Infant and Child Development Exam 2
What is an example of evaluative information?
"I saw a very, very funny movie."
What is an example of orienting information?
"I was at the zoo with my preschool group in the morning and saw a monkey."
What is an example of referential detail?
"It was a big black horse covered with sweat."
Define procedural memory:
"Knowing how" to perform actions or procedures, such as tying your shoes or riding a bike. Implicit.
Define declarative memory:
"Knowing that" memory, as in knowing that an event has occurred or that a particular fact is true. Involves info. that can be easily verbalized.
Describe Baillargeon's experiment concerning object solidity:
"The drawbridge study" Infants watched the screen swing back and forth several times through a full 180 degree arc, naturally stopping as it hit the table on either side. Infants as young as 3.5 months soon habituated and lost interest in event. Then researchers introduced new object, placing a large box on the far side of the screen from the infant in the path of the screen's arc. Even at 3.5 months of age, infants dishabituated much more strongly the the impossible 180 degree arc than to the partial arc that occurred when the screen was presumably blocked by the box. This response patterns requires infants to understand some principles about object solidity and to apply them even to objects that cannot see.
Define feral children:
"Wild" children who spent infancy and child out out of contact with other humans.
How long does information in working memory last before it either decays or is "pushed out" of working memory by new, incoming information or processed and transferred into long-term memory?
About 15 seconds.
Describe Stage 5:
Acquire ability to evaluate and selectively read info. from many sources and to integrate it to create new insights.
Describe Stage 4:
Acquire complex reading skill that involves interpreting text from a different viewpoints.
What is Type B attachment?
Actively explore novel environment when mom's present; shows distress when mom leaves and is apprehensive towards strangers; upon mom's return, the baby is happy to see her
Describe critical-period effects as it pertains to learning a second language:
Adults who move to a community where a new language is spoken will often speak the new language with an accent, whereas young children who grow up in bilingual communities become more fluent (and accent-free) in both languages. This change in language learning ability typically occurs during puberty.
Describe the principles and parameters approach:
Advanced by Chomsky; suggests that a common set of principles governs the internal structure of all languages--for example, the principle that all sentences must have a verb. This view also hold that early in life, the child's mind contains a large number of possible linguistic forms or alternative parameters that become fixed or set, according to the specific language the child learns--for example, whether the language requires that a sentence explicitly includes a subject or if it can be dropped and represented implicitly.
At what age do children begin to understand the relations between weight, density, and volume, and their implications for the nature of substances?
After age 10.
At what age do children begin one-word utterances?
Age 1
At what age do children begin multi-word utterances?
Age 1.5. Typically, these several-word sequences take the form of rote, inflexible phrases.
By what age do children who have Williams Syndrome have expressive language skills that seem relatively intact?
Age 3
By what age can children track almost all of those phonemes?
Age 3. Most 3 year olds can also use phonetic rules to segment these sounds into words, allowing them to easily identify most of the words they hear in spontaneous speech.
What age is included in Stage 4?
Ages 14-18
What age is included in Stage 5?
Ages 18 and older
What age include the pre operational period?
Ages 2-7.
What age is included in Stage 1:
Ages 6-7
What age is included in Stage 2?
Ages 7-8
What age is included in Stage 3?
Ages 8-13
Who did the Strange Situation experiment?
Ainsworth
Describe the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis:
All speakers of a language acquire a way of perceiving and understanding the world that is unique to that language and a direct consequence of special aspects of that language. Thus, the words of a language can influence the categories that the speaker uses for objects and ideas, and the grammar of a language can affect how the speaker perceives events. Empirical--assumes that prelinguistic children have essentially no strong predispositions in how their minds "carve up" the world.
What part of the brain are basic emotions closely linked to?
Amygdala
Define a production deficit:
An apparent inability to spontaneously use a strategy that would clearly improve performance on a memory task.
Describe the whole language approach:
An approach to reading that emphasizes reading in the context of stories, narratives, or even pictorial support. Teaching children to comprehend and produce small stories in a variety of formats.
Describe the phonics approach:
An approach to reading the emphasizes the sounds of letters and letter patterns and how they can be combined into larger units.
How does disgust develop differently from fear?
An early, specific disgust reaction becomes extended beyond a narrow range of stimuli to a much broader set of stimuli.
Define a utilization deficit:
An inability to benefit from a memory strategy when it's first used.
Define temperament:
An infant's tendency toward particular emotional and behavioral responses to specific situations. It emerges early in life and remains relatively stable over time and can also involve individual differences in self-regulation.
Define teratogens:
An internal or external hazardous environmental factor that can potentially cause problems during the prenatal period. Teratogens include drugs, diseases, malnutrition, and environmental toxins.
What are the three most important changes that occur in the growth of mathematical skills?
An understanding of mathematical concepts, skills in carrying out mathematical procedures, and the ability to solve math problems strategically.
Define natural language:
Any language spoken on a daily basis by a community.
Define prelinguistic vocalizations:
Any number of sounds made by the infant prior to the clear use of language. Vocalizations include babbling but can also include other earlier sounds, such as cooing and squealing, and lip smacking.
Describe Susan Carey's critique of Piaget's interpretation of animism:
Argued that these children weren't really mixing psychological explanations with physical, mechanical ones, as Piaget had claimed. Instead, she interpreted the animism data as showing that young kids tend to use psychological interpretations too broadly, especially in applying them to living things.
At what age do toddlers show their first attempts at counting?
Around age 2.
At what age do children start successfully using landmarks?
Around age 5.
At what age do children start to refer to objects in terms of relative spatial locations (i.e. "to the left of")?
Around age 5.
At what age do children form true class-based clusters of animals, dwellings, and food?
Around age 7.
Define alerting:
Arousing the attentional system through a cue that both indicates that a target stimulus is about to occur and that gives some information about the target.
Describe Gelman's magic task:
As compared to Piaget's coin conservation task. Avoided using "same" or "different" word to confuse the child, avoided asking the same question twice, changed number, length and density surreptitiously, used small number (1-3). Children as young as 3 year old can understand that number does not change when the irrelevant features change. During the fixation phase, children will spontaneously count to check the answer and can do simple addition and subtraction to fix the game.
How early can 10-word, long sentences occur?
As early as age 2, although there is usually a gradual lengthening of the average utterance length over several years.
How do young kids sometimes view the world?
As flat, and they think of the earth as being morel like everyday objects, such as trees, tables, and rocks, rather than resembling planets, moons and stars.
Describe how Carey tested her opinion on animism:
Asked kids questions about whether some familiar biological terms (i.e. heart) and some unfamiliar terms (i.e. omentum) could apply to various living and nonliving things. Thus, in such a property induction tasks, the child would induce which other entities have a property based on a known example. This property attribution method assumes that the kinds of guesses a child makes about what properties apply to living things can reveal the underlying conceptual system that the child is using to think about living things.
Describe Eleanor Rosch's experiment concerning categorization:
Asked young kids to sort or group together items that resembled each other at either the basic level of categorization or the superordinate level. Thus, a kid might be given four kinds of toy vehicles and four different kinds of clothing and asked to group the items that go together (superordinate categories) or they might be given four different kinds of toy cars and four kinds of shirts to sort (basic-level categories). The same preschoolers who failed to sort based on superordinate categories showed no problems sorting based on basic-level categories; they easily put all the shirts together and all the cars together. Thus, younger kids are capable of the kind of feature-based, logical classification that they fail at in Piaget's sorting tasks. Raises possibilities that they may fail to sort by superordinate categories because either it requires processing larger amounts of info. than kids can keep in mind at once or because the categories themselves are unfamiliar or arbitrary.
Describe late-emerging biology view:
Assume that even very young kids impressions of living things are embedded within larger explanatory systems that provide them with a sense of why those things are the way they are. In these views, kids use a theory for explaining the social world called naive psychology an a theory for explaining the physical world called naive physical mechanics. Thus, these views propose that young kids can interpret and explain things only in psychology terms or in terms of simple physical interactions between objects. Kids explain animal properties in psychological terms and explain plant properties in simple psychical terms. As kids develop, they come to realize that neither the psychological or physical system of explanation is adequate for explaining the properties of living things, and they begin to develop a new, specifically biological system of explanation.
Most natural scenes have _____________ outlines.
Asymmetrical.
What were the results of Spitz's experiment?
At 4m, prison nursery babies showed relatively normal reactions, but founding infants showed deficits
At what age do children emerge out of the sensorimotor period?
At about age 2.
What suggests that the developing ability to think about the self might relate to the emergence of the emotion, embarrassment?
At about the age at which children first seem to understand that mirror reflections are representations of themselves rather than of a separate individual are also easily induced into embarrassment.
At what age does formal operational period emerge?
At around age 12
At what age do children generally enter the concrete operational period?
At roughly age 7.
Which of the three aspects of emotional regulation are infants thought to use the most?
Attentional deployment
What does it appear babbling infants are trying to do?
Babbling infants do not appear to be trying to express word meanings; rather, they are exploring the sounds in their language to get a feel for them.
Why do we know that language isn't necessary for categorical perception effects (of color)?
Because infants show categorical perception of color many months before any language skills.
Why did Piaget think kids failed the conservation task?
