Human Lifespan Development Exam 2 (Ch, 6-10)
When a child reaches ____________(stage of development) they are able to decontextualize.
"Adolescence" (11-teens) could be concrete or formal operational depending. - decontextualization is the separation of prior knowledge and beliefs from the demands of the task at hand. Achievements of formal operational thinking depends on opportunities to learn scientific reasoning.
Lev Vygotsky expected __________________________ to vary from society to society.
"Cognitive development" - Depends on the mental tools that a culture values and makes available. - EX: Children acquire mental tools by interacting with parents and other more experiences members of the culture.
__________________are instrumental to success at problem solving; stored information is used to achieve a goal.
"Stored memories" Executive control processes select, organize, manipulate, and interpret what is going on in the context of problem solving.
Explicit memory is __________________, whereas implicit memory is___________________ .
"deliberate and effortful and changes over the life span" "automatic and relatively stable over the life span." I: Occurs unintentionally, automatically, and without awareness. Procedural memory Mediated by an area of the forebrain called the striatum. E: Involves deliberate, effortful recollection of events Declarative memory. Largely localized in the medial temporal lobe of the brain
Smell
women more sensitive than men to a variety of odors. influenced by hormonal flavors fertile women may use odor to find a mate men may use diff. in female body odor as a component of mate selection.
Kurt Fischer's Dynamic Skill Framework-
Development results from changes in skill levels. Skills reflect what a person can do on a particular task in a specific context. People operate within a developmental range, with higher levels of performance demonstrated within a supportive context and after more experience with a task. -not possible to analyze behavior outside the context in which it occurs. -behavior emerges from interactions between person and context. -human performance is dynamic. --changes in response change with context
True of False: Research suggests that the whole language approach may be superior in teaching a child to read.
False!!! Research strongly supports the phonics approach. To read well, children must somehow learn that spoken words are made up of sounds and that the letters of the alphabet correspond to these sounds.
true or false: concrete operational children are not capable of the logical operation of seriation
False. seriation enables them to arrange items mentally along quantifiable dimensions such as length or weight.
True or False: older adults only experience a decline in sensitivity to taste when some other condition is present.
False: there is a general decline in sensitivity to taste. -men show greater decline then women. -middle aged and older adults have difficulty discriminating among tastes that differ in intensity. *****Do not have difficulty differentiating degrees of sweetness.*****
Executive control processes
Guide the selection, organization, manipulation, and interpretation of information throughout Use of the information-processing system to achieve a goal or arrive at a decision
How is the brain structured to support language skills?
Have warnickes and broca;s area with connecting fibers. Gyrus.
What perspective did Piaget take on nature nurture?
He was an interactionist -believed children actively create knowledge by building schemes from their experiences (nurture) using two inborn intellectual functions (organizations and adaptation).
Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences
His theory includes these types of intelligence: linguistic, logical-mathematical, musical, spatial, bodily kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalist.
How do babies acquire knowledge?
Infants actively seek out stimulation by exploring their environments, which typically provides them with the stimulation they need to develop normal sensory and perceptual skills.
How developed are an infants language skills?
Infants are able to discriminate speech sounds and progress from crying, cooing, and babbling to one-word holophrases (at 12 months) and then to telegraphic speech (at 18 months).
In what stages does an infants memory develop?
Infants clearly show recognition memory for familiar stimuli at birth and cued recall memory by about 2 months. More explicit memory, which requires actively retrieving an image of an object or event no longer present, appears to emerge toward the end of the first year. By age 2, it is even clearer that infants can recall events that happened long ago, for they, like adults, use language to represent and describe what happened.
How to infants progress through the sensorimotor period and into the preoperational stage?
Infants progress through six sub stages of the sensorimotor period by perceiving and acting on the world; they progress from using their reflexes to adapt to their environment to using symbolic or representational thought to solve problems in their heads.
How does creativity develop during adolescence?
Levels of creativity vary considerably from one individual to another. Some adolescents conform to societal norms and express little creativity, while others show a great deal of innovation.
A child has a fluctuating IQ score, she likely____________
Lives in an unstable environment. Drops in IQ with age often occur among children who live in poverty Inadequate health, dental care, and nutrition Live in overcrowded and unsafe environments Families experience chronic stress Relationships with parents are not as supportive Lack opportunities for cognitive stimulation
what theories propose that observed differences in cognitive skills result from experience-induced changes in the underlying neural structures supporting these skills.
Modern constructivist theories such as neuroconstructivism
True or false: few elderly adults report difficulties with remembering things but few report that these difficulties have a significant impact on quality of life.
Most elderly adults report at least minor difficulties remembering things Older adults learn new material more slowly - Most research is cross-sectional - Declines not noticeable until 70s - Not all older people experience difficulties
True or false, adults are less sensitive to pain than children.
Mostly false: age differences in pain thresholds are not large or consistent.
Memory
Our ability to store and later retrieve information about past events, develops and changes over the life span
Characteristics of experts.
Overall, experts know more than novices do, their knowledge base is more organized, and they are able to use their knowledge and the specialized strategies they have devised to learn, remember, and solve problems efficiently in their areas of expertise—but not in other domains.
Rule assessment approach to problem solving
Siegler's approach to studying the development of problem solving that determines what information about a problem children take in and what rules they then formulate to account for this information.
Much research shows that speed of processing increases during childhood and adolescence, peaks in early adulthood, then declines slowly over the adult years (Baudouin et al., 2009).
Slow neural transmission, then, may be behind limitations in working memory in both childhood and old age
How does SEC impact childhood IQ scores?
Social class impacts IQ scores, raising the issue of middle-class testing bias. Children who are moved from low to higher socioeconomic status homes show an increase in IQ scores.
Psychometric approach
Spawned the development of standardized tests of intelligence
What tools did Vygotsky believe mediated mental activity?
