childhood: cognitive development Flashcards
mental representation
internalization of thought during the transition from sensorimotor to preoperational stage.
- helps language dev
deferred imitation and object permanence
symbolic understanding
understanding that things can stand/represent other things
dual representation
understanding that an object may simultaneously be itself and stand for another thing
shrinking room study
when a small doll is hidden in a small scale room, and then a big doll was hidden in a real room in the same place.
- 2 and a half y/ couldn’t find it but the 3 year old could
- dont understand that small room represents big one.
- shrinking room study: can fail first version but understand and find the dill if we say that the room shrank.
pretend/fantasy/sociodramatic play
children act out imaginary stories related to life experiences and may involve others in created play scenarios
- related to some cognitive abilities
limitations to preoperational stage
- egocentrism
- animistic thinking
- conservation
- appearance-reality distinction
cognitive achievements of preoperational stage
- symbolic understanding
- dual representation
- pretend play
egocentrism
tendency of children to think that other people view the world from their perspective
- inability to consider of POVs
ex: 3 mountain task
3 mountain task
each mountain has different things on it and the child is asked to describe each one from their perspective. asked again to describe from if someone else were seeing it from the other side and they tended to repeat what they had said the first time
Animistic thinking
belief that inanimate objects have human qualities
- ex: thinking that the stars shine because they are happy
- piaget thought that children would have difficulty distinguishing etween animate and inanimate objects. (underestimation by him)
essentialism
humans represent some categories as having underlying essence that unifies members of a category and is casually responsible for their attributes
ex: child knows males and females are different but dont know how or why
- could lead to stereotypes
conservation
can children understand that the number, mass or volume of something remains the same even if it looks different
- preoperational children usually dont (centration)
centration
tendency to focus on one perceptually salient feature of something (like only look at the height even if width is different)
- reason for children failing conservation tasks
reversibility
unable to mentally undo actions
piagets correct theory about conservation
he was right that children passed these task in particular orders.
- ex: learning liquid conservation before number
appearance-reality distinction
the knowledge that the appearance of something does not necessarily correspond to its reality
ex: sponge may look like a rock when its really a sponge
- children under three struggle making these distinctions
ex: dog in a cat mask
preoperatinal stage
- 2-7
- children are capable of mental representation or the internalization of thought
concrete operational stage
- 7-11 years
- children develop logical, flexible, organized and rational thinking; however, their thinking is limited to concrete experiences
achievements in concrete operational stage
- pass conservation taks
- little difficulty with appearance-reality distinction
- hierarchical classification
seriation - transitive inference
less egocentrism and more spatial reasoning - can draw and read maps (concept of scale)
hierarchical classification
ability of children in this stage to organise sets of things in different dimensions
- ex: classifying pokemons by their names, colours, powers, points…
seriation
being able to put things in order
transitive inference
- giving a series of logic statements and asking child to make inferences about it
- ex: zoe is taller than josh, josh is taller then ben…
inductive reasoning
ability to draw on specific observations, facts and knowledge to draw a logical conclusion
- includes transitive inference
- everyone here is happy. is he happy?
- children staring to understand this
deductive reasoning
ability to test ideas that are guided by hypotheses
- cant do this yet in concrete stage
executive functions
the collection of skills involved in controlling and coordinating attention, memory and other behaviors involved in goal directed actions
- allow functioning in everyday life
3 skils:
1. inhibitory control
2. cognitive flexibility
3. working memory
inhibitory control
ability to respond appropriately to a stimuli while inhibiting and alternating dominant control.
can test with strub test
- large improvement between 3 and 5
strub task
- the word yellow written in green and have to say the color its written in
- have to inhibit initial response of reading
- this doesnt work with samll children because their dominant response is not to read
- for children they can uses images of the sun but have to say night when they see it
flanker test
seeing one visual display at a time and the arrow in pointing left or right and you have to say the direction of the arrow in the middle but there are other around it pointing different directions
cognitive flexibility
ability to shift between different concepts or rules, or to think about multiple concepts simultaneously
- by 5 years kids are better
- dimensional card sort (asked to sort cards by color and shape)
-
working memory
ability to maintain and manipulate information in the mind over a short period of time
- for concentration, focus and following instructions
- 4-5 year olds can only hole 4 things in their working memory
- we can hold 7 give or take 2
- because children cant encode things as quickly to retain as many memories
planning
children select, coordinate and execute a sequence of actions while inhibiting other actions.
- test with the tower of london task
- get balls from one peg to another
procedural memory
knowing how to do things
declarative memory
knowing that (Semantic and episodic)
episodic memory
personal recollections that are tied to a specific time and place
- sub-type of declarative memory referring to everyday memory about personal experiences, situations and events
autobiographical memory
memory of yourself
- mostly episodic but also semantic
- semantic by remebering how many siblings you have
semantic memory
- general knowledge, facts, figures that are dissociate from a time or place
- knowledge helps memory by facilitating rehearsal and encoding of familiar material
- ## children knowledge base expands as they store more info in long term memory
scrips
knowledge about familiar routines
- ex: knowing the expected sequences of events whil at a restaurant
- not semantic or episodic
infantile amnesia
the difficulty adults have of remembering their first years of life
- adults say first memories came at about 3-4
- this is consistent and universal
- freud thought because of traumatic time we supressed
- could be because language (didn’t have the means to store)
- early memories just decay quicker
maturation of autobiographical memory
- as children grow they accumulate a unique identity and include more details about events
- 7-8 report that they simply know something happened
- 8-13 year old report more specific details and require fewer prompts
- continues to develop through teen
metacognition
a person’s awareness of what they know and how thinking work
- ex: what do i already know that i wont have to study as much
metamemory
understanding of the memory process
- what is going ot be the best way to study so i can retain info
rehearsal
relies on repeating info over and over again to aid memory
- begin in grade school and increase over time
- not great for long term mem
organization
imposing a structure on items based on their relations to one another to aid recall info
- chunking
- by categories or rhyming
- more conceptual ways of doing this are more efficient
- start oraganizing by concept by 7-8