Because they lack the critical mental operators, or formal mental tools, needed to consider the relations between sets of properties.
Describe Stage 0:
Begin to acquire foundational skills for reading. They start to get a sense that printed words relate to sounds, and they begin to recognize a small number of words.
What is another argued that falsifies the behaviorist approach to language acquisition?
Behaviorist approach would predict that it would take children longer to learn multiple languages; however, bilingual and even trilingual children tend two acquire all their languages together at about the same rate as a monolingual child.
What is a disorganized attachment?
Behaviors seem far less consistent than those of other types, and these infants appear to be insecure and unusually controlling with their parents at the same time
Define utilizational competence:
Being able to figure out which principles to use for a particular task.
Describe Kagan's view concerning infant temperament:
Believes that infants' inhibited behaviors actually have different biological bases than their uninhibited behaviors. Uninhibited infants are more likely to express positive emotions, such as happiness, and inhibited infants are more likely to express negative emotions, such as fear. Suggests that development of inhibited and uninhibited behaviors in infancy shows some significant patterns that seem to be human universals.Children throughout the world show increasingly inhibited behaviors in response to unexpected or unfamiliar events during first two years of life. He argued these kinds of inhibitions were important adaptive behaviors that promoted safety and survival. Argues that inhibition can have considerable value in protecting young kids from hazards of the world, but only in moderation. Excessive inhibition, which can give rise to inappropriate levels of shyness, can cause problems from kids if it leads to them being overly fearful and avoidant of new people and situations.
What age range was included in the Strange Situation?
Between 1 and 2
Describe the explicit rehearsal of past events:
Between 3 and 5, children are more inclined to recount past experiences. As they recount experiences, they show greatly improved memory for the events they have talked about.
Describe the development of narrative skills:
Between 3 and 5, children's narrative skills improve. They become increasingly attuned to orienting information, referential detail, and evaluative information. Using these narrative features to recount an even soon after it happens improves memory encoding, and it also aids retrieval by providing a more elaborate, detailed framework for later cueing.
How does the emergence of long-term autobiographical memory render the neural systems hypothesis less important?
Beyond the first year of life, the brain is mature enough to avoid imposing absolute limits on episodic memory.
Describe perceptual constraints:
Biases toward certain interpretations of word that arise from the way our perceptual system naturally carves up the world into distinct objects and events. This process can involve all sense, but researcher focus on vision.
What is indiscriminate attachment?
Can be affectionate and receptive to complete strangers as they are their primary caregivers.
What did Spitz's experiment include?
Compared foundling and prison infants.
Which logical operators did Piaget think children lacked?
Compensation, reversibility, and identity.
What are the three competences that apply to the progression of mathematical skills?
Conceptual competence, procedural competence, and utilizational competence.
Define pragmatics:
Concerned with how we use language to convey our intended meaning within a particular social context and how we figure out others' intended meanings. It helps us understand if an utterance is meant literally or sarcastically. Involves taking account the inferred goals and motivations of a speaker, the status of those involved in the speech act, and other nonlinguistic cues to intended meanings, such as situational constraints, gestures, and tone of voice.
Describe the domain of physical mechanics:
Concerns beliefs about solid objects' behaviors, such as trajectories and collisions.
When one-word utterances begin, what do they typically refer to?
Concrete objects (i.e. mommy, doggie)
Explain the Preattachment phase
Birth to 6 wks; Infants in this phase display attachment-related behaviors, but don't target them to particular individuals
What age is included in Stage 0?
Birth to age 6
What four personality types did Hippocrates believe to exist?
Blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile.
What are specific bonds?
Bonds to particular individuals
Who uses landmarks?
Both people and other animals can navigate by estimating the distance and direction in relation to these salient objects in the environment.
Describe Piaget's experiment on class-inclusion relations:
Bouquet of flowers consisting of 9 daffodils and three daisies. The kid was asked whether there were more daffodils or more flowers. Many preschoolers responded that there were more daffodils--which was logically impossible. Piaget interpreted this failure in reasoning about class-inclusion relations as evidence that kids lacked the appropriate mental operators to infer transitivity and hierarchical relations between classes.
Who proposed an internal working model?
Bowlby
Define bootstrapping:
Building new conceptual structures out of earlier ones that serve as a framework for fostering conceptual change and growth.
What does the IBQ-R help to reduce?
By asking questions about more focused, concrete behaviors, the questionnaire helps to reduce the influences of parents' subjective judgements.
At what age to kind start to become aware of some of the distinctive patterns to characterize the biological world, especially its more abstract principles and casual relationships?
By at least age 3.
Do deaf infants babble at the same age as hearing infants?
Deaf infants babble aloud at a later age and with less frequency than do hearing babies, but if they are exposed to a sign language, they soon begin "babbling" with their hands, trying out the basic components of a sign language as much as hearing babies do with sounds.
What are two key ideas in Stage 1?
Decoding and alphabetic principle
What is the learning theory approach to attachment?
Defined by an attempt to focus exclusively on the infant's behaviors and the ways in which the environment reinforces them. Believed that the drives of oral gratification and pleasure seeking are not well defined and therefore are not easy to study/measure. Believed bonds emerged by being associated with positively reinforcing stimuli.
Define the whole-object bias:
Describes our preferences for labeling whole, bounded object--rather than objects' parts or their relationships to other things.
Define referential detail:
Describes physical properties of important entities in the narrative.
Describe the Infant Behavior Questionnaire-Revised (IBQ-R):
Describes temperamental differences between infants in terms of three major dimensions: sergeancy/extroversion, negative affectivity, and orienting/regulation or effortful control. This process involves asking various caregivers specific, detailed questions about the infant's behavior. The second questionnaire leaves room for different interpretations of what is being asked and over what time period.
What is another emotion that occurs in response to a particular stimuli within the constraints of prepared learning?
Disgust
Although disgust, like some fears, shows evidence of preparedness, its development shows different patterns of change and cross-cultural variability than we saw with prepared fears. Name one example of this.
Disgust toward feces appears to be universal to adults in all cultures, but it isn't usually present in toddlers in any culture, at least not until the children are toilet trained. Instead, it typically develops sometime between 3 and 7 years of age.
What is a within subject design?
Each child participates in all experimental conditions, and therefore all children are assessed in the same manner.
What are the 3 basic emotions present at birth?
Contentment, interest, and distress
How do adults often communicate in unfamiliar settings?
Egocentrically
What may be the earliest complex emotions to emerge?
Embarrassment
Define evaluative information:
Conveys the narrator's own response to an event.
When scholars envision a domain as being constrained by foundation and innate constraints, what domain are they referring to?
Core domains, suggesting that these are basic universal cognitive components shared by all infants throughout the world and which then become elaborated on and combined in more powerful ways over the course of development.
What defines the prenatal stage?
Covers the moment from conception to birth; involves understanding the psychological effects of substances that can harm the developing fetus. This stage focuses on anatomical and physiological development
Describe the prefrontal cortex:
Critical to strategy use and metamemorial knowledge.
Which two hypothesis' view the emergence of a child's language skills as crucial for developing accessible long-term memories of experiences?
Cueing hypothesis and the memory format change hypothesis.
What is the suppression of certain emotions heavily influenced by?
Culture
What is an example of the dual representation?
Find snoopy experiment.
How long is the sensorimotor period?
First 2 years of life.
What are reasons as to why we don't learn language by imitation?
First, if what we mean by imitation is reproducing bits of what he hear, as a parrot does, then imitation clearly will not work as model because children would not show the common problem of over regularization. In fact, they wouldn't be able to produce novel sentences at all if they simply stored parts of utterances and played back the most appropriate ones later. Second, imitation leaves unexplained how a child discovers the rules or intentions that she imitates, since neither is directly observable.
What are these intuitive beliefs known as?
Folk physics, folk psychology, and folk biology.
Describe the experiment proving statistical learning and how it effects the roots of language development:
Examined whether infants can recognize the probability of sounds co-occurring within words or occurring at the end of one word and beginning of another. 8 month olds listened to uninterrupted strings of phonemes in which particular sets of sound patterns were repeated, suggesting words (i.e. bidakupadotigolabubidak..." would continue during several minutes, during which time the sound sequences, "bidaku" and "padoti" each occasionally repeated, interspersed with other phonemes. After listening for just a few minutes, infants seemed to learn which groups of sounds in this string reliably occurred together as "words." When the recording stopped and was replaced by either familiar sound sequences ("bidaku" and "padoti") or unfamiliar ones, the infants looked longer towards the speakers she nteh novel sequences were played. Results seemed to show that infants have a rapid, powerful statistical learning ability for acquiring language and learning other nonlinguistic sounds. After hearing particular sound sequences, such as "bidaku," recur within a stream of phonemes, children are more likely to later learn word labels that use those same sound sequences than they are to learn sequences using other sounds, such as "dabiku."
What does the Strange Situation experiment include?
Examines infants reactions in certain unusual situations and mildly threatening situations, both in mother's presence and when mother has left, as well as how child responds when mother returns
What is an example of vitalism:
Food and water instill a force in animals that enables them to move and be active; without this force, animals become increasingly inactive and tired.