Spoken language, writing, using numbers. -Believed that language shapes thought, thought changes fundamentally once we begin to think in words.
cooing
Spontaneous noises an infant makes which include all of the sounds from every different language.
What is the greatest symbolic strength of the preschooler.
Symbolic capacity. can use words to refer to things, can refer to past and future, engage in pretend or fantasy play, imaginary companions, associated with advanced cognitive and social development an higher levels of creativity.
True or False: Professional and technical workers (such as scientists and engineers) score higher on IQ tests than white-collar workers (such as bank managers), who in turn score higher than blue-collar, or manual, workers (such as construction workers)
TRUE! Good job tech guys!
joint attention
The act of looking at the same object at the same time with someone else; a way in which infants share perceptual experiences with their caregivers.
True of False: IQ scores are correlated with occupational status as well as health in adulthood.
True
True of false: The speed with which infants process information shows some relationship to later intelligence as intelligence across the life span seems related to being able to process information quickly.
True
True or False: As adults gain expertise in a domain, they develop large and organized knowledge bases and highly effective, specialized, and automated ways of retrieving and using their knowledge.
True
True or False: Explicit and implicit memories are separate components of long-term memory and are localized in different parts of the brain.
True
True or False: Language skills remain fairly stable throughout adulthood, unless there are substantial sensory impairments or cognitive declines.
True
True or False: Memory has neurological underpinnings that influence memory effectiveness and contribute to developmental changes across the life span.
True
True or False: Working-memory capacity increases during childhood and adolescence, peaks around age 45, then begins to decline (Swanson, 1999).
True
True or False: Young infants can recognize their mother's voice and distinguish speech sounds that adults cannot discriminate.
True!
True or false: Adults increasingly are seeking continued educational opportunities for both personal and work-related reasons.
True.
True or False: Preschool children use private speech (talking out laud to one's self and describing one's behavior).
True. -Speech to oneself that guides one's thoughts and behavior. - critical step in the development of mature thought - forerunner or the silent thinking in words adults use. - intellectually capable children rely more on heavily on private speech (so its a good sign) and heavy use contributes to effective problem solving.
True or False: During adolescence, IQ scores are relatively stable and intellectual performance reaches near-adult level.
True. IQ scores are useful for predicting the academic achievement of adolescents.
True or False: As children get older, selective attention increases
True. Research suggests that performance increases as distractions are eliminated. A better ability to ignor distractions correlates to better performance overall
True or False: Creative output increases sharply from early to middle adulthood, and although it then drops somewhat, it remains above the level where it started in young adulthood.
True. The peak period of creativity varies from one field to another. Creative output may drop-off in older adulthood because people have already generated and expressed their creative potential.
True or False: Grade point average from 1st grade to 12th graders with many risk factors for students with high and low IQ showed a decrease in academic success regardless of IQ.
True:
True or False: Formal operational thought is more abstract than concrete operational thought.
True: - also permits systematic and scientific thinking about problems.
True or False: Consolidation and storage of memories show improvement over infancy
True: Allows older children and adults to simultaneously perform more mental operations in working memory Short-term memory capacity is domain-specific
True or false: Ability to perceive odors declines w/age.
True: Can still identify and remember unpleasant odors but there is some decline in the ability to detest and remember pleasant odors. ***Under optimal conditions, many older adults will not experience deficits in taste and smell.****
True or False: Older adults capable of using effective problem-solving strategies
True: Do not use them in some contexts Problem solving in everyday problems declines in old age
True or false: Knowledge base continues to expand during adolescence. Metamemory and metacognition improve
True: Knowledge base continues to expand during adolescence. Metamemory and metacognition improve
True or False: most cases of intellectual disability have no identifiable organic cause;
True: Most cases of intellectual disability have no identifiable organic cause; they are characterized by milder symptoms and appear to result from some combination of genetic endowment and environmental factors
True of False: We have an inborn readiness to acquire language.
True: The complex process of language acquisition appears to occur effortlessly through an interaction of inborn readiness and a normal language environment.
fluid intelligence
Ability to quickly identify relationships and connections, and then use those relationships and connections to make correct deductions.
equilibraition
According to Piaget, the process by which we reduce conflict. Process of achieving mental stability where internal thoughts are not consistent with the evidence received from the external world.
Why does achievement motivation and grades tend to drop during adolescence?
Achievement motivation and grades tend to drop during adolescence for a variety of reasons, including cognitive growth, family characteristics, peer pressure, and a poor fit between the student and the school.
What are two reasons why achievement motivation may decline during adolescence?
Adolescents are better able than younger children to realistically evaluate their strengths and weaknesses and may become discouraged if they focus on their weaknesses, leading to a decline in achievement motivation. Adolescents may also become frustrated by the emphasis on grades or abandon learning goals in favor of performance goals.
Pieget's Characteristics of Adolescent Children
Adolescents may advance to Piaget's last stage of cognitive development—formal-operational thought, in which they can think about abstract concepts and apply their logical reasoning to hypothetical problems. Formal-operational thinkers can simultaneously consider multiple task components. Formal-operational thought may give rise to special forms of egocentrism, namely, the imaginary audience and personal fable.
What circumstances are common in creative adolescents?
Adolescents with exceptional talents or creativity have both talent and motivation on the nature side and environments that foster their talents and value independence on the nurture side. Give children freedom to explore!
imaginary audience
Adolescents' belief that they are the focus of everyone else's attention and concern.
True or False: Length of sustained attention continues to increase from early childhood into adulthood.
True: This improved ability to sustain attention seems to be tied to increased myelination of those portions of the brain that help regulate attention (Tanner, 1990). In addition, adolescents become still more efficient at ignoring irrelevant information so that they can concentrate on the task at hand
True or False: Babies know more about object permanence than they reveal with their actions.
True: in some situations, looking my developmentally precede reaching for an object and in others, looking does not predict subsequent action on an object.
Infants as young as six months display deferred imitation. This is...
