Chapter 5: Cognitive Development During The First Three Years Flashcards
What are the Approaches used to study Cognitive Development?
Behaviorist Approach Psychometric Approach Piagetian Approach Information Processing Approach Cognitive Neuroscience Approach Social-Contextual Approach
What is the Behaviorist Approach to studying Cognitive Development?
Studies the mechanics of learning
Concerned with behavioral changes in response to experience
What is the Psychometric Approach to studying Cognitive Development?
They measure quantitative differences in abilities that make up intelligence by using tests that indicate or predict these abilities
What is the Piagetian Approach to studying Cognitive Development?
It looks at changes or stages in the quality of cognitive functioning, It studies how the mind structures its activities and adapts to the environment
What is the Information-Processing Approach to studying Cognitive Development?
It focuses on perception, learning, memory, and problem-solving.
It aims to discover how children process information from the time they encounter it until they use it.
What is the Cognitive Neuroscience Approach to studying Cognitive Development?
It examines the hardware of the central nervous system
It seeks to identify what brain structures are involved in specific aspects of cognition
What is the Social-Contextual Approach to studying Cognitive Development?
It focuses on environmental influences of parents and other caregivers
What are the basic Mechanics of Learning from a Behaviorist’s perspective?
Classical Conditioning
Operant Conditioning
What is Classical Condition?
Learning based on associating a stimulus that does not ordinarily elicit a response with another stimulus that does elicit the response
Learning fades if not reinforced by repeated association
What is Operant Conditioning?
Learning based on reinforcement of punishment
Infant learns to make a certain response to an environmental stimulus in order to produce a particular effect
What is Infantile Amnesia?
It is the inability to remember early events
What do Piaget, Freud, and others say about Infantile Amnesia?
Piaget - The brain is not yet developed enough to store memories
Freud - Early memories are stored but are repressed because they are emotionally troubling
Others - Children can’t store events until they can talk about them
What is the Evolutionary Developmental Perspective?
Abilities develop as they can fulfill useful functions in adapting to the environment
Infancy is seen as a time of great change and retention of specific experiences is unlikely to be useful for long
What is the Psychometric Approach to Developmental and Intelligence Testing?
The goal of psychometric testing is to measure quantitatively the factors that are thought to make up intelligence (comprehension and reasoning) from the results of that measurement, to predict a child’s future performance
What are the characteristics of Intelligent Behavior?
It is goal-oriented and adaptive
It is directed at adjusting to the circumstances and conditions of life
What is intelligence?
It enables people to acquire, remember, and use knowledge, to understand concepts and relationships and to solve everyday problems
What is an Intelligence Quotient (IQ) Test?
It is a test which consists of questions and tasks that are supposed to show how much of the measured abilities a person has, by comparing that person’s performance with norms established by a large group of test takers who were in the standardization sample
What are Developmental Tests?
These are psychometric tests that compare a baby’s performance on a series of tasks with standardized norms for particular ages
What is the Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development?
It is a standardized test of infants’ and toddlers’ mental and motor development.
The scores indicate a child’s strengths, weaknesses, and competencies in Cognitive, Language, Motor, Social-Emotional Skills, and Adaptive behavior.
What are Developmental Quotients (DQ)?
These are calculated for each scale and are most useful for early detection of emotional disturbances and sensory, neurological, and environmental deficits, and can help parents and professionals plan a child’s needs
What is Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment (Home)?
This is an instrument used to measure the influence of the home environment on children’s cognitive growth
What are conditions that enable Cognitive and Psychosocial Development of a Child?
Encourage exploration of the environment
Monitor basic cognitive and social skills
Celebrate developmental advances
Guide in practicing and extending skills
Protect the child from inappropriate disapproval, testing, and punishment
Communicate richly and responsively
Guide and limit behavior
What are ways in which parents can foster competence in children?
Provide sensory stimulation
Create an environment that fosters learning
Respond to the babies’ signals
Give babies power to effect changes
Give babies freedom to explore
Talk to the babies
Enter into whatever they are interested in
Arrange opportunities to learn basic skills
Applaud new skills and help babies practice and explore them
Read to babies in a warm, caring atmosphere from an early age
Use punishment sparingly
What is Early Intervention?
The systematic process of planning and providing therapeutic and educational services for families that need help in meeting infants’, toddlers’, and preschool children’s developmental needs
How can Early Interventions become more effective?
Start early and continue throughout preschool years
Be aware that it is highly time-sensitive
Provide direct educational experiences, not just parental training
Include health, family counseling, and social services
Tailor the intervention to individual differences and needs
What is the Piagetian Approach to Cognitive Development in a child’s first three years?
Piaget says that children from birth to the age of 2 are in the Sensorimotor Stage
What happens to Cognitive Development during the Sensorimotor Stage?
Infants learn about themselves and their world through their developing sensory and motor activity
What are the substages of Piaget’s Sensorimotor Stage of Cognitive Development an when do they occur?
