Cognitive And Pragmatic Development Flashcards
Brain Development Order:
Lower Brain- Bodily Functions
Cerebellum & Basal Ganglia-Movement
Motor Cortex-Volitional Movement
Visual Cortex-Visual Processing
Limbic System-Emotions
Cerebral Cortex-Higher Thinking
myelination
myelin sheath is that fatty tissue tube which insulates the axon making sure that the impulse is sent quickly, efficiently and to a specified receiver.
Synaptogenesis
formation of synapses between neurons.
Neural Pruning
removal of neural pathways.
Sensation
Ability to register sensory information (light, touch, taste, sound, smell).
Overstimulation
If a touch or a sound is stronger or louder, the child responds in kind. This is because the cortex itself is immature, and firing on all cylinders, as they say.
Overstimulation
The state of agitation as a result of the inability to ignore stimuli.
Habituation
The only way in which infants begin to learn how to ignore stimuli is through habituation.
Habituation
Disregarding a stimulus because it is no longer “novel.”
If you’ve ever worked in fast food, you’ve likely experienced this. During the first few days of working, you will notice the beeping timers for fryers and other tools going off constantly. However, after a few days, or even a few hours for some, the timers begin to fade into the general music of the scene. Luckily, however, the alarms do not fade completely, or you’d miss a timer and burn an entire batch of fries.
Selective Attention
Once a child begins to be able to habituate to sounds which become less novel – or new to her - she now has the cognitive reserves to attend to just one thing.
selective attention:
The ability to focus on one stimulus and filter sensations to maintain a stable state.
It tends to be the things that are important to her, like in the “Cocktail Effect” where you hear your own name it a crowd, even though it was not said more loudly than anything else, you still attend to it because it is personally important.
Perception
Ability to integrate sensory information and prior experiences.
Discrimination
Ability to identify the salient characteristics of a stimulus.
Reflex Development
Children are born with reflexes, which in healthy children are developed in utero. For instance, thumb-sucking, blinking, as well as heart rate changes due to external stimuli all develop before birth.
Reflexes
involuntary neuro-motor responses to stimulation.
Primitive reflexes are those that are present at birth but disappear by 6 months as part of normal development. Typically their role is to support survival in the early weeks, until the child develops control over her muscles.
True
In general, oral motor development is the first area of motor skill which infants really master. It begins with an up-down movement (as in aphasic bite) which gradually develops into front-to-back control, graded, rotational and lateral movement. The last of this sequence is made possible by the emerging ability of the child to separate jaw movement from the movement of the lips, tongue, and cheeks.
True
Motor Speech
Planning, preparation, and execution of muscle movement for oral communication.
The sounds that they begin to make when they are not crying are called quasi-resonant nuclei, or QRN. These are back-of-the-throat sounds which are half consonant and half vowel. As they begin to gain some control, their sounds take on true vowels and consonants, and they begin to take turns with their vocalizations in “protoconversations.”
True
Stimuli
In the beginning, a stimulus, or several stimuli occur.
Attention
Attention is the first active role a child has in learning. The stimuli that are attended to will have a chance to be “processed.” But, the stimuli not attended to will be ignored.
Perception
The next step is to compare stimuli to other experiences. If it is a stimulus that has been attended to before, it has a higher likelihood of being processed this time. Remember - human brains love patterns.
Discrimination
Relevant characteristics of the stimuli are identified. Think about a road sign. If you used the base of the sign (the wooden or metal sticks) to discriminate between them, you might get into an accident, because you were using the wrong characteristics. The salient characteristics are the words or images on the top shape. Discrimination means looking for what’s important in a stimulus. Combined, Perception and Discrimination constitute what is called “working” or “short term” memory.
Organization
Researchers have shown that we can maintain about 7-12 units of information in our mind at once. This is what we call our “working memory.” Have you ever tried to remember a shopping list that was longer than ten items, or remembered the names of more than ten new people at a party? There is a real, scientific reason why this is difficult, and it’s why the organization of information is so important. When you organize information, which we can also call “chunking,” we can turn 144 pieces of information into 12 chunked units of information. It’s a great thing to remember when you are studying for a test. Organization is the first half of creating a long term memory.