Describe the snoopy experiment:
For 2.5 year olds, the task is extremely difficult. But for 3 year olds, the task is easy and they succeed admirably. The 2.5 can find the toy in the model room, but can't connect the model to the full-scale room in a meaningful way.
What is one of the most basic forms of transmission of emotions?
Emotional Contagion
What three fundamental trait-like categories are thought to make important contributions to later personality traits.
Emotionality, activity level, and sociability.
Define complex emotions:
Emotions that build on and occur developmentally later than the basic emotions. They emerge from various combinations of basic emotions and through the introduction of more complex supporting cognitions about a situation.
Describe the cueing hypothesis:
Emphasizes how the ability to cue, or trigger, memories changes with age in ways that make very early memories inaccessible.
Describe empiricism vs. nativism (language acquisition):
Empiricist systems are specialized to handle specific kinds of info. only at the earliest parts of the learning process. Many statistical learning theorists view infants' ability to identify statistical patterns as evidence for a general learning system rather than a language-specific one. Connectionists have also noted that the basic features connectionist system--neural networks capable of parallel processing--make up almost all animals' brains. Thus, connectionists argued that humans acquire linage and other species do not mostly because humans have a bigger, more powerful brain, not because the brain is tailored for the complexities of language.
What branching direction does English have?
English is a right-branching language. The embedded clauses in sentences branch out after, or to the right of, the main verb.
What is the dominant perspective in the field of attachment?
Ethological approach
What do children not understand about counting?
Even though they understand that they can begin t count with any one of the objects, they don't usually understand that a count can proceed in any order whatsoever (i.e. from left to right or right to left).
Describe the early competence view:
Even very young kids think of biological things as different from other kinds of things and accordingly explain their properties and actions as distinctive, too. In this view, most developmental change in biological thinking consists of becoming more capable of applying biological explanations to specific phenomena and different kinds of situations and gaining more detailed knowledge of biological mechanisms.
Describe the "shrinking machine" experiment:
Experimenter explained to child that the 3-D model was the "real" room but it had been shrunk by a magic "shrinking machine." Then, after the child watched the researcher hide the min object, the model was removed and said to be "enlarged" and the child was asked to find the object in the full-sized room. In this case, 2.5 year olds did much better at find the hidden object in the real room. Why? The "shrinking room" description provided a casual account of how to link the model to the full-scale environment. It made clear what sort of relations between the model and the real room were important and therefore made much clearer how the model could be used as information to guide a search.
What are two key explanatory processes that are common in children's scientific reasoning?
Explanation application and explanation expansion.
What are two types of long-term memory?
Explicit and implicit.
What are the four important influences on the emergence of episodic memory and autobiographical memory?
Explicit rehearsal of past events, development of narrative skills, social sharing of memories, and development of sense of self.
What are memory strategies?
Explicit techniques we use to enhance the encoding, storage, or retrieval of info.
Describe Mischel's study on the delay of gratification:
Found longer waiting times with distractors in the reward conditions. Young kids deployment of attention can be affected by the environment and can be affected by instructions from adults. Freud's theory of delayed gratification: child can wait by constructing an image of desired object, but only if can't see it..... Results inconsistent with Freudian concept.
What are the two systems of imprinting?
General and IMHV
What do the findings concerning chess pieces reveal?
Grandmasters' skills are not based on broadly superior memory capacities but on their deep knowledge base, which helps them store info. relevant to their area of expertise much more efficiently.
Describe Bryant and Trabasso's experiment to figure out whether young children might be failing at seriation tasks because of the tasks' memory demands:
Extensively trained young kids to compare pairs of colored rods to determine which was longer. The kids learned the length relationships for pairs of rods by associating the lengths with the color of rods and memorizing the inequalities in the lengths with the color of rods and memorizing the inequalities in the lengths of these different-colored rod pairs. Then they were presented with pairs of rods that they had never directly seen side by side. To determine those length relationships, the children had to use transitive reasoning. The memory training had striking effects on the children's performance. Once the younger kids had demonstrated reliable memories for the length relationships they were taught, they could easily make judgements about the new inequalities, presumably by using transitive reasoning. Study suggests that by devising the right experimental task, such as training children to memorize a set of length inequalities before using those inequalities in transitive reasoning, researchers can disentangle transitive reasoning skills from memory capacity. Findings suggest that children younger than about 7 may not have problems with transitive reasoning itself; rather, they are more likely to fail at transitive reasoning tasks because those tasks make larger memory demands than young kids can manage.
What are phobias?
Extreme, often irrational fears of specific things or situations.
How do researchers infer infants' emotional states?
Facial expressions
What percent of the infant population show disorganized attachment?
Fewer than 10%
Define class-inclusion relations:
How different classes in a hierarchy rate to each other and how broad superordinate categories can encompass narrower, subordinate categories. These operators include transitivity and equivalences.
How do universal constraints play a role in a child learning their first language?
If a child already "knows" such constraints or somehow learns them very early on, she will be able to gently narrow down the possible meanings of sentences she hears. In addition, in her attempts to figure out the particular grammatical rules of her language, she can use the universal constraints to narrow down the possible rules quite dramatically, tacitly knowing that certain structures would never occur.
What is an example of an account of global cognitive development?
Imagine that humans' cognitive capacity to reason about all kinds of cause-and-effect relationships is a single, broad, global ability. If this were the case, then a young child who doesn't understand that causes must precede effects would make errors in understanding the sequence of all sorts of events.
How does autobiographical memory improve?
Improves as children verbally rehearse events, develop narrative skills, talk with others about events and develop a sense of self.
What are the core symptoms of ADHD?
Inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity.
What is the negativity bias?
Infans show a strong tendency to respond more powerfully and consistently to negative emotions than to positive ones.
What did the monkey wire mother experiment include?
Infant monkeys were given a choice between a wire-frame "mother" that was roughly the size and shape of an adult monkey and a "mother" that was covered in furry terry cloth.
Do infants prefer listening to child-directed speech?
Infants in all cultures prefer to listen to speech that has the characteristics of child-directed speech.
What about social referencing changes at 9 months?
Infants not only use others' emotional stages to gauge whether they themselves should be cautious in a particular situation, they also use this information to make inferences about other peoples' future behaviors. Infants use the emotional stages of others to infer how they will likely interact with novel objects.
Describe infants' understanding of numbers:
Infants seem to have some sense of numerosity of small displays and some intuitive arithmetical skills that give them a sense of what changes when small amounts are added or subtracted. But even so, infants' understanding of number is very different from that of preschoolers.
What were the founding deficits?
Infants were less likely to move (locomotion); they developed bizarre reactions to strangers/unfamiliar things (unstable/ hyperfearful; would cling to strangers); unusual, repetitive patterns (stimulation); vacant, expressionless faces
How did researchers prove that infants reach to "mean" and "nice" social agents?
Infats watched a cartoon showing a triangle that "helped" a ball move up a hill while a square "hindered" its attempts. The researchers then measured the infants' reactions to other cartoons in which the ball approached either the triangle (the helper) or the square (the hinderer). When the ball approached the hinderer, infants as young as 10 months looks significantly longer. This responses suggests that the infants were surprised to see the ball approach the shape that had been "mean" to it as opposed to the one that had been "nice." When the task was changed so that infants watched an enactment on a display stage of the cartoon event with small geometric solids (with eyes attached to make them look more animate) and then were allowed to choose to play with either the triangle helper or the square hinderer, event 6 month olds more often chose the helper.
How is the A-not-B error explained from different perspectives?
Information processing approaches focus on the role of working memory. Infants think that the game is an act of communication, so the error is a communicative one. Also, younger infants may simply be less mature in the brain regions necessary to inhibit the practiced action, specifically the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex
What is the second system of imprinting?
Intermediate Medial Hyperstriatum Ventrale in forebrain; governs ability to recognize specific individuals rather than categories; most receptive during critical period; where imprinting occurs
Why are early episodic memories fragile?
Rather than source monitoring, they often fail to notice its source.
What do proponents of the whole language approach argue?
Reading has to be connected to broader communicative competencies so that it will be engaging and meaningful for child.
Define domain-general:
Referring to a learning mechanism or representation format that applies across all domains of cognition.
Define domain-specific:
Referring to a learning mechanism or representation format that applies to a specific domain of cognition.
Define semantic memory:
Refers to knowledge of facts about the world, without necessarily remembering how or when the info. was learned.
Define grammar:
Refers to knowledge of other rules beyond those governing relations between words, such as relations between elements inside words.
Define syntax:
Refers to set of rules concerning how words are combined into sentences.
Define explanation application:
Refers to the ability to answer questions about how a thing works or why it is the way it is by referring to relationships and dynamic patterns.
Define mutual exclusivity:
Refers to the assumption that each object in a language has only one label.
Define phonological awareness:
Refers to the child's understanding of the sound units and structures of spoken words.
Define branching direction:
Refers to the order in which ideas typically occur in a sentence. Children seem to learn very early wether their language is right or left branching and then "set" that parameter, which then guides additional learning about syntax.
