Psych 2400 Exam 2 terms
preferential looking technique
a method of studying visual attention in infants in which an infant is presented with 2 stimuli and whichever the infant looks longer at, we can assume the infant prefers it.
Joint attention
a process in which social partners intentionally focus on a common referent in the external environment First develops between 9-15 months -related to language skills (success in following others gaze predicts later language vocab)
What changes perception
locomotion
What is concrete operational stage about?
logic---math problems, categorzing things, master 3 mountain task
Dynamic systems approach
looks at neural mechanism and increases in strength, posture control, balance, perceptual skills and motivation.
Infants and speech
they are very good at understanding the subtle sounds of human speech, that is why when taught multiple languages younger in age, they are more likely to sound like native speakers than they are at an older age.
Difference in memory across cultures?
they recall events that as consistent to cultural values
Brief transitions
thinking of each stage influences think across diverse topics and context
Formal operational stage
thinks abstractly, politcs, ethics
Top-heavy processing
this is what infants have, they like looking at eyes up, anything that has more stuff on top
core knowledge theroirsts
view children as entering the world with specialized learning abilities that allow them to quickly and effortlessly acquire information of evolutionary importance.
Video study
4 month old infants responded more to the videos in which the audio and visuals were matched-- "stared longer"
Selective attention between 4 and 7 year olds
4 year olds will focus on both charts, 7 year olds will focus on one
When do mental strategies for memory emerge?
5 - 8 years old
When can infants pull themselves up to stand?
6-10 months
How old must a human be to imitate novel actions
6-9 months, and they understand the intention of the action, even if it was failed
When does concrete operational stage happen?
7 - 12
at this age, baby can sit independelty and reach for objects stable
7 months
First sentences-telegraphic speech
sentenced are first produced in 2 word combos known as this
Downs syndrome study
showed that developmental research can not only improve motor skills, but also other domains of developmetn such as cognition and emotions.
Morphemes
smallest unit of meaning (single letter or combos)
Overregulazation
speech errors in which children treat irregular forms of words as if they were regular
Self-locomotion
starts at 8 months, infant moving around in the environment on their own
Centration
tendency to focus on a single aspect of an object or event
Cognitive development arises through
-Expansion of memory capacity -Increasing efficiency in execution of basic processes -acquisition of new strategies and knowledge
Evidence for critical period of language
-Feral children: kids like Genie have shown it's hard to acquire language during teens -Effects of brain injury on language: differ depending which age injury occurred -second language acquisition: capabilities differ depending on age.
What do they do in A-not-b?
-In this error, infants 8-12 months of age have reached for and found a hidden object multiple times in one place (Location A). -When they see the object hidden at a different place (location b) and are prevented from immediately searching for it, they continue to search for it in place A.
DST motivators of development
-Learn about and participate in the world around them -Explore and expand their own capabilities
Dynamic systems theory
-Look at relations among motor activities, attention, and other aspects of children's behavior Integrate connection between thinking and action. -emphasize how varied aspects of the child function as a single integrated whole to produce behavior -development is self-organizing (continuously adapt to our changing environment)
Parts of the language acquisition process
-Speech perception -preparation for production -first words -putting words together
Evidence for interactionist view
-ability of infants and young children to use pragmatic cues to interpret utterances -role of infant directed speech in language acquistion
Manual babbling
-babies exposed to sign language engage in this -hand movements produced in slower rhythm but corresponding to rhythmic patterning of adult sign
Example of synaptic bootstrapping
-children hear "the duck is kradding the rabbit" or the "rabbit and the duck are kradding" -children used syntax to infer meaning of the new word -look longer at causative action when hear causative frame
Problems with Piagets model?
-depicts children's thinking as more consistent than what it is -infants are more cognitively competent than he thought -understates social world -vague mechanisms for development
Cognitive development according to information processing
-expanding memory capacity -increased efficenty of exceution of basic processes -acquisition of new strategies and knowledge
Conditioned head turn procedure
-infants are born with ability to discriminate speech sounds for any language, but gradually gain ability to specialize with their native language -lose ability to discriminate speech sounds not in native language b/n 6 and 12 months
Regularities in speech
-stress patterns -distributional properties -own name
Study on acquiring english with asians
-tested English grammar -found that performance was inversely related to age of arrival to the united states (meaning, the earlier they came, the easier it was for them to learn English) -not based on the length of exposure (think about grandparents vs parents) -scores of adults who arrived before 7 years was the same as those of native English speakers
VOT
-this is the length of time between the vocal cords start vibrating and when air passes through the lips -ba: 15msec VOT -pa: 100 ms VOT -they play the p and b sounds on the same continuum but the adults and infants perceive them as distinctly different
core-knowledge and education
Understanding naive theories can be used to help children gain more advanced understanding
Pacifier study
1 month old infants were more likely to look longer at the pacifiers they had sucked on vs. the ones they didn't indicating they recognized which one they had sucked.
