Ch. 9 The growth of knowledge Flashcards
Animism
According to Piaget, the tendency of young children to attribute psychological
motivations to nonliving things.
Basic level of categorization
A level of categorization at which category members maximally contrast with members of other categories while also having high similarity among members of the same categories.
Centration
A mental operation, according to Piaget, that emerges in the preoperational
period and that causes the child to focus on one dimension (for example, height) while
ignoring relevant other dimensions (for example, width).
Classification
In Piaget’s theory, the ability to think about groups of things as forming classes defined by a single property or relation.
Cognitive map
A mental representation of the spatial layout, used to infer distance, direction, and a way of navigating the environment.
Compensation
A mental operation, according to Piaget, that emerges in the concrete operational period and that enables the child to understand how a change in one dimension, such as height, might be compensated for by another change, such as in width, with a third dimension, such as quantity, remaining invariant.
Concrete operational period
A stage of cognitive development occurring after the preoperational period and before the formal operational period, roughly from 7 to 12 years. During this stage, children start to use mental operators such as identity and reversibility to more flexibly understand the physical world and the ways in which it can change.
Conservation task
Any of the tasks designed by Piaget in which children are asked to judge whether certain physical properties of an object, such as its size, or aspects of an array, such as its number, remain unchanged when the object or array is transformed along different dimensions.
Core domain
A domain of knowledge and thought that is thought to have a privileged role in development, emerging early in infancy and maintaining a strong influence throughout much of development.
Domain general
Referring to a learning mechanism or representational format that applies
across all domains of cognition.
Domain specific
Referring to a learning mechanism or representational format that applies to a specific domain of cognition.
Essentialism
A tendency to assume that the surface properties of entities are caused by deeper essences.
Formal operational period
A stage of cognitive development occurring after the concrete
stage, at roughly 12 years old but with considerable variability. In this stage, children start to
engage in deductive and logical reasoning about situations and processes and are able to
consider logical alternatives and their potential consequences.
Geometric information
The information about an environment’s overall shape (its contour) that helps to locate oneself in space.
Identity
A mental operation, according to Piaget, that emerges in the concrete operational period and that enables the child to realize that a single dimension or aspect remains the same despite dramatic changes in other dimensions.
