Devleopment Exam II

Hypothetical deductive reasoning

Piaget's formal operational concept that adolescents have the cognitive ability to develop hypotheses about ways to solve problems and can systematically deduce which is the best path to follow in solving the problem

Assimilation

Piagetian concept in which children use existing schemes to incorporate new information

Accommodation

Piagetian concept of adjusting to fit new information and experiences

Organization

Piagetian concept of grouping isolated behaviors and thoughts into a higher-order, more smoothly functioning cognitive system

Triarchic theory of intelligence

Sternberg's theory that intelligence consists of analytical intelligence, creative intelligence, and practical intelligence

Zone of proximal development

Vygotsky's term for tasks too difficult for children to master alone but that can be mastered with guidance and assistance from adults or more-skilled children

Animism

a facet of peroperational thought—the belief that inanimate objects have lifelike qualities and are capable of action

Equilibration

a mechanism that Piaget proposed to explain how children shift from one stage of thought to the next

Working memory

a mental "workbench" where individuals manipulate and assemble information when making decisions, solving problems, and comprehending written and spoken language

Semantic memory

a person's knowledge about the world, including fields of expertise, general academic knowledge, and "everyday knowledge" about meaning of words, famous individuals, important places, and common things

Long-term memory

a relatively permanent and unlimited type of memory

Circular reaction

a repetitive action

Habit

a scheme based on a reflex tat has become completely separated from its eliciting stimulus

Primary circular reaction

a scheme based on the attempt to reproduce an event that initially occurred by chance

Normal distribution

a symmetrical, bell shaped curve with a majority of the cases falling in the middle of the possible range of scores and few scores appearing toward the extremes of the range

Adaptation

adjusting to new environmental demands

Reminiscence bump

adults remember more events from the second and third decades of their lives than from the other decades

Secondary circular reaction

an action repeated because of its consequence

Social constructivist approach

an emphasis on the social contexts of learning and construction of knowledge through social interaction. Vygotsky's theory reflects this approach

Mental age (MA)

an individual's level of mental development relative to others

Intelligence quotient (IQ)

an individual's mental age divided by chronological age multiplied by 100; devised in 1912 by William Stern

Symbol

an internalized sensory image or word that represents an event

Theory of mind

awareness of one's own mental processes and the mental processes of others

Mindfulness

being alert, mentally present, and cognitively flexible while going through life's everyday activities and tasks

False beliefs

beliefs that are not true

Disequilibrium

cognitive conflict; child is constantly faced with counterexamples to his or her existing schemes and with inconsistencies

Executive attention

cognitive process involving action planning, allocating attention to goals, error detection, and compensation, monitoring progress on tasks, and dealing with novel or difficult circumstances

Divided attention

concentration on more than one activity at the same time

Explicit memory

conscious memory of facts and experiences

Simple reflexes

coordination of sensation and action through reflexive behaviors

First habits and primary circular reactions

coordination of sensation and two types of scheme; main focus is still on the body

Coordination of secondary circular reactions

coordination of vision and touch—hand-eye coordination; coordination of schemes and intentionality

Analogy

correspondence in some respects between things that are dissimilar

Strategy construction

creation of new procedures for processing information

Cultural specificity hypothesis

cultural experiences determine what is relevant in a person's life and thus what a person is likely to remember

Habituation

decreased responsiveness to a stimulus after repeated presentations of the stimulus

Executive function

describes several functions (such as inhibition and planning) that are important for flexible, future-oriented behavior

Neo-piagetians

developmentalists who have elaborated on Piaget's theory, emphasizing attention to children's strategies; information-processing speed; the task involved; and division of ht problem into more precise smaller steps

Elaboration

engagement in more extensive processing of information, benefiting memory

Problem solving

finding an appropriate way to attain a goal

Joint attention

focus by individual on the same object or event; requires an ability to track another's behavior, one individual's directing another's attention, and reciprocal interaction

Attention

focusing of mental resources

Selective attention

focusing on a specific aspect of experience that is relevant while ignoring others that are irrelevant

Categories

grouping objects, events, and characteristics on the basis of their common properties

Expertise

having extensive, highly organized knowledge and understanding of a particular knowledge and understanding of a particular domain

Concepts

ideas about what categories represent; the sort of thing we think category members are

Schemes

in Piaget's theory, actions or mental representations that organize knowledge

Scaffolding

in cognitive development, a term Vygotsky used to describe the changing level of support over the course of a teaching session, with the more-skilled person adjusting guidance to fit the child's current performance level

Tip of the tongue phenomenon (TOT)

individuals can't quite retrieve familiar information but have the feeling that they should be able to retrieve it

Tertiary circular reactions, novelty, and curiosity

infants become intrigued by the many properties of objects and by the many things they can make happen to objects; they experiment with new behavior

Secondary circular reactions

infants become more object-oriented, moving beyond self-preoccupation; repeat actions that bring interesting or pleasurable results