Internalizaton of thought
1) Adult Statements 2) Private Speech 3) Internalized Private speech (thought)
When can babies walk around on their own?
11 - 14 months
Formal operation stage happens when?
12+, but not everyone can reach this (think people with developmental disablity)
When does the pre-operational stage take place?
2 - 7
When can infants slowly track a moving object?
2 months
example of assimilation
2 year old boy sees man that is bald with frizzy hair and says "Clown", because he thinks he is a clown he has seen before.
can find words in speech stream after 2 minutes
8 month olds and speech
Which of the following statements is NOT CONSISTENT with core-knowledge theories? a. Children are born with all they need to know about the physics of animate and inanimate objects. b. Children are actively involved in their own cognitive development c. The understandings children are born with are domain-specific d. Cognitive development is produced by an interaction between nature and nurture, and nature includes some innate understandings
A
Why is it easier to be bilingual as a child over an adult?
Adults already know what language is/are programmed to it, whereas children are not and are not held back by rules/preconceived ideas.
Crucial info, such as relative frequency of events is encoded...
Automatically
Why does our memory/encoding fail us sometimes?
Because we don't pay attention to it
How does encoding improve?
Better with age and specific experience
at 6 months old infants ....... discriminate both monkey and human faces
Can
at 9 months old infants______ discriminate both monkey and human faces
Can't
Metaphor for information processing theory
Children are a computation system
Vygotsky
Children as social beings Developmental change is continuous and quantitative (not qualitative)
Key points from each theory for DST
Children have an innate motivation to learn (Piaget) Emphasize precise analysis of problem-solving activity (information-processing) Emphasize early emerging competencies (core-knowledge) Emphasize the formative influence of other people (sociocultural) -says no one aspect is important, all must be considered
piaget and education
Distinctive ways of thinking at different ages needs to be considered Relevant physical activities with related questions
Social scaffolding
Competent people provide a temporary framework that supports children's thinking at a higher level than children could manage on their own, can help create autobiographical memories
Which comes first, comprehension or production?
Comprehension
Information Processing Theory focuses on the ___________ of development while Piaget's theory focuses on the ____________ of development?
Continuity, Discontinuity
Examples of self-locomotion
Crawling and walking
Example of fast mapping
Ex: in a preschool classroom, experimenter had 2 trays, one a red and one that wasn't. Asked children, get me the chromium tray, not the red one"
4 month old prefers to watch videos that have matching auditory and movement
Example of intermodal perception
Visual cliff finding
Experience moving in the environment helps us understand visual surfaces
Evidence for specialized learning mechanisms
Face perception Language
Deffered imitation
First sign that infants gain the ability to form enduring mental representation
What is the simplest form of learning
Habituation
Communicatoin
Information is exchanged a)May be: -intentional -symbolic -linguistic b) gesture or other non-verbal signal c) example of human non-linguistic communication: mime, charades
How do guided participation and social scaffolding differ?
It's a bit more explicit in instruction and explanation
Semantic development
Learning how to express language (word learning)
Why does the stepping reflex disappear?
Legs are too heavy
A-not-B-error
tendency to reach for a hidden object where it was last found rather than in the new location where it was last hidden.
First cue somebody has for segregation
Movement
dynamic systems approach
New view of motor development
Are reflexes random
No, they are tools used to increase intelligence
information-processing and education
Numerical experience appears particularly important for later numerical learning
sociocultural and education
One way to improve education is to change culture of schools
How does problem solving develop?
Overlapping-waves theory
Sources of Discontinuity in Piaget
Qualitative change, broad applicablity, brief transitions and invariant sequence
Infants become sensitive to ______ this in speech:
Regularities
Pre-operational stage is about what?
Representation
Sensirmotor stage
Senses/Action: intelligence develops through sensory and motor abilities. Intelligence is bound to immediate perceptions and actions.
What are Piaget's four stages?
Sensorimotor, pre-operational, concrete operational and formal operational
Do reflexes disappear
Some do, but many remain throughout life
Evidence for modularity hypothesis
Species-specific and universal nature of language -newly emerging sign languages (no linguistic model) with increasing linguistic complexity
Recognition-Comprehension Production
Steps of first words
What does a 6 month old baby assume when a human arm reaches for an object in the same location?
