unit 2 Flashcards

Question

Perspective taking

Answer 1

o Example of a domain where Piaget underestimate the capabilities of young children o Perspective taking – understanding what another person sees, thinks, knows, feels, etc.  Egocentrism – lack of differentiation between own and others’ perspectives  Why should we care: enables children to communicate and influence others and overall important for social interactions

Answer 2

 Piaget’s “three mountain task” used to measure visual perspective taking * He believes children are egocentric until 7 years o However, might have difficulty to remember what it looked like/ spatial skills which is a hard task  If you make the task easier they do much better at a much younger age

Answer 3

* Level 1 visual perspective-taking o Age 2/3 o Knowledge of what another person sees vs. doesn’t see (e.g., “block task”) o Knowns that to see an object, a person must have an eye open that is aimed at object with no obstacles; what child sees is irrelevant for what other sees o Enables percept production (showing an object to another), percept deprivation (hide an object), and percept diagnosis (figuring out what somebody else sees) o But assumes that if 2 people can see the same object, it looks the same to them

Answer 4

o Age 4 or 5 o Self and other can see the same object but have it look different to each because of differing positions (e.g. turtle)  2 yr old would say they both see it on it’s back since that’s the way they’re facing but at age 4 they will say they see it upside-down

Answer 5

understanding what other people know/think o False belief task (pass at 4/5): can child know that someone has different belief that is false or different then they’re own  3 year old fails it by thinking that they know the truth and so can’t believe that someone has a different belief  Common development may explain why the can do both visual perspective taking and conceptual perspective-taking around the same time - What’s changing is that they’re developing “theory of mind” o Child moves from thinking the mind has direct access to “the truth” (passively copies reality) to realizing that the mind interprets (mentally represents) the world

Answer 6

o Appearance: what does it look like? A sponge or a rock o Reality: what is it really? A sponge or a rock  3 year old will fail by giving the same answer both questions: unable to separate the difference  4/5 will say it looks like a rock but is truly a sponge, able to determine between appearance and reality  Also typically “passed” by age 4-5 years

Answer 7

o Understanding cause and effect allows child to understand the world – predict future, have control by initiating causes that will bring about desired effects o Understanding causality represents an end-point in development –adults have “naïve theories” of causality  Don’t think about rules that we uses for causality  Adult Naïve theories examples * Definitional principles o Priority: causes come before effects  Always true * Rules of thumb  Can violate but often true o Temporal contiguity: causes and effects tend to happen close together in time o Spatial contiguity: causes and effects tend to come close together in space

Answer 8

 Piaget: children are pre-causal until 7/8 * Had children explain natural and mechanical phenomena: why do clouds move, why do boats float, how does an engine work o Errors they’d make:  Animism: endowing inanimate objects with animate properties * Ex. Why do clouds move? Because they want to * Indifferent to temporal sequence: put the effect before the cause * Piaget’s questions were too hard, and asking them to explain something and they may not have the words to explain it, the way question is asked also impacted answer o Why do clouds move = animism o What makes clouds move = no animism  More recent evidence (preschoolers) * Definitional principle o Priprity principle (passed by age 3) * If you make the class less verbal, and more similar they can do it o Shows priority principle * Rule of thumb o Spatial contiguity (passed by age 4)  2 balls go down at the same time and the ball closest to jake in the box made it pop up  Makes sense that this is later because it’s not always consistent o Temporal contiguity (passed by age 4)  Ball on left then ball on right then jack in the box  Uses temporal contiguity and the second ball happened closer in time * Priority vs. Spatial contiguity o Should go with priority principle since it’s always true o Ball goes down on left, jack pops up on right, ball goes down on right  Spatial would say to pick right, but priority would say left  4 year olds say ball on left: priority principle

Answer 9

o One-to-one principle: one distinctive number, and only one, number name to each object o Stable-order principle: use number names in same order each time o Cardinal principle: last number name you use, tells you how many of them there are o Abstraction principle: anything can be counted o Order-irrelevance principle: it doesn’t matter in which order the objects are counted

Answer 10

knowing what transformations do or do not change the number of object (ex. Changing color vs. add or subtracting one)

