Midterm Flashcards
Piaget General assumptions: stage theory of development
-Cognition develops through a series of distinct stages- not gradual acquisition of knowledge.
-Qualitative (tadpole to frog) not quantitative (small tadpole to big tadpole)
-Stages are invariable (same for everyone-same order, no skipping), universally experienced, individual differences-children may go through stages at different speeds.
Piaget General assumptions: Domain-General
-All abilities are linked- contrasts with information-processing models
Piaget General Assumptions: Children as Active Agents
-Children constantly seek out stimulation in their environment, children are curious and responsible for their own development (as much responsible as parents)
Piaget General Assumptions: Constructivist approach
-Children discover/construct all knowledge of the world through their own actions- via interactions with the environment (build up-together experiences-tie together to create ability). Individual difference- you have different pieces to construct with depending on experience.
Assimilation
incorporation of new information into existing knowledge.
Specific→General (developing ideas): dopping a cup may have been accidental initially but babies learn that elicits a funny reaction from parent and starts dropping all kinds of objects (assimilation)
Accommodation
adjusting schemes to fit new information and experiences.
General→ Specific (updating ideas): baby though dropping bowl of food would be funny but parents got angry so baby learns not to drop food (accommodation)
Schemas
cogntivite structures that organize knowledge. Assimilation and accommodation happens continuously to build the most useful set of chemas for interaction with the world. Behavioural schemes characterize infancy and mental (cognitive) scheme develop in childhood.
Sensorimotor stage (0-2 years):
First stage, infants construct an understanding of the world by coordinating sensory experiences (e.g. hearing) with motoric actions. Inability to differentiate self from the world. 6 substages characterized by increased: intentionality, object knowledge, symbolic representation.
First month: limited to reflexes
Around 8 months see: first evidence of goal-directed behaviour, understanding cause and effect, and object permanence
Between 18-24 months see: new behaviours without trial and error, understand symbolic representation (cartoons now make sense), deferred imitation (6m-remerber 24h later; 14 months- remember 1 week later), shopping cart study- you differ from others
Object permeance
understanding that objects disappear when out of sight.
The A-not-B Error
occurs when infants make the mistake of selecting the familiar hiding place (A) to locate an object, rather than looking in the new hiding place (B), as they progress into substage 4 in piaget’s sensorimotor stage. 8-12 mo ths old- older= less likely to make error
Preoperational stage (2-7 years):
-Largely define by what the cold cannot do (operations)- difficulty mentally manipulating items they see in the real world.
-Children fail to understand: reversibility, and conservation
-Characterized by egocentrism: The inability to distinguish between one’s own and someone else’s perspective.
Egocentrism
The inability to distinguish between one’s own and someone else’s perspective.
Concrete operational stage (7-11 years):
Children can perform concrete operations and logical reasoning replaces intuitive reasoning as long as the reasoning can be applied to specific concrete examples. Ability to solve various conservation and reversibility taks- less influenced by outside appearance.
Formal operational stage (11-Adulthood):
Move beyond concrete experiences and think in more abstract and logical ways. Can reason abstractly (algebra),have heightened metacognition (ability to think about thinking- diary), and generate idea about things they have never before experienced-generate ideas not limited to real world (lofty ideas-idealism)
Limitations of Piaget’s Theory:
- underestimating children competence and some adults are less competent than he theorized
-vague processes
-Variation in performance not accounted for (think 7 vs 2 year old- in the same stage?)
-Undervalues influence of sociocultural environment on cognitive development- vygotsky)
Vygotsky-Intersubjectivity
Mutual shared understanding among participants in an activity. Learning happens through shared activities. 1st social- then internal: understand first by learning to interact then internalize
Vygotsky-Guided participation
Cognitive growth results from children’s involvement in structured activities with others who are more skilled than them.
Vygotsky-Zone of proximal development:
Difference between what a child can do alone and what they can do with the help of someone who is more capable. Best to teach within this zone.
Vygotsky-Scaffolding:
Experts who are sensitive to the abilities of the child respond cognitively to the child’s reactions in the learning situation- take baby steps
Information processing theory:
-Human cognition consists of mental hardware and software. Analogy to computers
Sensory Memory:
raw unanalyzed information is held (unlimited) very briefly- afterimage of hand). Attention filters what information to pass on to working memory(tells us what to process).
Working Memory:
Ongoing cognitive activity (RAM). Desktop of your brain- current cognitive processes, necessary for switching tasks
Long-term Memory:
Limitless, permanent store of knowledge. Similar experiences can update memories so not like a permanent video record of your experiences but rather a way to reactivate neural networks involved in the original encoding- merge similar info to just get highlights increasing efficiency. Recognition may be easier than retrieval with no cues.
Executive functioning:
inhibiting inappropriate behaviour; switching tasks; updating working memory contents. Develops most during childhood.
Improvement in executive function allows:
better use of strategies, faster processing, better attention, better inhibitory control, more cognitive flexibility
Children have limited used of attention strategies
difference is scanning patterns for differences between 5 and 8 year olds- more systemic as get older
Speed of processing:
young children require more time to complete cognitive tasks: speed increases with age. Speed increase due to increased myelination and synaptic pruning.
Attention changes with development
with age attention span (how long can pay attention) and selective attention (can ignore distractions) increases.
Inhibitory control
-Inhibition= ability to prevent a cognitive or behavioral response. Increases with age. Tasks such as day/night, simon says, and gift delay (marshmallow task) all assess inhibitory control.
Cognitive flexibility:
Ability to shift between sets of rules or tasks- shown on dimensional card sort task- red/blue sort then truck/circle- stuck on the first set of instructions. Children often preservate a single action. Wisconsin card sorting task.
