Cognitive Development Flashcards
The neutral, preferred category for a given object, at an intermediate level of specificity
Basic-level category
A set of entities that are equivalent in some way. Usually the items are similar to one another
Category
The mental representation of a category
Concept
An example in memory that is labeled as being in a particular category
Exemplar
The belief that member of a category have an unseen property that causes them to be in the category and to have the properties associated with it
Psychological essentialism
The difference in “goodness” of category members, ranging from the most typical (the prototype) to borderline members
Typicality
Piagetian stage between ages 7-12 when kids can think logically about concrete situations but not engage in systematic scientific reasoning
Concrete operations stage
Problems pioneered by Piaget in which physical transformation of an object or set of objects changed a perceptually salient dimension but not the quantity that is being asked about
Conservation problems
Ways in which development occurs in a gradual incremental manner, rather than through sudden jumps
Continuous development
Development that does not occur in a gradual incremental manner
Discontinuous development
Piagetian stage starting at age 12 and continuing for the rest of life, in which adolescents may gain the reasoning powers of educated adults
Formal operations stage
Theories that focus on describing the cognitive processes that underlie thinking at any one age and cognitive growth over time
Information processing theories
The Piagetian task in which infants below about 9 months fail to search for an object that is removed from their sight and, if not allowed to search immediately for the object, act as if they do not know that it continues to exist.
Object permanence task
Awareness of the component sounds within words
Phonemic awareness
Theory that development occurs through a sequence of discontinuous stages: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational stages
Piaget’s theory
Period within piagetian theory from age 2-7, in which kids can represent objects through drawing and language but cannot solve logical reasoning problems
Preoperational reasoning stage
Large, fundamental changes, as when a caterpillar changes into a butterfly. Theories such as piagets posit that each stage reflects qualitative change relative to the previous stage
Qualitative changes
Gradual, incremental change, as in the growth of a tree’s width
Quantitative changes
Period within piagetian theory from birth to 2, during which kids come to represent the enduring reality of objects
Sensorimotor stage
Theory founded in large part by Lev Vygotsky that emphasizes how other people and the attitudes, values, and beliefs of the surrounding culture influence children’s development
Sociocultural theories
A characteristic that reflects a genetic liability for disease and a more basic component of a complex clinical presentation. They are less developmentally malleable than overt behaviour.
Endophenotypes
Measure the firing of groups of neurons in the cortex. As a person views of listens to specific types of information, neuronal activity creates small electrical currents that can be recorded from non-invasive sensors placed on the scalp. ERP provides excellent information about the timing of processing, clarifying brain activity at the millisecond pace at which it unfolds.
Event-related potentials (ERP)
Uses powerful magnets to measure oxygen levels within the brain that vary with changes in neural activity.
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)
The set of neuroanatomical structures that allows us to understand the actions and intentions of other people
Social brain