Answer 11

: If engaging and with less numbers the children do better  Ask which is the winner? They’ll pick the one with 3 mice, then they take out the middle one and ask which is the winner and they become confused so they didn’t pick it based on how long the row is so it must be that they were going off of the number there was * as early as 3 years old * not fueled because we brought down the numbers, made it more engaging, and asking who the winner is o can infants detect numerosity?  3 vs. 2 objects: use habituation-dishabituation – start with 3 objects till they’re habituated (different objects but always 3), now you present 2 objects and they dishabituate * 6th to 8th month olds can tell the difference  Intermodal perception * Matching number across sight and sound (6-8 month olds) o Shown two screens, one with 2 and one with 3 with eh same objects and hear a drum beat when it comes on speaker (either 2 or 3). After a number of trials they look at the screen who’s number matches the number of drum beats  Another example of intermodal perception * Visual

Answer 12

- Children show increase in domain-specific knowledge (expertise) o Shift from Novice -> expert - Effects on memory o Expertise allows information to be organized, reducing number of items to be remembered  Study by Chi – study of chess expert: told them to remember where the chess pieces were and put them back * 10 year olds did better than the adults since they remembered configurations instead of every piece so could clump the pieces together o When randomly placed on the board they didn’t do better, only when it was a meaningful placement o Connections among concepts in domain of expertise can also aid memory – one item triggers others (dinosaur expert example) interconnected

Answer 13

- Planning: increase - Noticing similarities to other problems: effective in planning - Allows some problems to be solved almost automatically, freeing up mental capacity and allowing for deeper, more complex thinking; allows for more effective metacognition (thinking about thinking) - May promote higher levels of reasoning than Piaget would expect o Another study by chi found that nonexperts would focus on irrelevant features while the expert would focus on more relevant features and more importantly reason correctly about the dinosaur  Scientific reasoning is not supposed to come in formal operational stage according to Piaget but they are doing it earlier in their area of expertise - In other words, experts look very cognitively mature when functioning in their domain expertise - Adults usually have more expertise: children as “universal novices” (but not always) - Is development qualitative or quantitative? (discontinuous/stage-like vs. continuous) o Might explain why child does better when the task is child friendly - “stages” may simply be useful short-hand descriptions of what child tend to be like at varias ages rather than representing truly abrupt, qualitative, general shifts o Scientists tend to believe that it’s more continuous

Answer 14

 Lack of intentional communication  But infant plays active role in communication * Haith study: really little babies. Had faces: Still, Moving side to side and Talking o older babies looked at faces more: focus o oldest group focused on the eyes, the younger group focused on the edges of the face o when face talked, babies looked more at the eyes: recognizing eyes have communicative value  when they make eye contact, it makes the speaker talk to them more which is important for learning language  babies start to coo (around 2 months) * no evidence of talk, just making noises

Answer 15

 Babbling (vowel and consent sounds together) which leads to first word  Intentional communication (gestures, sounds)  Follow another person’s attention * Pointing * Baldwin study: figure out what someone is attending too to learn a new word o Follow-in labeling condition: look at the one child is holding and label it  Following child’s attention o Discrepant labeling condition: adult looks down in the bucket and says what the child is holding  If they assume whatever the child is holding is what they’re saying then first one, if they assume what the adult is looking at then * Second one where they assumed what the adult was looking at was the object  Language comprehension: child starts to understand words * Test kids by saying objects name etc, * Around 10 months is when you see language comprehension before speaking

Answer 16

 Language comprehension improves dramatically  Progress in language production (but slower) * Comprehension precedes production (400 word vocabulary)

Answer 17

 Language production improves dramatically (vocab spurt)  2-5 word sentences: learning grammar for the first time (50-200 words) * Vocabulary also doubles * Toddler learning 30 words a day

Answer 18

 Skinner – behaviorist view (nurture) * Language is learned just like any other behavior (modeling, reinforcement) child passive o Argue you can start teaching language in prenatal development: prenatal university  No research supporting it

Answer 19

 Chomsky – nativist view (nature) * Environment doesn’t give enough support for rapid language development so instead humans are born to learn language o All have a language acquisition device (LAD) that allows us to acquire language with minimal imput  If you look beneath the surface all languages have the same component: Deep structure (lang. universal) vs. object words and word order: surface structure

