Psychology test number 2 chapter 6 and 8

He also identified stranger anxiety

a fear of strangers common in infants at about 6 or 7 months of age, which increases in intensity until about 121/2 months and then declines.

Short-term memory (STM)

a temporary store that picks up information from sensory memory for further processing.

Memory strategies such as organization

allow the memory system to make efficient use of the STM's limited capacity.

Environmental factors, such as parents' child-rearing style

also affect temperament

At birth

an infant's vision is about 20/600, and it doesn't approach the 20/20 level until the child is about 2 years old

Atkinson-Shiffrin model of memory

an information-processing model tha proposes three memory storage system: sensory, short-term, and long-term.

Odors are one element of a context that can be tied to a memory

and can become a trigger for it.

Neonates

are able to discriminate among and show preferences for certain odors and tastes.

Classical conditioning and operant conditioning

are evident in infants in the first few days of life. They can also learn from observation.

Schemas

are highly organized knowledge structures in long-term memory that facilitate the reconstruction of memories. Schemas also influence new learning in that schema-consistent information is more easily remembered than schema-inconsistent information.

Studies suggest that the various dimensions of temperament

can predict behavioral problems that may appear later in childhood or in adolescence.

Slow-to-warm-up

children tend to withdraw, are slow to adapt, and were prone to negative emotional states.

Sperling's classic research

demonstrated that information fades quickly from sensory memory.

Depression in the mother is related to

insecure attachment.

Rehearsal

involves active processing of information.

Maintenance rehearsal

involves repeating information without transforming it.

Bowlby claimed

that attachment serves the adaptive function of protecting infants from dangers in the environment.

Memories are often tied to the settings in which they occur.

Returning to such a setting can trigger the retrieval of context-linked memories.

Information is held for less than 30 seconds in

STM unless it is actively processed.

Variations in the quality of infant attachment

persist into adulthood and predict behavior

Consolidation

physiological change in the brain that facilitates the storage of a piece of information.

The tendency to remember the beginning of a series is the

primacy effect.

Chunking

reduces information to a number of pieces that the STM can manage (e.g., grouping of Social Security numbers into three chunks, telephone numbers into two or three chunks, etc.)

Recognition

requires only that a person be aware of having encountered the information before (e.g., B. F. Skinner was the founder of operant conditioning theory. (true/false))

STM

holds about seven unrelated items of information

Declarative memory is also called

explicit memory

Low birth weight

is a weight at birth of less than 5.5 pounds

Storage

retention of information in memory.

Retrieval

the process of calling up information from memory.

One of the most important questions in developmental psychology is whether a child who is acting out is going through a "phase" or "stage" or not.

Changes in developmental variables occur in stages.

Both types of studies are subject to cohort effects but in different ways.

The strongest evidence for developmental change comes from research that includes both longitudinal and cross-sectional studies.

Thinking is dominated by perception, and children at this stage exhibit egocentrism in thought.

They believe that everyone sees what they see, thinks as they think, and feels as they feel. And they may display animistic thinking, the belief that inanimate objects are alive.

Harlow's studies demonstrated that physical nourishment alone is not enough to bind infants to their primary caregivers.

They require what he called "contact comfort."

In studies of relearning, psychologists sometimes calculate a savings score for each participant

This is a measure that compares the amount of time required to learn new material versus material that participants have already studied.

Teratogens

are viruses and other harmful agents that can have a negative impact on prenatal development

Developmental psychologists also

attempt to answers questions about the extent to which personal traits, such as intelligence and personality, are stable over time.

The concepts of maintenance and elaborative rehearsal are

derived from Craik and Tulving's levels of processing model that states that meaningful information is more easily stored transferred to LTM than nonmeaningful information.

Object permanence

develops during this stage and is the realization that objects continue to exist even when they are out of sight.

If additional information enters STM,

displacement occurs and the information previously stored in STM is lost.

Avoidant infants

do not show distress when mother leaves and are indifferent when mother returns.

Retrieval cue

give hints about the information that is required (e.g., The founder of operant conditioning theory was B. F. ____________.)

Some developmental psychologists

have argued that the best way to resolve the nature-nurture debate is to think of each child as born with certain vulnerabilities, such as a difficult temperament or a genetic disorder along with certain protective factors, such as high IQ.

Easy children

have generally pleasant moods, are adaptable, approach new situations and people positively, and establish regular sleeping, eating, and elimination patterns.

Difficult children

have generally unpleasant moods, react negatively to new situations and people, are intense in their emotional reactions, and show irregularity of bodily functions.

Sensory memory

holds information coming in through the senses for up to several seconds. This is just long enough for the nervous system to begin to process the information and send some of it on to short-term memory.

Nondeclarative memory

holds information that is not easily translated into words (e.g., how to ride a bicycle). It also includes behavioral responses acquired through operant and classical conditioning.

Alexander Thomas, Stella Chess, and Herbert Birch

identified three types of infant temperament in their classic 1970 study.

Nondeclarative memory is also called

implicit memory.

Researchers now believe that temperament

includes several dimensions: activity level, sociability, inhibition, negative emotionality, and effortful control

The sensorimotor stage

is Piaget's first stage of cognitive development in which infants gain an understanding of their world through their senses and their motor activities; culminates with the development of object permanence and the beginning of representational thought.

The formal operations stage

is Piaget's fourth and final stage of cognitive development which is characterized by the ability to apply logical thinking to abstract problems and hypothetical situations.

