6.2 Infancy and Childhood: Exploring and Learning

Question 1

habituation

Answer 1

• the decreased responsiveness toward a stimulus after it has been presented numerous times in succession

Question 2

schemas

Answer 2

• patterns of knowledge in long-term memory—that help them remember, organize, and respond to information

Question 3

assimilation

Answer 3

• use already developed schemas to understand new information

Question 4

accomodation

Answer 4

• learning new information, and thus changing the schema

Question 5

sensorimotor stage

Answer 5

• the cognitive stage that begins at birth and lasts until around the age of 2. It is defined by the direct physical interactions that babies have with the objects around them

Question 6

object permanence

Answer 6

• the child’s ability to know that an object exists even when the object cannot be perceived

Question 7

preoperational stage

Answer 7

• children begin to use language and to think more abstractly about objects, but their understanding is more intuitive and without much ability to deduce or reason

Question 8

egocentric

Answer 8

• unable to readily see and understand other people‘s viewpoints

Question 9

theory of mind

Answer 9

• the ability to take another person’s viewpoint

Question 10

concrete operational stage

Answer 10

• marked by more frequent and more accurate use of transitions, operations, and abstract concepts, including those of time, space, and numbers

Question 11

conservation

Answer 11

• the understanding that changes in the form of an object do not necessarily mean changes in the quantity of the object

Question 12

formal operational stage

Answer 12

• marked by the ability to think in abstract terms and to use scientific and philosophical lines of thought

Question 13

self-concept

Answer 13

• a knowledge representation or schema that contains knowledge about us, including our beliefs about our personality traits, physical characteristics, abilities, values, goals, and roles, as well as the knowledge that we exist as individuals

Question 14

competence and autonmy

Answer 14

• the recognition of one‘s own abilities relative to other children

Question 15

attachment

Answer 15

• The emotional bonds that we develop with those with whom we feel closest, and particularly the bonds that an infant develops with the mother or primary caregiver

Question 16

strange situation

Answer 16

• conducted in a context that is unfamiliar to the child and therefore likely to heighten the child’s need for his or her parent

Question 17

temperament

Answer 17

• the innate personality characteristics of the infant

Question 18

longitudinal research designs

Answer 18

• research designs in which individuals in the sample are followed and contacted over an extended period of time, often over multiple developmental stages

Question 19

cross-sectional research

Answer 19

• age comparisons are made between samples of different people at different ages at one time

Question 20

cohort effects

Answer 20

• the possibility that differences in cognition or behavior at two points in time may be caused by differences that are unrelated to the changes in age. The differences might instead be due to environmental factors that affect an entire age group