week 13 - cognitive development

Question 1

learning goal - understand the problems with attempting to define categories

Answer 1

Defining categories isn’t always easy because objects in categories are often diverse, often objects have many categories to which they belong to. Ex. a brown bear can belong to the ‘animal’ and ‘mammal’ categories at the same time.

Question 2

learning goal - understand typicality and fuzzy category boundaries

Answer 2

Typicality - the finding that people are quicker to make category judgments about typical members of a category than they are to make such judgments about atypical members. For example, they are more quickly able to judge that a dog is a mammal than they are able to judge that a whale is a mammal.
Fuzzy category boundaries - McCloskey and Glucksberg (1978) found further evidence for borderline membership by asking people to judge category membership twice, separated by two weeks. They found that when people made repeated category judgments such as “Is an olive a fruit?” or “Is a sponge a kitchen utensil?” they changed their minds about borderline items—up to 22 percent of the time. So, not only do people disagree with one another about borderline items, they disagree with themselves! As a result, researchers often say that categories are fuzzy, that is, they have unclear boundaries that can shift over time.

Question 3

basic level category

Answer 3

Basic-level category - The neutral, preferred category for a given object, at an intermediate level of specificity.

Question 4

borderline members

Answer 4

Borderline members - members of a category that are just included or barely excluded from a group, such as seaweed/avocados from the vegetable category. This leads to categories being kind of ‘fuzzy’ in terms of being able to have strict boundaries that don’t shift overtime.

Question 5

category

Answer 5

Category - A set of entities that are equivalent in some way. Usually the items are similar to one another. Traditionally, it has been assumed that categories are well-defined. This means that you can give a definition that specifies what is in and out of the category. Such a definition has two parts. First, it provides the necessary features for category membership: What must objects have in order to be in it? Second, those features must be jointly sufficient for membership: If an object has those features, then it is in the category.

Question 6

concept

Answer 6

Concept - The mental representation of a category. Concepts allow you to extend what you have learned about a limited number of objects to a potentially infinite set of entities.

Question 7

exemplar

Answer 7

Exemplar - An example in memory that is labelled as being in a particular category.

Question 8

psychological essentialism

Answer 8

Psychological essentialism - The belief that members of a category have an unseen property that causes them to be in the category and to have the properties associated with it.

Question 9

typicality

Answer 9

Typicality - The difference in “goodness” of category members, ranging from the most typical (the prototype) to borderline members.

Question 10

family resemblance theory

Answer 10

Family resemblance theory - items are likely to be typical if they (a) have the features that are frequent in the category and (b) do not have features frequent in other categories.

Question 11

hierarchies

Answer 11

Hierarchies, in which more concrete categories are nested inside larger, abstract categories. For example, consider the categories: brown bear, bear, mammal, vertebrate, animal, entity.

Question 12

exemplar theory

Answer 12

Exemplar theory (exemplar being a fancy name for an example; Medin & Schaffer, 1978). This theory denies that there is a summary representation. Instead, the theory claims that your concept of vegetables is remembered as examples of vegetables you have seen.

Question 13

signs of essentialism

Answer 13

Signs of essentialism include (a) objects are believed to be either in or out of the category, with no in-between; (b) resistance to change of category membership or of properties connected to the essence; and (c) for living things, the essence is passed on to progeny. Essentialism is probably helpful in dealing with much of the natural world, but it may be less helpful when it is applied to humans. Considerable evidence suggests that people think of gender, racial, and ethnic groups as having essences, which serves to emphasize the difference between groups and even justify discrimination.

Question 14

Be able to identify and describe the main areas of cognitive development.

Answer 14

Cognitive development refers to the development of thinking across the lifespan.
Thinking obviously involves the higher mental processes: problem solving, reasoning, creating, conceptualising, categorising, remembering, planning, and so on.

Question 15

Be able to describe major theories of cognitive development and what distinguishes them.

Answer 15

Piaget’s stage theory focuses on whether children progress through qualitatively different stages of development.
Sociocultural theories, such as that of Lev Vygotsky, emphasise how other people and the attitudes, values, and beliefs of the surrounding culture, influence children’s development.
Information processing theories, such as that of David Klahr, examine the mental processes that produce thinking at any one time and the transition processes that lead to growth in that thinking.

Question 16

chutes and ladders

Answer 16

Chutes and Ladders - A numerical board game that seems to be useful for building numerical knowledge.

Question 17

concrete operations stage

Answer 17

Concrete operations stage - Piagetian stage between ages 7 and 12 when children can think logically about concrete situations but not engage in systematic scientific reasoning.

Question 18

conservation problems

Answer 18

Conservation problems - Problems pioneered by Piaget in which physical transformation of an object or set of objects changes a perceptually salient dimension but not the quantity that is being asked about.

Question 19

continuous development

Answer 19

Continuous development - Ways in which development occurs in a gradual incremental manner, rather than through sudden jumps.

Question 20

depth perception

Answer 20

Depth perception - The ability to actively perceive the distance from oneself of objects in the environment.

Question 21

discontinuous development

Answer 21

Discontinuous development - Development that does not occur in a gradual incremental manner.

Question 22

formal operations stage

Answer 22

Formal operations stage - 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.

Question 23

information processing theories

Answer 23

Information processing theories - Theories that focus on describing the cognitive processes that underlie thinking at any one age and cognitive growth over time.

