Exam 2

• -constructivist: knowledge and meaning are generated from an interaction between experiences and ideas (experiencing things is how we learn)
• -children: 1) are active 2) learn lessons on their own 3) are intrinsically motivated to learn

the tendency to respond to the demands of the environment to meet one’s goals

the tendency to integrate particular observations into coherent knowledge

the process by which people translate incoming information into a form they can understand

the process by which people adapt current knowledge structures in response to new experiences

the process by which people balance assimilation and accommodation to create stable understanding

• 1) sensorimotor: 0-2
• 2) preoperational: 2-7
• 3) concrete operational: 7-12
• 4) formal operational: 12+

• includes:
• -object permanence: happens at 4-8 mo; when babies know objects still exist even though they not visible
• -A-Not-B error happens during this stage, at about 8-12 mo; babies reach for objects where they've been found before, not where they're last hidden
• -deferred imitation is the first sign that babies have enduring memories; happens at 18-24 mo; is when they repeat behaviors a substational amount of time after they've observed the behavior

• acquisitions:
• -symbolic representation: using one object to stand for another
• limitations:
• -egocentrism: seeing the world only from one's own perspective (the 3 mountain task)
• -centration: tendency to focus on a single, striking feature of an object (ex. the balance scale)
• -children in this stage LACK the conservation concept: the idea that changing the appearance of objects doesn't change their properties (tested using glasses of liquid, playdough & coins in a row [spread out or closer together])

• -children reason logically about the world
• -understand the conservation problems, but reasoning is limited to concrete situations
• -still have difficulty thinking systematically

• -children below the age of 12 usually CANNOT do it
• -task: compare the motion of a pendulum depending on string length and the weight attached; the way they decide is usually faulty

• -here, cognitive ability is 'developed' when you can think abstractly and reason hypothetically
• -in this stage individuals can
• 1) imagine alternate worlds
• 2) reason systematically
• -attainment of this stage is not universal!

• 1) children don't think as consistantly as the the stage model makes the out to
• 2) BUT infants & young children are more competent cognitively than Piaget thought
• 3) his theory understates the contribution of the social world to development
• 4) it doesn't outline specifics about the cognitive processes that give rise to thinking and the mechanisms that produce cognitive growth

• supports the view that children undergo continuous cognitive change
• -continuous:
• 1) changes occur constantly (are not restricted to special transition periods between stages like with Piaget)
• 2) Cognitive growth happens in small increments not abrupt changes

• 1) precisely defines the processes involved in children’s thinking
• -Task analysis: how information-processing researchers
• understand/predict children’s behavior

2) thinking is a process that occurs over time

3) there's an emphasis on structure & processes (s & p?)

• -in information processing theories, this is how the child is viewed
• -the child is a computation system

• Cognitive development happens when children gradually overcome processing limitations by:
• -using basic processes more efficiently
• -have a better memory capacity
• -use new strategies
• -have more knowledge

• -also a tennant of information processing theories
• -children are viewed as active problem solvers
• -problem solving: involves a goal, perceived obstacle, and a strategy or rule.
• -children’s cognitive flexibility helps them pursue goals

• -their emphasis on precise descriptions of how change occurs
• -main idea is to reconcile the influence of nature vs. nurture on development

1) Sensory memory: the immediate perception of sights, sounds, and other sensations that just enter the cognitive system; they're briefly held in raw form until identified; a moderate amount of information can be held for a fraction of a second; its capacity stays constant over development

2) Working memory: a workspace in which information from the environment and relevant knowledge are brought together, given attention and actively processed; is limited in capacity & duration; its capacity & speed of operation increases greatly over childhood & into adolescence

3) Long-term memory: information retained on an enduring basis; can retain an unlimited amount of information forever; its capacity increases enormously over development

• the simplest and most frequently used mental activities:
• -associating events with one another
• -recognizing objects as familiar
• -recalling facts and procedures
• -generalizing from one instance to another

allows the perceived item of interest to be converted into a construct that can be stored within the brain and recalled later from short or long term memory

the process of representing in memory information specific features of objects and events

• 1) processing speed: the speed that children
• execute basic processes increases over the course of childhood; biological maturation & experience
• contribute to increased processing speed; especially myelination and increased connectivity among brain regions are 2 processes that decrease processing speed

2) mental strategies: emerge between ages 5 & 8; eg. rehearsal and selective attention

3) content knowledge:

rehearsal: process of repeating information over and over to aid memory

selective attention: process of intentionally focusing on information that's most relevant to the current goal

important type of content knowledge; it's knowledge of the events of one’s life

the phenomenon that most adults remember nothing that occurred before the age of three years

-this type of amnesia probably ends because of verbal encoding, conversations with parents, and physiological maturation

• children solve problems using a variety of approaches
• 

• -contributes to successful problem-solving; children begin to form simple plans by their first birthday
• -as children get older, making a variety of plans helps them solve a a broader range of problems

