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Child Development > Physical World > Flashcards

Physical World Flashcards

1
Q

Who is Jean Piaget?

A
  • father of field of cognitive development
  • in 1920, worked a at the Binet Institute on intelligence tests
  • he was intrigued by children’s wrong answers
  • proposed that children’s thinking is qualitatively different from adults’ thinking and cognition grows and develops through a series of stages
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2
Q

What are the stages in Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development?

A
  • sensorimotor stage
  • pre operational stage
  • concrete operational stage
  • formal operational stage
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3
Q

What are the properties of Piaget’s theory?

A
  • children at different stages think in qualitatively different ways
  • thinking at each stage influences thinking across diverse topics
  • brief transitional period at the end of each stage (showing both stages)
  • the stages are universal (not culture dependent) and the order is always the same
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4
Q

What is the sensorimotor stage?

A
  • birth to 2 years
  • infants live in the here and now
  • gain knowledge about the world through movements and sensations
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5
Q

What happens from 0 - 4 months according to Piaget?

A
  • interact with world via reflexes and repeat pleasurable actions
  • indicates interest in own bodies
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6
Q

What happens from 4 - 8 months according to Piaget?

A
  • repeat actions towards objects to produce a desired outcome
  • indicates interest in the world, beyond own body
  • allows for formation of connections between own actions and consequences in the world
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7
Q

What happens from 8 - 12 months according to Piaget?

A
  • combine several actions to achieve a goal
  • indicates that actions are clearly intentional
  • emergence of object permanence
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8
Q

What is object permanence?

A
  • understanding that objects continue to exist even through they can no longer be seen or heard
  • develops around 8 months
  • tested by seeing how a baby reacts to an object being hidden
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9
Q

What is an A-not-B error?

A
  • tendency to reach for a hidden object where it was last found rather than in the new location where it was last hidden
  • evidence that initial object permanence is fragile
  • disappears around 12 months
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10
Q

What happens from 12 - 18 months according to Piaget?

A
  • trial and error experiments to see how outcome changes
  • allows for greater understanding of cause and effect relations
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11
Q

What happens from 18 - 24 months according to Piaget?

A
  • mental representation
  • fully developed object permanence
  • indicated by deferred imitation
  • allows for symbolic thoughts
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12
Q

What is the pre operational stage?

A
  • from ages 2 - 7
  • symbolic thought
  • egocentrism
  • centration
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13
Q

What is symbolic thought?

A
  • the ability to think about objects or events that are not within the immediate environment
  • enables language acquisition
  • ability to use symbolic representation
  • ability to engage in pretend play and drawing
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14
Q

What is egocentrism?

A
  • perceiving the world solely from one’s own point of view
  • difficulty taking another person’s spatial perspective
  • egocentric speech
  • sign of progress is an increase in children’s verbal arguments; means that child is at least paying attention to another perspective
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15
Q

What is centration?

A
  • tendency to focus on a single, perceptually striking feature of an object or event to the exclusion of other relevant features
  • difficulties with conservation concept; merely changing the appearance of an object does not change the objects’ other key properties
  • failure of conservation tasks
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16
Q

What is the concrete operational stage?

A
  • 7 - 12 years
  • less egocentric so can think about others’ perspective
  • can reason logically about concrete objects and events
  • decentration
  • reversibility
  • seriation
  • cannot think in purely abstract/hypothetical terms
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17
Q

What is decentration?

A
  • understanding that something can stay the same in quantity even though it looks different
18
Q

What is reversibility?

A
  • the capacity to think through a series of steps and then mentally reverse direction, returning to the starting point
19
Q

What is seriation?

A
  • the ability to order items along a quantitative dimension such as length or weight
20
Q

What is the formal operational stage?

A
  • 12 years and up
  • can think abstractly
  • allows them to be interested in politics, ethics, science fiction, and to reason scientifically
  • ability to engage deductive reasoning
  • not universal (not all adolescents or adults reach it)
21
Q

What is Piaget’s pendulum problem?

A
  • test of deductive reasoning
  • determine the influence of weight and string length on the time it takes for the pendulum to swing back and forth
  • unbiassed experiments require varying only one variable at a time
  • children under 12 perform unsystematic experiments and draw incorrect conclusions
22
Q

How did Piaget think children learn?

