Chapter 6 - Cognitive Development in Infancy and Toddlerhood Flashcards
Jean Piaget
With a background in biology, Piaget believed that the child’s mind forms and modifies psychological structures so they achieve a better fit with external reality…children’s thinking develops as they act directly on the environment
Sensorimotor stage
Piaget’s first stage, which 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
According to Piaget, these specific psychological structures - organized ways of making sense of experiences, and they change with age via adaptation and organization
Adaptation
Involves building schemes through direct interaction with the environment. it consists of two complimentary activities: Assimilation and Accommodation
Assimilation
We use our current schemes to interpret the external world. i.e., when Timmy dropped objects, he was assimilating them to his sensorimotor “dropping scheme”
Accommodation
We create new schemes or adjust old ones after noticing that our current ways of thinking do not capture the environment completely. i.e., when Timmy dropped objects in different ways, he modified his dropping scheme to take account of the varied properties of objects.
Cognitive equilibrium
When children are not changing much, they assimilate more than they accommodate; a steady, comfortable state.
Disequilibrium
When children are in times of rapid cognitive change, or cognitive discomfort. Children shift between assimilation and accommodation continually, over time.
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. i.e., Timmy will eventually relate “dropping” to “throwing” and to his developing understanding of “nearness” and “farness”
Stages within sensorimotor stage
1) Reflexive schemes (birth-1 month)
2) Primary circular reactions (1-4 months)
3) Secondary circular reactions (4-8 months)
4) Coordination of secondary circular reactions (8-12 months)
5) Tertiary circular reactions (12-18 months)
6) Mental representation (18 months-2 years)
Circular reaction
This 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 originally occurred by chance strengthens into a new scheme.
Primary circular reaction (1-4 months)
Babies start to gain voluntary control over their actions, by repeating chance behaviors largely motivated by basic needs.
Secondary circular reaction (4-8 months)
Motor achievements such as sitting up and reaching for objects strengthen this reaction, through which babies try to repeat interesting events in the surrounding environment that are caused by their own actions.
Intentional (goal-directed) behavior
When babies ages 8-12 months combine schemes that lead to new and more complex action sequences. There is a coordination of schemes to deliberately solve simple problems.
Object permanence
The understanding that objects continue to exist when they are out of sight. This awareness is not yet complete, however; babies make the A-not-B search error.
A-not-B search error
If babies reach several times for an object at a first hiding place (A), then see it moved to a second place (B), they still search for it in the first hiding place (A). This led Piaget to believe they still do not have a clear image of the object as persisting even when hidden from view.
Tertiary circular reaction
From 12-18 months, toddlers repeat behaviors with variation. i.e., Timmy dropped objects over the basement steps, trying this action, then that, then another. This exploratory approach makes 12-18 month children better problem solvers.
Mental repressions
Internal depictions of information that the mind can manipulate. Mostly fall into two categories, 1) images (mental pictures of objects, people, spaces) and 2) concepts (categories in which similar objects or events are grouped together.
Deferred imitation
The ability to remember and copy the behavior f models who are not present.
Make-believe play
When children act out everyday and imaginary activities.
Violation-of-expectation method
Method of research where researchers may habituate babies to a physical event, (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 event 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
A symbolic capacity that emerges around the first birthday, this is the realization that words can be used to cue mental images of things not physically present.
Video deficit effect
Poorer performance after 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 understandings permits a ready grasp of new, related information and therefore supports early, rapid development.
Sensory register
Information enters the sensory register, where sights and sounds are represented directly and stored briefly.
Short-term memory store
The second part of the mind, where 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
This is the conscious, reflective part of our mental system, ensuring that we think purposefully to attain our goals.
To manage the cognitive system’s complex activities, the central executive directs the flow of information, implementing the basic procedures just mentioned and also engaging in more sophisticated activities that enable complex, flexible thinking. i.e., 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
These 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
Aspects of cognitive system that improve during childhood:
1) basic capacity of its storage
2) the functioning of the central executive
3) the speed with which information is worked on
Executive function
The diverse cognitive operations and strategies that enable us to achieve our goals in cognitively challenging situations. Include controlling emotions, suppressing impulses, coordinating information and directing behavior.
