Life-Span Human Development (Chapter 7)

Clinical Method

A flexible question-and-answer technique used to discover how children think about problems. Imprecise! B/c does not involving asking standardized questions

Personal fable

A tendency to think that you and your thoughts and feelings are unique.

Egocentrism

A tendency to view the world solely from one's own perspective and to have difficulty recognizing other points of view. (aka NOT having the theory of mind.)

Secondary circulation reactions

At this substage, infant derive pleasure from repeated performing an action with the EXTERNAL environment

Primary circular reaction

Babies do repeating actions related to their own bodies. (Internal)

Guided participation

By actively participating in culturally relevant activities with the aid and support of their parents and other knowledgeable guides.

Organization

Children (and maybe even adults) systematically combine existing schemes into new and more complex ones. -> Logically ordered and interrelated actions and ideas. (Not separated and clustered ideas!)

Dialectical thinking

Detecting paradoxes and inconsistencies among ideas and trying to reconcile them.

Adolescent egocentrism

Difficulty differentiating one's own thoughts and feelings from those of other people

Seriation

Enables them to arrange items mentally along a quantifiable dimension such as length or weight, or even time.

Imaginary audience

Involves confusing your own thoughts with those of a hypothesized audience for your behavior.

Scheme (Or schema)

Plural schemes or schemata Cognitive structures-organized patterns of actions or thought that people construct to interpret their experiences

Hypothetical-deductive reasoning

Reasoning from general ideas or rules to their specific implications. (Can you do a controlled experiment?)

Decontextualize

Separate prior knowledge and beliefs from the demands of the task at hand. Increases the likelihood of using reasoning to analyze a problem logically rather than relying on intuition or faulty existing knowledge

Private Speech

Speech to oneself that guides one's thought and behavior.

Object Permanence

That is the fundamental understanding that objects continue to exist- they are permanent-when they are no long visible or otherwise detectable to the senses.

Transformational though

The ability to conceptualize transformation, or process of change from one state to another, as when water is poured from one glass to another.

Decentration

The ability to focus on two or more dimensions of problem at once.

Symbolic capacity

The ability to use images, words or gestures to represent or stand for objects and experiences-enable more sophisticated problem solving. (This is what leads the infant into the preoperational stage.)

Cognition

The activity of knowing and the process through which knowledge is acquired and problems are solved.

Tertiary circular reaction

The baby finds motions are interesting, such as throwing, so that they keep doing the motion.

Zone of proximal development

The gap between what a learner can accomplish independently and what she can accomplish with the guidance and encouragement of a more skilled partner.

Conservation

The idea that certain properties of an object or substance do not change when its appearance is altered in some superficial way.

Transitivity

The idea that describes the necessary relations among elements in a series. For example, John is taller than Mark, and Mark is taller than Sam, who is taller-John or Sam?

Horizontal decalage

The idea that different cognitive skills related to the same stage of cognitive development emerge at different times.

Class inclusion

The logical understanding that the parts are included within the whole. "Which group would have more- the dogs or the animals?"

Scaffolding

The more skilled person gives structured help to a less skilled learner but gradually reduces the help as the less skilled learner become more competent.

Perceptual salience

The most obvious features of an object or situation.

Equilibration

The process of achieving mental stability where our internal thoughts are consistent with the evidence we are receiving from the external world. (Now, let's check if this animal is a dog! Yes, through using my new schema, this is indeed a dog!)

Adaptation

The process of adjusting to the demands of environment. Consists of two processes assimilation and accommodation.

Reversibility

The process of mentally undoing or reversing an action.

Accommodation

The process of modifying existing schemes to better fit new experiences. (If we misrecognize the dog as a cat, we have to re-define what is a dog.)

A-not-B error

The surprising tendency of 8-to 12 month-olds to search for an object in the place they last found it (A) rather than in its new hiding place (B) is called the A-not-B error.

Centration

The tendency to center attenion on a single aspect of the problem.

Coordination or secondary schemes

This is the final sub-stage for Sensory motor stage: Infant combine (or coordinate) secondary actions to achieve simple goals, such as grasping for an object.

Static though

Thought that is fixed on end states rather than the changes that transform one state into another (when the water is sitting in the two glasses, not being poured or manipulated) Most children do this.

Imaginary companions

Typically first-borns or the only child invent imaginary/invisible companions. -> Better theory of mind

Relativistic thinking

Understand that knowledge depends on its context and the subjective perspective of the knower.

Postformal thought

Ways of thinking that are more complex and those of the formal operational stage.

Assimilation

the process by which we interpret new experiences in terms of existing schemes or cognitive structures. (Dog VS Cat. Look really similar, but is actually very different.)