A
  • children’s progress through the stages is governed by brain maturation as well as exposure to certain concepts
  • children actively shape their knowledge of the world; not passive
  • children are capable of learning on their own
  • children are intrinsically motivated to learn; don’t require rewards
23
Q

What are the strengths of Piaget’s theory?

A
  • intuitively plausible depiction of children’s nature as active learners and how learning progresses
  • provides a good overview of children’s thinking at different ages that is largely accurate
  • exceptional breadth
  • spans the lifespan
  • examines many cognitive operations and concepts
24
Q

How do kids learn best?

A
  • by interacting with the environment
  • hands on learning
  • experiments
25
Q

What are the weaknesses of Piaget’s theory?

A
  • Piaget didn’t use scientific method to develop theory
  • theory depicts children’s thinking as more consistent than it is
  • theory is vague about the mechanisms of cognitive growth
  • children are more cognitively competent than Piaget recognized
  • theory underestimates the contribution of the social world to cognitive development
26
Q

What is the nativist view of cognitive development?

A
  • children have innate, specialized cognitive mechanisms that provide them with basic knowledge in domains of evolutionary importance
  • these cognitive mechanisms also allow children to rapidly acquire additional knowledge in these important domains
27
Q

What are the domains of evolutionary importance?

A
  • understanding of physical laws
  • numbers
  • categorization
  • understanding the minds of people
  • language
28
Q

What is understanding physical laws?

A
  • have object permanence
  • understand that solid objects can’t go through another solid object
  • understanding of gravity
29
Q

When does object permanence develop according to nativists?

A
  • before 8 months, as young as 3.5 months
  • when lights are turned off, reach for object
  • evidence for earlier object permanence
  • Piaget’s test too complex, haven’t developed motor capacity to search
  • use violation of expectation paradigm; drawbridge study
  • innate understanding of physical properties of solid objects
30
Q

What is the violation of expectation paradigm?

A
  • adaption of habituation paradigm to study infant cognition
  • infants are habituated to an event
  • test: presented with possible and impossible event that are variations on the habituation event
  • longer looking at the impossible event indicates that the infant possesses the knowledge being studied
31
Q

Can infants understand gravity?

A
  • 3 month olds do
  • suggest innate, rudimentary understanding of gravity
32
Q

What is understanding numbers?

A
  • 6 months: detect difference in numbers in 2:1 ratio
  • 9 months: discriminate displays in a 3:2 ratio
  • since infants haven’t learned to count, suggests they have an innate approximate number sense (ANS)
33
Q

What is ANS?

A
  • approximate number sense
  • cognitive system that allows infants to intuitively estimate numbers and magnitudes
34
Q

What is the relationship between ANS and math ability?

A
  • positive correlation between infant ANS and preschool math ability
  • suggests that ANS lays the foundation for later math ability
35
Q

What is categorization?

A
  • categorization begins in infancy
  • 3 months: cat vs dog
  • 6 months: mammal or not
  • 9 months: 3 broad categories
36
Q

What are the 3 broad categories 9 month olds use?

A
  • people
  • animals
  • inanimate objects
37
Q

Why is categorization important?

A
  • helps make sense of the world by simplifying it
  • allows children to make inferences and predictions about objects of the same category
38
Q

What do infants concentrate on when forming categories?

A
  • infants focus on similarities in shape when forming categories
  • focus on similarities in shape results in difficulties understanding exceptions
39
Q

How do children categorize objects beyond infancy (after a year)?

A
  • by 2-3 years, children start to form category hierarchies
40
Q

What are category hierarchies?

A
  • organize object categories by set-subset relations
  • allows for finer distinctions among objects within each level
  • usually learn basic level first, because they have obvious similarities
41
Q

What are the 3 levels in object categorization?

A
  • superordinate: too general, less similar
  • basic: general
  • subordinate: too specific, too similar
42
Q

What are criticisms of the nativist view?

A
  • over estimate infants’ innate, cognitive understanding
  • findings of nativist studies can instead be explained by:
  • perceptual features of stimuli: look longer because more interesting and not because they understand the concept
  • learning from the environment: 3 months old are not newborns, have learned a lot about the world

Child Development (12 decks)

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