Chapter 10: Emotional, Cognitive & Psychological Development Across The Lifespan Flashcards
What is Piaget’s theory?
A theory by the Swiss psychologist where he believed that cognitive development depends upon the interaction of the brain’s biological maturation with personal experience.
What are Piaget’s 4 stages of cognitive development? Explain them.
Sensorimotor (birth-2)
Infants learn about their world through their senses (hearing, seeing) and by actions (motor) such as grasping or pulling.
Preoperational (2-7)
Children continue to develop, and they use symbols, images and language to represent their world.
Concrete operational (7-12) Children can perform basic mental problems that involve physical objects.
Formal operational (12+) Children are able to think logically and methodically about physical and abstract problems.
What is attachment?
Emotional development allows attachment to occur within infants: that is, a strong, close, and emotional bond that develops between an infant and their caregiver and lasts for many years.
Attachment can be observed when you see children crying as their mothers leave them, or adults making sad farewells.
What is privation?
Refers to attachment never occurs- that is, if a child never forms a close relationship with anyone, possibly causing permanent emotional damage.
What is Harry Harlow’s theory attachment?
Harlow demonstrated that Freud’s idea that infants became attached to people who could provide them with oral satisfaction and nourishment was not the case.
He focused on the attachment in rhesus monkeys. He separated infant monkeys from their mothers and discovered that the monkeys grew up healthy, but were unable to get along with other monkeys.
Harlow found that when he placed monkeys in individual cages that contained a blanket, the monkeys became attached to the blanket and got upset if it was taken away. These behaviours indicated that attachment may be formed by means other than nourishment.
What is the strange situation procedure?
Part of Mary Ainsworth’s theory of attachment, she and her colleagues created a laboratory testing technique known as the strange situation.
This allowed her to measure infant attachment by having infants experience a sequence of events, including separations and reunions with their mothers, and introductions to an adult stranger.
When the infant becomes distressed after the stranger picks it up when it’s mother is not in the room, a secure attachment is illustrated.
What are schemata?
Mental structures that organise past experiences and provide an understanding of future experiences.
What is assimilation?
The process where new experiences are combines with existing schemata.
Eg. A child seeing a zebra for the first time and calling it a horse. The child assimilates this information into their schema for a horse.
What is accommodation?
When new experiences cause schemata to change or modify.
Eg. If a child discovers a truck is bigger than a car, then these thoughts cause schemata to change and become more complex.
What test could be attempted to figure out of a child was in their developmental stage or not.
Step 1: Place two sets of equal numbers of blocks in two parallel rows so they are the same length.
Ask the child which row has more objects.
Step 2: Remove one row of objects and place them in a tight circle or group as closely as possible to one another.
Again, ask the child which set of objects has more objects.
If the child says there is more blocks after step 2 than step 1 then they are preoperational, however if they say there are still the same number of blocks, they are advanced into a concrete operational phase.
