Chapter 4 - The Cognitive and Intellectual Changes of Adolescence Flashcards
Prefrontal Cortex
The prefrontal cortex is the region of the cortex located behind the forehead that is involved in abstract thought.
Myelination
Myelination is the formation of a fatty sheath surrounding a nerve fiber (axon), which increases speed of neural conduction.
Object Permanence
Object permanence is Piaget’s term for the infant’s recognition that objects exist even when they cannot be seen.
Schemes
Schemes is Piaget’s term for the precursors of concepts; they are ways of representing experience through one’s actions.
Conservation
Conservation is the realization that something remains the same despite changes in its appearance.
Differentiation
Differentiation is a process by which one distinguishes or perceives differences not previously recognized.
Psychometric Approach
The psychometric approach is an approach that focuses on the measurement of individual differences in abilities contributing to intelligence.
Intelligence
Intelligence is the ability to profit from experience and adapt to one’s surroundings; measured by intelligence tests.
WAIS-R
The Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale is an intelligence scale for adults that is individually administered.
Cohort Differences
Cohort differences are experiential differences between groups of people born at different periods in time; these differences can be confounded with age changes.
Cross-Sectional Research
Cross-sectional research is a research design in which several age cohorts are compared at a single time of measurement.
Sequential Designs
Sequential design is a research design in which several age cohort groups are compared at several times of measurement; essentially, a number of longitudinal studies, each starting with a different age group.
Culture-Fair Test
A culture-fair test is a measure of intelligence that minimizes cultural bias by using materials or requiring skills not likely to be more familiar to one segment of the population than to another.
Information Processing
Information processing is an approach to cognition that focuses on the processes by which information is encoded, retrieved, and utilized.
Automaticity
Automaticity is the ability to perform highly practiced cognitive operations without conscious attention.
Speed of Processing
Speed of processing is the rate at which a cognitive operation (e.g., encoding, decoding, retrieval) or a combination of these can be performed.
Working Memory
Working memory is brief memory that holds information for less than a minute while further processing occurs.
Encoding
Encoding is the process by which information is transferred from one form to another in memory.
Strategies
Strategies are activities that organize cognition so as to improve performance, such as repeating a phone number or categorizing a list of things to be remembered.
Metacognition
Metacognition is an awareness of one’s thinking, cognitive abilities, and style.
Metacomponents
Metacomponents are higher-order cognitive functions that select and monitor lower-order cognitive functions, for example, metacomponents are employed to determine which performance components are required to perform a task.
Performance Components
Performance components are cognitive mechanisms, selected by metacomponents, that operate directly on the information to be processed.
Knowledge-Acquistion Components
Knowledge-acquisition components are cognitive mechanisms - e.g., perception, memory retrieval - that, under the direction of metacomponents, acquire new information as needed.
Multiple Intelligences
Multiple intelligences is the view that intelligence is comprised of a number of different capacities each relevant to a different domain - e.g., music, linguistics, mathematics, interpersonal relations. One’s ability in each domain is not necessarily highly correlated with ability in others.
Practical Intelligence
Practical intelligence is distinguished from “academic intelligence” or intelligence measured by IQ tests. It requires the individual, rather than a teacher or an examiner, to define the problem to be solved and decide what constitutes a solution.
Pseudostupidity
Pseudostupidity is the inability to see the obvious by making a simple task more complicated than it is.
Imaginary Audience
The imaginary audience is the experience of being the focus of attention that emerges with adolescents’ ability to think about thinking in others and their confusion of the concerns of others with their own preoccupation with themselves.
Personal Fable
The personal fable is the feeling of being special; it is thought to derive from the imaginary audience.
Social Understanding
Social understanding is the ability to assume another’s perspective and coordinate this with one’s own.
Inductive Reasoning
Inductive reasoning is reasoning from the particular to the general.
Deductive Reasoning
Deductive reasoning is reasoning from the general to the particular.