An ability to imitate a novel act after a delay, which clearly requires memory ability Seems to represent an early form of explicit or declarative memory
functional grammar
An analysis of the semantic relations (meanings such as naming and locating) that children express in their earliest sentences.
The Stanford-Binet and Wechsler Scales...
are the most common intelligence tests and compare an individual's performance on a variety of cognitive tasks with the average performance of age-mates.
Primary Circular Reactions
babies learn to repeat pleasant bodily sensation first achieved by chance via reflexes
Presbycusis—
changes in hearing associated with aging—affects many older adults and most commonly leads to trouble detecting high-pitched sounds. Older adults have more difficulty with speech perception, especially under noisy conditions, than younger adults. Hearing aids can significantly improve older adults' abilities to detect sounds.
Lev Vygotsky's sociocultural perspective emphasizes______________more than Piaget's theory does
cultural and social influences on cognitive development: Through guided participation in culturally important activities, children learn problem-solving techniques from knowledgeable partners sensitive to their zone of proximal development.
Much of what we remember is a. biographical In third person b. autobiographical in first person c. biographical past tense d. autobiographical past tense
d. autobiographical past tense.
Intellectual disability is defined by....
deficits in adaptive behavior combined with low IQ scores. Functioning varies by level of disability and is worse when accompanied by other conditions. Most intellectually disabled adults live in the community, either in group homes or with their families.
Concrete Operational: Transitivity
described the necessary relations among elements in a series. "all of these things are circles.
The Flynn effect...
describes a global increase in IQ scores over the past century that is likely the result of better nutrition, living conditions, and education.
Binet and Simon: Significant contribution to the psychometric approach to intelligence
devised a large battery of tasks Forerunner of the modern IQ test Mental age Level of age-graded problems that the child is able to solve IQ= MA/CA
cross modal perception
dfn: using several senses to understand the same experience, The ability to transfer info about an object from one sense, such as vision and use it when encountering the object later using a different sense such as touch
Adolescent Egocentrism
difficulty differentiating one's own thoughts and feelings from those of other people. EX imaginary audience and personal fable.
What theory described how a child is able to learn to navigate through a tricky environment?
dynamic systems theory. Coupling perception with action to develop locomotion skills—the ability to navigate one's body around the environment—is a major accomplishment of childhood made understandable by dynamic systems theory.
telegraphic speech
early speech stage in which a child speaks like a telegram--'go car'--using mostly nouns and verbs and omitting 'auxiliary' words
The whole-language (or look-say) approach...
emphasizes reading for meaning and teaches children to recognize specific words by sight or to figure out what they mean using clues in the surrounding context (Donat, 2006).
_____________impairment is three times as prevalent as ____________ impairment.
hearing, visual - a majority of individuals older than 65 have at least mildly impaired hearing. -caused by degeneration of cochlea. First loose sensitivity to high pitched sounds then low freq sounds become diff. to hear.
Students from _____________________ (higher/lower) socioeconomic backgrounds report more use of metacognitive strategies
higher
Teacher Effectiveness can be defined by...
how far teachers can advance their students each year.
What methods have researchers used to study memory in infants?
imitation, habituation, and operant conditioning techniques,
where is vocabulary stored?
in the limbic-temporal cortex.
How does memory improve during childhood.
increased efficiency of basic information-processing capacities, greater use of memory strategies, improvement in metamemory, and growth of general knowledge base.
phonological awareness
is a broad skill that includes identifying and manipulating units of oral language - parts such as words, syllables, and onsets
___________________ in terms of language acquisition is analogous the zone of proximal development in cognitive development.
Bruner's linguistic scaffold
Parallel processing
Carrying out multiple cognitive activities simultaneously
crystallized intelligence
Cognitive capacity to understand relationships or solve problems using information acquired during schooling and other experiences.
How does creativity develop during childhood?
Creativity increases throughout early childhood but dips during later elementary school, possibly in response to societal expectations to conform. Creativity is associated with playfulness, openness to new experiences, and originality.
What social factors are suspected to influence the success of most Asian schools in math scores?
Cross-cultural research suggests that the success of Asian schools is rooted in more class time spent on academics, more homework, more parent involvement, more peer support, and a stronger belief that hard work pays off.
Theories of language development include...
learning theories, nativist theories, and interactionist theories.
A child whose IQ increases through the childhood years most likely...
lives in a favorable environment with good nutrition, high socioeconomic status, and better schooling.
Adolescent Girls consistently report more ___________________ strategies as compared to boys.
metacognitive
information-processing approach
model of memory that assumes the processing of information for memory storage is similar to the way a computer processes memory in a series of three stages. Emphasizes the basic mental processes involved in attention, perception, memory, and decision making Maturation of the nervous system plus experience enable adults to remember more than young children
The Bayley scales include
motor, mental, and behavior ratings to assess infant development. - Summarizes how well or how poorly the infant performs in comparison with a large norm group The motor scale, - which measures the infant's ability to do such things as grasp a cube and throw a ball The mental scale, - which includes adaptive behaviors such as reaching for a desirable object, searching for a hidden toy, and following directions The behavior rating scale, - a rating of the child's behavior on dimensions such as goal-directness, emotional regulation, and social responsibility
assimilating new experiences to existing understandings and accommodating existing understandings to new experiences is defined as
organization and adaptation
Formal Operational Thought: Hypothetical deductive reasoning.
reasoning from general ideas or rules to their specific implications. - intuitive and scientific reasoning coexist in more developed thinkers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJyuy4B2aKU
Types of retrieval include:
recognition, recall, and cued recall.
language acquisition device (LAD)
sifts through information presented in early infancy and organized information used in the acquisition of the native language. A set of linguistic processing skills that nativists believe to be innate; presumably the LAD enables a child to infer the rules governing others' speech and then use these rules to produce language.