Describe the connetionsist approach to language acquisition:
Rely on associative mechanisms, but they are vastly more powerful than early behaviorist explanations, which arises from two innovative explanations: [1] Connectionist approaches propose that language acquisition depends on the brain's massive capacity for parallel processing--that is, handling many kinds of info. simultaneously. [2] Connectionism incorporates hidden layers of processing that go beyond overt associations learned through reinforcement. Argue that human brain acts like computer, emphasize that brain can process vast amounts of info simultaneously and that it's made up of separate processing units that share info. across networks of connections. Empirical, they assume cognition is built up from learned associations based on input from the environment and experience.
What is social referencing?
Relying on the expression and behavior of others for important information about how to interpret various situations
Who research social deprivation on infants in Latin America?
Rene Spitz
Describe the experiment that tested the idea that infants may be able to go beyond recognizing language's recurring sound patterns to learning its rules:
Research team presented infants with phoneme sequences mud hike those described in the previous study, except that the sequences that the infants heard taught them a rule rather than a relation between specific groups of sounds. The researchers presented in fats with different elements that follow a similar rule-based pattern (i.e. ABA pattern "ga ti ga") They would play the ABA pattern for about two minutes. In another condition they taught an ABB rule, infants would hear sequences like "ti ga ga." Results: Infants looked longer at the novel patterns that violated the rule, indicating their awareness of the rules and their surprise that the rule had not been followed. Infants that we're sonly 7 months old recognized when a rule had been violated.
Describe the study that tested whether children with earlier exposure to adults' language and narratives tend to have earlier first memories:
Researchers compared the ages at which Koreans and Americans formed their earliest memory. Because Korean culture transitionally involves fewer parent-chld interactions focused on narrating experiences, the researchers predicted that Koreans would have later first memories. Researchers also predicted firstborns, who received more undivided attention, would develop narrative skills early and thereby retain earlier first memories. They also expected girls, who tend to have more verbal interactions with parents, would have early first memories than boys. Results: Americans first memories tended to be earlier than those of Koreans. Other hypothesis' were correct, also.
What is a between subject design?
Involve assessing a different group of children in each experiment condition
Define classification:
Involve sorting object according to a consistent criteria, such as color, shape, or size.
Define overextension:
Involves applying a word too broadly. (i.e. a toddler who calls any large, four-legged animal a "cow" has extended this label far beyond its true boundaries)
Define qualitative development:
Involves distinct and dramatic changes in structure.
What kind of attention increases as children start acquiring knowledge?
Joint attention. As children begin acquiring words, they already are able to establish a shared point of focus with another person and to know what a speaker is talking about.
What are the 6 primary emotions?
Joy, sadness, disgust, surprise, anger and fear
Describe the New York Longitudinal Study:
Researchers: Alexander Thomas and Stella Chess Topic: Temperament research Subjects studied from infancy to middle age Method: Based on extensive interviews with mothers at beginning of study in which each mother was asked to provide a detailed description of her infants' daily activities and routine rather than explicit information about the infants' personality or temperament, the researchers described nine dimensions of temperament: activity level, approach/withdrawal, adaptability, mood, threshold of responsiveness, intensity of reaction, distractibility, rhythmicity, and attention span/persistence. Each baby was then scored and classified into one of three categories [1] easy babies, 40% of group [2] difficult babies 10% of group, and [3] slow to warm up babies 15% of group. The remaining 35% were average babies. Results: Suggested some patterns in the development of temperament that became a basis for later research. They believed that a difficult baby who is also highly reaction to situations and shows a low attention span might be less likely to do well in highly structured elementary school settings and more limey to have hostile relations with peers. Moreover, children considered to be slow to warm up might tend to become more isolated from peers and would rarely become central members of social groups.
Which aspect of regulating emotion is late emerging?
Response modification.
What are the benefits of being exposed to ASL at an early age?
Results in clear advantages at mastering some aspects of its structure.
Describe the Chimp as Child experiment:
Kellog and Luella tried to raise 7.5 month old chimp as child, giving him the same environment as son and mirroring the experience a child had when acquiring language. Results: After about 9 months, child was outpacing chimp at acquiring language, but chimp outperformed child at other cognitive abilities. Humans have a bias for learning language.
Describe Stage 1:
Kids start to master the idea that each letter has a sound and that letters can be combined to create words. They learn that they can figure out the sound of a word from the sounds of its letter and how they blend together (decoding).
Define procedural competence:
Knowing how to perform the behaviors that fit with particular principles.
What are the two aspects of metamemory?
Knowing roughly how memory works and monitoring how effectively these processes are working to know when to rely on strategies.
Define the alphabetic principle:
Knowing that words are built up out of letters and letter combinations that stand for particular sounds.
What are display rules?
Rules governing what kinds of emotional expressions a particular group considers appropriate; can vary dramatically across cultures.
Describe Stage 3:
See reading as a way to acquire new info. Reading adds to child's vocab. Can start to focus more directly on understanding what they've read and the broader narrative structure of a set of sentences.
What is a key difference between basic and complex emotions?
Many complex emotions are also self-conscious emotions, meaning that the emotional experience itself requires some degree of self-awareness.
Define implicit memory:
May influence behavior but is usually outside of conscious awareness.
What are Machiavellian emotions?
Meant to influence others and not simply to reflect an internal state.
What does damage in Wernicke's area do?
Semantic abilities are impaired and syntax seems to remain largely intact, often resulting in problems understanding speech while still being able to produce rapid speech.
What are the two facets of declarative memory?
Semantic and episodic.
What are the four major periods of cognitive development according to Piaget's theory?
Sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational.
Define echoic memory:
Sensory memory for sounds.
Define iconic memory:
Sensory memory for visual information.
How is working memory's limited capacity described?
Seven pieces of information plus or minus two.
What situations do infants with indiscriminate attachments come from?
Severe deprivation that often occurs in institutions
Define discalculia:
Severe difficulty in making arithmetical calculations, as a result of brain disorder.
According to Piaget, how would a young child, who is presumably egocentric, understand how other animals think?
She would assume they think like she does. Thus, she might freely apply human mental states to other animals.
Define rehearsal:
Simply repeating to oneself the info. to be remembered.
What are the three aspects of emotional regulation that are especially important for infants?
Situational factors, attentional deployment, and response modification.
Define quantitative development:
Smooth, continuous changes without the kind of abrupt transitions that would suggest a wholly new process or structure.
Describe conceptual constraints:
Some kinds of categories or relationships seem more "natural" to label. Thus, even when there may be equally compelling perceptual features, some conceptual slices of the world are more easily mapped onto words.
Define telegraphic speech:
Speech by young children that is several truncated by dropping out nonessential elements such as articles, prepositions, and pronouns.
What are the stages of learning to read?
Stage 0: Prereading Stage 1: Initial reading and decoding Stage 2: Confirmation and fluency Stage 3: Reading to learn Stage 4: Multiple viewpoints Stage 5: Construction and reconstruction
Describe Piaget's "three mountains" task:
Tested child's cognitive mapping abilities. He constructed a scene made out of three papier-mâché mountains, each with distinctive colors and landmarks. The three mountains were placed on a board in clear and unambiguous spatial relation to each other. Kids were asked to describe what a doll who was sitting at a different spot than the child would see and to choose what the cool would see from among pictures of four different vantage points of the scene. In each case, kids under 7 responded in a manner that was interpreted as spatially egocentric. Thus, they often though that the doll would still see just what they saw, and they had enormous difficulty understanding how the scene would look from a pony of view other than their own. Piaget concluded that younger kids are unable to take more than one perspective on a scene and are unable to free themselves from their own particular point of view, which represented a very general cognitive deficit that reflects being in the pre operational stage.
What did later studies on deprivation suggest?
That in the first few months of life, interacting with any responsive social beings may be enough to put infants on a normal trajectory for attachment. Only later, after about 6m, does the infant seem to need to form specific attachments to people.
What is procedural fluency?
The ability to carry out mathematical procedures, being able to perform calculations efficiently and appropriately.
Define scientific reasoning:
The ability to develop hypotheses about some aspect of the world and then effectively test those hypotheses with relevant data.
What is the hallmark ability of the formal operational period?
The ability to engage in hypothetico-deductive reasoning.
Define delay of gratification:
The ability to hold off engaging in an action that will bring a desired reward.
Define source monitoring:
The ability to keep track of the sources of our memories, such as whether we experienced them directly, learned them from someone else, or acquired them through a dream.
Define seriation:
The ability to order objects according to a shared property, such as length or size. This ability requires an understanding of the transitive ordering relationships among the objects on a particular dimensions, such as length.
What is an important aspect of a child's advancement into formal operational period?
The ability to reason logically without reference to the immediate surroundings.
What is a cognitive skill that is significantly influenced by emergent constraints?
The ability to recognize symbols of a particular writing system. This ability requires extensive exposure to a specific set of symbols, and cultures vary greatly both in their uses of writing symbols and in which of those symbols children learn.
What is one consequence of the ability to regulate emotions by redirecting attention?
The ability to redirect attention develops significantly throughout infancy and early childhood, resulting in an increasing ability to avoid overexposure to negative stimuli and to achieve an optimum amount of exposure to positive stimuli.
Define metacognition:
The ability to think about our own mind and what we know and to think about knowledge in terms of its quality, depth, and relevance.
What do children lack during the pre operational period?
