Chapter 9 Flashcards
1
Q
Preoperational Stage
A
- second stage of Piaget’s model of cognitive development
- 2-7
- egocentrism
- immature notions about what causes what
- confusion between mental and physical events
- ability to focus on only one dimension at a time
2
Q
Symbolic Thought
A
- Preoperational thought
- The use of symbols to represent objects and relationships among them
- drawings are symbols of objects, people, and events in their own lives
3
Q
Symbolic/Pretend Play
A
- children make believe that objects and toys are other than what they are
- requires cognitive sophistication
-12 or 13 months
- make believe they are
performing familiar activities such
as sleeping/feeding themselves - 15 to 20 months
- shift from themselves to others
- pretend to feed his/her doll - 30 months
- she/he make believe that the
other object takes an active role
- may pretend doll is feeding itself
4
Q
Violent Pretend Play
A
- less empathetic
- less likely to help other children
- more likely to engage in antisocial behavior later on
5
Q
Imaginary Friends
A
- 65% of preschoolers have them
- more common among firstborn or only children
- children with imaginary friends are/have…
- less aggressive
- more cooperative
- more creative
- more real friends
- greater ability to concentrate
- more advanced in language
development
6
Q
Egocentrism
A
- putting oneself at the center of things such that one is unable to perceive the world from another person’s point of view
- prevents young children from taking the viewpoints of others
- three mountain test (Piaget)
7
Q
Causality
A
- precasual: a type of thought in which natural causes-and-effect relationships are attributed to will and other preoperational concepts
- “why does it get dark outside?”
“so I can go to sleep”
- answers are centered around
themselves and how it affects
them - transductive reasoning: reasoning for one specific isolated event to another specific isolated event
- he/she can play outside
because it is light outside
- cause-and-effect relationships - animism: The attribution of life and intentionality to inanimate objects
- “why is the moon gone during
the day”
“is it scared of the sun?” - artificialism: The belief that environmental features were made by people
- “why is the sky blue?”
“did someone paint it?”
8
Q
One Dimension at a Time
A
- conservation: in cognitive psychology, the principle that properties of substances such as weight and mass remain the same when superficial characteristics such as their shapes or arrangement are changed
- preoperational children focus
on one problem at a time
- Piaget called this
centration
- conservation requires the ability
to focus on two aspects of a
situation at one time
- the inability to understand
conservation is because of
irreversibility
9
Q
Class Inclusion
A
- including new objects are categories and brought her mental classes or categories
- requires children who can focus on two aspects of the situation at a time
10
Q
Factors in Cognitive Development
A
- two factors
- scaffolding: Vygotsky’s term for temporary cognitive structures or methods of solving problems that help the child as he/she learns to function independently
- count on fingers
- temporary support - zone of proximal development (ZPD): Vygotsky’s term for the range of tasks a child can carry out with the help of someone who is more skilled
- watching parent cook
- the key forms of children’s
cognitive activities develop
through interaction with older,
more experienced individuals
who teach and guide them
11
Q
Home Environment
A
- Bettye Caldwell and her colleagues developed a measure for evaluating children’s home environments
- HOME – Home Observation
for the Measurement of the
Environment
- directly observe parent-child
interaction at home - early learning experiences affect children’s levels of intellectual functioning
- higher IQ scores and greater
school achievement later on - Victoria Molfese and her colleagues found that the home environment is the single most important predictor of scores on IQ tests
12
Q
Effects of Early Childhood Education
A
- preschool education enables children to get an early start on achievement in school
- early 1960s – preschool programs were created for children who were living in poverty
- Head Start program
- studies of Head Start
show that environmental
enrichment can enhance
the cognitive development
of economically disadvantaged
children
- gains in school readiness
tests and achievement tests
- programs that involve/
education parents are
particularly beneficial
- Head Start program
13
Q
Television
A
- The Children’s Television Act requires networks devote and number of hours to per week to educational tv
- mild to moderate positive
effects on preschooler’s
cognitive development - promote intellectual growth of preschoolers
- especially children of lower
socioeconomic status - regular viewing increases children’s learning of numbers, letters, and cognitive skills