The action is directed toward object, not the place
Impact of different motor development across culture?
The variation in cultural motor development in infants does impact when kids learn to do certain things, but it doesn't impact them later as adults, so it doesn't negatively impact long-term development
How would a Chinese child recall memories about childhood?
They would recall more things about their families
How would a 5 year old to a concervation task? The task would be starting with 2 equally poured liquid cups, then one is poured into a taller, thinner cup?
They would say the taller, thinner cup has more than the other one
How would an 8 - 10 year old respond to the same conservation task?
They would say they are the same, regardless of the size difference--mastery of conservation task
What does Information processing emphasize?
Thinking as a processes that changes over time (Continuous cognitive change)
Old view of motor development
Thought it was just through neural maturity
How do we test for object permanence?
Violation-of-Expectancy
statisical learning
What do infants use to calculate distributional regularties and segment words?
Dumbell experiment
When 18 month-olds see a person apparently try, but fail, to pull the ends off a dumbbell, they imitate pulling the ends off - the action the person intended to do, not what the person actually did.
Qualities of social knowledge
a) Distinguish animate and inanimate entities b) Learn that behavior of others is purposeful and goal-directed c) Understand how behavior relates to goals and intentions -15 month old can make inferences about what a person will do (Theory of mind)-means understanding the thoughts of another person
Linguistic bias/shape bias
a) children were shown exemplar of a figure and said "this is a dax!" and were later able to point it out with other mixed objects. -showed that children use grammatical categorization of novel words to help with meaning
Uses of symbols
a) help use communication with each other b) can be spoken, gestural or written c) the creative and flexible use of symbols is arguably the capacity that most sets humans apart from other species d) using symbols is a significant developmental task for children throughout the world.
Early word production
a) produce first words between 10-15 months of age -productive vocab: refers to words a child is able to say b) Names for people, objects, and events from everyday life (mostly nouns) -this is probably 1st b/c meaning is easier c) begin word usage by saying simple parts of words (banana—nanna)
According to Piaget, how are children viewed?
active, intrinsically motivated to learn and *little scientists*
Language production
actually speaking, signing or writing to others
color vision
adult-like part of vision at 2-3 months
Species universal
all humans can learn language, need the experience with others but it can emerge quick without a model
reflexes
are automatic functions important for survival of infants, but aren't fully automatic--babies won't do the rooting reflex if they arent hungry. Strong reflexes at birth are a sign of a strong nervous system.
Preparation for production
around 6-8 weeks, infants start producing drawn out vowel sounds. -as they produce more sounds, infants notice that people respond more to their vocalizations -they start turn-taking, with sounds, which is important for conversation
Sources of continuity for piaget
assimilation, accomodation and equilibration
adults vs. infant vision
at 8 months of age it becomes close to an adult, fully developed at age 6 (Color similar at 2-3 months)
Why does infant research focus on vision?
b/c approximately 50% of cerebral cortex is involved in this
Baillargeon experiment
babies look longer at impossible events than at possible ones,
Attractive face
babies look longer at this....
instrumental learning (operant conditioning)
based on recognizing contingency relation between own behavior and reward/punishment
Babbling
begins around 6-10 months, begin by repeating strings of consonant vowel sounds (BA-CA-DA) -feedback is important
Nativits view
believe language is too complex to come from experience alone, language requires a universal grammar, innate and common to all languages -held by Chomsky and pinker
Piaget's view on nature/nurture?
believe they interacted
Processing speed
biological maturation and experience contribute to increased processed speed -increased brain connectivity -increased myelination
When does sensorimotor stage take place?
birth-2-years
When is language development mastered?
by 5 years old, regardless of spoken or signed
Example of holophrastic period
can still get thoughts across—if an infant has a pain in their eye they may say "ow" then point to their eye and say "eye"
Mutual exclusivity
children expect that one entity will only have one name
Qualitative change
children of different ages think in qualitatively different ways. Ex: children who are 5 base moral dilemas on different factors than those who are 9.
Overlapping waves theory
children use a variety of approaches to solve problems, understanding new problems by recognizing parallels with familiar problems -those that are successful, become more prevlant.
Intermodal perception
combining of information from two or more sensory systems.
Information processing theory
concentrates on precisely detailing processes involved in children's thinking.
