Chapter 4 The Emergence Of Thought And Language: Cognitive Development In Infancy And Early Childhood Flashcards
Basic principles of cognitive development
Schemes, psychological structures that organize experience.
Assimilation & Accommodation
Assimilation occurs when new experiences are readily incorporated into existing schemes.
Accommodation occurs when schemes are modified based on experience.
Equilibration when disequilibrium occurs, children reorganize their schemes to return to a state of equilibrium.
Period of development & age ranges
Sensorimotor period - infancy (0-2 years)
Preoperational period - preschool and early elementary school years (2-7 years)
Concrete operational period - middle and late elementary school years (7-11 years)
Formal operational period - adolescence and adulthood (11 year and up)
Sensorimotor Thinking
The sensorimotor period
Adapting to and exploring the environment.
Understanding objects
Object permanence understanding that objects exist independently.
Using symbols
Preoperational Thinking
Egocentrism is difficulty in seeing the world from another’s outlook.
Animism they may even credit inanimate objects with life and lifelike properties.
Centration narrowly focused thought that characterizes preoperational youngsters.
Characteristic of preoperational thinking
Egocentrism -child believes that people see the world as he or she does (ex. A child gestures during a telephone conversation, not realizing that the listener cannot see the gestures)
Centration -child focuses on one aspect of a problem or situation but ignores other relevant aspects. (Ex. In conversation of liquid quantity, child pays attention to the height of the liquid in the beaker but ignores the diameter of the breaker.
Appearance as reality -child assumes that an object really is what it appears to be. (Ex. Child believes that a person smiling at another person is really happy even though the other person is being mean)