-frontal lobe (inhibition) is important for planning but is one of the last parts of the brain to mature; young children tend to be over-optimistic & incorrectly believe they can succeed without planning

reasoning that applies between specific objects or cases, where what's known about one thing is used to infer new information about a different thing; the basic intuition behind analogical reasoning isthat when there are substantial parallels across different situations, there are likely to be further parallels

• -kids either played color or number board game for 2 weeks
• conclusion: numerical board games are a good way to improve the numerical knowledge of low-income preschoolers before they begin formal education

• -believe infants’ and young children’s think sophisticatedly in areas that are evolutionarily important throughout history
• -depict children as active learners, striving to solve problems and to organize understandings into coherent wholes
• -DIFFERENCE: core-knowledge theorists think children enter the world with specialized learning abilities that allow them to quickly/easily acquire information of evolutionary importance

• 1) face perception: from birth onward, infants prefer faces to objects
• 2) language: universality of language acquisition; left hemisphere appears to be attuned for language

the idea that basic understanding are domain-specific, i.e. limited to a particular area, such as living things or inanimate objects; theory proposed by core-knowledge theorists

• -infants begin life with a primitive theory of physics.
• -the first theories of psychology and biology may emerge at about 18 months & three years of age, respectively

young children’s extrapolation from what they know about people to predict the qualities of other animals; is important to address in correcting some misconceptions in children’s early biological understanding

-focus on the contribution of other people and the surrounding culture to children’s development

• -guided participation: more knowledgeable
• people help less knowledgeable ones engage in activities
• they wouldn’t be able to manage on their own

-Vygotsky originated the approach to cognitive development; his views differ greatly from piaget

children develop their self-regulation and problem-solving abilities by telling themselves what to do; the second phase of Vygotsky’s internalization-of-thought process

• 1) the inclination to teach others
• 2) the inclination to attend to and learn from such teaching

the mutual understanding that people share during communication

-joint attention: a process by which social partners intentionally focus on a common referent in the external environment

a process through which more competent people provide a temporary framework that supports children’s thinking at a higher level than children could manage on their own

-the quality of scaffolding that people provide tends to increase as people age & gain experience

-important when forming autobiographical memories; sometimes parents push kids to remember more details

• -theories that focus on how change occurs over time in complex systems
• -at ALL points in develoment, thought and action change from moment to moment in response to the child’s current situation & past
• -children acquire skills at different ages & in different ways
• -development entails regression, as well as progress

• -theories are unique in their emphasis on how children’s
• specific actions shape their development

• -Emphasizes children’s innate motivations to explore
• the environment (Piaget)
• -Emphasize precise analysis of problem-solving activity (information-processing)
• -Emphasize early emerging competencies (core-
• knowledge)
• -Emphasize the formative influence of other people
• (sociocultural)

bringing together and integrating components as needed to adapt to a continuously changing environment

• - dynamic-systems theories see development as a process of self-organization
• -sometimes called soft organization: b/c components and their organization are subject to change

Variation: different behaviors being generated to produce the same goal

Selection: an increasing choice of behaviors that are effective in meeting goals and a decreasing choice of less effective behaviors

FUCKERS

processing of basic information from the external world by the sensory receptors in the sense organs and brain

the process of organizing and interpreting sensory information

1) preferential-looking technique: involves showing infants two patterns or two objects at a time to see if the infants have a preference for one over the other

• 2) habituation: involves repeatedly presenting an infant
• with a given stimulus until the response declines

the sharpness of infants' visual discrimination approaches that of adults; is fully developed by 6 years of age

high visual contrast; this is because they have poor contrast sensitivity (ability to detect differences in light and dark areas)

color vision; but by 2-3 months their color vision is similar to that of adults

• Scanning: 1-month-olds scan the perimeters
• of shapes ---- 2-month-olds scan both the perimeters & the interiors of shapes.

Tracking: although infants begin scanning the environment right away, they cannot track even slowly moving objects smoothly until 2 to 3 months of age

almost over

understanding what others say or sign or write; ex. a child who can understand his parents words but not speak yet

only when a child speaks (not just understands) languages is she producing language

the strategies young children use when beginning to speak; individual difference in style appear to have no long-term effects on children's ultimate language abilities

the learning of a sound system of a language

young children's talk with one another that often involves a serious of unrelated statements; common between preschoolers

the argument that the human brain contains an innate, self-contained language component seperate from other aspect of cognitive funcitoning; supported by the fact that all humans exposed to language successfulyl acquire it, whereas no other animals do

learning knowledge about how language is used; ex. knowing that culturally, ships are considered female in the English language

the notion that the use of a symbolic artifact requires mentally representing it both as a real object and as a symbol for something other than itself; ex. for a map, this involves understanding it's a tangible piece of paper with line & colors and an understanding that lines and colors represent roads, water, mountians, etc.

the perception of speech sounds as belonging to discrete categories; infants do categorical perception for speech sounds they've never heard before --- means it's innate/independent of experience

the length of time between when air passes through the lips and when the vocal cords start vibrating; /Hb/ & /E/ differ only in voice onset time???

