Chapter 6- Cognition Flashcards
_________ refers to the inner processes and products of the mind that lead to “knowing.” It includes all mental activity- attending, remembering, symbolizing, categorizing, planning, reasoning, problem solving, creating, and fantasizing.
Cognition
Theorist that believed in 4 stages of development
Piaget
Piaget viewed children as discovering, or constructing, virtually all knowledge about their world through their own activity. What type of approach is his theory?
Constructive
According to Piaget, specific psychological structures called _______- organized ways of making sense of experience-change with age.
Schemes
For Piaget, this change marks the transition from a sensorimotor approach to the world to a cognitive approach based on _________ _________- internal depictions of information that the mind can manipulate.
Mental Representations
__________ involves building schemes through direct interaction with the environment.
Adaptation
In ____________, we create new schemes or adjust old ones after noticing that our current way of thinking does not capture the environment completely.
Accommodation
Piaget’s term for this back-and-fourth movement between equilibrium and disequilibrium is ______________.
Equilibration
Schemes also change through ___________, 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.
Organization
Piaget’s first stage of development, spans the first two years of life. Its name reflects Piaget’s belief that infants and toddlers “think” with their eyes, ears, hands, and other sensorimotor equipment. They cannot yet carry out many activities mentally.
Sensorimotor Stage
___________ ___________ 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 originally occurred by chance strengthens into t new scheme.
Circular Reaction
Around 1 month babies start to gain voluntary control over their actions through the __________ circular reaction, by repeating chance behaviors largely motivated by basic needs.
Primary
Children develop cognitive structures ___________.
Actively
Infants sit up and become skilled at reaching for and manipulating objects- motor achievements that strengthen the _________ circular reaction, through which they try to repeat interesting events in the surrounding environment that are caused by their own actions.
Secondary
What is the understanding that objects continue to exist even when they are out of sight?
Object Permanence
When babies reach several times for an object in one hiding place (A), then they see it moved to another (B), they still search for it in the first hiding place (A).
A-not-B Search Error
The ability to remember and copy the behavior of models who are not present.
Deferred Imitation
By 10-12 months, infants can engage in __________ problem solving-applying a solution from one problem to other relevant problems.
Analogical
Piaget’s second stage of development. Spans from 2-7 years. The most obvious change is an extraordinary increase in representational, or symbolic, activity.
Preoperational Stage
How does language increase the efficiency of thought?
It is the most flexible means of mental representation. When we think in words we can deal with past, present, and future at once and combine concepts in unique ways.
Later children combine pretend schemes with those of peers in __________ ________, the make-believe with others that is underway by the end of the second year and increases rapidly in complexity during early childhood.
Sociodramatic Play
Piaget believed that young children are not capable of _______- mental representations of actions that obey logical rules.
Operations
For Piaget, the most fundamental deficiency of preoperational thinking is __________- failure to distinguish others’ symbolic viewpoints form one’s own.
Egocentrism
_________ refers to the idea that certain physical characteristics of objects remain the same, even when their outward appearance changes.
Conservation
First, their understanding is centered, or characterized by ___________. They focus on one aspect of a situation, neglecting other important features.
Centration
__________- the ability to go through a series of steps in a problem and then mentally reverse the direction, returning to the starting point- is a part of every logical operation
Reversibility
Preoperational children have difficulty with ___________ __________- the organization of objects into classes and subclasses on the basis of similarities and differences.
Hierarchical Classification
Piaget’s third stage of development. Extending from 7-11 years, marks a major turning point in cognitive development. Thought becomes far more logical, flexible, and organized, more closely resembling the reasoning of adults than that of younger children.
Concrete Operational
The ability to pass _________ _______ provides clear evidence of operations- mental actions that obey logical rules.
Conservation Tasks
What is a child’s ability to focus on several aspects of a problem and relating them, rather than entering on only one?
Decentration
The ability to order items along a quantitative dimension, such as length or weight, is called _________.
Seriation
The concrete operational child can also seriate mentally, an ability called _________ _________.
Transitive Inference
Piaget’s fourth stage of development. Occurs at about age 11. Children develop the capacity for abstract, systematic, scientific thinking.
Formal Operational
In adolescence children become capable of ________-_________ reasoning- when faced with a problem, they start with a hypothesis, or prediction about variables that might affect an outcome, from which they deduce logical, testable inferences.
Hypothetico-deductive
An egocentric adolescent behavior. Their belief that they are the focus of everyone’s attention and concern. Heightened consciousness
Imaginary Audience
An egocentric adolescent behavior. Their belief that others are observing and thinking about them. Teens develop an inflated opinion of their own importance- a feeling they are special and unique.
Personal Fable
Theorist whose theory is no longer fully accepted. Researchers still draw inspiration from his vision of children as active, constructive learners and his lifelong quest to understand how children acquire new capacities. His findings serve as the starting point for virtually every major contemporary line of research on cognitive development.
Piaget
According to the ____ _________ ___________ infants begin life with innate, special-purpose knowledge systems referred to as core domains of thought. Each of these “prewired” understandings permits a ready grasp of new, related information and therefore supports early, rapid development of certain aspects of cognition.
Core Knowledge Perspective
According Vygotsky’s ___________ theory are infants endowed with basic perceptual, attention, and memory capacities that they share with other animals. These develop during the first two years through direct contact with the environment. Then rapid growth of language leads to a profound change in thinking. It broadens preschoolers’ participation in social dialogues with more knowledge individuals, who encourage them to master culturally important tasks.
Sociocultural
Which theorist believed in a sociocultural theory?
Vygotsky
Children’s self-directed speech is called _______ _______
Private Speech
Vygotsky believed that children’s learning takes place within the ____ __ ________ ___________- a range of tasks too difficult for the child to do alone, but possible with the help of adults and more skilled peers.
Zone of Proximal Development
Vygotsky believed what helps children think about mental activities and behavior and elect courses of action, he saw it as the foundation for all higher cognitive processes, including controlled attention, deliberate memorization and recall, categorization, planning, problem solving, abstract reasoning, and self-reflection.
Language
__________- adjusting the support offered during a teaching session to fit the child’s current level of performance.
Scaffolding
________ teaching- a teacher and two to four students form a collaborative group and take turns leading dialouges on the content of a text passage. Members apply 4 cognitive strategies: questioning, summarizing, clarifying, and predicting.
Reciprocal
_________’s theory helps us understand the wide cultural variation in cognitive skills, leads us to expect highly diverse paths of development, underscores the vital role of teaching in cognitive development, focused on social and cultural influences, but said little about biological contributions to children’s cognition.
Vygotsky