Damage to hippocampus leads to...
significant impairments in creating new episodic memories
Taste in adolescence
slight decline in preferance for sweets increased sensitivity to and liking of sour treats determined by chemosensory irritation influences by cognition.
Broca's area is associated with __________________ while Wernicke's area is associated with ___________________
speech production/comprehension of language -left hemisphere showing increased activity when listening to speech and the right hemisphere showing more activity when processing the melody or rhythm of speech
Many older adults perform less well than young adults on memory tasks that require___________
speed, the learning of unfamiliar or meaningless material, the use of unexercised abilities, recall rather than recognition memory, and explicit rather than implicit memory.
babbling
stage of language development at about 4 months when an infant spontaneously utters nonsense sounds that imitate actual language.
The phonics (or code-oriented) approach...
teaches children to analyze words into their component sounds; that is, it systematically teaches them letter-sound correspondence rules.
Creativity is...
the ability to produce novel and socially valuable work. It involves divergent rather than convergent thinking and is often measured in terms of ideational fluency, the sheer number of different (including novel) ideas that a person can generate.
Cross-modal perception,
the ability to recognize through one sense what was learned by a different sense, originates in infancy but becomes more fully developed in childhood. Infant associates textures with vision, sounds with smells, own body with the bodies of others
symbolic capacity.
the ability to use words, gestures and images represent objects (18 months). Most important cognitive achievement of infancy. - part of sensorimotor phase
The interactionist view emphasizes...
the child's biologically based capacities and experience conversing with adults who use child-directed speech and strategies such as expansion that simplify the language-learning task.
Major accomplishments of the sensorimotor stage include
the development of object permanence, or the realization that objects continue to exist even when they are not directly experienced, and the symbolic capacity, or the ability to allow one thing to represent something else. The emergence of the symbolic capacity paves the way for language and pretend play.
Older adults have the greatest difficulty processing information when
the situation is novel or complex. Have fewer problems when there are clear expectations about what to do and when the task is not overly complicated. -men loose hearing at a faster rate.
Learning theory of language
theory that language is based on modeling, imitation, exposure and reinforcement
True or false: Emergent literacy activities such as listening to storybooks facilitate later reading.
true
True or false: some mental abilities decline as the average person ages.
true
True or False: Older adults also loose some ability to understand conversations
true. combination of auditory and cognitive declines.
Piaget has been criticized for
underestimating the capacities of infants and young children, not considering factors besides competence that influence performance, failing to demonstrate that his stages have coherence, offering vague explanations of development, and underestimating the role of language and social interaction in cognitive development Also, his clinical method is imprecise.
relativistic thinking
viewing all knowledge as embedded in a framework of thought. Aware of a diversity of opinions on many topics, they gave up the possibility of absolute truth in favor of multiple truths, each relative to its context
Young 1-year-olds can recall experiences for
weeks and even months under certain conditions.
On the basis of mental and motor scores in the Baley test, infants are given a ______ score as opposed to an IQ score for adults.
DQ: developmental quotient.
In terms of memory, what types of decline are common among older adults?
Declines in basic processing capacity and difficulty using strategies, plus contextual factors such as cohort differences and the irrelevance of many laboratory tasks to everyday life, contribute to age differences in memory.
dialectical thinking
Detecting paradoxes and inconsistencies among ideas and trying to reconcile them
Overlapping waves theory
Development of problem-solving skills is a matter of knowing and using a variety of strategies Becoming increasingly selective with experience about which strategy to use Changing or adding strategies as needed
Meta memory is defined as ________________ and developed most during ________________ (phase of life).
- "An understanding about the processes that underlie memory, which emerges and improves during middle childhood. awareness of our own memory process, abilities, and limitations" -"Childhood"
What basic capacities improve when a child matriculates into adolescence?
- Adolescents perform cognitive operations faster than children do - Have greater functional use of their working memory - No differences on tasks of low complexity meaning that adolescence are equally as good at simple tasks as children but better at complex tasks compared to children. - Face recognition
Characteristics of formal operational thought
- May prepare individual to gain a sense of identity. - Think in more complex ways about moral issues. - Questioning can lead to confusion - Rebellion against ideas Piaget's fourth and final stage of cognitive development (from age 11 or 12), when the individual begins to think more rationally and systematically about abstract concepts and hypothetical ideas.
why do sensory and perceptual capacities decline gradually with age?
- a rise in sensory threshold - declining perceptual abilities -difficulties in older adults in processing or interpreting information. old people may be less sensitive to temp changes.
decentration
- ability to focus on two or more dimensions of a problem at once. -preschoolers struggle with this. -- preoperational thinkers engage in centration: tendency to center attention on a single aspect of the problem.
What are the implications of the Zone of Proximal Development?
- knowledge is not a fixed state - no single test or score can adequately reflect the range of a persons knowledge. - development consists of moving toward the upper range of the zone. 2'
orienting system
- reacts to events in the environment An attentional system that reacts to events in the environment; contrast with a focusing system that deliberately seeks out and maintains attention to events.
Piaget's four distinct stages of cognitive developement.
- sensorimotor (birth -2), preoperational (2-7), concrete operations(7-11), formal operational (11+).
overregularizations
-In early childhood, children begin to use past tenses and plurals in speech
These basics of language are supported by a brain that is uniquely structured for language.Mastering a language includes...
-Knowing the phonemes and morphemes and how these can be combined, -the syntax for turning words into sentences, -the semantics for understanding the meaning of words and sentences, -the pragmatics for how to best use language to suit the context and our conversational partner, and the -prosody or sound features of speech.
