Chapter 7: Physical and Cognitive Development in Early Childhood Flashcards
What age is early childhood?
2-6 years
Three areas of motor development in early childhood
Gross motor skills, fine motor skills, brain development
Gross motor skills
- Increase in physical strength
- Learning new motor skills
- More proximodistal development
- Not learning gross motor movements, but increasing efficiency and combining movements (ex. climbing)
Fine motor skills
Interaction between cognitive and motor domains (ex. writing and gripping development)
Brain development in early childhood
- Period of rapid brain growth
- Myelination
- Demonstration of plasticity
Children sleep about __% less than infants and toddlers
20
Problems with sleep
- Trouble developing a sleep schedule
- Nightmares and night terrors
Piaget: characteristics of ____ ____
preoperational reasoning
Preoperational reasoning
- Trying to connect with things
- Mental representation of what an object is
- Egocentrism
- Animism
- Centration
- Irreversibility
Egocentrism
Children have a hard time taking in another’s point of view. Children being to realize that other people have different thoughts and observations. (ex. the three mountain task)
Three mountain task
Child describes what they [and the adult] see on their side of the mountain, not realizing that the adult doesn’t see what they see.
Animism
Inanimate objects have feelings and intentions
Centration
The appearance-reality distinction, hyperfocusing one thing
Example of centration
Calling a person with a bear mask on a bear, not a person
Irreversibility and conservation
Once and object changes form, it can never go back (ex. taking the cap off a pen destroys it).
Vygotsky’s sociocultural perspective
Emphasis on culture on development, including scaffolding and zone of proximal development
Scaffolding
Activities to help the child learn what is on their ZPD
Zone of proximal development
Skills that are close to the ones that have already been mastered. Lower than the zone is current understanding, above it is out of reach.
Characteristics of effective scaffolding
Demonstrating how to do something, finding most efficient way changes with age
Private speech
Self-talk that turns into inner speech and aids in self-regulation.
Four key parts of information processing in early childhood
Attention, working memory and executive function, memory, theory of mind
Changes to attention in early childhood
Improvements in sustained attention, but still have difficulty with selective attention.
Changes to working memory and executive function in early childhood
Improvements in holding information in working memory as we think through the things we’re learning, improvements in creating and carrying out a plan.
Changes to memory in early childhood
- Autobiographical memory
- Important or unique events are more easily recalled - Long-term descriptions of things
Components of theory of mind
People have different mindsets and you recognize this, false belief, metacognition
Example of theory of mind
Water bottle filled with orange juice
- No theory of mind: you think everyone thinks there’s orange juice in the WATER bottle
- Theory of mind: you realize everyone assumes there’s water in the water bottle
False belief
Wrongly assuming something, then saying you think other people will assume what you just learned (ex. smarties and pencil)
Metacognition
Thinking about our thinking, about other people’s thinking
Why are cognitive abilities are necessary for theory of mind?
Object permanence, conception of self, mental representations, hold memories
Vocabulary development in early childhoood
Rapid vocabulary acquisition, fast mapping, logical extension, mutual exclusivity assumption
Logical extension
Figuring out what a word means (ex. knowing a ball is big, you can call a large square “big”)
Early grammar often leads to ___ ____
Overregulation errors - trying to fit everything into the grammar rule they learned, need to learn the boundaries of the rule
Characteristics of bilingual language learning
Slower growth rates in each individual language, but have a combined vocab that is equal.