type of information-processing approach that emphasizes the simultaneous activity of numerous interconnected (processing) units; researchers taking this approach have developed computer simulations of language acquisition

the stage in which infants use one word at a time; ex. a child who uses 'nap nap' to say they want to take a nap is probz in this period

the notion that we can put together an infinite number of sentences to express an infnite number of ideas using the finite set or words in our vocabulary; as a result, it is possible to form a sentence that has never been uttered by anyone else on earth

child's first sentences; are usually 2-word utterances; these sentences omit nonessential elements, such as word endings and function words

the learning of the system for expressing meaning in language

descriptions of past events that have the basic structure of a story

the learning of grammar of a language

the understanding of properties and function of language; ex. knowing all languages have words, and that sentences are made up of words

the perception of objects as being of constant size, shape, color, etc., in spite of physical differences in the retinal image of the object

the process by which the visual cortex combines the differing neural signals sent to the brain by the two eyes; emerges at 4 months of ageq

cues of depth that can be achieved by one eye alone; happens around 6–7 months of age

ex. relative size, interposition

infants and toddlers attempt to treat pictures as though they were real objects; have to learn their symbolic nature

5 or 6; but is well developed at birth

systems for representing thoughts, feelings, and knowledgable and communicating them to other people; eg. pictures, numbers, models, maps

the elementary use of meaningful sound that produces language; eg. in English, the words 'cat' and 'hat' differ in only one phoneme

1st utterances made by children with this style tend to be long "sentences" made up of hardly any recognizable words but uttered with perfect rythm and intonation

the process of rapidly learning a new word simply from the contrastive use of a familiar and unfamiliar word

speech strategy that results in children beginning to talk at a comparatively late age

the strategy of using the grammatical structure of a whole sentence to determine the meaning of novel words

universal grammar

clumsy swiping movements by young infants toward the general vicinity of objects they see

-Infants begin successfully reaching for objects at around 3 to 4 months of age

-at 7 months infants can sit on their own and reaching becomes stable

-by 10 months, the way an infant reaches for an object is affected by what they plan to do with it

crawl at 8 mo; walk at 11-12 mo

chilren try to do something with a miniature replica object that is much too small for the action to be completed

the extraction from the constantly changing environment those elements that remain stable

the possibilities for action offered by objects and situations and the relation between objects and humans

involves picking up information from the environment, forming associations among stimuli that occur in a statistically predictable pattern

where infants are shown an event that should evoke surprise or interest if it violates something that the infant knows or assumes to be true

-shows that infants are able to represent invisible objects better than Piaget thought

the basic structure of their native language, whether spoken or manually signed

1) phonological development: knowledge about phonemes, the elementary units of sound that distinguish meaning

2) semantic development: learning the system for expressing meaning in a language, beginning with morphemes (smallest unit of meaning in a language)

• 3) syntactic development: learning the syntax or
• rules for combining words

4) pragmatic development: acquiring knowledge of how language is used, which includes understanding a variety of conversational conventions

impairment of language ability; provides evidence for laterization of language in left hemisphere

• -damage to Broca’s area, near the motor cortex, is associated with difficulties in producing speech
• -damage to Wernicke’s area, which is near the auditory cortex, is linked to difficulties with meaning

• the distinctive mode of speech that adults adopt when talking to babies
• !!is not universal!!
• -warm and affectionate tone, high pitch, extreme intonation, and slower speech accompanied by exaggerated facial expressions; infants prefer it

the sharing of a common focus of attention by two or more people

established when the baby and the parent are looking at and reacting to the same thing in the world around them

the rhythm, tempo, melody, intonational patterns, and so forth with which a language is spoken

-variations in prosody are responsible for why languages sound different from one another

• -declines between 6 and 12 months of age
• -by 10 mo, English-speakers can't discriminate between syllables in Hindi and Nthlakapmx

• -recognize words
• -then comprehend them
• -then begin to produce some of the words they learned.

• -sometime between 6 and 10 months of age, infants begin
• to babble
• -key component of the development of babbling is
• receiving feedback about the sounds one is producing
• -silent babbling: babies exposed to the sign language of their deaf parents engage in “silent babbling"

after infants begin to recognize recurrent sounds from the speech they hear, they have to start associating words with meanings; this can happen by 6 months

using a given word in a broader context than is appropriate, represents an effort to communicate despite a limited vocabulary (I still do this)

• -1st word: 10-15 months old
• -vocabulary spurt: 19 months
• -simple sentences: 24 months

leads children to expect a novel word to refer to a whole object, not a part

leads children to expect that a given entity will have only one name

• 1) Nativist Views: using a language requires a set of abstract, unconscious rules – a universal grammar that is innate and common to all languages; argues that the cognitive abilities that support language development are specific to language
• -CRITICISM: focuses only on syntax not the communicative role of language

• 2) Interactionist Views: language development is influenced by its communicative function
• -CRITICISM: limited attention to syntactic development

3) Connectionist Views: presents language development as the result of the gradual strengthening of connections in the neural network