Question 24

numerical magnitudes

Answer 24

Numerical magnitudes - The sizes of numbers.

Question 25

object permanence task

Answer 25

Object permanence task - The Piagetian task in which infants below about 9 months of age fail to search for an object that is removed from their sight and, if not allowed to search immediately for the object, act as if they do not know that it continues to exist.

Question 26

phonemic awareness

Answer 26

Phonemic awareness - Awareness of the component sounds within words.

Question 27

Piaget’s theory

Answer 27

Piaget’s theory - Theory that development occurs through a sequence of discontinuous stages: the sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational stages.

Question 28

pre operational reasoning stage

Answer 28

Preoperational reasoning 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.

Question 29

qualitative change

Answer 29

Qualitative changes - Large, fundamental change, as when a caterpillar changes into a butterfly; stage theories such as Piaget’s posit that each stage reflects qualitative change relative to previous stages.

Question 30

quantitative changes

Answer 30

Quantitative changes - Gradual, incremental change, as in the growth of a pine tree’s girth.

Question 31

sensorimotor stage

Answer 31

Sensorimotor stage - Period within Piagetian theory from birth to age 2 years, during which children come to represent the enduring reality of objects.

Question 32

sociocultural theories

Answer 32

Sociocultural theories - Theory founded in large part by Lev Vygotsky that emphasises how other people and the attitudes, values, and beliefs of the surrounding culture influence children’s development.

Question 33

understand why cognitive development is sometimes viewed as discontinuous/continuous

Answer 33

Understand why cognitive development is sometimes viewed as discontinuous and sometimes as continuous.

Some aspects of the development of living organisms, such as the growth of the width of a pine tree, involve quantitative changes, with the tree getting a little wider each year.

Other changes, such as the life cycle of a ladybug, involve qualitative changes, with the creature becoming a totally different type of entity after a transition than before.

The existence of both gradual, quantitative changes and relatively sudden, qualitative changes in the world has led researchers who study cognitive development to ask whether changes in children’s thinking are gradual and continuous or sudden and discontinuous.

Question 34

Appreciate how social neuroscience may facilitate the diagnosis and treatment of ASD.

Answer 34

ERP and fMRI are complementary, with fMRI providing excellent spatial resolution and ERP offering outstanding temporal resolution. Together, this information is critical to understanding the nature of social perception in ASD. To date, the most thoroughly investigated areas of the social brain in ASD are the superior temporal sulcus (STS), which underlies the perception and interpretation of biological motion, and the fusiform gyrus (FG), which supports face perception.
Examination of the social brain may well reveal diagnostically meaningful subgroups of Autistic children. Measurements of the “where” and “when” of brain activity during social processing tasks provide reliable sources of the detailed information needed to profile Autistic children with greater accuracy. These profiles, in turn, may help to inform treatment of ASD by helping us to match specific treatments to specific profiles.
Endophenotypes, or characteristics that are not immediately available to observation but that reflect an underlying genetic liability for disease, expose the most basic components of a complex psychiatric disorder and are more stable across the lifespan than observable behaviour. By describing the key characteristics of ASD in these objective ways, neuroimaging research will facilitate identification of genetic contributions to ASD.

Question 35

distinguish components of the social brain and understand their differences in ASD

Answer 35

Distinguish components of the social brain and understand their differences in ASD.
Brothers first suggested the notion of a social brain, a set of interconnected neuroanatomical structures that process social information, enabling the recognition of other individuals and the evaluation of their mental states (e.g., intentions, dispositions, desires, and beliefs).
The social brain is of great research interest because the social difficulties characteristic of ASD are thought to relate closely to the functioning of this brain network.

Question 36

difference between erp and fmri

Answer 36

While fMRI provides information about where brain activity occurs, ERP specifies when by detailing the timing of processing at the millisecond pace at which it unfolds.

Question 37

endophenotypes

Answer 37

Endophenotypes - A characteristic that reflects a genetic liability for disease and a more basic component of a complex clinical presentation. Endophenotypes are less developmentally malleable than overt behaviour.

Question 38

event related potentials

Answer 38

Event-related potentials (ERP) - 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. ERP provides excellent information about the timing of processing, clarifying brain activity at the millisecond pace at which it unfolds.

Question 39

fmri

Answer 39

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) - 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. By having people listen to or view social percepts in an MRI scanner, fMRI specifies the brain regions that evidence a relative increase in blood flow. In this way, fMRI provides excellent spatial information, pinpointing with millimetre accuracy, the brain regions most critical for different social processes.

Question 40

social brain

Answer 40

Social brain - The set of neuroanatomical structures that allows us to understand the actions and intentions of other people.

Question 41

what is the social brain comprised of

Answer 41

The social brain is hypothesised to consist of the amygdala, the orbital frontal cortex (OFC), fusiform gyrus (FG), and the posterior superior temporal sulcus (STS) region, among other structures. Though all areas work in coordination to support social processing, each appears to serve a distinct role. The amygdala helps us recognize the emotional states of others and also to experience and regulate our own emotions. The OFC supports the “reward” feelings we have when we are around other people. The FG, located at the bottom of the surface of the temporal lobes, detects faces and supports face recognition. The posterior STS region recognizes the biological motion, including eye, hand and other body movements, and helps to interpret and predict the actions and intentions of others.