The ability to think about the world abstractly. Instead, Piaget held that pre operational children, while having learned symbols such as the words of their language, are unable to use those symbols in flexible ways that help them bread down a task into its critical components and represent it as a set of lawfully interacting elements.
What is hypothetic-deductive reasoning?
The ability to think systematically about different possibilities that might depart from the current reality. According to Piaget, his form of reasoning is supported by new mental operators that enable adolescents to propose hypotheses, mentally explore their logical consequences, and rule out alternative hypotheses.
Define metamemory:
The awareness of our own memory processes, abilities, and limitations. It is one facet of metacognition.
What are the three prominent explanations concerning infantile amnesia?
The basic memory "code" or format may change with age in ways that make early memories inaccessible later; early in life, immature brain regions may be unable to preserve memories; early memories may actually be present and potential accessible later in life, but they may not be easily retrieved unless the right kinds of cues are used.
Define vitalism:
The belief that living things are imbued with a vital force that is the cause behind growth, movement, and possibly other biological activities.
What helps explain younger children's greater use of over- and under-extensions of word meanings?
The characteristic-to-defining shift--Perhaps younger children initially rely on characteristic features as the basis for word meanings, and then, as they get older, they shift to understanding word meanings in terms of defining features.
Describe qualitative development in cognitive ability:
The child has an entirely different kind of understanding or mental capacity than before.
Describe the rate of which children begin acquiring words:
The child initially starts acquiring words at a slow rate, but then that rte increase continuously over the next few years, hitting a peak rate at somewhere around 4 years old. By age 5, many children have vocabularies as large as about 10,000 words.
Describe the concrete operational period:
The child moves into this period by acquiring the same mental operators that he previously lacked, such as reversibility, identity, and compensation. During this period, children gradually expand their use of these mental operators by applying them to a broader range of problems. As a result concrete operational children start to respond correctly on conservation, seriation and classification tasks.
Describe Piaget's view of acquired learning:
The child's acquired knowledge exerts a broad influence on future learning. When the child masters certain knowledge, this change enables him to make a qualitative transition into a new way of thinking and of understanding the world. Piaget also viewed these transitions largely as domain general, affecting all domains of knowledge.
Define executive functioning:
The collection of cognitive activities involved in goal-directed tasks and problem solving.
Preschool children have implicit knowledge of:
The counting principle of one-to-one correspondence, stable order, cardinality, abstraction, and order irrelevance.
What do children gain in the sensorimotor period?
The crude ability to think in terms of simple symbols, which Piaget believed enables them to mentally represent ideas that are not completely driven by action and perception.
How do cultures produce differences in the cosmological beliefs children share?
The degree to which particular cultures sees the earth in ways that are unlike the properties of everyday objects. Thus, one report suggests Australian children may come to understand aspects of cosmology earlier than British children.
Describe the experiment that proves prepared fears have a strong genetic component.
The developing organism is afraid of particular "naturally" feared objects without having been previously exposed to them, either directly or culturally. Researchers showed monkeys who had been raised in isolation videotapes of other rhesus monkeys exhibiting extreme fear to different sorts of stimuli. Through clever editing of tapes, some monkeys saw videos that seemed to depict model monkeys showing fearful reactions to harmless items, such as flowers or a toy rabbit, while other monkeys saw videos of model monkeys showing fear of a toy snake or toy crocodile. Although the monkeys who watched the videos had not seen any of the feared objects before or had any opportunity to learn about them, they nonetheless developed a strong fear of snakes and crocodiles and no fear of bunnies or flowers.
What is a drawback of the principles and parameters approach?
The difficulty of determining how many parameters are involved in the world's languages and how many "settings" or variations are possible for each language.
Describe Quine's riddle of reference:
The dilemma of knowing whether a word refers to a whole object, a set of its parts, or an event or action associated with object. Quine argues that we assume that "gavagai" means rabbit because we share with the other speaker a common way of carving up the world into meaningful units.
What are trait approaches?
The early emergence of temperament has a high degree of heritability. Emphasis on behavior patterns as heritable traits.
What do children's beliefs about cosmology concern?
The earth, moon, and stars, including their origins, relationships to each other, and phenomena such as day and night and the seasons.
What are the child's achievements during the formal operational period thought to represent?
The emergence of "scientific thinking skills," the ability to plan and perform experiments by isolating individual variables and seeing how they change when they are systematically manipulated one at a time.
What is a hallmark action of the pre operational period?
The emergence of language.
Define semantic development:
The emerging understanding of word meanings and their interrelationships, requires linking words to concepts, which in turn often correspond to real-word phenomena.
Describe the recency effect:
The end of the curve shows that recall improves for the last few items on the list. This effect occurs because the last few items to be remembered remain in working memory when the list is finished.
How did Nelson view the establishment of autobiographical memory?
The establishment of autobiographical memories at 2.5 to 3 years comes from talking to people about the memories. Once an autobiographical memory system is established, it takes on a personal as well as a social function, defining the self.
Define overregularization:
The excessive use of a rule so that it applies to more cases than it actually should.
Define fast mapping:
The extraordinary speed with which young children seem to map words onto the correct concepts, sometimes as fast as 500 new words a month. This is thought to be possible because out of the universe of possible word meanings, children are somehow bias to infer only a relatively small subset, making the language problem much easier, given the child's cognitive abilities.
What happened when the chess pieces were arranged randomly?
The grandmasters couldn't exploit their background knowledge, and they performed much like novices.
Define the serial positive curve:
The graph that describes this pattern of recall (recalling numbers at the beginning and end of a sequence) by plotting how often each list item is successfully recalled against its "serial position"--that is, its order in the series.
Describe the primacy effect:
The higher recall rate for items early in the series, shown at the front of the curve. It is largely caused by the use of memory strategies.
Describe the neural change hypothesis:
The hippocampus plays a role in transferring info. from working memory into long-term memory, as well as helping set up a system for retrieving and integrating memory traces distributed throughout the cerebral cortex. The hypothesis suggests that some brain structures involved in memory, including the hippocampus and certain frontal lobe regions, must mature before they can set up and maintain permanent memory stores, particularly those that support episodic memories.
Define generativity:
The idea that all languages allow us to constantly produce novel sentences that were never uttered before. Using a relatively small number of basic linguistic components and rules, we an create a boundless variety of unique expressions.
Describe Chomsky's poverty of the stimulus argument:
The idea that the linguistic information that a child hears is so impoverished that, on its own, it is inadequate to explain the ability learn a language. Children can't possible learn language only by listening to others talk, they must have some knowledge of the language's structure.
Define infantile amnesia:
The inability later in life to recall any memories of experience prior to about 2.5 years of age.
Define geometric information:
The information about an environment's overall shape (its contour) that helps to locate oneself in space; when we construct a mental representation of the environment's overall space.
Define langauge determinism:
The language we speak actually determines the nature of our thoughts.
Define cardinality:
The last number counted is the total number of objects in a group.
Describe the memory format change hypothesis:
The memory format or code changes, so that memories formed very early in life become inaccessible to older children and adults.
What was the most surprising finding of Spitz's experiment?
The mortality rate of the foundling infants was 37%
What is goodness of fit?
The notion of goodness of fit maintains that the same environment is not optimal for al children and that an environment that could devastate some children might have little or not negative effects on others. This idea also implies that most children can flourish if they experience an environment well suited to their temperament.
The ancient Greek physician Hippocrates was the first to create what theory?
The notion that richness and diversity of personality might develop from different combinations of relatively few biologically based values.
Why does current research argue children can use analogical reasoning?
The only reason they might fail is if they don't know enough about the relevant topic.
Define the operator of compensation:
The operator of compensation involves noting that a change in one dimension compensates for a change in another dimension.
Define the operator of identity:
The operator of identity involves noting that values on a dimension are the same.
Define the operator of reversibility:
The operator of reversibility involves noting that a change can be reversed or "run backward" to return things to their initial condition. Thus, children who lack the operator of reversibility fail to notice that the longer row of coins can be easily transformed back to the length it was initially.
What is an attachment style?
The pattern of relating to significant others that is based on expectations about how they will respond and that affects perceptions, emotions, thoughts, and behaviors in close relationships
Define episodic memory:
Memories of specific events that have been experienced at a particular time and place.
Define explicit memory:
Memory for info. that is consciously recalled and can often be stated verbally, like a new acquaintance's name or a historical fact.
Define long-term memory:
Memory that endures for extended periods of time. Information in long-term memory has often been processed, organized in terms of meaning, and stored for later retrieval.
Define dual representation:
Models that can be both physical objects in their own right and also symbols for other objects.
What were the results of the monkey wire mother experiment?
Monkeys preferred terry-cloth mother and frequently rubbed their stomachs against the front of the terry-cloth mother for tactile stimulation
What is Type C attachment?
More likely to show distress; less prone to explore; can initially be more clingy to mom in unknown places; when mom returns, they are angry but still cling to her
How do negative emotions differ in infants and adults?
Negative emotions are often seen as more clearly distinct from each other in adults, but less differentiated in infants. Initially, it is difficult to distinguish between specific negative emotions, as all negative emotions in infancy seem to be variations of distress.
What is cognitive reframing or reappraisal?