Answer 20

o No role: not true because we learn languages depending on where we grow up o Mere exposure? No because Dutch children grow up watching German television but if that’s their only exposure to German then they don’t learn German  Need active conversation and involvement  Sesame street has higher vocabulary, cartoons don’t because sesame street engages the children and causes active conversation o Imitation? Yes and no because it can help language development, but it may not be as important as you might think  Yes: amount of parental speech to children correlates positively with child vocabulary size * young children DO imitate language and some use imitation as a strategy for vocabulary development (masur study) o more they imitated, the larger their vocabulary was later on * but  no: comprehension precedes production: kids are able to understand language before they can speak it and there’s nothing that you’re imitating with comprehension * so, can’t explain pattern  much grammatical learning goes on without imitation: children produce a lot of non-imitative utterances; will often imitate a grammatical structure only after they have already learned how to produce it * young child not using am___ verb forms and if you ask them to imitate they’ll say I go instead of I am going o translating them into the word form they already use o reinforcement? Yes and no  no: parents tend to reinforce for “truth value” and ignore grammar * reinforce if what they said is true, not necessarily the grammar o but  yes: recasts/expansions (parent reforms sentence and expands upon it to make it more grammatically correct – when what child said is grammatically wrong or incomplete) vs exact repetition (parent mimics what child said - form of positive enforcement and usual happens when what the child said is correct) o other environment assistance  motherese: slower tempo, higher pitched, and more variation in pitch (sing song) * parentese: because a lot of people can do it but formally called infant directed speech * grabs their attention, slower so helps them hear the individual words and related to advanced language development

Answer 21

o specialized brain regions for processing language (left side of brain) o babbling (vocal – in deaf babies) at the same age (6 months) and this is biological because even deaf babies do it at that age o sensitive period for language acquisition most likely tied to brain plasticity (up through early adolescence)  case of Genie: rescued at 13 because was locked in the closet most of the time and so didn’t have any language exposure and yet by age 17 she still had not fully grasped syntax and grammar and so missed being exposed to language during that sensitive period  Newport studies: ASL 2nd language learning – deaf children learning American sign language of two groups who were taught asl from birth and those who had hearing parents and didn’t learn ASL till later and so the first group of kids mastered ASL to a greater extent because the second group didn’t get any language for the first few years of life * Later you learn a language the less likely you are to be completely fluent o Accent, not as good grammar o Categorical perception  Adults hear certain speech sounds as if they fall into two distinct categories (i.e., categorically) even though they actually fall along a continuum (e.g, “pa” vs. “ba”) * Fall along a continuum because it’s the time between vocal cord vibration burst of air o Hear it as two distinct categories it’s a Pa until it’s a ba  Eimas Study * habituation dishabituation paradigm and presented sounds ot them o Within-category shift habituated to 0/20 (B/B), Tested for dishabituation with 40/60 (p/p) o between-category shift 20/40 (B/P)  do they dishabituate? Expect to see dishabituation o control 20/20 (B) and 40/40 (p) * found that only when sounds shifted from B/P did they notice dishabituation so they’re just like adults o this is important because if cild could hear all of them how would they know the difference between pat and bat for instance  babies focus on relevant differences and not focus on irrelevant differences * from birth so biological o babies born with ability to perceive sound distinctions used in any language  babies can hear a distinction between any two sounds in any language in the world but as adults we lose the distinction to hear it in different languages  Werker study (R vs. L native Japanese speakers): can’t tell the difference between r and l in Japanese adults but babies can * Come prepared to learn any language and the distinctions between them but lose the ability once we learn to speak to help us focus on the language we are being exposed too o Role of other child predisposition/capabilities (not necessarily “biological”_  General cognitive abilities * Symbolic thought * Object permanence * Evidence from morpheme acquisition: word endings that modify the meaning o E.g. “_ed” vs. “was _ing” (role of cognitive complexity)  Master the first version earlier then the second version because the second one is more complex suggesting general cognitive abilities impact language learning  Biases that aid in word learning * Assumption of taxonomic organization: new words tend to refer to object categories not to the specific object, property of the object, one of it’s parts or it’s relation to other things * Mutual exclusivity bias: objects have one name o Assume new word applies to new object and not the object they already know  Child as a rule learner