Week 13 - Cognitive Development

Question 1

What is the basic-level category?

Answer 1

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

Question 2

What is a category?

Answer 2

A set of entities that are equivalent in some way. Usually items are similar to one another.

Question 3

What is a concept?

Answer 3

Fundamental unit of symbolic knowledge. Mental representation used for a variety of cognitive functions. Can be used in a single word/symbol.

Question 4

What is an exemplar?

Answer 4

An example in memory that is labeled as being in a particular category.

Question 5

What is psychological essentialism?

Answer 5

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 6

What is typicality?

Answer 6

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

Question 7

What are chutes and ladders?

Answer 7

A numerical board game that seems to be useful for building numerical knowledge.

Question 8

What is the concerte operation stage?

Answer 8

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

Question 9

What are conservation problems?

Answer 9

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

Question 10

What is continuous development?

Answer 10

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

Question 11

What is depth perception?

Answer 11

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

Question 12

What is discontinuous development?

Answer 12

Development that does not occur in a gradual incremental manner.

Question 13

What is the formal operations stage?

Answer 13

Piagetian stage starting at the age of 12 and continuing for the rest of life, in which adolescents may gain the reasoning powers of educated adults.

Question 14

What are the information processing theories?

Answer 14

Theories that focus on describing the cognitive processes that underlie thinking at any one age and cognitive growth overtime.

Question 15

What is nature?

Answer 15

The genes that children bring with them to life and that influence all aspects of their development.

Question 16

What are numerical magnitudes?

Answer 16

The sizes of numbers.

Question 17

What is nurture?

Answer 17

The environments, starting with the womb, that influence all aspects of children’s development.

Question 18

What is the object permanence task?

Answer 18

The piagetian task in which infants below 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 19

What is phonemic awareness?

Answer 19

Awareness of the component sounds within words.

Question 20

What is Piaget’s theory?

Answer 20

Theory that development occurs through a sequence of discontinuous stages; the sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete, operational, and formal operational stages.

Question 21

What is the Preoperational reasoning stage?

Answer 21

Period within Piagetian theory from the ages 2-7 in which children can represent objects through drawing and language but cannot solve logical reasoning problems, such as the conservation problems.

Question 22

What are qualitative changes?

Answer 22

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 23

What are quantitative changes?

Answer 23

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

Question 24

What is the sensorimotor stage?

Answer 24

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

Question 25

What are sociocultural theories?

Answer 25

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.

Question 26

What are endophenotypes?

Answer 26

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

Question 27

What is event-related potentials (ERP)?

Answer 27

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 28

What is a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)?

Answer 28

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 excellant spatial information, pinpointing with milimeter accuracy, the brain regions most critical for different social processes.

Question 29

What is the social brain?

Answer 29

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

Question 30

What is family resemblance theory?

Answer 30

Typical items that either have the most common characteristics of the category or do not have the most common characteristic of a different category.

Question 31

What is the basic-level?

Answer 31

Maximally distinctive for most people, identified faster, easier and faster to learn, but not universal.