Research methods re. infant’s memory:
- operant conditioning research
- habituation research
- recall memory
Context dependent
As regards operant conditioning, infant’s memory for operant responses is highly context dependent around 2-6 months. This declines around 9 months as they move on their own and experience frequent changes in context
Habituation memory research
These studies show that infants learn and retain a wide variety of information just by watching object and events, without being physically active. (terms familiarity preference and novelty preference).
Recognition
noticing when a stimulus is identical or similar to one previously experienced. this is the simplest form of memory.
Recall
involves remembering something not present at the time, and is more challenging than recognition.
Infantile amnesia
the term for the fact that most adults cannot remember events that happened to us before age 3. Neurological changes as well as social experiences contribute to this.
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 the move to a new house.
Issues with information processing perspective
- underscores the continuity of human thinking from infancy into adult life.
- its analytical, specific points make it difficult to put together into a comprehensive theory
Social context of early cognitive development
Vygotsky! He believed that through joint activities with more mature members of society, children master activities and think in ways that have meaning in their culture.
Zone of proximal development
Refers to a range of tasks that the child cannot yet handle alone but can do with the help of a more skilled partner. (term scaffolding)
make-believe
Current evidence supports the idea that early make-believe is the combined result of children’s readiness to engage in it and social experiences that promote it.
Intelligence Quotient (IQ)
Indicates the extent to which the raw score (number of items passed) deviates from the typical performance of same-age individuals.
Standardization
giving the IQ test to a large, representative sample and using the results as the standard for interpreting the scores.
Normal distribution
in which most scores cluster around the mean, with progressively fewer falling towards the extremes. This bell-shaped distribution results whenever researchers measure individual differences in large samples. the mean is set at 100, anything higher or lower than that indicates one’s deviation from the mean.
Developmental Quotients (DQs)
Because most infant test scores do not tap the same dimensions of intelligence measured at older ages, they are conservatively labeled DQs rather than IQs
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 interviews. This subscale is positively related to toddler’s mental test performance.
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 among experts.
Center-based interventions
When children attend an organized child-care or preschool program where they received educational, nutritional, and health services and their parents receive child rearing and other social service supports
Home-based interventions
A skilled adult visits the home and works with parents, providing social support and teaching them how to stimulate a young child’s development.
Nativist perspective
Proposed by Noam Chomsky (1957), he said language is a uniquely human accomplishment, etched into the structure of the brain. Focusing on grammar, Chomsky reasoned that the rules of sentence organization are too complex to be directly taught to or discovered by even a cognitively sophisticated young child. He proposed that all children have a language acquisition device (LAD)
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. (Chomsky)
Aphasias
Communication disorder
Broca’s area
located in the left frontal lobe, supports grammatical processing and language production
Wernicke’s area
located in the left temporal lobe, plays a role in comprehending word meaning
Interacitonist perspective
Recent ideas about language development emphasize interactions between the inner capacities and environmental influences. One type of interactionist theory applies the information-processing perspective to language development. A second type emphasizes social interaction.
Joint attention
When the child attends to the same object or event as the caregiver
Underextension
An error describing how when young children first learn words, they sometimes apply them too narrowly.
Overextension
An error describing how when young children first learn words, they sometimes apply a word to a wider collection of objects and events than is appropriate
Telegraphic speech
Two-word utterances that, like a telegram, focus on high-content words, omitting smaller, less important ones.
Production
The words and word combinations children use
Comprehension
The language children understand. At all ages, comprehension develops ahead of production
Referential style
When vocabularies consist mainly of words that refer to objects, used by the majority of toddlers
Expressive style
Used by a smaller number of toddlers, when vocabularies produce many more social formulas and pronouns.
Infant-directed speech (IDS)
A form of communication made up of short sentences with high-pitched, exaggerated expression, clear pronunciation, distinct pauses between word segments, clear gestures to support verbal meaning, and repetition of new words in a variety of contexts