Binet's test
-Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale -Lewis Terman (Stanford University) later translated it from french and published for use with American children Intelligence quotient (IQ)
Operant conditioning
-Task taps into implicit or procedural memory -Young infants have difficulty recalling what they have learned if cues are insufficient or different -Early memories are cue-dependent and context-specific
Nativist View of language developement
-The view that not only are humans genetically programmed to have a general capacity for language, particular aspects of language ability are also genetically specified
Infants remember best when:
-They have repeated exposures to what they are to remember -They are given plenty of cues to help them remember -Events they must remember occur in a meaningful or logical order -Infants can overcome obstacles to achieve desired goals --Increasingly pay attention to the cues provided by adults --Increasingly solicit help by pointing, reaching, or letting the adult know that assistance is needed
Scripts or general event representations
-Typical sequence of actions related to an event -Guide future behaviors in similar settings Scripts become more detailed as children age -Affect how they form new memories -Affect how they recall events
dynamic systems theory
-developments take place over time through a self organizing process. -children use sensory feedback when trying different movement sot modify their motor behavior in adaptive ways. -the view that development is a self-organizing process, where new forms of behavior emerge through consistent interactions between a biological being and his or her cultural and environmental contexts
chemo-sensory irritation
-reaction of your skin in your mouth and nose to certain chemical compounds in foods.
Children progress through four stages to successful strategy use
1. Mediation deficiency: children cannot spontaneously use or benefit from strategies even if they are taught to use them 2. Production deficiency: children can use strategies they are taught but cannot produce them on their own 3. Utilization deficiency: children fail to benefit from a memory strategy they are able to produce 4. Effective strategy: children can actually use the strategy they create.
Six stages of sensory motor period.
1. Reflex activity (birth-1 month) active exercise and refinement of inborn reflexes. 2. Primary Circular Reactions (1-4 months) repetition of interesting acts centered on the child's own body. 3. Secondary Circular Reactions (4-8 months) repetition of interesting acts on objects 4. Coordination of secondary schemes (8-12 months) combination of actions to solve simple problems or achieve goals; first evidence of intentionality. 5. Tertiary Circular Reactions (12-18 months) Experimentation to find new ways to solve problems and produce interesting outcomes (splashing in water different ways). 6. Beginning of thought (18-24 months) First evidence of insight, able to solve problems mentally and use symbols to stand for objects and actions; visualize how a stick could be used to move a toy closer if it was previously out of reach.
Children who live in poverty average______points below middle-class age-mates
10-20, Cumulative-deficit hypothesis Describes how impoverished environments inhibit intellectual growth Negative effects accumulate over time
What are the IQ ranges used to classify each level of disability.
52-70: Mild: Usually independent. 6th grade 35-51: Moderate: Needs supervision. Cannot do academic work. 20-34: Severe: May be semi independent, needs supervision. Below 19: Profound: Dependent and needs constant supervision.
personal fable
A cognitive distortion experienced by adolescents, in which they believe they are so special and unique that other people cannot understand them and risky behaviors will not harm them
wisdom according to Paul Baltes and colleagues.
A combination of rich factual knowledge about life and procedural knowledge such as strategies for giving advice and handling conflicts.
recall
A measure of memory in which the person must retrieve information learned earlier, as on a fill-in-the-blank test.
vocabulary spurt
A phenomenon occurring around 18 months of age when the pace of word learning quickens dramatically.
Terminal Drop
A rapid decline in intellectual abilities that people within a few years of dying often experience.
holophrases
A single-word utterance used by an infant that represents an entire sentence's worth of meaning
universal grammar
A system of common rules and properties of language that may allow infants to grow up learning any of the world's languages.
Six major approaches to cognitive development have been presented in Chapters 7, 8, and 9. These include
(1) Piaget's focus on qualitatively different stages of thought, (2)Fischer's dynamic skills, and (3) Vygotsky's emphasis on culturally transmitted modes of thought. The (4) information-processing approach reveals how memory and problem solving are influenced by characteristics of the person such as age and task factors such as complexity. The (5) psychometric approach defines cognitive abilities in measurable ways, illustrating that people have more or less of distinct mental abilities. (6) Sternberg's triarchic theory adds creative and practical intelligence to the more traditional analytic intelligence.
Schaie's sequential study suggests that (4 things).
(1) date of birth (cohort) influences test performance, (2) no major declines in mental abilities occur until the late 60s or 70s, (3) some abilities (especially fluid ones) decline more than others (especially crystallized ones), and (4) not all people's abilities decline.
Students perform best when (3 things)...
(1) they are intellectually capable and motivated; (2) their teachers create a motivating, comfortable, and task-oriented setting and involve parents in their children's schooling; and (3) there is a good fit between children's characteristics and the kind of instruction they receive.
Why might students in Asian schools outperform many other students in science and math?
Asian schools typically spend more time on academics and they are backed up by parents who place a high priority on education, encouraging study time and homework. Peer groups also support studying and friends often get together to study, as opposed to getting together to "hang out."
Adaptation consists of:
Assimilation and accommodation. assimilation: process by which we interpret new experiences in terms of existing schemes or cognitive structure. accommodation: the process of modifying existing schemes to better fit new experiences.
What is the difference between attention and the focusing system?
Attention is the focusing of perception and cognition on something in particular. The focusing system deliberately seeks out and maintains attention to events.
When do humans begin using scripts? What are scripts? How do these influence memory?
By age 3, children store routine daily events as scripts that they can draw on in similar situations. Our scripts influence what we remember about an event, which is also influenced by information related to but coming after the event.
Fuzzy-trace theory
Children store verbatim and general accounts of an event separately One explanation of childhood amnesia Verbatim information unstable - Events of our early childhood do not seem to undergo consolidation
Four major hypotheses about why learning and memory improve:
Changes in memory strategies Increased knowledge about memory Increased knowledge about the world
Memory strategies such as rehearsal, organization, and elaboration improve most during what phase?
Childhood
Autobiographical memories
Episodic memories of personal events Important for understanding of who we are
How does achievement motivation present itself in children.
During childhood, some children develop higher levels of achievement motivation than others; they tend to have a growth mindset rather than a fixed mindset regarding abilities, and they set learning goals rather than performance goals in the classroom.
