Chapter 7: Cognitive processes and Academic Skills

Question 1

origins of memory

Answer 1

Infants rapidly learn that kicking moves a mobile; days later, babies will kick immediately, showing that they remember the connection between their action and the mobile’s movement.

Question 2

hippocampus

Answer 2

The brain structures primarily responsible for the initial storage of information
- develop during the first year
- part of the hippocampus is not mature until about 20 to 24 months, and developmental changes continue across childhood

Question 3

Frontal cortex

Answer 3

responsible for retrieving these stored memories

Question 4

rehearsal

Answer 4

A memory strategy that involves repeating information that is to be remembered

Question 5

chunking

Answer 5

the process of organizing related items into one meaningful group, thus improving working memory capacity.

Question 6

metamemory

Answer 6

which refers to a child’s informal understanding of memory.

Question 7

metacognitive knowledge

Answer 7

A person’s knowledge and awareness of cognitive processes.

Question 8

cognitive self-regulation

Answer 8

The ability to identify goals, select effective strategies, and monitor accurately; a characteristic of successful students

Question 9

script

Answer 9

The means by which people remember common events consisting of sequences of activities.
- Highly familiar activities, such as baking cookies, are often stored in memory as scripts that denote the events in the activity and the sequence in which they occur.

Question 10

autobiographical memory

Answer 10

A person’s memory of the significant events and experiences of his or her own life.

Question 11

infantile amnesia

Answer 11

the inability to remember events from early in one’s life.

When trying to remember past events, young children sometimes “remember” what others suggest might have happened in the past, particularly when the suggestion comes from a person in authority.

Question 12

Fuzzy Trace Theory

Answer 12

Children’s knowledge of the world usually helps them remember, but sometimes it leads to inaccurate or distorted memory.

According to the fuzzy trace theory, developed by Charles J. Brainerd and Valerie Reyna (2005, 2013), most experiences can be stored in memory exactly (verbatim) or in terms of their basic meaning (gist). A 10-year-old who reads an invitation to a birthday party may store the information in memory as “the party starts at 7:30 P.M.” (verbatim) or as “the party is after dinner” (gist)

Question 13

encoding processes

Answer 13

The cognitive processes that transform the information in a problem into a mental representation

Question 14

means-ends analysis

Answer 14

A problem-solving heuristic in which people determine the difference between the current and desired situations, then do something to reduce the difference.

Question 15

Heuristics

Answer 15

Rules of thumb that are handy for solving problems but that do not guarantee a solution.

Question 16

Confounded

Answer 16

As applied to the design of experiments, an error in which variables are combined instead of evaluated independently, making the results of the experiment ambiguous.