Internalization of schemes

infants develop the ability to use primitive symbols and form enduring mental representations

Orienting investigative process

involves directing attention to potentially important locations in he environment (where) and recognizing objects and their features (what)

Critical thinking

involves grasping the deeper meaning of ideas, keeping an open mind, and deciding for oneself what to believe or do

Metacognition

knowing about knowing

Metamemory

knowledge about memory

Private speech

language used for self-regulation

Thinking

manipulating and transforming information in memory in order to reason, reflect, evaluate ideas and solve problems and make decisions

Implicit memory

memory without conscious recollection—memory of skills and routine procedures that are performed automatically

Schemas

mental frameworks that organize concepts and information

Prospective memory

remembering to do something in the future

Episodic memory

retention of information about the where and when of life's happenings

Short-term memory

retention of information for up to 15-30 seconds, without rehearsal of the information. Using rehearsal, individuals can keep the information longer

Memory

retention of information over time

Operations

reversible mental actions that allows children to do mentally what before they had done only physically

Tertiary circular reactions

schemes in which the infant purposely explores new possibilities with objects, continually doing new things to them and exploring the results

Dual process model

states that decision making is influenced by two systems—one analytical and one experiential, which compete with each other; in this model, it is the experiential system—monitoring and managing actual experiences—that benefits adolescent decision making

Core knowledge approach

states that infants are born with domain specific innate knowledge systems. Among these domain specific knowledge systems are those involving space, number sense, object permanence, and language

Imaginary audience

that aspect of adolescent egocentrism that involves feeling one is the center of attention and sensing that one is on stage

Object permanence

the Piagetian term for one of an infant's most important accomplishments: understanding that objects continue to exist even when they cannot directly be seen, heard, or touched.

Transitivity

the ability to logically combine relations to understand certain conclusions. Piaget argued that an understanding of this is characteristic of concrete operational thought

Sustained attention

the ability to maintain attention to a selected stimulus for a prolonged period of time; also called vigilance

Automaticity

the ability to process information with little or no effort

Source memory

the ability to remember where something is learned

Intelligence

the ability to solve problems and to adapt to and learn from experiences

Conservation

the awareness that altering the appearance of an object or a substance does not change its basic properties

Preoperational thought

the beginning of the ability to reconstruct in thought what has been established in behavior

Perceptual categorization

the categorizations based on similar perceptual features of objects such as size, color, and movement, as well as parts of objects

Seriation

the concrete operation that involves ordering stimuli along a quantitative dimension (such as length)

Sensorimotor stage

the first of Piaget's stages, which lasts from birth to about 2 years of age; infants construct an understanding of the world by coordinating sensory experiences (such as seeing or hearing) with physical motoric actions

Symbolic function substage

the first substage of peroperational thought, occurring roughly between the ages of 2 and 4. The young child gains the ability to represent mentally an object that is not present

Centration

the focusing of attention on one characteristic to the exclusion of all others

Formal operational stage

the fourth and final Piagetian stage, which appears between the ages of 11 and 15; individuals move beyond concrete experiences and think in more abstract and logical ways

Adolescent egocentrism

the heightened self-consciousness of adolescents, which is reflected in adolescents' beliefs that others are as interested in them as they are in themselves, and in adolescents' sense of personal uniqueness and invincibility

Egocentrism

the inability to distinguish between one's own and someone else's perspective; an important feature of preoperational thought

Infantile amnesia

the inability to remember events from the first three years of life

Dishabituation

the increase e in responsiveness after a change in stimulation

Strategies

the mental activities to improve the processing of information; rehearsal and organizing

Personal fable

the part of adolescent egocentrism that involves an adolescent's sense of personal uniqueness and invincibility

Autobiographical memory

the personal recollection of events and facts

Encoding

the process by which information gets into memory

Intuitive thought substage

the second substage of preoperational thought, occurring between approximately 4 and 7 years of age. Children begin to use primitive reasoning and want to know the answers to all sorts of questions

Preoperationalstage

the secondPiagetian developmental stage, which lasts from about 2-7 years of age; children begin to represent the world with words, images, and drawings

Individual differences

the stable, consistent ways in which people are different from one another

Concrete operational stage

the third Piagetian stage, which lasts from 7-11 years of age; children can perform concrete operations and logical reasoning replaces intuitive reasoning as long as the reasoning can be applied to specific or concrete examples

Fuzzy trace theory

theory stating that memory is best understood by considering two types of memory representations (1) verbatim memory and (2) gist. In this theory, older children's better memory is attributed to the gist of the information

Schema theory

theory stating that people mold memories to fit information that already exists in their minds

Postformal thought

thinking that is reflective, relativistic, and contextual; provisional; realistic; and open to emotions and subjective

A not B error

this occurs when infants make the mistake of selecting the familiar hiding place rather than the new hiding place as they progress into substage 5 in Piaget's sensorimotor stage

Inner speech

thoughts