What happens to language during preschool?
During the preschool years, language abilities improve dramatically, as illustrated by overregularizations and new transformation rules.
When do children develop symbolic schemes?
During their second year of life. Schemes are organized patterns of thought or action that people construct to interpret their experiences.
What learning strategies do we begin to master in adolescence?
Elaboration, note taking, and underlining, and they use their strategies more deliberately and selectively. Metamemory skills also improve and contribute to increased memory performance and problem-solving ability.
Erikson's influential theory of life-span development.
Erikson says that older adults often gain wisdom as they face the prospect of death and attempt to find meaning in their lives
How do children problem solve according to Robert Siegler?
Even young children use systematic rules to solve problems, but their problem-solving skills improve as they replace faulty rules with ones that incorporate all the relevant aspects of the problem. Multiple strategies are used at any age so that development proceeds through a natural selection process and resembles overlapping waves more than a set of stairsteps leading from one way of thinking to the next.
fixed mindset vs growth mindset.
F: The belief that intelligence and other traits are fixed or static; associated with the tendency to want to prove rather than improve one's ability. Contrast with growth mindset. G: The belief that intelligence is not fixed but malleable and can therefore be improved through hard work and effort. Contrast with fixed mindset.
True or False: Most adults operate at the formal operational level in Piegets theory.
False: Many adults seem to function at the concrete-operational level, rather than at Piaget's highest level of formal-operational thought. Formal-operational thought appears to be highly dependent on formal education. It is also influenced by culture and area of expertise. Some adults may acquire advanced levels of thought not considered by Piaget, such as relativistic thinking (or understanding that knowledge is dependent on the knower's subjective perspective) and dialectical thinking, (detecting and reconciling contradictory ideas).
True or False: Most adults display exceptional insight into complex life problems.
False: A few adults display wisdom, or exceptional insight into complex life problems, which requires a rich knowledge base along with particular personality traits and cognitive styles and is influenced more by experience than age.
True or False: The Bayley scales are a good predictor of the IQ an infant will obtain later in life.
False: Although traditionally used as a measure of infant intelligence, they do not correlate well with later IQ scores.
True or False: IQ remains stable throughout adulthood.
False: Both cross-sectional studies and longitudinal studies tend to show age-related decreases in IQ.
True or False: IQ tends to steadily increase through adolescence.
False: During childhood, IQ scores become more stable so that scores at one point in time are generally consistent with scores obtained at a second point.
True of False: Early intervention programs like "Better Baby" can improve a child's lifetime academic success.
False: Early education can help prepare disadvantaged children for formal schooling, but an overemphasis on academics at the expense of exploration and play may hinder young children's development.
True of False: Short term memory is only a temporary holding place.
False: Expanded view of short-term memory consists of a central executive - Directs attention and controls the flow of information
True or False: Giftedness is always associated with a higher IQ.
False: Giftedness has most often been defined by high IQ scores, although more recent definitions recognize special talents not measured by traditional IQ tests. Life outcomes for gifted people are generally above average.
True of False: IQ is independent of genetic heritage.
False: Individual differences in IQ at a given age are linked to genetic factors and to differences in intellectually stimulating qualities of the home environment such as parental involvement and responsive stimulation.
True or False: By the time an individual reaches mid childhood, they are selectively attentive and can control what received their attention.
False: Infants and young children are selectively attentive to the world around them, but they have not fully taken charge of their attentional processes.
True or False: Level of achievement in adolescence rarely predicts achievement in adulthood.
False: Level of achievement carries over from adolescence into adulthood. There may be some decline in achievement motivation among women who set aside career goals to raise children, but career goals reemerge as their children age, especially among women with higher levels of education.
True or false: Literacy programs have greatly improves literacy rates?
False: Literacy programs have had minimal success in improving literacy rates. Some adults, despite years of education, have not acquired the skills of functional literacy.
True or False; Long-term storage capacity contributes to developmental differences in memory
False: Long-term storage capacity does not contribute to developmental differences in memory - Encoding of information improves over the first several years of life - Consolidation and storage of memories show improvement over infancy
True of False: Signs of achievement motivation due not become apparent until early childhood.
False: Precursors of achievement motivation can be seen among infants who strive to master their environments. Mastery motivation is fostered by a responsive environment that provides plenty of opportunities for infants to learn that they can control their environments and experience successes.
True or False: Sensory register and long-term memory change throughout childhood.
False: Sensory register and long-term memory do not change with age Improvements with age in operating speed and efficiency of working memory throughout childhood. Includes improvements in the encoding and consolidation processes
True or False: Simple problem solving does not improve throughout infancy, because infants realize that they can get adults to help them solve problems.
False: Simple problem solving improves throughout infancy, and infants realize that they can get adults to help them solve problems.
True of False: Teenagers have chemical senses that are more similar to their prepubescent peers than to adults.
False: The chemical senses operate at adult levels and may contribute to mate selection.
True or False: American students typically score below average on math tests compared to all other countries.
False: U.S. students score close to the international average but below several other countries in math. Middle school and high school in Asian countries include a greater focus on mathematics education.
True or False: Our long term memory has limited space and limited permanency.
False: long-term memory seems to be unlimited in terms of size and permanency. Encoding and retrieval strategies influence memory performance.
True or False: Preoperational thinkers display an understanding of conservation.
False: preoperational thinkers fail to demonstrate conservation because of limitations in transformational thought (ability to conceptualize transformations). i.e. they have static thinking.
How do adults function cognitively in everyday life?
Formal operations in field of expertise, concrete operations in less familiar areas. Performance: - likely to be inconsistent across content areas unless the person has had the chance to build knowledge and skills. may progress to post formal thought (more complex than formal operational stage) such as relativistic and dialectical thinking.
True or False: Gardner believes that the current IQ score is a measure of human intelligence.
