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Chapter 6: Cognitive Development in Infancy and Toddlerhood
Important terms and concepts from Laura Berk's Infants and Children-7th ed.
45
Psychology
Undergraduate 1
12/15/2013

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Term
Sensorimotor Stage
Definition
Spans the first two years of life. Piaget believed that infants and toddlers "think" with their eyes, ears, hands, and other sensorimotor equipment. They cannot yet carry out many activities inside their heads.
Term
Schemes
Definition
Specific psychological structures - organized ways of making sense of experience.
Term
Adaptation
Definition
Building schemes through direct interaction with the environment.
Term
Assimilation
Definition
Use our current schemes to interpret the external world.
Term
Accommodation
Definition
We create new schemes or adjust old ones after noticing that our current ways of thinking do not capture the environment completely.
Term
Organization
Definition
An internal process, apart from direct contact with the environment. Once children form new schemes, they rearrange them, linking them with other schemes to create a strongly interconnected cognitive system.
Term
Circular Reaction
Definition
Provides a special means of adapting their first schemes. Involves stumbling onto a new experience caused by the baby's own motor activity. The reaction is "circular" because, as the infant tries to repeat the event again and again, a sensorimotor response that originally occurred by chance becomes strengthened into a new scheme.
Term
Goal-Directed (Intentional) Behavior
Definition
Coordinating schemes deliberately to solve simple problems.
Term
Object Permanence
Definition
Understanding that objects continue to exist when they are out of sight.
Term
A-Not-B Search Error
Definition
If they reach several times for an object at a first hiding place A, then moved to a second B, they still search for it in the first hiding place A.
Term
Mental Representations
Definition
Internal depictions of information that the mind can manipulate.
Term
Deferred Imitation
Definition
The ability to remember and copy the behavior of models who are not present.
Term
Make-Believe Play
Definition
Children act out everyday and imaginary activities.
Term
Violation-of-Expectation Method
Definition
They may habituate babies to a physical event (expose them to an event until their looking declines) to familiarize them with a situation in which their knowledge will be tested. Or they may simply show babies an expected event (one consistent with reality) or an unexpected event (a variation of the first event that violates reality). Heightened attention to the unexpected events suggests that the infant is "surprised" by a deviation from a physical reality and, therefore, is aware of that aspect of the physical world.
Term
Displaced Reference
Definition
The realization that words can be used to cue mental images of things not physically present. A symbolic capacity that emerges around the first birthday.
Term
Video Deficit Effect
Definition
Poorer performance after a video than a live demonstration.
Term
Core Knowledge Perspective
Definition
Babies are born with a set of innate knowledge systems, or core domains of thought. Each of these "prewired" understandings permits a ready grasp of new, related information and therefore supports early, rapid development.
Term
Mental Strategies
Definition
In information processing, procedures that operate on and transform information, thereby increasing the efficiency and flexibility of thinking and the chances that information will be retained.
Term
Sensory Register
Definition
Where information first enters and where sights and sounds are represented directly and stored briefly.
Term
Short-Term (Working) Memory
Definition
Second part of the mind where we actively apply mental strategies as we "work" on a limited amount of information.
Term
Central Executive
Definition
Special part of the working memory for managing its complex activities by directing the flow of information. It decides what to attend to, coordinates incoming information with information already in the system, and selects, applies, and monitors strategies.
Term
Long-Term Memory
Definition
Our permanent knowledge base.
Term
Recognition
Definition
Noticing when a stimulus is identical or similar to one previously experienced.
Term
Recall
Definition
More challenging because it involves remembering something without perceptual support.
Term
Infantile Amnesia
Definition
Most of us cannot retrieve events that happened to us before age 3.
Term
Autobiographical Memory
Definition
Recollections of personally meaningful one-time events from both the recent and the distant past.
Term
Zone of Proximal Development
Definition
Range of tasks that the child cannot yet handle alone but can do with the help of more skilled partners.
Term
Intelligence Quotient (IQ)
Definition
Indicates the extent to which the raw score (number of items passed) deviates from the typical performance of same-age individuals.
Term
Standardization
Definition
Giving the test to a large, representative sample and using the results as the standard for interpreting scores.
Term
Normal Distribution
Definition
Most scores cluster around the mean (or average) with progressively fewer falling toward the extremes. This bell-shaped distribution results whenever researchers measure individual differences in large samples.
Term
Developmental Quotients (DQs)
Definition
Infant test scores are conservatively labeled because they do not tap the same dimensions of intelligence measured at older ages.
Term
Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment (HOME)
Definition
Checklist for gathering information about the quality of children's home lives through observation and parental interview.
Term
Developmentally Appropriate Practice
Definition
Standards, devised by the U.S. National Association for the Education of Young Children, specify program characteristics that serve young children's developmental and individual needs, based on both current research and consensus among experts.
Term
Language Acquisition Device (LAD)
Definition
An innate system that contains a universal grammar, or set of rules common to all languages. It enables children, no matter which language they hear, to understand and speak in a rule-oriented fashion as soon as they pick up enough words.
Term
Cooing
Definition
Vowel-like noises that appear around 2 months; pleasant "oo" quality.
Term
Babbling
Definition
Appears around 6 months, in which infants repeat consonant-vowel combinations, often in long strings, such as "bababababa" or "nananananana."
Term
Joint Attention
Definition
Child attends to the same object or event as the caregiver.
Term
Underextension
Definition
When young children first learning words apply them too narrowly.
Term
Overextension
Definition
As vocabulary expands, applying a word to a wider collection of objects and events than is appropriate.
Term
Telegraphic Speech
Definition
Two-word utterances that like a telegram, focus on high-content words, omitting smaller, less important ones.
Term
Production
Definition
The words and word combinations children use.
Term
Comprehension
Definition
The language children understand.
Term
Referential Style
Definition
Vocabularies consisted mainly of words that referred to objects.
Term
Expressive Style
Definition
Produce many more social formulas and pronouns (than referential).
Term
Child-Directed Speech (CDS)
Definition
A form of communication made up of short sentences with high-pitched, exaggerated expression, clear pronunciation, distinct pauses between speech segments, clear gestures to support verbal meaning, and repetition of new words in a variety of contexts.
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