Newer emotional regulation process that emerges over child's development. Consists of rethinking a situation to interpret its negative aspects in less upsetting or more positive ways.
Define display rules:
Norms governing the kinds of emotional expressions a particular group considers appropriate in particular situations.
How is the formal operational period different from earlier periods in Piaget's theory?
Not all children achieve the formal operational period.
Define stable order:
Numbers are always counted in the same order.
How do people brain's differ as it pertains to the critical period of language?
People who learn another language later in life seem to rely on different brain regions for their second-language grammatical processing than do people who learn the additional language early on.
What are the main components that make up language's multilayered structure?
Phonology, semantics, syntax, and pragmatics
Define centration:
Piaget believed that pre operational children's lack of mental operators lead them to focus excessively on one dimension of a transformation while ignoring other relevant dimensions.
What is the mechanism of change that enables a child to progress from pre operational thought to concrete operational?
Piaget suggested that the knowledge of structures of one stage, such as pre operational thought, become progressively elaborated to a critical point, where they become a launching platform for the next stage. The child's mental structures at the end of one stage start to lay the groundwork for the structures of the next stage, and through accommodation and assimilation, there is a qualitative restructuring of the child's thought.
What is assimilation?
Process by which the child interprets something new and unfamiliar in terms of preexisting schemes--that is, behaviors and concepts that are already familiar to her. The result can often by a distorted or severely narrow view of that aspect of the world.
What is emotional regulation?
Process through which we influence the emotions we experiences, when and how we experience them, and how we reveal our emotions to others. Includes conscious processes, such as automatic actions or habits that reduce the intensity of an emotional experience. Can involve external factors, such as parent soothing an infant, or internal facts, such as an infant purposely shifting his attention away from a frightening image.
Define orienting information:
Provides context for where an event happened and who was involved.
What did Harlow's study include/what were the results?
Put young rhesus monkeys into empty wire cages. These monkeys were given all the food they could eat, but they had not contact with any caregiver. After a few months, the young monkeys began to show behaviors similar to the behavior of the deprived human infant
Define conceptual competence:
The principles of counting.
Define explanation expansion:
The process of elaborating a simple explanation into a more complex one in response to further queries.
Define retrieval:
The process of finding a memory in storage and bringing it to mind for use, usually in a conscious manner.
Define storage:
The process of preserving information in memory over time.
Define scaffolding:
The process of supporting and guiding the child's learning. Adults and other children can scaffold.
Define encoding:
The process of turning information into a mentally useful representational format.
What are characteristic features?
The properties most typically associated with members of a category. (i.e. characteristic features of jails include that they have bars on the windows and are highly secure).
What are defining features?
The properties that pertain two what the word really means and how adults would tell whether it applies in a particular case (i.e. a defining feature of jails is that they are places where criminals are held).
Why might 10 year olds have trouble ignoring distractors than adults?
The relatively late development of certain front cortical regions, which may not fully mature until late adolescence.
Define morphemes:
The smallest unit of language that represents a discrete meaning. Morphemes are not only words but also parts of words that carry meaning, such as plural endings in English.
Define phoneme:
The smallest units of sound that create differences in meaning.
What changes with development, in terms of emotions and smiling?
The stimuli that elicit the most smiles changes with development, from mostly internal cues in newborns, to general social stimulation in the first few months, to the smile of recognition of specific individuals at around 6 months.
Define animism:
The tendency to imbue inanimate things with psychological motivations such as desires and beliefs--to explain the physical mechanisms of objects, the movement of the sun and clouds, and the behavior of plants in intentional terms.
What is an important component of procedural fluency?
The times tables.
Why do children younger than 6 often fail as communicators in referential communication tasks?
Their descriptions are too vague, their descriptions often are too idiosyncratic and personal to be helpful to the listener without understanding that these references are unfamiliar to their partner.
Why did Piaget think children fail to grasp analogies?
Their minds lack certain logical operators. He argued that analogical reasoning requires several sophisticated logical operators that most children don't acquire until early adolescence.
The infant has the strongest attachment to who?
Their parents
Why might the negativity bias occur?
There is a larger cost to ignoring or misinterpreting negative emotions than positive ones.
What happens if the hippocampus is damaged?
There may be difficulty in consciously accessing new memories. Damage can block the ability to transfer info. from short-lived working memory into more permanent long-term memory.
What did Piaget mean by stating that his theory was qualitative, domain-general?
These global changes should have predictable effects on almost any cognitive domain, including children's thinking about physical, social, and abstract phenomena.
Describe Piaget's opinion on "schemes":
These schemes are basic building blocks in Piaget's theory of the young child's mental life. As the child gains more experience, his schemes combine, interact, and grow more elaborate. These changes in scheme's structure and complexity explained the child's progress through later periods of cognitive development.
Describe the posterior regions of the cortex:
They are involved in remembering knowledge that is not associated with specific learning experiences, such as knowing that dogs have four legs.
Describe how young children react when they were disoriented and put in small, symmetrical enclosures.
They behaved like rats. They seemed to rely on geometric information, and roughly 50% of their search incorrectly led to the second, mirror-image location suggested by geometric relations. They made these mistakes deeply the salient landmarks that pointed to the correct location.
How do children view worms?
They believe that since worms don't have rich thoughts and desires, they don't eat, sleep, or have babies in the psychological sense in which children seem to think about these properties.
What can infants produce well before they can say recognizable words?
They can produce the pitch changes that characterize their language.
What happens as children gain semantic knowledge?
They develop more extensive and elaborate conceptual knowledge of categories.
What is one explanation as to why children fail to use memory strategies?
They don't understand what memory is or have a sense of how their own memory functions.
Describe nativist approaches:
They emphasize the idea that hum as are endowed with a specific brain system specialized for acquiring any natural language. The system includes abstract principles that guide learning about the structural patterns common to all languages.
What do infants learn about their language long before they speak?
They learn which phonemes matter in this own language and which ones they can ignore. This process of learning to categorically perceive meaningful differences between sounds helps infants to begin making sense of the full range of speech sounds in their language.
How does young children view biology, physics, and psychology?
They seem to develop naive, or intuitive, theories about broad slices of the natural world that we might loosely associate with domains such as biology, physics, and psychology.
How do grandmasters succeed in remembering the pattern of a mid-game chess board?
They use their rich knowledge of chess and familiar game patterns to store many positions in terms of the meaningful relations between pieces--that is, they use chunking to remember where the chess pieces would be in a typical game.
What are advantages of using geometric information as well as recognizing this outline and knowing where we are relative to its edges and overall shape?
This way of representing location works well even when the local landmarks or other small features of the landscape change. It also works well in low light or with limited visual acuity.
Define language relatively:
Thoughts and perceptions are influenced by our native language.
Define emotions:
Transient states that correspond to physiological and cognitive processes associated with distinct internal sensations, or feelings
At what age and how do infants respond to emotions?
Using both visual and auditory cues together, infants as young as 4 months are able to respond differently to several different emotions, such as happiness, sadness, and surprise.
What method of locating ourselves in space in highly reliable but often involve little attention to local landmarks?
Using geometric information in an environment.
Describe critical-period effects as it pertains to language acquisition:
Usually refer to the way that certain behaviors or types of info., such as fusing visual info. from the two eyes, singing a species-specific birdsong, etc. become more difficult to learn after a certain point in development.
What are the most critical components of early biological thought?
Vitalism and essentialism.
How does social referencing pertain to emotions?
Watching the expressions and actions of others who know more about an unfamiliar or potentially dangerous circumstance is social referencing. Infants use their parents' reactions as cues to interpret ambiguous situations, and the effect of social referencing in these situations can be quite pronounced.
Define constraints on word meanings:
Ways of limiting the number of possible meanings that could be assigned to a given word. Constraints on word meanings do not really constrain the child; they liberate her by reducing the number of possible meanings.
Describe how culture affects early memories:
Western cultures tend to have an individualistic view of identity, emphasizing people's individuality and autonomy more than their group membership. May make children in Western cultures more inclined to view themselves as autonomous early on and may lead them to pay more attention to their own memory timelines.
What are some parental effects on insecure attachment?
What are some parental effects on insecure attachment? Mother's ability to accurately perceive negative emotional states, not only in their 4m infants, but also in their partners and their own parents before the babies were born (mother's ability to understand when another person is truly distressed, without being insensitive or oversensitive). High levels of maternal anxiety during the prenatal period can predict insecure attachments. Maternal depression before or during pregnancy is also related to difficulties in parent-child attachment. Father's views of infants and paternal roles partially predicted the qualities of interaction in the Strange Situation at 12m.
What do children's beliefs about substances concern?
What things are made of, how different substances combine, and how they change over time.
What is an example of orienting?
When a baby moves her eyes and turns her head to look at a blinking light or stays oriented in that direction in anticipation of another blink.
What is an example of alerting?
When a child notices that a changing traffic light predicts when and where certain cars will start to move and the looks to that location in anticipation of the move at an appropriate time.
Describe pragmatic constraints:
When child infers what the speaker is referencing to, thereby limiting where the child directs his attention.
Describe the development of sense of self:
When children are able to think about their own past as situated on a continuous timelines, they can see how personal events along that timeline relate to each other and to experiences shared with others.