Gardner rejects IQ score is a measure of human intelligence Argues for eight intelligences 1. Linguistic intelligence 2. Logical-mathematical intelligence 3. Musical intelligence 4. Spatial intelligence 5. Bodily-kinesthetic intelligence 6. Interpersonal intelligence 7. Intrapersonal intelligence 9. Naturalist intelligence
Define intellectual disability
IQ of 70-75 or lower and troubles completing ADL's autonomously.
Goal
Identify these traits precisely and to measure them
What type of memory (I or E) develops first?
Implicit memory develops earlier in infancy than explicit memory
Robert Sternberg defines a wise person as...
Integrating all three aspects of intelligence: creative, practical, and analytical. Wisdom is a combination of rich factual knowledge about life and procedural knowledge such as strategies for giving advice and handling conflicts.
Intelligence according to Piaget.
Intelligence is a basic life function that allows organisms (including humans) to adapt to the demands of their environment.
Knowledge base
Knowledge of a content area to be learned Affects learning and memory performance More you know, the more you can know
metalinguistic awareness
Knowledge of language as a system.
Metacognition
Knowledge of the human mind and of the range of cognitive processes Present in three- and four-year-olds
What is the most important tool that adults use to pass culturally valued thinking and problem solving to their children?
Language: Language shapes their thought and moves from social speech to private speech and later to inner speech.
Habituation
Learning not to respond to a repeated stimulus
Retrograde amnesia
Loss of memory for information and events occurring prior to the incident that caused the amnesia
mastery goals vs. performance goals
M: In achievement situations, aiming to learn new things in order to learn or improve ability; contrast with performance goal. P: A goal adopted by learners in which they attempt to prove their ability rather than to improve it.
How does the memory of an older adult compare to a young adult?
May be slighlty decreased but few individuals actually report sever memory impairment.
explicit memory
Memory of facts and experiences that one can consciously know and "declare." Teenagers and young adults out perform adults in this category.
implicit memory
Memory that does not require conscious recall; consists of skills and conditioned behaviors.
Working Memory
Mental "scratch Pad" that temporarily stores memory while actively operating on it.
What are the main features of the nativist and learning theories of language acquisition?
N: universal grammar a system of common rules and properties for learning any of the world's languages, language acquisition device (LAD) which sifts through language, applies the universal rules, and begins tailoring the system to the specifics of the language spoken in the young child's environment, poverty of the stimulus (POTS), young children produce many sentences they are unlikely to have heard adults using L:.Children learn the words they hear spoken by others—even when the words are not spoken directly to them. reinforcement and expansion
Neuroconstructivism Theory:
New knowledge is constructed in the context of existing knowledge and is contained by genetic and environmental factors. - Believe that the neural structures in the brain underlying cognitive phenomenon develop and change in response to experience.
Anterograde amnesia
No longer able to form new memories (50 first dates)
2 Conclusions about development of learning and memory in childhood.
Older and younger children do not differ in terms of sensory register or long-term memory capacity Older children Use more effective memory strategies Know more about memory Have a larger memory base
In what categories of cognitive processing do older adults perform less well as compared to younger adults? In which do they perform better?
On average, older adults also perform less well than younger adults on laboratory problem-solving tasks, but everyday problem-solving skills are likely to improve from early adulthood to middle adulthood and to be maintained in old age.
holophrases
One-word sentences commonly used by children under 2 years of age. single terms that are applied by an infant to broad categories of things
How do changes in vision and hearing affects activities of daily living.
Overall, visual impairment has a bigger impact on ADLs than hearing impairment. Visual and hearing impairment has the greatest impact.
egocentric communicators
Person who creates messages without giving much thought to the person who is listening; a communicator who is self-focused and self-absorbed. Common in young children but becomes less prevalent in school aged children.
What determines whether an event is likely to be recalled?
Personal significance Distinctiveness Emotional intensity Life phase of the event
Compare and Contrast Piaget with Fischer.
Piaget: -tested children in artificial settings -cognitive structures develop Fischer: -studied development as it should happen in natural context. -skill levels change and develop with increasing social and environmental pressure.
What are the three components of Sternberg's triarchic theory?
Practical, creative, and analytical The practical component predicts that intelligent behavior will vary across different sociocultural contexts. According to the creative component, intelligent responses will vary depending on whether problems are novel or routine (automated). Finally, the analytical aspect of intelligence includes the thinking skills that a person brings to a problem-solving situation.
Piaget's characteristics of Preschool-age children.
Preschool-age children are in Piaget's preoperational stage and do not yet reason logically; instead they rely on perceptually salient features of a task or object. Their prelogical set of cognitive structures leads them to have trouble with conservation and classification tasks. In particular, preoperational children lack the abilities to decenter, reverse thought, and understand transformations. In addition, they tend to be egocentric—viewing the world from their own perspective and not recognizing others' points of views.
Constraint-seeking questions
Questions that rule out more than one answer to narrow the field of possible choices rather than asking about only one hypothesis at a time
True or False: All races perform equally on IQ tests.
Racial and ethnic differences in IQ also exist, with African American and Hispanic children typically scoring, on average, lower than European American children. Motivational differences, stereotype threat, genetic factors, and environment have all been considered as contributors.
Characteristics of gifted children.
Rapid learning Extensive vocabulary Good memory Long attention span Perfectionism Preference for older companions Excellent sense of humor Early interest in reading Strong ability with puzzles and mazes Maturity Perseverance on tasks
Fischer's four tiers of cognitive development.
Reflexive, sensorimotor action, representations, abstractions.
Childhood memory strategies.
