Developmental Psychology
Field tracing psychological change across the entire lifespan, from infant cognition to aging.
Specifications & Metrics
- focus
- How perception, cognition, emotion, and social behavior change with age
- pioneer
- Jean Piaget (stage theory of cognitive development)
- method
- Longitudinal and cross-sectional designs, habituation and looking-time paradigms in infants
Core Principles & Analysis
- Piaget's stage theory framed development as qualitative change, driving decades of infant and child research.
- Modern work covers the whole lifespan, including adolescence, adulthood, and aging, not only childhood.
- Infant-looking paradigms let researchers probe preverbal cognition decades before children can report anything.
Sources