Chapter 6: Cognitive Development in Infancy and Toddlerhood Flashcards
According to Piaget, how do infants think?
Infants “think” by building schemes through sensory and motor exploration
Be familiar with Piaget’s ideas about how cognitive change takes place.
A) What are schemes?
B) Be able to describe the two processes that account for changes in schemes in development (adaptation and organization).
C) Describe the two complementary activities that comprise adaptation (assimilation and accommodation). Give example of each.
Specific psychological structures - organized ways babies use to make sense of their experience.
Adaptation
Circular reactions—stumbling upon a new experience caused by the baby’s own motor activity
Two complementary processes:
– Assimilation
Using current schemes to interpret external world
– Repeating schemes, playing, practicing
– Accommodation
Adjusting old schemes and creating new ones to better fit environment
Organization
– Internal rearranging and linking schemes together
Be familiar with the cognitive changes that take place during Piaget’s Sensorimotor Stage, and each of its 6 substages.
A. What is a circular reaction? primary, secondary, tertiary circular reactions. Give examples.
B. What is object permanence?
C. What is the A not-B search error? In what substage does this error occur?
D. What is mental representation? In what substage does this emerge?
E. What is deferred imitation? What is make-believe play? In what substage do these advanced cognitive skills emerge? How are they linked to the ability to form mental representations?
– Primary, secondary, and tertiary
1) Simple motor habits centered around the infant’s own body;limited anticipation of events
2) Action aimed at repeating interesting effects in the surrounding world; limitation of familiar behaviors.
3) Exploration of the properties of objects by acting on them in novel ways; imitation of novel behaviors; ability to search in several locations for hidden objects (A-not-B).
Object permanence - understand that objects continue to exist when they are not in sight.
Substage 4 (Coordination of secondary circular reaction). Hide object at point A, move it to point B, they will still look at point A.
internal depictions of information that the mind can manipulate. Stage 6
- the ability to remember and coop the behavior of models who are not present.
- children act out everyday and imaginary activities
- stage 6
- 1) images - or mental pictures of object, people, and places and 2) concepts, or categories in which similar objects or events are grouped together
What is the core knowledge perspective?
babies are born with a set of innate knowledge system, or core domains of thought. Each of these “pre-wired” understandings permits a ready gras o new, related information and therefore supports early, rapid development.
– Physical knowledge – Linguistic knowledge – Psychological knowledge – Numerical knowledge Innate math? Core domains allow for a quick grasp of related information Support rapid early development Still acknowledge experience Findings controversial
Be familiar with the model of human information-processing system described in the text. Be able to describe how information flows throughout the 3 main parts of the mental system (sensory register, working or short-term memory, and long-term memory). What is the role of the central executive?
Sensory registry - represents sights and sounds directly and stores them briefly
- goes to working and short term memory by attention
working/short term memory - holds limited about of information that is worked on to facilitate memory and problem solving
- goes to long term with repetitive storage and retrieval
long term - stores information permanently
central executive (controls all components)
- conscious part of the mind
- coordinates incoming info with info in the system
- controls attention
- selects, applies, and monitors the effectiveness of strategies.
When do infants become increasingly capable of intentional behavior? What are the consequences for their attention processes (their attraction to novelty and their ability to sustain attention to a single object)?
substage 4 (8-12 months) - During toddlerhood, children become capable of intentional behavior, and sustained attention improves.
Habituation for newborns require a long time and recovery to novel visual stimuli is about 3 to 4 minutes. But by 4 to 5 months, infants require as little as 5 to 10 seconds to take in a complex visual stimulus and recognize that it differs from the previous one.
Describe the perpetual-to-conceptual change in children’s categorical skill from infancy to toddlerhood.
- By 6 months, infants can categorize based on two features (e.g., shape and color).
- Earliest categories are perceptual, but by the second half of the first year, more categories areconceptual.
Be familiar with the violation-of expectation method, and how Baillargeon and others used it to show that object permanence may occur earlier than Piaget thought.
René Baillargeon and her collaborators claim to have found evidence for object permanence in the first few months of life
– Used habituation and violation of expectation paradigms
Diff size carrots moves behind a solid paper comes out the same size. Baby reacts when different size carrot moves behind partial paper and comes out the same, but through the opening they cannot see the carrot.
What is problem solving by analogy? Give an example. At what age can infants solve problems by analogy?
- by 10-12 months, babies can apply a solution strategy from one problem to other relevant problems
How is habituation/recovery research used to study changes in infant’s memory capacities? Explain why habituation and recovery are efficient indices of early intelligence.
Habituation/recovery research:
– Infants do not need to be physically active to acquire and retain new information.
– Contradicts Piaget
Shows that they are able to recognize things from their reaction to new stimuli.
What is recognition memory? What is recall memory? Which type is simpler?
recognition - noticing when a stimulus is identical or similar to one previously experienced.
recall - is more challenging because it involves remembering something without perceptual support.
recognition
What is autobiographical memory? What is infantile amnesia?
We can recall many personally meaningful one-time events from both the recent and distant past: the day a sibling was born or a move to a new house-recollections.
Most of us cannot recall events before age 3 May be due to:
– Immature brain development
– Memory processing in infants is nonverbal
Memories may be present but not accessible verbally – Lack of focused self-image
Be familiar with the basic tenets of Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory. Describe the importance of “coordinated dialogues” with more competent members of society for children’s cognitive development.
-Thinking develops through
“cooperative dialogues”
(social interactions) with more competent individuals (the social world)
-Language is the foundation for social interaction and thought.
In Vygotsky’s theory, what is the zone of proximal development? What is scaffolding? Give an example of each.
Zone of proximal development:
tasks child cannot do alone but can learn to do with help
-Children can perform at a higher level developmentally when interacting with another person than alone
-The competent individual provides just enough structure and support (“scaffolding”) so that the child can solve the problem on his or her own
– Scaffolding promotes learning at all ages.
– Cultural variations affect mental strategies taught and learned.
What is an Intelligent quotient (IQ)? What do IQ scores tell us about an individual’s cognitive functioning related to that of same-aged peers? For instance, if a child’s IQ score placed in the 50 percentile relative to his age mates on a standardized IQ test, what would is IQ score be?
indicates the extent to which the raw score (number of items passed) deviates from the typical performances of same-aged individuals.
50 percentile would be a score of 100 –> average
