The sociohistoric tradition has its origin in the social and culture, rather than the structure of subject or objective world. But is it better to treat it as a third tradition apart from expiricist and rationalist position, or a different hierarchy, cross-cultural view of expiricists (or rationalist)?
It is common to not include infants due to fussiness in experiments -- but I wonder whether by not including these infants a different population is being measured (e.g. only infants with better/longer attention spans, infants who are more securely attached, etc). Infant fussiness is natural, but I wonder, when an infant becomes fussy, is it common to make an attempt to have them tested at a later time? Pg. 20 speaks to this breifly but does not answer this specific question.
The Field chapter mentions habituation as well as operant and classical conditioning under learning for infants. Those usually refer to short term learning and memory effects. I was wondering if infants can learn a simple task at time 'x' and then perform that same task after a certain period of time 'y'. An infant could learn for example that by moving his/her leg (or legs) can make a toy hovering on top of its crib move in a fashion that the infant enjoys. Then the toy could be removed and introduced after a certain period of time (after a few days) and see if the baby still remembers how to go about making the toy move or if the learning period in the future case differs from the initial case.
The Field chapter mentions that a special problem in studying infants is their limited behavioral repertoire. Could neuroimaging techniques (EEG, fMRI, etc.) expand our understanding of infant cognition by identifying distinct processes that do not necessarily lead to different behaviors? How feasible is neuroimaging research in infants given the special methodological problems?
How do you choose what age-range to study? Do we just look at previous literature? Should age groups be continuous (i.e., 12-months, 13-months, 14-months) or can it be discontinuous (i.e., 12, 14, 16)?
On p. 19, Field refers to the possible change over time in the meaningfulness of a stimulus type. This creates a methodological trade-off: would you be better off (in a longitudinal or comparative study) presenting the same stimulus to multiple age groups, knowing that the perceptual information etc. is all the same, or changing the stimulus to be sure to evoke the same response (therefore theoretically measuring the same construct) across groups?
I was surprised that the nature vs. nurture debate was not featured more prominently (or perhaps overtly) in either of the readings. In addition to knowing what skills emerge at different ages, I would be interested in acquiring a better understanding of the mechanisms underlying the development of these skills. Clearly (to me at least), certain responses which are being tested (e.g., the Babkin reflex) are the result of pre-programmed development. However, the degree to which the acquisition of other abilities (e.g., occlusion prediction) relies upon domain specific pre-programming or simple rules (ala PDP perhaps) supported by rich statistical structure and reinforcement schemes is unclear.
Other than simply ignoring these issues, how do developmental psychologists tackle these problems? Do they depend on the time at which children are tested - do findings made using neonate populations imply a "nature" explanation?
Different perceptual abilities do not develop at the same speed such as olfactory sense matures faster than visual perception. So I was wondering the perceptual system that infants rely on would change over the time course. For instance, if two integrated sensory stimuli are presented, would there be any difference to which cue infants attend. If it is, should the types of stimuli be considered depending on the age of infants?
The Field reading led me to think about individual differences in infants. Different babies may be on different developmental tracks. Some babies may develop more quickly than others. Also, certain sets of babies may have a different pattern of development which may result later in life in learning disordersor other differences. How are individual differences addressed when looking at infant data? For example, are family histories recorded to try to identify babies who may develop a learning disorder?
I agree with Jingyuan that the Sociohistoric tradition seems more like a reminder to consider the impact of sociohistorical constraints on development trajectory, rather than a distinct epistemological position. Maybe this is because the Case chapter uses only examples pertaining to delay of developmental transitions as they relate among groups of individuals. Are there other examples of how the Sociohistoric viewpoint distinguishes itself from the other views, aside from temporal arguments?
Relatedly, if we know that children develop at different rates depending on sociohistoric factors, is it appropriate to split our participant groups by age as the independent variable? Wouldn't it be better to group individuals by their developmental profile? Is this even quantifiable?