Define recasting:
When parents paraphrase what the child has said. In recasting, adults are unlikely to directly correct a child's utterance by saying it is wrong, but will use the correct form of a verb or noun in their responses.
Define motherese or child-directed speech:
When talking to kids, parents tend to enunciate their words very clearly and to speak more slowly and at a higher pitch. These differences tend to accentuate the boundaries between individual words and between phrases. Also uses simpler words and fewer words per sentences, and it tends to be more grammatically correct. Modified in a way that highlights critical elements in the language.
What is an example of Piaget's view of acquired knowledge?
When the preschooler develops a sufficient understanding of the concepts of "greater than" and "less than," this enables the emergence of a new form of logic known as transitive reasoning. As a result, children who can use transitive reasoning perform qualitatively differently from children who cannot on many tasks that involve comparing unequal sizes or amounts.
What is attentional deployment?
When we direct our thoughts in a way that makes a situation feel less emotionally charged. This is generally done through distraction, focusing out attention on a less adverse aspect of a situation or thinking about something else completely.
What is ecological validity?
Whether a study faithfully captures a pattern of behavior that would occur in the normal circumstances of childhood. Are the results relevant to the real world?
What are the two ways to teach reading?
Whole language approach and phonics approach.
What percent of the infant population is Type C?
10%
Explain the Reciprocal Relationships phase
18m/2yrs+; Children take into account parents needs and adjust behavior accordingly
What percent of the infant population is Type A?
20%
At what age do the 3 basic emotions turn into joy, surprise, and disgust?
3 months
What affects children's vocabulary?
3 year olds who hear a more diverse and sophisticated vocabulary from their parents have larger vocabularies 1 year later.
At what age does disgust turn into anger?
4 months
At what age can children begin to extend disgust to immoral actions?
5 years old
At what age do infants begin to show emotional contagion?
6 months
At what age does anger turn into fear?
6 months
By what age do the 6 basic emotions emerge?
6 months
At what age do infants exhibit specific bonds?
6-7m
Explain the Clear Cut Attachment phase
6/8 months to 18m/2yrs; Infants more actively stage near particular person by using more effective signals (i.e. protesting if person leaves). Clings to parents, uses caregiver as secure base to explore
Before what age do infants show no specific bonds?
6m
Explain the Attachment in the Making phase
6wks to 6/8 months; Infants start to smile/cry to focus on specific people
What percent of the infant population is Type B?
70%
How old are infants when they begin to social reference?
7m
At what age do infants begin to have separation anxiety?
8m
Describe the U-shaped developmental curve of overregularization:
A 2 year old might be heard to say "kicked" and "liked" (regular past tenses) as well as "went" and "saw" (irregular past tenses). One might therefore conclude that the child is well on her way to mastering the subtle contrasts that adults use for past tense forms of words. Then, however, older children sometimes start to make more mistakes. They now take the regular form of the past tense (adding "-ed") and use it for some irregular verbs. This incorrect use of the regular form leads to such utterances as "John goed home yesterday." These mistakes can persist for quite some times, even years, before the child once again starts to use the correct past tense of irregular verbs. This U-shaped cure has been said to represent children's discovery of the past tense "-ed" rule. This discovery of this rule suggests a broader pattern of use to the children than it is seen in adult range.
What is the amygdala?
A brain structure that, among other functions, is known to be involved in forming memories of emotional events.
Define sensory memory:
A brief memory for sensory information, such as visual images, sounds, odors, tastes, and touch.
Define under-extension:
A child incorrectly applies a word too narrowly, is much less noticeable, but still very common. (ie. a child who under extends the word "doggie" by applying it to only dogs that look like the family dog)
What did Vygotsky argue about social and cultural factors and cognition?
A child's cultural context and social interactions often mediate her interactions with the world. Thus, the child is not an isolated individual learning about the world independently. Rather, she is a part of a community, which plays a crucial role in packaging and presenting information. Concluded that children's social interactions, both through language and through the influences of large cultural institutions, profoundly influence their cognitive growth.
Define attentional schema:
A cognitive structure that's learned through experience in response to a particular set of stimuli in a specific kind of task. When embedded in such tasks, attentional schema form a framework for organizing information and responses to that information and for recognizing particular patterns of information and filtering out irrelevant information.
Define ADHD:
A constellation of problems resulting in difficulty staying on task, often accompanied by restless activity.
Define emergent constraints:
A constraint that emerges over the course of development and that reflects the influences of experience and the environment.
Define foundational constraints:
A constraint that is present from the start and is usually associated with nature accounts of learning and development. Normally thought of as genetically rooted.
Define core domains:
A domain of knowledge and thought that is thought to have a privileged role in development, emerging early in infancy and maintaining a strong influence throughout much of development.
Describe Williams Syndrome:
A genetic disorder leading to an elfin appearance and below-average intelligence but in which individuals seem to have intact language skills while having considerable difficulties in many other areas of cognition.
Describe the language acquisition device:
A hypothesized mental system in humans that is specialized for the acquisition of language and not other kinds of knowledge. Is thought to embody a great deal of implicit linguistic knowledge about all languages. (Chomsky)
What is a Specific Language Impairment?
A language impairment in which there are highly specific problems with particular syntactic structures, such as noun-verb agreement and the use of articles and prepositions.
Define prosody:
A language's acoustic properties such as intonation, rhythm, and pitch.
Define landmarks:
A large object in the environment that enables an organism to navigate by estimating distance and direction from the landmark.
Define dyslexia:
A learning disability that typically involves a deficit in phonological processing despite normal intelligence, a good motivation to learn to read, and ample early exposure to environments that normally foster reading.
Define the basic level of categorization:
A level of categorization at which category members maximally contrast with members of other categories while also having high similarity among members of the same category.
Define zone of proximal development:
A level of cognitive attainment that is the next possible achievement by a child, often made possible through adult guidance.
What is an internal working model?
A mental representation of the self and others and how they might interact in different circumstances
Define cognitive maps:
A mental representation of the spatial layout, used to infer distance, direction, and a way of navigating the environment.
What is response modification?
A method of emotional regulation which involves managing an emotional reaction by directly influencing the physiological response itself--for example, relaxing muscle or slowing the heartbeat--or by engaging in an activity that indirectly leads to a change in the expression of emotion.
What are other explanations to why children fail Piaget's conservation task, other than the idea that they lack the critical cognitive structures or abilities?
A particular version of the task might require other kinds of cognitive skills that are beyond the reach of most 5 year olds; When children are presented with the task, they might not realize which aspects are most important to keep in might and so they might fail to encode the problem correctly; If some aspect of task seems to imply a particular kind of response, the children might be responding based partly on how they believe the experimenter wants them to answer.
What do self-conscious emotions require?
A sense of self in relation to others, whether it involves feeling superior to other (pride), feeling that something private about us has been exposed to others (embarrassment), or feeling that others are more fortunate than we are (envy).
Define lexicon:
A set of words that a person knows.
What is a cross-sectional design?
A study that examines developmental change by comparing groups of children at different ages
Define behavioral inhibition:
A temperament that has been linked to development of social anxiety disorder. Behavioral inhibition (BI) relates to the tendency to experience distress and to withdraw from unfamiliar situations, people, or environments. BI is a stable trait in a subset of children.
Define naive essentialism:
A tendency to assume that the surface properties of entities are caused by deeper essences.
Define aphasia:
A type of neurological deficit in which localized damage to the brain causes language impairments.
Define analogical reasoning:
A way of comparing things that on the surface seem quite different in order to see deeper-level similarities between them. Can involve using info. known about one domain to understand corresponding info. about another domain. Young children lack this ability.
Describe the connectionism:
A way of representing networks of associations based on computer simulations with multiple levels of associations.
At what age do children first show self-conscious emotions?
1 and a half to 2 years old
Why might children use geometric information less often in large rooms?
It's harder to see the whole room at once to determine its shape.
Define autobiographical memory:
(Episodic) Memories of one's own specific experiences as a participant in an event.
Define working memory:
(Short-term memory) Involves specifically attending to and processing the incoming information from sensory memory. It has a limited capacity.
What is a micro-genetic analysis?
(in longitudinal designs) where the researchers assess participants every few days or weeks rather than every few years; this documents the details of developmental transitions at a scale much closer to real-time change in skill or cognitive structure.
What is the first system of imprinting?
Present throughout lifespan; general tendency to notice and follow other chickens; doesn't allow the chick to recognize other chicken as an individual
Describe Chomsky's criticism of the behaviorist approach to language acquisition:
He pointed out that behaviorists assume that the learner needs direct, specific feedback, but he noted that parents rarely correct or compliment children's grammar in early utterances. Instead, parents devote most of their attention to the meaning the child conveys.
Why did Piaget argue children used animism?
He thought kids were incapable of reasoning in purely physical, causal, and mechanical ways. He say young kids as having great difficulty disentangling explanations about animate things from more mechanical, inanimate explanations--that is, they seemed unable to separate the world of the mind from the world of the physical.