How did IPT think about cognitive change?
continuous cognitive change that occurs constantly and in small increments
Example of pragmatics
conversational conventions, intonation, context
Physical knowledge
demonstrate knowledge of gravity within first year, appreciate that objects don't float in mid air--look longer when a ball moves up the slope than when it looks down
Rate of vocab
development is influence by the amount of talk they hear—more talk, more vocab
Thelen's research
did research that showed it can be shown even when it was supposed to disappear, proving factors other than neural changes impact display (nuture)
Kipisigis
dig holes so baby can sit
China
discourage infant movement, have them sit on a couch
Manual exploration
dominates exploration after 4 monthes of age
Oral exploration
dominates the kind of exploration for first few months
Perceptual narrowing
ideal that face processing becomes more selective over time--related to loss of differing monkey face
Transferring (Adolph)
that infants do not initially transfer what they learned about crawling down slopes to walking down them
Phonemes
elementary units of meaningful sound used to produce language, distinguish meaning in one language overlap w/another language but also differ
Invariant sequence
everyone goes through the same order and doesn't skip a stage
Mali
exercise their infants to promote development
dynamic-systems
experience reaching successful intervention method for preterm infants
Phonological development
first step in children's language learning, mastery of the sound system of their language. -have a hard time understanding Chinese b/c I can't perceive the sounds being uttered.
Criticism of nativist view
focus almost exclusively on syntax, ignore the communicative role of language
statistical learning
infants pick up information from the environment, forming associations among stimuli that occur in statistically predictable patterns
Sociocultural theories
focuses on the contribution of other people and the surrounding culture to children's development
Vot test on babies
had 1 and 4 month olds habituated to tape of artificial speech sounds (did this by setting up a pacifier with a specific sound, baby was exposed repeatedly to the same sound, when they slowed their sucking, showed habituation) -then a new sound was played. If sucking time increased, it was shown that babies can distinguish them. -overall, infants make more distinctions with subtle speech sounds -as infants grow older, they have a harder time distinguishing between native/other languages
domain specific
held by core-knowledge theorists, meaning limited to a particular area such as living things or inanimate objects. Cues infants use to segregate objects
Ache (paraguay)
hold their babies for 0-3 years
common movement
how infants are able to distinguish different objects
visual acuity
how sharp vision is in an indivual
Common movement experiment loop hole
if they are first presented an object with no movement, they look equally as long at both objects--one rod and 2 rods.
How does habituation influence IQ?
if they habituate faster, more likely to have a higher IQ 18 years later - in turn, it's related to cognitive abilities
Phonology
individual sounds or parameters (sign language) 1st part of language acquisition
Common movment experiment
infant presented with rectangle and a rod behind it moving. in this case, the infant thinks it's 1 rod moving behind the block. Can even be different colors. After habituating to the display, they look longer at the 2 rod segments vs one because they believe it to be novel.
Object segregation
infants 2 months of age, use common movement for this, while older children use ideas like gravity to understand the world
Top-heavy bias
infants are more likely to look at what is at the top of the face, even if it is scrambled
Infants and monkey faces
infants at 6 months of age are equally good at processing monkeys as they are at human faces. Adults end up losing this ability (@ 9 months)
contrast sensitivty
infants like images like checker boards, things with high contrast b/c of underdeveloped cones
Expected motion trajectories
infants look longer at objects that violate this (so a box has be supported)
Violation-of-expectancy paradigm
infants surprised by "they look longer" at an impossible event than at possible event. -they are interested in events that are inconsistent with their knowledge
Facial expressions
infants understand what these are w/emotional tones by 5 months of age
Motor development
influenced by the culture in which the baby is brought into--china discourages infant movment--others encourage infant exercise
Social Referencing
influences infants' development of wariness of heights
Language
intentional exchange of information a) Must be: -symbolic -discrete -hierarchical -strcutured (follows rules) -can be ungrammatical
Intersubjectivity
is the mutual understanding that people share during communication...good communication requires participants to focus on same topic-
Connectionist view
language development is a result of gradual strengthening of connections in the neural network.
Interactionist view
language development occurs as a result of communication, held by tomasello
Species-specific
language is this, can only be aquired by humans who are in a normal environment
Evidence for connectionist
language learning can emerge from general-purpose learning mechanism and experience b) consistent with speech-perception/statistical learning research c) Have successfully modeled a few aspects of language development d) Still modeling of other aspects of language acquisition
Deaf babies
late and limited vocal babbling, more likely to babble manually -as infants babbling becomes more varied, it conforms to the sounds, rhythm and intonation patters of language they hear everyday
acquiring a language
learning basic building blocks (sounds /c/ & sound patterns /ts/ or handshapes & movements) -specific words and parts of words (cats) -ways to combine words according to rules (Cats are awesome)
Pragmatics
learning how language is used
Criticims for interactionist view
limited attention to syntactic development
What must infants have in order to habituate?
memory representation
Conservation Concept
merely changing the appearance or arrangement of objects does not neccarily change key properties—such as quantity.