The preoperational stage

is Piaget's second stage of cognitive development which is characterized by the development and refinement of schemes for symbolic representation.

Organization

is Piaget's term for a mental process that uses specific experiences to make inferences that can be generalized to new experiences (schemes).

The concrete operations stage

is Piaget's third stage of cognitive development during which a child acquires the concepts of reversibility and conservation and is able to attend to two or more dimensions of a stimulus at the same time.

Fetal alcohol syndrome

is a condition that is caused by maternal alcohol intake early in prenatal development and that leads to facial deformities as well as mental retardation.

Habituation

is a decrease in response or attention to a stimulus as an infant becomes accustomed to it.

Priming

is a function of nondeclarative memory in which prior exposure to a stimulus causes it to be recognized more quickly than it would have been otherwise. It can occur even if an individual is unaware of having been exposed to the stimulus.

A scheme

is a generic plan of action, based on previous experiences, to be used in circumstances that are similar to those in which it was constructed.

A critical period

is a period during the embryonic stage when certain body structures are developing and can be harmed by negative influences in the prenatal environment.

Temperament

is a person's behavioral style or characteristic way of responding to the environment.

Centration

is a preoperational child's tendency to focus on only one dimension of a stimulus.

A cross-sectional study

is a type of developmental study in which researchers compare groups of participants of different ages on various characteristics to determine age-related differences.

A longitudinal study

is a type of developmental study in which the same group of participants is followed and measured at different ages.

The visual cliff

is an apparatus used to measure infants' ability to perceive depth. Hearing is well developed at birth.

Infant temperament

is associated with attachment quality.

Distortion in memory

is attributable to the effects of schemas more often than to deliberate attempts to be deceptive.

Positive bias

is one kind of distortion (e.g., students remember their grades as being better than they actually were).

Research indicates that temperament

is strongly influenced by heredity.

Declarative memory

is the LTM subsystem that holds information that can be easily expressed in language (i.e., declared).

Attachment

is the emotional bond that develops between an infant and a caregiver.

Reversibility

is the fact that when only the appearance of a substance has been changed, it can be returned to its original state.

Assimilation

is the mental process by which new objects, events, experiences, and information are incorporated into existing schemes.

Accommodation

is the mental process of modifying existing schemes and creating new ones in order to incorporate new objects, events, experiences, and information.

Equilibration

is the mental process that motivates humans to keep schemes in balance with the real environment.

Long-term memory (LTM)

is the permanent or relatively permanent memory system with a virtually unlimited capacity.

The state-dependent memory effect

is the phenomenon in which emotion serves as a contextual memory cue. For instance, test anxiety may trigger memories of studied information in students who were also anxious while studying.

Reconstruction

is the process of building memories from partial information and inferences based on prior knowledge.

Relearning

is the process of studying information that a person has already learned to some degree in the past. (e.g., reviewing for a comprehensive final exam).

Elaborative rehearsal

is the process of using prior knowledge to add meaning to new information, making it more memorable.

Developmental psychology

is the study of how humans grow, develop, and change throughout the lifespan.

Semantic memory

is the subsystem of declarative memory that includes general information

Episodic memory

is the subsystem of declarative memory that includes information about person experiences.

The serial position effect

is the tendency to remember the first and last bits of information more effectively than middle items in a sequence of information.

The recency effect

is the tendency to remember the information to which one was most recently exposed.

Conservation

is the understanding that a given quantity of matter remains the same if it is rearranged or changed in its appearance, as long as nothing is added or taken away.

Resistant infants

may cling to mother before she leaves and show anger when mother returns; may push mother away; do not explore environment when mother is present; difficult to comfort when upset.

Disorganized/disoriented infants

may show distress when mother leaves and alternate between happiness, indifference, and anger when mother returns; often look away from mother or look at her with expressionless face.

Ainsworth identified four categories of attachment security in infants

secure infants, avoidant infants, resistant infants, and disorganized/disoriented infants

Penfield's studies of brain stimulation

seemed to suggest that the brain records events much like a tape recorder.

Secure infants

show distress on separation from mother and happiness when mother returns; use mother as safe base for exploration.

Recall

tasks require people to retrieve information from memory without the benefit of any kind of cue. (e.g., short-answer questions such as "Who was the founder of operant conditioning theory?")

Bartlett argued

that memories are reconstructions based on bits and pieces of information rather than faithful records of previous events.

Bowlby noted the development of separation anxiety

the fear and distress shown by infants and toddlers when the parent leaves, occurring from 8 to 24 months and reaching a peak between 12 and 18 months.

Memory

the process of encoding, storage, consolidation, and retrieval of information.

Encoding

the process of putting information into a form that can be stored in memory.

Working memory include

the speech-based STM as well as other kinds of temporary stores that hold other kinds of information (e.g., visual).

Working memory

the term that refers to STM's role as a cognitive workspace.

Neo-Piagetians believe that

there are important general patterns in cognitive development, but there is also more variability in how children perform on certain tasks than Piaget described.

Information-processing theory

uses computer models and computer terminology to describe human cognitive functioning.

Piaget relied on observation and on the interview technique,

which depends on verbal responses. Newer techniques requiring nonverbal responses—sucking, looking, heart-rate changes, reaching, and head turning—have shown that infants and young children are more competent than Piaget proposed.