Sensation
when information interacts with sensory receptors- the eyes, ears, tongue, nostril and skin.
Perception:
interpretation of what is sensed. Air waves interpreted as music
Visual preference method (preference paradigm)
method developed by Fantz to determine whether infants can distinguish one stimulus from another by measuring the length of time they attend to different stimuli. Infants 2 days old look longer at patterned stimuli such as faces and concentric circles. Infants 2-3 weeks old preferred to look at patterns- a face, a piece of printed matter or a bullseye.
infant vision and testing
Testing visual acuity using teller acuity cards and measuring looking time.
At birth visual acuity is about 30x worse than adult (20/240 vision)
Contrast sensitivity is also 20-25 times worse than adult- due to contrast and acuitity limitations, a baby at birth looks primarily at contour of face but by 2 months looks around more similar to adult. Newborns prefer high contrast. ALso have deficits in convergence, coordination and colour perception.
Habituation and dishabituation:
Habituation- decreased responsiveness to a stimulus after repeated presentation of the stimulus. Dishabituation is the recovery of a habituated response after a change in stimulation. Newborns can habituate to sights, sounds, smells or touches- changes in behaviour such as sucking, breathing, heart and looking time demonstrate habituation and dishabituation.
Externality effect
newborns focus on the outline and ignore the shape inside
Experience shapes perceptual processes:
At 3 months old- infants prefer their own race races (because they have predominantly been exposed to it- infants that see both white and black faces have no preference)- Brain wired to selective attendant to key thing in our environment.
Preference: which do you like better; ability to discriminate: can you tell the difference
Perceptual narrowing: at 3 months old- could discriminate caucasian, chinese, african and middle eastern faces; 6 months- chinese and caucasian (done in toronto lots of asian faces also); 9 months could only discriminate caucasian faces- descriminante only the race w/in their environment (perception fined tuned to environment)- same with monkeys
Also for hearing-Phonemic discrimination: 1 and 4 month olds can discrimination between ba and pa (measured with changes in sucking)
Operant conditioning
BEST MEASURE OF PREFERENCE
Cannot fully discern preference from looking time- may be impacted by other factors- behavior tells us real preference.
Yong infants: compare amount of behaviour 1 vs 2 to measure preference- eg looking times to measure auditory preference- look R to play one song L for the other-look the direction for the song they want tp play. Conditioned head turning
Auditory development: language
Infants demonstrate- preference for midfrequncy tones (human speech) and prefer high frequency (motherese). Prefer forwards vs backwards played speech (know how it should shond). Categorical perception of phenomes- get worse at differentiating phenomes not in language.
Auditory development: Music
Early perceptual biases: natural pasues in music 9at end of sentence)-4-6 months, Consonant over dissonant tones.
Perceptual tuning (9-12 months): prefer own muscle scale and rhythms
Controlled sucking behaviour:
train babies to suck- baseline introduce new stimuli- sucking increases then habituate and it decreases, new again increases again switch between increasing and decreasing sucking- infants learn to alter sucking behaviour to control what plays- shows preference.
-infants listen longer to mothers voice over stranger, listen longer to familiar story- rember rhythm vs new story.
Intersensory redundancy:
Infants’ perceptual system is particularly attuned to amodal (not belonging to a single sensory mode) information presented to multiple sensory modes
Synesthesia- amodal perception in adulthood- perhaps present in infancy but never pruned- heat voice see color- usually very consistent.
Innate or learned- colour with emotion, expressions like feel blue
Infant synesthesia- sight and touch- infants looked longer at pacifier that matched the tactile sensation of what they were sucking
Emotional expression: redundancy
-Infants (4,5,7 months) watch videos of emotional portrayal (both audio and visual)- infants habituate- then present a different emotion- audio and visual, video only or audio only. 4 months old could discriminante emoths with both visual and auditory (need redundancy), 5 month old could discriminate with just audio and 7 month olds could discriminante with just visual. Bue even as adults redundancy helps- eg masks and hearing loss
Attention:
-Process that allows people to control input from the environment and regulate behaviour.
Attentional networks
-Alering network: keeps attentional process prepared, ready to detect and respond to stimuli
-Orienting network: selects which stimuli will be processed further
-Executive network: monitoring thoughts, feelings, behaviour (most complex, develops slowly)- modify behaviour based on stimuli
ADHD:
3-7% school-aged children- 4:1 boys (genetic). Inattention: unable to stay on task, difficulty maintaining prolonged attention. Hyperactivity and impulsivity to varying degrees- depends on individual
Infant brain is prepared to learn:
Visual acuity, Preference for face-like stimuli
-preference of patients after treatment (1-12 months old) matched newborn preference- show that the brain is ready to support once vision is available.
Acuity measured with teller cards after treatment improved after just 1 hour of seeing and improved even more 1 months later (more so so aged-matched normals). Infant brain was waiting for experience- experience expectant: expect visual input-get it-triggers neural development
Gene x Environment-Experience-Expectant processes
brain was waiting for visual input to set up neural architecture for visual perception- even without brain was set up t prefer some patterns and ready- soon as 1h after- same as newborns
Gene x Environment-Experience-Dependent processes:
brain specializes in processing information that is in the environment (race or face, human/monkey faces, phonemes in language, mom’s smell).
Face perception in Monkeys reared with no exposure to faces
-Raised in visually rich but no faces- following deprivation exposed to human or monkey faces for 1 month: experience expectant: even during deprivation monkeys preferred faces to objects. Experience dependent: after 1 month selective exposure monkeys preferred the species face they saw. These preferences persisted a year later after the deprivation period, effects were the same regardless of length of deprivation(6 vs 24 months)