Chapter 5 Flashcards
Sensorimotor Stage
Spans the first two years of life. Piaget believed that infants and toddlers “think’” with their eyes, ears, hands, and other sensorimotor equipment. They cannot yet carry out many activities inside their heads.
Schemes
Specific psychological structures - organized ways of making sense of experience (Piaget)
Adaptation
Involves building schemes through direct interaction with the environment (Piaget)
Assimilation
During which we use our current schemes to interpret the external world (Piaget).
Accommodation
We create new schemes or adjust old ones after noticing that our current ways of thinking do not capture the environment completely (Piaget)
Organization
A process that occurs internally, apart from direct contact with the environment. Once children form new schemes, they rearrange them, linking them with other schemes to create a strongly interconnected cognitive system (Piaget)
Piaget’s Sensorimotor Stage
- ) Reflextive Schemes (birth-1m)
- ) Primary Circular Reactions (1-4m)
- ) Secondary Circular Reactions (4-8m)
- ) Coordination of Secondary Circular Reactions (8-12m)
- ) Tertiary Circular Reactions (12-18m)
- ) Mental Representation (18m-2y)
Circular Reaction
Provides a special means of adapting their first schemes. It involves stumbling onto a new experience caused by the baby’s own motor activity. The reaction is “circular” because, as the infant tries to repeat the event again and again, a sensorimotor response that first occurred by chance strengthens into a new scheme (Piaget)
Intentional (Goal-Directed) Behavior
Coordinating schemes deliberately to solve simple problems.
Substage 4
Object Permanence
The understanding that objects continue to exists when out of sight Substage 4
Mental Representations
Internal Depictions of information that the mind can manipulate
Substage 6
Deferred Imitation
The ability to remember and copy the behavior of models who are not present.
Make-Believe Play
In which children act out everyday and imaginary activities
Violation-of-Expectation Method
The may habituate babies to a physical even (expose them to the event until their looking declines) to familiarize them with a situation in which their knowledge will be tested. Or they may simply show babies an expected event (one that is consistent with reality) and an unexpected event (a variation of the first event that violates reality). Heightened attention to the unexpected even suggests that the infant is “surprised” by a deviation from physical reality and, therefore, is aware of that aspect of the physical world.
Displaced Reference
The realization that words can be used to cue mental images of things not physically present that emerges around the first birthday.
Video Deficit Effect
Poorer performance after viewing a video than a live demonstration
Core Knowledge Perspective
Babies are born with a set of innate knowledge systems, or core domains of thought. Each of these prewired understanding permits a ready grasp of new, related information and therefore supports early, rapid development.
Sensory Register
Information center where sights and sounds are represented directly and store briefly.
Short-Term Memory Store
In the second part of the mind, we retain attended-to information briefly so we can actively “work on” it to reach our goals.
Working Memory
The number of items that can be briefly held in mind while also engaging in some effort to monitor or manipulate those items.
Central Executive
To manage the cognitive system’s activities, directing the flow of information, implementing the basic procedures just mentioned and also engaging in more sophisticated activities that enable complex, flexible thinking. For example, the central executive coordinates incoming information with information already in the system, and it selects, applies, and monitors strategies that facilitate memory storage, comprehension, reasoning, and problem solving.
Automatic Processes
Are so well-learned that they require no space in working memory and, therefore, permit us to focus on other information while performing them.
Long-Term Memory
Our permanent knowledge base
Executive Function
The diverse cognitive operations and strategies that enable us to achieve our goals in cognitively challenging situations.
Recognition
Noticing when a stimulus is identical or similar to one previously experienced
Recall
Is more challenging because it involves remembering something not present.
Infantile Amnesia
That most of us can retrieve few, if any, events that happened to us before age 2-3.
Autobiographical Memory
We can recall many personally meaningful one-time events from both the recent and the distant past: the day a sibling was born or a move to a new house.
Zone of Proximal (Potential) Development
Refers to a range of tasks that the child cannot yet handle alone but can do with the help of the more skilled partners.
Intelligence Quotient (IQ)
Which Indicates the extent to which the raw score (number of items passed) deviates form the typical performance of same-age individuals.
Standardization
Giving the test to a large, representative sample and using the results as the standard for interpreting scores.
Normal Distribution
In which most scores cluster around the mean, or average, with progressively fewer falling toward the extremes. This bell-shaped distribution results whenever researchers measure individual differences in larges samples.
Developmental Quotients (DQs)
Most infant test scores do not tap the same dimensions of intelligence assessed in older children, they usually are conservatively labeled.
Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment (HOME)
A checklist for gathering information about the quality of children’s home lives through observation and parental interview.
Developmentally Appropriate Practice
These standards, devised by the U.S. National Association for the Education of Young Children, specify program characteristics that serve young children’s developmental and individual needs, based on both current research and consensus research and consensus among experts.
Language Acquisition Device (LAD)
An innate system that contains a universal grammar, or set of rules common to all languages. It enables children, no matter which language they hear, to understand and speak in a rule-oriented fashion as soon as they pick up enough words.
Joint Attention
When the child attends to the same object or event as the caregiver
Underextenstion
Then young children first learn words, they sometimes apply them too narrowly, an error
Overextension
Applying a word to a wider collection of objects and events than is appropriate.
Telegraphic Speech
Two-word utterances “mommy show” omitting smaller, less important words.
Referential Style
Vocabularies consisted mainly of words that refer to objects
Expressive Style
Produce many more social formulas and pronouns than referential style
Infant-Directed Speech (IDS)
A form of communication made up of short sentences with high-pitched, exaggerated expression, clear pronunciation, distinct pauses between speech segments, clear gestures to support verbal meaning, and repetition of new words in a variety of contexts.