Use of Reflexes (Birth to 1 Month)
Primary Circular Reactions (1 to 4 Months)
Secondary Circular Reactions (4 to 8 Months)
Coordination of Secondary Schemes (8 to 12 Months)
Tertiary Circular Reactions (12 to 18 Months)
Mental Combinations (18-24 Months)
What happens to Cognitive Development during the first five substages?
Babies learn to coordinate input from their senses and organize their activities in relation to their environment
What happens during the last substage of the Sensorimotor stage?
Infants progress from trial-and-error learning to using symbols and concepts to solve problems
What happens during the Use of Reflex Substage of the Sensorimotor Stage?
Infants exercise their inborn reflexes and gain some control over them.
They do not coordinate information from their senses
They do not grasp an object they are looking at
What happens during the Primary Circular Reaction Substage of Piaget’s Sensorimotor Stage?
Infants repeat pleasurable behaviors that first occur by chance.
Activities focus on the infant’s body rather than the effects of the behavior on the environment
Infants make first acquired adaptations
They begin to coordinate sensory information and grasp objects
What happens during the Secondaary Circular Reaction Substage of Piaget’s Sensorimotor Stage?
Infants become more interested in the environment and repeat actions that bring interesting results and prolong interesting experiences.
Actions are intentional but not initially goal directed
What happens during the Coordination of Secondary Schemes Substage of Piaget’s Sensorimotor Stage?
Behavior is more deliberate and purposeful as infants coordinate previously learned schemes and use previously learned behaviors to attain their goals.
They can anticipate events
What happens during the Tertiary Circular Reaction Substage of Piaget’s Sensorimotor Stage?
Toddlers show curiosity and experimentation, they purposefully vary their actions to see results.
They actively explore their world to determine what is novel about an object, event, or situation
They try out new activities and use trial and error in solving problems
What happens during the Mental Combination Substage of Piaget’s Sensorimotor Stage?
Toddlers are no longer confined to trial and error to solve problems.
Symbolic thought enables toddlers to begin to think about events and anticipate their consequences without always resorting to action.
Toddlers begin to demonstrate insight.
They can use symbols and can pretend.
What are Schemes?
Piaget’s term for organized patterns of thought and behavior used in particular situations
What are Circular Reactions?
Piaget’s term for processes by which an infant learns to reproduce desired occurrences originally discovered by chance
What are Key Developments of the Sensorimotor Stage?
Imitation Object Permanence Symbolic Development Categorization Causality Number
What is Invisible Imitation and when does it develop?
This skill develops at around 9 months.
Imitation using parts of the body that a baby cannot see
what is Visible Imitation?
Imitation with parts of one’s body that one can see
What is Deferred Imitation?
Piaget’s term for reproduction of an observed behavior after the passage of time by calling up a stored symbol of it.
This begins at about 6 to 9 months.
What are the types of Imitation?
Deferred Imitation
Invisible Imitation
Elicited Imitation
What is Elicited Imitation?
It is a research method in which infants or toddlers are induced to imitate a specific series of actions they have seen but not necessarily done before.
What factors seem to determine young children’s Long-Term Recall?
The number of times a sequence of events have been experienced
Whether the child actively participates or merely observes
Whether a child is given verbal reminders of the experience
Whether the sequence of events occurs in a logical, causal order
What is Representational Ability?
The ability to mentally represent objects and actions in memory, largely through symbols such as words and numbers, and mental pictures
What is Object Concept?
The idea that objects have their own independent existence, characteristics, and locations in space
What is Object Permanence?
Piaget’s term for the understanding that person or object still exists when out of sight
When does Object Permanence Develop?
At first, infants have no such concept.
By the third substage (4 to 8 months) they will look for something they have dropped but if they cannot see it, they act as if it no longer exists.
In the 4th substage, (8 to 12 Months) they will look for an object in a place where they first found it after seeing it hidden, even if they later saw it being move to another place.
In the 5th substage, (12 to 18 Months) they will search for an object in the last place they saw it hidden. They will not loo for it where they did not see it hidden.
By the 6th substage, (18 to 24 Months) object permanence is fully achieved. Toddlers will look for an object even if they did not see it hidden.
What is the Dynamic Systems Theory?
The decision where to search for a hidden object is not about what babies know but about what they do and why.
Who proposed the Dynamic Systems Theory?
Esther Thelen
What are symbols?
Intentional representations of reality
What is being Symbol-Minded?
Being attentive to symbols ad their relationshipss to the things they represent
What is Pictorial Competence?
The ability to understand the nature of pictures
What are Scale Errors?
Momentary misperceptions of the relative sizes of symbolic and real objects
What is the Dual Representation Hypothesis?
It is difficult for toddlers to mentally represent both a symbol and the object it represents at the same time, and so they may confuse the two.
What is Habituation?
It is the type of learning in which familiarity with a stimulus reduces, slows, or stops a response
It is the type of learning in which familiarity with a stimulus reduces, slows, or stops a response
What is Dishabituation?