14
Q
Theory of Mind
A
- a commonsense understanding of how the mind works
- Piaget predicted that preoperational children are too egocentric to have a theory of mind
- research shows that preschoolers can accurately predict and explain human action and emotion in terms of mental states
15
Q
Origins of Knowledge
A
- age 3 – begin to realize that people gain knowledge about something by looking at it
- age 4 – begin to understand that particular senses provide information about only certain qualities of an object
16
Q
The Appearance-Reality Distinction
A
- the difference between real events on the one hand and mental events, fantasies, and misleading appearances on the other hand
- Piaget – children do not differentiate reality from appearances or mental events until 7 or 8
- Marjorie Taylor and Barbara Hort – children age 3-5 cannot make the distinction
- 3-year-olds also cannot
understand changes in their
mental states
17
Q
Development of Memory
A
- by age 4, children can recall events that occurred at least 1 1/2 years earlier
- Katherine Nelson interviewed children ages 2 to 5
- found that 3-year-olds can
present coherent accounts of
familiar events
- scripts: generalized accounts
of repeated events
- an unusual experience (like a
hurricane) may be remembered
in detail for years - autobiographical memory: the memory of specific events, also called episodic memory
18
Q
Factors Influencing Memory
A
- what the child is asked to remember
- the interest level of the child
- availability of retrieval cues
- younger children depend more
on cues provided by adults to
retrieve their memories - what memory measures the child is using
19
Q
Measuring Memory
A
- children’s memory can be measured or assessed by asking them to say what they remember
- verbal reports underestimate
children’s memory
- a study found that children
who were allowed to recall
events using a doll were better
able to recall the events
20
Q
Memory Strategies
A
- rehearsal: mental repetition
- organize things to be remembered into categories
- children don’t engage in rehearsal until 5
- advances greatly in middle childhood
21
Q
Language Development
A
- preschoolers learn an average of nine words a day
- fast-mapping: a process of quickly determining a words meaning, facilitates children’s vocabulary development
- whole-object assumption: the assumption that words refer to whole objects and not to their component parts or characteristics
- contrast assumption: the assumption that objects have only one label; also known as mutual exclusivity assumption
22
Q
Development of Grammar
A
- age 3 – grammar explosion
- sentence structure expands
to include the words missing
in telegraphic speech
- add articles (a, an, the),
conjunctions, possessive
adjectives (your, her), pronouns,
and prepositions (in, on, around,
through) - overregularization: the application of regular grammatical rules for forming the past tense of irregular verbs and plurals of irregular nouns
- apply grammatical rules strictly
- try to imitate parents
- misapply them to irregular
words
- “mommy sitted down”
23
Q
Asking Questions
A
- children’s first questions are telegraphic and characterized by a rising pitch at the end
- “more milky?” - latter part of the third year
- wh- questions appear
- more likely to use “when”
because they are egocentric
- “why” and “how” are too
philosophical - age 4
- why, when, and how questions
- “where mommy go?”
- later on the child will include is,
did, and will
24
Q
Passive Sentences
A
Most children don’t produce passive sentences spontaneously until 5/6
25
Pragmatics
- the practical aspects of communication, such as adaptation of language to fit the social situation
- show greater formality in their
choice of words when role
playing high-status figures
- because of egocentrism in
preschoolers, they think others
know everything they know
- once that changed the child
begins to realize others have
different points of view
26
Language and Cognition
- interwoven
- does cognitive development precede language development
- Piaget believed it did
- children must understand
concepts before they use words
to describe them
- does language development precede cognitive development
- claim that children create
cognitive classes to understand
things that are labeled by words
27
Outer Speech and Inner Speech
- in the early stages of language development, concepts often precede words
- language influences thought
- Vygotsky believed that during most of the first year, vocalizations and thought are separate
- second year, thought and
speech combine forces
- inner speech: Vygotsky's concept of the ultimate binding of language and thought. Inner speech originates in vocalizations that may regulate the child's behavior and become internalize by age 6 or 7
- at first, children's thoughts are
spoken out loud
- gradually become internalized
- involved in the development of
planning and self-regulation
- facilitates learning