Advantage of dynamic systems theory
most systems overlook the connection between thinking and acting, they try to overcome this
Infants and smell
prefer the smell of their own mother to other women, prefer smell of breast milk to other smells.
Whole object
novel world refers to whole object, not a part
Object permanence
objects exist independently of one's ability to perceive or act on them—infant develops as early as 3 months
habituation
one object is presented until the response declines, then novel image presented. If the response increases, we understand that the baby can discriminate them.
example of guided participation
parent helping child to assemble a toy
Categorical perception of speech sounds
perception of speech sounds belonging to discrete categories
Auditory localizatoin
perception of the location in space of a sound source--when infants hear a sound, they turn to it.
Holophrastic period
period when children begin using the words in their small productive vocab one word at a time
How is DST unique?
pervasive emphasis on how children's specific actions shape their development.
Distrubtional properties
phenomenon in language when certain sounds are more likely to appear together
Constructivist theory
piaget, depicts children as constructing knowledge for themselves ain response to their experiences. -generate hypothesis -perform experiments -draw conclusions from observations -learn a lot on their own, rather than just depending on parents
accomodation
process by which people adapt their current understandings in response to new experiences.
Equlibration
process by which people balance assimilation and accommodation to create stable understanding.
Assimilation
process by which people translate/incorporate incoming information into concepts they can understand.
Guided participation
process in which more knowledgeable individuals organize activities in ways that allow less knowledgeable people to engage in them at a higher level than they could manage on their own.
Selective attention
process of intentionally focusing on information that is most relevant to current goal.
Rehearsal
process of repeating information over and over to aid memory
Encoding
process of representing info in memory that draws our attention or that is considered important.
Self-organizatoin
process that drives this theory, bringing together and integrating components as needed to adapt to a continuously changing environment
right Hemisphere and face processing
processing a face requires input to ...... hemisphere
What was tomasello's arguments?
proposed that the human species has unique characteristics: -The inclination to teach others of the species -The inclination to attend to and learn from such teaching
Fast mapping
rapidly learning a new word from the contrastive use of a familiar and unfamiliar word.
How would an american child recall memories about their childhood?
reference themselves--own feelings and reactions
Process of language acquisition
requires both comprehending what other people communicate to you and producing the language yourself (comprehension before production)
Syntax
rules in language that specify how words from different categories (nouns, verbs, adj) can be combined. a) for English, grammatical rules pertain to order in which words appear in a sentence (John loves mary doesn't mean the same thing as Mary loves Joe)
observational/imitation
salient source of learning, occurs through watching
Soft assembly
same as self-organization, the components and their organization change from moment to moment and situation to situation. (not fixed)
cultural tools
symbol systems, artifacts, skills, values
Symbols
systems for representing thoughts, feelings and knowledge.(pictures, maps, spoken language) (not facial expressions)
Difference between humans and animals in language acquisition
takes a lot of time and effort to train animals, whereas with infant humans native lang is effortless
Recognizing mother
takes only 12 hours of exposure to do this
perceptual constancy
the ability to understand the different shapes in relation to environment--infants can do this
Discrimination vs. preference
the fact that infants discriminate an object, doesn't mean they prefer it--discrimination DOES NOT entail preference
Modularity hypothesis
the human brain contains an innate, self-contained language module that is separate from other aspects of cognitive functioning.
Synaptic bootstrapping
the strategy of using the grammatical structure of whole sentences to figure out meaning.
Critical period for language
the time during which language develops easily (birth-5 years) to learn language children must be exposed to other people using the language (signed or spoke
Metalinguistic knowledge
understanding of the properties and function of language-understanding language as a language.
Language comprehension
understanding what others say, sign or write
Generativity
using a finite set of words we can create and infinite number of sentences/express infinite number of ideas. (always coming across sentences you've never heard of before)
Overextension
using a given word in a broader context than is appropriate. -using daddy for any man or doggy for any animal -show an effort to communicate rather than a lack of knowledge
Symbolic representation
using one object to stand for another ex: five year olds play games involving pirates and princesses
How does change occur in DST?
variation and selection, basically try a bunch of different things, and select methods that work best
Zone of proximal development
what a learner can and cannot do without help
Example of accoomdatin
with the clown example, when the father points out that this man isn't a clown, just a man with silly hair, the little boy must process the difference, while still understanding his concept of a clown.
Infants and pictures
younger than 2 months tend to look at perimeter