week 13 Flashcards
What is a category?
A set of entities that are equivalent in some way. Usually the items are similar to one another.
What is a concept?
The mental representation of a category.
What is typicality?
The difference in “goodness” of category members, ranging from the most typical (the prototype) to borderline members.
What is an examplar?
An example in memory that is labeled as being in a particular category.
Which term is probably the best synonym for the word “cognition” as it is used in a discussion of cognitive development?
Thinking
Owen is writing a paper about how the attitudes, values, and beliefs of culture influence development in children. What would be the best title for his essay?
“Child development according to Lev Vygotsky”
If you were taking part in a debate with another psychologist over the relative influences of nature and nurture on development, which position do you think you’d be most likely to take if you wanted to win the debate?
Nature and nurture interact to determine virtually every aspect of development.
The correct order of Piaget’s proposed stages of cognitive development is:
sensorimotor, preoperational reasoning, concrete operational reasoning, formal operational reasoning
What measure might a psychologist use to demonstrate that an infant does not know that his teddy bear still exists when it is removed from his field of vision?
an object permanence task
Adam, who is 4 years old, watches his mother pour a half full glass of juice into a taller, thinner glass. Adam’s eyes go wide as he says, “Mommy, you made more juice, like magic!” Adam is clearly in Piaget’s ______stage and is failing to understand the concept of conservation.
preoperational
With regard to the validity of Piaget’s theory of cognitive development, which criticism would be the most accurate?
Children’s cognitive development seems to be more continuous that Piaget proposed.
Which part of the brain, important in planning and flexible problem solving, continues to develop throughout adolescence?
the prefrontal cortex
Theory founded in large part by Lev Vygotsky that emphasizes how other people and the attitudes, values, and beliefs of the surrounding culture influence children’s development.
Sociocultural theories
Period within Piagetian theory from birth to age 2 years, during which children come to represent the enduring reality of objects.
Sensorimotor stage
Period within Piagetian theory from age 2 to 7 years, in which children can represent objects through drawing and language but cannot solve logical reasoning problems, such as the conservation problems.
Preoperational reasoning stage
Theory that development occurs through a sequence of discontinuous stages: the sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational stages.
Piaget’s theory
Awareness of the component sounds within words.
Phonemic awareness
Theories that focus on describing the cognitive processes that underlie thinking at any one age and cognitive growth over time.
Information processing theories
Piagetian stage starting at age 12 years and continuing for the rest of life, in which adolescents may gain the reasoning powers of educated adults.
Formal operations stage
Piagetian stage between ages 7 and 12 when children can think logically about concrete situations but not engage in systematic scientific reasoning.
Concrete operations stage
Children with ASD tend to show decreased attention to human faces by what age:
6-12 months
A characteristic that reflects a genetic liability for disease and a more basic component of a complex clinical presentation.
Endophenotypes
Measures the firing of groups of neurons in the cortex. As a person views or listens to specific types of information, neuronal activity creates small electrical currents that can be recorded from non-invasive sensors placed on the scalp.
Event-related potentials (ERP)
Entails the use of powerful magnets to measure the levels of oxygen within the brain that vary with changes in neural activity. That is, as the neurons in specific brain regions “work harder” when performing a specific task, they require more oxygen.
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)