Rehearsal emerges first, then organization, and then elaboration Organization - Classifying items into meaningful groups Elaboration - Actively creating meaningful links between items to be remembered
Childhood: Rehearsal
Repeating of items they are trying to learn and remember. Three- and four-year-olds rarely use rehearsal
rhythmic stereotypes
Repetitive movements observed in infants shortly before a new motor skill emerges. Repeated large muscle movement that have no purpose, such as kicking the legs or waving the hands.
general event representations (GERs)
Representations that people create over time of the typical sequence of actions related to an event; also called "scripts."
cued recall
Reproducing information from memory by making use of some kind of aid or hint to assist retrieval.
Info Processing Framework (atkinson and Shiffren)
Sensory register, Short term Memory, Long term memory. Steps to memory creation: Encode: get information into the system Consolidation: information is processed and organized in a form suitable for long term storage. Storage: Refers to holding information in a long term memory store. Retrieval: the process of getting information out when it is needed.
transformational grammar
Rules of syntax that allow a person to transform statements into questions, negatives, imperatives, and other kinds of sentences.
Piaget's characteristics of School-Age Chilredn
School-age children are in Piaget's concrete-operational stage and can reason logically about concrete information, which allows them to solve conservation and classification tasks. Concrete-operational children have acquired the abilities of decentration, reversibility of thought, and transformational thought. They can think about relations, grasping seriation and transitivity, and they understand the concept of class inclusion.
Models how older adults may cope with and compensate for their diminishing cognitive resources through:
Selection: Optimization: Compensation:
Types of memory (4)
Semantic memory -General facts Episodic memory -Specific experiences Explicit memory -Fallible; subject to forgetting Implicit memory -Infallible; remains intact
A not B error:
Tendency of newborns to search for an object in the place where they last found it (A) rather than in its new hiding place (B).
poverty of the stimulus (POTS) (POTS):
Term for the notion that the language input to young children is so impoverished or limited that they could not possibly acquire language (without a powerful, innate language acquisition device).
Test norms
Test results are normally distrubted with a standard deviation around 15-16 IQ points. Based on the performance of a large, representative sample Wechsler Scales WPPSI-III: preschool WISC-IV: Children
Reversability
The ability to follow a line of reasoning back to its original starting point; mentally undoing or reversing an action.
fast mapping
The capacity of young language learners to readily determine the object or other referent of a word and then remember this for future encounters with the word.
emergent literacy
The developmental precursors of reading skills in young children, including knowledge, skills, and attributes that will facilitate the acquisition of reading competence.
What is the 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. - Skills w/in zone: should be targeted by instruction - Skills not w/in zone: either already well mastered, can learn on their own, or too advanced to being.
alphabetic principle
The idea that the letters in printed words represent the sounds in spoken words. Prealphabetic phase, Partial alphabetic phase, Full alphabetic phase, Consolidated alphabetic phase,
childhood amnesia
The inability to remember events and experiences that occurred during the first two or three years of life.
overregularization
The overgeneralization of observed grammatical rules to irregular cases to which the rules do not apply (for example, saying mouses rather than mice).
giftedness
The possession of unusually high general intellectual potential or of special abilities in such areas as creativity, mathematics, or the arts.
Successful intelligences
Those who successfully demonstrate proficiency in all domains of intelligence and furthermore integrate these domains to be successful in life.
perceptual salience
The seeming importance of information that is the focus of people's attention - most obvious features of object or situation - can be fooled by appearances - have difficulty with logic based tasks. - children in the sensorimotor phase are most tricked by this quality.
compare and contrast Piaget and Vygotsky:
To Piaget, a child's level of cognitive development dictates what he can learn. To Vygotsky, learning inc collaboration with more knowledgeable companions drives cognitive development. May have placed too much emphasis on social interaction. Both: acknowledge the importance of social context of development.
What specific skills are necessary for a toddler to master language?
To acquire language, children must master phonology (sound), semantics (meaning), and syntax (sentence structure). They must also learn how to use language appropriately (pragmatics) and how to understand prosody.
What tasks must children master in order to read?
To read, children must master the alphabetic principle and develop phonological awareness so that they can grasp letter-sound correspondence rules. Compared with unskilled readers, skilled readers have better understanding of the alphabetic principle and greater phonological awareness.
Intelligence is a hierarchy
Top general ability factor Broad dimensions of abilities: fluid intelligence, crystallized intelligence, memory capacity, and processing speed Bottom specific abilities
Intelligence
Trait or a set of traits that characterizes some people to a greater extent than others
syntactic bootstrapping
Using the syntax of a sentence—that is, where a word is placed in a sentence—to determine the meaning of the word.
What visual declines are common with advanced age?
Visual changes include cataracts (clouding of the lens), reduced ability of the pupil to change in response to changes in light, thickening of the lens leading to decreased acuity (presbyopia), and retinal changes such as age-related macular degeneration and retinitis pigmentosa. Glaucoma, increased fluid pressure in the eye, becomes more common with age and can lead to blindness if untreated.
Compare and Contrast Vygotsky and Fischer.
Vygotsky: -uses concept of zone of proximal development to explain how cognition advances from one level to another. Fischer: Used term "developmental Range" to better capture their findings that peoples abilities vary with context.
Perseveration Errors
Younger children have a tendency to make perseveration errors - Continue to use the same strategy that was successful in the past despite the strategy's current lack of success
recognition
a measure of memory in which the person need only identify items previously learned, as on a multiple-choice test
High-achieving parents pass their genes to their children, providing genetic potential for high achievement to their children (Rutter & Maughan, 2002). These same high-achieving parents are likely to select schools that have strong academic reputations, often by choosing to live in a neighborhood served by a "good" school district. This is an example of__________________
a passive gene-environment correlation -children are influenced by their parent's genes directly through genetic transmission and indirectly through the environments their parents create for them.
The psychometric, or testing, approach to cognition defines intelligence as...
a set of traits that allows some people to think and solve problems more effectively than others.
What is guided participation according to Lev Vygotsky?
actively participating in culturally significant tasks with the help of a parent of other guide. Parents provide scaffolding for their child's development wherein a more skilled person gives structured help to a less skilled person.