Increase in responsiveness after presentation of a new stimulus
What is Visual Preference?
Tendency of infants to spend more time looking at one sight than another
What is Visual Recognition Memory?
The ability to distinguish a familiar visual stimulus from an unfamiliar one when shown both at the same time.
What is Cross-Modal Transfer?
The ability to use information gained from one sense to guide another
What is the Visual Expectation Paradigm?
It is a measure of Visual Reaction Time and Visual Anticipation
What is Categorization?
Dividing the world into meaningful categories
Important to thinking about objects or concepts and their relationships
What is Causality?
The principle that events have identifiable causes, it is important because it allows people to predict and control their world.
What are Reasoning Abilities?
Innate learning mechanisms that help them make sense of the information they encounter
What is the Violation-Of-Expectation Research Method?
Research method in which dishabituation to a stimulus that conflicts with experience is taken as evidence that an infant recognizes the new stimulus as surprising.
What are the two types of Long-Term Memory Systems?
Implicit Memory
Explicit Memory
What is Implicit Memory?
Unconscious recall, generally of habits and skills.
Sometimes called Procedural Memory
What is Explicit Memory?
Intentional and conscious memory, generally of facts, names, and events
What is Working Memory?
Short-Term storage of information the brain is actively processing, or working on
What is Guided Participation?
Mutual interactions with adults that help structure children’s activities and bridge the gap between a child’s understanding and an adult’s
What is Language?
A communication system based on words and grammar
What is Prelinguistic Speech?
Forerunner of linguistic speech
Utterance of sounds that are not words.
Includes crying, cooing, babbling, and accidental and deliberate imitation of sounds without understanding their meaning
What are the Language Milestones from Birth to 3 Years?
Birth - Can perceive speech, cry, make some response to sound
5 to 6 Months up to 10 Months - Babbles to match what is heard, babbles in strings of consonants and vowels
9 to 12 Months - Uses a few social gestures
10 to 12 Months - No longer can discriminate sounds not in own language
12 to 14 Months - Says first word, label
10 to 18 Months - Says single words (holophrase)
18 to 24 Months - Expands one’s vocabulary, says first sentence (telegraphic)
20 to 22 Months - Has Comprehension Spurt
30-36 Months - Speaks in combinations of three or more words, makes grammatical mistakes, says up to 1,000 words, 80% intelligible
What is Babbling?
Repeating consonant-vowel strings
What are the different types of Gestures that infants use?
Conventional Social Gestures
Representational Gestures
Symbolic Gestures
What are Conventional Social Gestures?
Waving goodbye, Nodding his/her head to mean yes, Shaking her head to signify no
What are Representational Gestures?
Holding an empty cup to her mouth to show that she wants a drink or hold up her arms to show that she wanted to be picked up
What are Symbolic Gestures?
Blowing to mean hot or cold
What is Linguistic Speech?
Verbal expression designeed to convey meaning
What is a Holophrase?
A single word that conveys a complete thought
What s Telegraphic Speech?
An early form of sentence which consists of only a few essential words.
What is Syntax?
Rules for forming sentences in a particular language.
Infants show an increasing competence with this
What are the characteristics of early speech?
Speech is telegraphic and simplified
Grammatical relationships are understood but cannot be expressed
Word meanings are underextended or overextended
Rules are overregularized
What was Noam Chomsky’s view of Language Development?
There are inborn Language Acquisition Device which program children’s brains to analyze the language they hear and figure out its rules
What is Nativism?
The theory that human beings have an inborn capacity for language acquisition
What is a Language Acquisition Device?
In Chomsky’s terminology, an inborn mechanism that enables children to infer linguistic rules from the language they hear
What influences Early Language Development?
Brain Development
Social Interaction: Prelinguistic Period, Vocabulary Development
What parts of the brain control a newborn’s cries?
Brain Stem and Pons
What emerges with the maturation of the motor cortex?
Repetitive babbling
What does Bronfenbrenner’s Bioecological Model predict on the role of Social Interaction on the development of Language?
The age of parents or caregivers, the way they interact with and talk with an infant, the child’s birth order, child care experience, and, later, schooling, peers, and television exposure all affect the pace ad course of language acquisition
What do bilingual children tend to do?
Code Mixing
Code Switching
What is Code Mixing?
Use of elements of two languages, sometimes in the same utterance, by young children in households were both languages are spoken
What is Code-Switching?
Changing one’s speech, to match the situation, as in people who are bilingual
What is Child-Directed Speech (CDS)?
Form of speech often used in talking to babies or toddlers; includes slow, simplified speech, a high-pitched tone, exaggerated vowel sounds, short words and sentences, and much repetition
Also called Parentese or Motherese
What is Literacy?
The ability to read or write
What are the different styles of reading to children?
Comprehender Style
Describer Style
Performance-Oriented Style
Shared Reading
