Exam 2 Flashcards
What are Jean Piaget’s 4 stages?
Sensory motor
Preoperational
Concrete Operational
Formal Operational
Explain the Sensorimotor Stage proposed by piaget:
Timeframe: birth to 2 years
Huge variety of new sensory experiences
Core facets of intelligence expressed through experimentation with developing motor faculties
Examples: Tracking objects visually, Grasping objects with near hands, placing objects in mouth, turning head towards sound.
Piaget Suggests that infants cognitive deficits are mostly do to object permanence.
Explain the Preoperational Stage proposed by Piaget:
Timeframe: 2-7 years
This is where kids start to develop imagination.
Interaction with worl not limited to physical movements. (Developement of symbolic representations)
In this stage, they focus on a single feature among many when making decisions about objects (like thinking that the taller glass has more water when the shorter glass is fatter.
A notable deficit here is that they have difficulty in perceiving the world from another’s point of view. ( video of the kid saying what he sees on the hill thing)
Explain the Concrete Operational stage:
Timeframe: 7 years and 12 years old
here they start to be able to consider multiple dimensions/ point of views.
Difficulty with abstract reasoning and hypotheticals
Explain the Formal operational stage:
Timeframe: 12 years to an undertermined age
this is where they are able to think abstractly and reason hypothetically
what are some Caveats to Piaget?
- Children’s mental stratagies do not generalize across problem types within a given stage
- Infants struggles with object permanence may be overstated by measurment technique
- Underestimates impact of the social world
- Doesn’t explain the underlying cognitive processes or mechanisms of change.
Infants as little as three months old will still look at the object under the towel.
a lot of things are also teachable and probably not a mental deficit, would just need to be experienced.
One really good thing that Piaget is good at is describing what things look like
Explain information Processing
Child has a limited-capacity processing system
- Multiple memory systems subserved by multiple disparate regions of the brain
- Working Memory
- Severe capacity limit—- give or take 3 to 4 items
10-12 years olds tend to struggle lots with working memory
what are some sources of variability in information processing?
Ecoding & retrieval
strategy use
speed of processing
selective attention
content knowledge
Explain Core Knowledge:
” Children must have specialized language learning mechanisms to grasp the immense syntactic complexity of language”
through evolution our brains are made for learning (natural selection for adaptable brains, Hard-wiring behaviour = no variability based on human universals of experience)
children learn language incredibly quick
Explain Dynamic Systems:
Developement does not occur in a bubble
each developmental changes impact the way a child interfaces with their own environment
Crucial to consider with the acquisition of new skills in development
what is the Nativist view on Nature and Nurture?
Experience allows us to grow our knowledge
Nature:
Children are born with innate knowledge
-Grammar, objects, time & spase, causality, number & the human mind (basic things the brain can do)
Children have specialized learning mechinisms to acquire this knowledge
Nurture:
Experiences shape knowledge beyond the initial level that all children are born with (but initial knowledge is present at birth)
What is the Empiricist View
We need to experience things to acquire knowledge.
Nature:
Children are born with general learning machanisms to acquire knowledge ( ability to perceive, make associations between objects, generalize, remember
Nurture:
Exposure to different experiences results in knowledge about various topics. (grammar, time & space, causality, number & the human mind)
Perceptual categorization:
grouping objects with similar appearance
by 3-4 months, infants categorize along numerous dimensions (color, shape, size, movement)
May also categorize based on the prominent feature or function (presence or absence of legs)
Explain Categorical Hierarchies:
Children use cause and effect to make categories of things.
what helps children aged 4-5 years old to identify wugs?
if you told them what their features were for
explain Naive psychology:
an understanding of other people & oneself
major developments in infancy: joint attention, intentionality, understanding others emotions
what is the nativist view of naive psychology?
children born with intrinsic understanding of human psychology
what is the empiricist view of Naive Psychology?
experiences with other people & processing capacities influence how we understand others’ actions
At what age can a child connect beliefs and action? but yet still struggle with false-belief problems?
by three years and continues to improve up to 5 years of age
what is the Nativist view of theory of mind?
theory of mind module develops in 1st 5 years
- Amygdala, brainstem atypical in Autism
what is the Empiricist view of Theory of Mind?
More interaction & experience with other
- children with siblings develop ToM earlier
- particularly if older siblings of opposit sex
Increased general processing skills
- Improved complex reasoning
- Ability to inhibit one’s own reactions
what percentage of children report having an imaginary friend?
63% of children report imaginary friend at 3-4 years, 7-8 years, or both
-30% of children 3-7 years
what are some characteristics of kids with imaginary friends?
More likely to be the first born or only-child
watch relitively little tv
Verbally skillful
Advanced Theory of Mind
explain egocentric representations:
Coding of object location relative to self without regard to surroundings
Self-locomotion improves understanding of space beyond one’s self
Use of landmarks helps navigating through space
-development of spatial skills depends on cultural importance
By what age do infants gain the ability to replicate the other of events shown in a series of two pictures?
12 months
what age can infants replicate the order of events shown in a series of three pictures?
20 months
what memory systems come online first in children?
Implicit and Procedural
sense of duration starts at about what age ?
4 months
how did the study the sense of duration in infants?
through observing their change in heartrate.
Their heartrate goes up just before the light goes off as if they are predicting that the light will shut
What kind of sense of duration can preschoolers discriminate from?
weeks / months
precision with time discrimination continues to develop into middle childhood
when do kids develop the ability to understand and think of past and future ?
by the age of 6, by this time passage of time almost adult like
- likely related to class experience
what do children rely on to understand why physical and psychological events occur?
causality, children and adults have better understanding of psychological than physical causality: we can tell you why someone would change the channel better than we can describe how the remote works.
would a child have better recall for events with a causal relationship or a non-causal relationship?
causal, we are more interested in things that have an actual cause
when do magi tricks become interesting for kids?
at about 5 years old
preschoolers expect ______ in cause-effect relationship.
consistency
understanding of numeracy happens at what age?
trick question, it varies across culture and language.
wha is working memory’s capacity limit for infants about 5-6 months?
1-3 items
if the numbers are large, young infants (6 months) can discriminate between what?
between sets of numbers with a 2:1 ratio, more precise with age. Numeracy for large numbers develops earlier than for small numbers
by three years old, how high can most children count to?
10
1-to-1 correspondence:
each object can only have a single nubered label
Stable order:
recited in same order (numbers go from 1-10)
Cardinality:
number= last of the set
Order irrelevance
“you’ll have the same number of objects, no matter what order you count them in”
Abstraction:
anything can be counted
which culture would have a difference in the rate at which children can learn?
china, their numbers are quicker to say therefore easier for a child to remember
what is general intelligience?
Aspect of intelligence that is tapped into whenever intelligence is measured.
Influences ability to think & learn
Correlated with :
- Academic performance
- Speed of processing
- Speed of brain functions
- Brain volume
