exam 2 Flashcards
What was Piaget’s view of children? How does this view compare to how behaviorists might view children? (i.e., what role do they think children play in their own development?) Does Piaget support a continuous or discontinuous view of development? Why?
Piaget viewed them as motivated explorers whose thinking develops as they act directly on the environment, yet according to him they cannot yet carry out many activities inside their heads. Behaviorists, however, say that by the end of toddler-hood, children can solve practical everyday problems and represent their experiences in speech, gesture, and play. Piaget supports continuous development because he just does.
What are schemes? How do they change with age?
Schemes are organized ways of making sense of experience. Adaption and organization account for changes in schemes.
What is adaptation? What is the difference between assimilation and accommodation? Examples?
Adaption involves building schemes through different interaction with the environment.
Assimilation we use our current schemes to interpret the external world. (ex: when timmy dropped objects, he was assimilating them to his sensorimotor “dropping scheme.”
Accommodation= we create new schemes or adjust old ones after noticing that our current ways of thinking do not capture the environment completely. (ex: when timmy dropped his objects in different ways, he modified his dropping scheme to take account of the varied properties of objects).
What is equilibrium? Disequilibrium?
equilibrium= implying a steady comfortable condition.
Disequilibrium= cognitive discomfort.
What is object permanence? According to Piaget, when do children understand object permanence? Was he correct?
object permanence= the understanding that objects continue to exist when out of sight.
according to piaget, children understand object permanence when they are in substage 5 (12 to 18 months). i have no idea if he was correct, my textbook is vague and not straight forward.
Explain the steps of the violation of expectation method.
A method in which researchers show babies an expected event (one that follows physical laws) and an unexpected event (a variation of the first event that violates physical laws). Heightened attention to the unexpected event suggests that the infant is “surprised” by a deviation from physical reality and, therefore, is aware of that aspect of the physical world.
Some people have suggested that infants are born with core knowledge. What does this mean?
a perspective that states that infants are born with a set of innate knowledge systems , or core domains of thought, each of which permits a ready grasp of new, related information and therefore supports early, rapid development of certain aspects of cognition.
Describe the information processing view of cognitive development? How do attention, memory, and categorization change over time? What are scale errors?
Most researchers assume that we hold information in three parts of the mental system for processing: the sensory register; working, or short-term memory; and long-term memory.
Attention= As plans and activities become more complex, so does the duration of attention.
Memory= retention of visual events increases dramatically over infancy and toddler-hood.
Categorization= by 6 months of age they can categorize on the basis of two correlated features –> this ability to categorize using clusters of features prepares babies for acquiring many complex everyday categories.
scale errors= a serious attempt made by a child to perform a task that is patently impossible because of the extreme differences in the size of the objects involved. An example of this would be a child attempting to slide down a toy slide or attempting to enter and drive a miniature toy car.
What are the three main theories/perspectives of language development? Describe the main language development milestones through the two-word utterance point.
according to the behaviorist perspective, parents train children in language skills through operant conditioning and imitation.
Chomsky’s nativist view regards children as naturally endowed with a LAD (language acquisition device)
Recent theories suggest that language development results from interactions between inner capacities and environmental influences.
infants begin cooing at 2 months and babbling at about 6 months. At 10 to 11 months, their skill at establishing joint attention improves. In the second half of the first year, infants begin to understand word meanings. At the end of the first year, they use preverbal gestures, such as pointing , to influence other’s behavior. Around 12 months, toddlers say their first word. Young children often make errors of underextension and overextension. Rate of word learning increases steadily, and once vocabulary reaches about 200 words, two word utterances called telegraphic speech appear. At all ages, language comprehension is ahead of production.
describe the stages infant and toddlerhood (basic trust vs. mistrust; autonomy vs. shame and doubt), according to Erikson.
Warm, responsive caregiving leads infants to resolve the psychological conflict of basic trust and mistust on the positive side.During toddler-hood, autonomy versus shame and doubt is resolved favorably when parents provide appropriate guidance and reasonable choices.
Describe the basic emotions during infancy and toddlerhood. What is a social smile? When does it first happen? What is stranger anxiety? What are self-conscious emotions? What is emotional self-regulation? What is social referencing? Examples?
The social smile appears between 6 and 10 weeks.
Anger and fear, especially in the form of stranger anxiety,increase in the second half-year.
During toddler-hood, self awareness and adult instruction provide the foundation for self-conscious emotions.
emotional self regulation emerges as the frontal lobes of the cerebral cortex develop and as caregivers sensitively assist infants in adjusting their emotional reactions.
social referencing= as infants’ ability to detect the meaning of emotional expressions improves over the first year, social referencing appears; in uncertain situations, 8 to 10 month olds begin actively seeking emotional information from caregivers.
What is temperament? Describe the three types of temperament.
temperament= early-appearing, stable individual differences in reactivity (quickness and intensity of emotional arousal , attention, and motor activity) and self-regulation (strategies that modify that reactivity).
- easy child
- difficult child
- slow-to-warm-up child
Discuss evidence for the biological basis for temperament.
shyness
- Heart rate: from the first few weeks of life, the heart rates of shy children are consistently higher & speed up further in response to unfamiliar events
- Cortisol: saliva concentrations of the stress hormone tend to be higher, and to rise more in response to a stressful event
- Pupil dialation, blood pressure, and skin surface temperature: greater pupil dialation, rise in blood pressure, and cooling of the finger tips when faced with novelty.
- EEG brain-wave activity in the cerebral cortex: show greater generalized activation of the cerebral cortex, an indicator of high emotional arousal and monitoring of new situations for potential threats.
Is temperament stable? What does goodness-of-fit refer to?
stability of temperament is generally low to moderate.
goodness-of-fit= parenting practices that create a good fit with the child’s temperament help children achieve more adaptive functioning.
What is attachment?
the infant’s emotional tie to the caregiver as an evolved response that promotes survival.
