mins) - Wednesday 29 April @ 2.35 pm

 * Use end points from last lesson to introduce this lesson; (10mins) **

Remind students of the instruments used to measure perception: * Measurements of basic responses in studies of infant perception provide the basis for making inferences (drawing conclusions from evidence) about the presence of certain perceptual abilities. * The most common method of studying perceptual abilities of young infants, particularly for the more dominant senses of vision and hearing, takes advantage of the infant's preference for looking at new rather than familiar stimuli (preferential looking) and the infant's tendency to pay less and less attention when it is used to a stimulus (habituation).

- You might for instance, conclude that an infant can hear sounds if it is startled by the sound of a motorbike. Or that it likes elephants if it responds positively to the visual cue of an elephant. (give example) Most of the dominant studies of infants take advantage of an infant’s preference for looking at a new stimulus, which is called preferential looking, compared to stimulus that they are used to, habituation. Old teddy – new teddy.
 * In simpler terms;** - researchers’ are able to draw conclusions from basic responses shown by infants; for example; infants can suck, move their eyes, heads, legs and arms... Infants have some degree of self control and they will do certain things in response to certain cues.

* The **orienting response** is the tendency to respond to a new or unusual //stimulus// in the environment by directing one's attention towards the stimulus. It is called the **orienting response** because the sense organs are 'oriented', or positioned towards the source of the visual or auditory //stimulus//. - Point out to students how they have 'oriented' there attention in my direction (maybe standing in the corner of the room). * The orienting response is present at birth and has been described by some psychologists as a reflexive response because it seems to occur automatically when the infant's attention is disrupted or attracted by a new stimulus. * In studies of visual percepual abilities, this preference for paying attention to a new stimulus ahead of a familiar stimulus is called **preferential looking**. It is called preferential looking because the infant appears to prefer looking at one stimulus rather than another stimulus. Simple? Make a serious then funny face and ask them which one they prefer looking at. * There are various quite subtle physiological changes associated with human orienting and preferential looking responses. - These include an increase in the size of the pupils in the eyes. - A slight decrease in the heart rate (but an increase if the stimulus is intense or alarming). - Brainwave changes and increased activity in specific parts of the brain involved in visual perception. (put up on board)
 * Preferential looking**

These can be measured using the instruments we talked about earlier. * It is believed that the orienting response and preferential looking are a related pare of responses that serve the purpose of alerting us to new visual stimuli, directing our attention to them, then maintaining our attention on them long enough to 'take in' and mentally process the information.

Has anyone heard of the flight or fight response? I want you to close your eyes now, and picture yourself sitting in Rosalind park eating your lunch. It’s nice and sunny. The sun feels warm on your face and you close your eyes. You open them again and there is a black blob in the corner of your vision. You turn for a better look and right next to you it’s a huge spider hanging from a branch trying to get you.

As you can see, new visual stimuli can be quite hazardous at times. The orienting response and preferential looking responses help us to notice and identify according to past knowledge, objects that enter our visual field. * The orienting response and preferential looking are considered to play a crucial role in visual perception. How long an infant engages in preferential looking towards a particular stimulus usually depends on the complexity (eg. a circle versus a star shape), novelty (eg. familiar versus unusual) and significance (eg. alarming versus not alarming) of the stimulus.

Questions: Open books to page 161; do review questions 2. a and b, 3. a, b and c (10mins)
 * Habituation - dishabituation**


 * When a stimulus that triggers a preferential looking response is repeatedly (or continuously) presented, less and less attention is paid to the stimulus and the response gradually fades (as measured by the time spent looking at the stimulus). This is called habituation.
 * **Habituation** is the tendency to get used to and therefore ignore a stimulus when it is experienced repeatedly. If a picture, sound or some other kind of stimulus is presented over and over again, the infant seems to eventually lose interest and look away.
 * If a different stimulus is presented after habituation has occured and the infant regains interest and increases its looking time in response to the new stimulus, then dishabituation is said to have occured.
 * **Dishabituation** is an infant's renewed interest in a new stimulus, following habituation to an old stimulus. Dishabituation suggests that the infant has noticed a difference between the old and new stimulus, as measured by the amount of time spent attending to the new stimulus.
 * Using the habituation-dishabituation technique, researchers can determine, for example, the age at which infants begin to distinguish between different faces, voices, musical notes, speech sounds, colours, geometric shapes and so on.

Read out case studies on pp. 159 - 160 and get class to do questions 4 and 5 on p.161.

Homework for next class will be to finish questions 1 - 5 on page 161, I want to see them finished by the end of the week. Also read pages 162 - 164 please.

Lesson 3 (60mins) - Friday 1 May @ 1.35 pm

 * Start with written on board: Perception - Video: Discovering psychology (30mins)

While video is playing; check and correct student homework; giving a lolly to the students' who have finished.

- The complexities of perception in the human adult. - Perception, due to it's complexity, is not fully developed at birth.
 * Discuss after the video:

'The Retina, Visual Cortex and the Optic nerve are not fully developed until the infant is about 7 months of age'

Have something covering their eyes to simulate what a baby of 1month, 2months, 3months and 7months can percieve visually. - What other perceptual cues might you rely on to percieve your environment if not your vision?
 * short activity, need four volunteers:

It is hard to know for sure just how well infants can percieve their environment. What we do know is that the ability to percieve things visually is not fully developed until around 7 months of age. - Visual acuity; vision for fine details, such as sharpness. Infants see things better that are about 15 - 20 cm away from face. - Visual accomodation; - Coordinating movement of both eyes. infant may see things doubled up from time to time.
 * vision is limited in 3 main ways, these are:

Once your visual abilities are fully developed at 7 months, whats to say that depth perception is inate in humans and not something we have to experience such as a sensation?

The Visual cliff experiment conducted by Gibson and Walk. Research study conducted by Gibson and Walk in the 60's. - they wondered if young infants needed to learn to avoid high places from experience or if they had trouble percieving depth. - they used a large glass topped box like the one shown on page 164.

Next week we will be looking more closely at the Gibson and Walk study and comparing it with another more recent study, researching perception in infancy.

For homework over the weekend, could you please read pp. 162 - 166 and complete the questions on your LA6 handouts up to question...