Describe the "straight-down" rule:
Children younger than 3.5 years old see a ball dropped into a curved tub, the straight-down rule is so strong that it often seems to cause them to see the ball come out of the wrong tube, the one whose bottom is directly below the dropping point. When children are made more familiar with the tubes, they predict more correctly where the ball will emerge, but their initial mistakes indicate their difficult inhibiting the straight-down rule without such training.
Describe Gardner and Gardner's experiment pertaining to ASL and chimps:
Chimps appeared to master using signs to refer to specific classes of things, as well as combining signs in ways that suggested an understanding of syntax. But they do not appear to have the capacity to use language in a flexible, generative way to form new, spontaneous expressions.
Because Piaget's model was based on domain-general (global) changes, he believed all of a child's mental processes are limited in similar ways by the child's stage of cognitive development. Thus, he held that a pre operational child lacks the logical operators necessary to understand certain kinds of relationship, such as _________________________.
Class-Inclusion Relations. The limitations of pre operational kid's understanding of these kinds of relationships keep them from realizing how hierarchically arranged categories relate to each other.
What do accounts of global cognitive development describe?
Changes to broad mental capacities that are though to be used in all kinds of thinking. When this kind of domain-general cognitive capacity improves, it should lead to advancements in each and every domain of knowledge.
One way of envisioning how mental representations of word meanings develop is based on the idea that words meanings are made up of what two features?
Characteristic features and defining features
Who pioneered the method used to infer infants' emotional states?
Charles Darwin
Who began the idea that disgust is an emotion that occurs in response to particular stimuli?
Charles Darwin. He noted that disgust seems to consist of the specific emotion and facial expression that relate to potentially ingesting something offensive.
Define fetal alcohol syndrome:
Child born with low birth weight, microcephaly, a low nasal bridge, a thin upper lip, and small but widely spaced eyes.
Describe the development of counting:
Children all over the world learn number words, the rate at which they do so is affected by the system of number words in their culture.
Describe Piaget's conservation task:
Children are asked to judge whether certain physical properties of an object, such as its size or amount, are conserved (remain unchanged) when the object is transformed along different sort of dimensions.
Describe Stage 2:
Children are confirming what they've learned in stage 1 and become more rapid, fluent readers. Start t ouse context of sentence to help decode words.
What do accounts of local, domain-specific cognitive development describe:
Children are seen as going through a series of changes in knowledge and reasoning that are unique to each domain. In this view, a child's ability to reason about causes and effects in the biological word would progress largely independent from her casual reasoning about physical mechanics or social interactions.
How does bootstrapping pertain to learning numbers?
Children may achieve this insight by noticing patterns in the way small numbers are used in their language, and then seeing how those patterns apply to larger numbers as well.
Describe the idea of implantation of false memories:
Children ranging from preschool age to adolescence are often quite susceptible to the implantation of false memories. In some cases, memories created by suggestions can be more detailed and elaborate than real memories. A child is much more likely to incorporate a false suggestion presented in context consistent with what she already knows. If the context seems to contradict this knowledge, she is more likely to resist the suggestion.
What happens when researchers use pictures of rooms instead of small 3-D models?
Children show a shift in their mapping ability, failing at 2 years old, but succeeding at 2.5 years old.
How do children display the primacy and recency effect?
Children show limited primacy effect but show a recency effect similar to that shown by older children and adults.
What did Kagan find concerning excessive inhibition?
Children who were very inhibited at age 2 continued to show high levels of inhibition and shyness several years later. Infants who showed uninhibited behaviors remained more uninhibited and exuberant into elementary school.
What kind of mother-child interaction promotes the development of language?
Children whose mothers are more sensitive to their emotional states tend to achieve language milestones earlier.
Define orienting:
Drawing attention to a particular region.
When does executive functioning develop?
During the elementary and middle school years.
When do metacognitive capabilities emerge?
During the elementary school years.
What are some examples of self-conscious emotions?
Guilt, shame, embarrassment, jealousy, pride, envoy, and empathy.
Describe Stage 4 of the Sensorimotor Period
Hallmark action is that the infant is interacting with the same object in various ways or applying multiple schemes to the same object. Infant begins to get a sense that the object has enduring properties and that it exists independently of his actions. Object permanence, but infants will still make the A-not-B error
Who did the monkey wire mother experiment?
Harlow
Who did a deprivation study in nonhuman primates?
Harry Harlow
Describe B.F. Skinner's behaviorist approach to language acquisition:
He argued that parents and other caregivers gradually shape infants' linguistic response patterns, which gradually become more like adult language (i.e. parents responding more positively to babbling that resemble adult speech sounds and more negatively to those that do not). Moreover, it was thought that parents have the same effect on children's use of grammatical rules, reacting more positively as children utter strings of words that come closer and closer to adult grammatical patterns. To behaviorists, language acquisition seems to consist of learning the appropriate verbal "responses" in a variety of circumstances, making it a seemingly straightforward, easily measured object of study.
Describe Piaget's view of child development:
He believed a child is born with a bundle of built-in sensorimotor reflexes. As the infant learns about the world from experience, these reflexes are modified and transferred into new schemes, which are patterns of understanding and interacting with the world.
How did Vygotsky view language acquisition?
He believed that over the course of early development, the child internalizes his own language, making it a true vehicle or tool for thinking about the world. He held that before language is internalized, the child's thoughts are entirely concrete and field to the here and now. Language liberates the child's thoughts by making them more abstract and therefore a more powerful, principled way of understanding meanings and categories. Langue may facilitate though in both children and adults. It can produce additional memory and attentional support for complex tasks and can sometimes foster more analytical problem solving.
Describe Piaget's view of egocentrism as it pertains to language:
He concluded that kids younger than 7 were unable to take more than one perspective on a scene or to free themselves from their own viewpoint. This egocentrism represented a general cognitive deficit that would also be manifested in young kid's language.
Why did Piaget think infants failed the A-not-B test?
He considered it a failure to apply a new scheme to the object. He believed that infants make this error because they can't fully mentally represent unseen objects.
How did Piaget view children's cognitive mapping abilities?
He had a notion that young kids can think about and remember spatial layouts and relations only in terms of their own point of view (egocentrically) and not in terms of independent coordinates, like the longitude and latitude on a map.
How does disgust develop?
It seems to develop from a response to a very narrow range of stimuli, such as disgusting tastes (typically bitter ones early on), to a much broader range of stimuli.
When is the orienting network fully operational?
In infancy and changes little thereafter.
When is the alerting system fully present?
In infancy, but it undergoes considerable refinement during the early elementary school years, with corresponding improvements in a range of alerting tasks.
Describe the functionalist approach to emotion:
It stresses the function of emotional responses, and emotions are thought of as ways of mobilizing ourselves to take action toward a goal. In this view, emotions are elicited not by an event but by our own "appreciation" of how the event relates to our personal goals.
What happens when emotional contagion take place?
It takes place when someone around us feels a particular emotion and we subsequently seem to "pick it up" and feel the same way ourselves.
Define transitive reasoning:
Involves reasoning about known relationships of stimuli to infer a relationship between the stimuli that were not initially directly related to each other.
What is an example of display rules?
Iranian children are socialized to suppress their emotions more than Dutch children, especially when in the presence of family members. On the other hand, when Dutch children do suppress their emotions, they tend to do so more in the presence of peers.
Define phonology:
Is concerned with the sound patterns of a language and the rules for combining sounds into words.
What does it mean to argue that some facets of morality may emerge as part of an infant's emotional repertoire?
It appears that infants react to "mean" and "nice" social agents in much the same way as older children and adults.
What is the ethological approach?
It approached the bond between offspring and parents from an evolutionary and comparative perspective, asking about its functional role in the development of organisms and groups of organisms.
Define order irrelevance:
It doesn't matter which object is counted first or in which order.
Describe Piaget and Inhelder's study testing the development of the formal operational period?
It focused on a task in which children had to figure out how to change the length of time it takes a small pendulum to swing back and forth. Children in concrete operational period often failed to carefully test the effects of change a single variable while holding everything else constant.
Machiavellian emotions are generally expressed by adults; how do infants express them?
It may be that young infants are evolutionarily prepared to display certain Machiavellian emotions to caregivers as to elicit a response from an adult, even if the infants are not really feeling what seems to be expressed. Thus, Machiavellian emotions can serve as "shortcuts" that don't require the infant to actually have a particular feeling in combination with certain cognitions about the self and others. Instead, the infant might merely need to know that a certain facial expression or posture has brought positive results in certain kinds of situations.
When does geometric information fail?
It only fails in perfectly symmetrical artificial environments.
Describe Baye's rule (Bayesian learning models):
It provides a formal way of updating beliefs in light of new evidence. It is a way of confirming that certain rules hold. A child can become more or less certain of those rules, a process that is continuously repeated as the child encounters more and more evidence. Bayesian learning models provide ways of exploring how children of different ages, even when presented with the same evidence, might adjust the strength of the rule to differing degrees because younger kids and older kids have different kinds of prior knowledge to that learning event. This models apply statistical learning to the strength of explicit rules.
What do statistical learning theorists suggest that young infants' ability to rapidly extract and use such complex recurring patterns from a continuous stream of sounds reflect?
It reflects not a language-specific system, but a much more general learning system that calculates conditional probabilities.
What are the two separate that describe how children learn about living things?
Late-emerging biology views and early competence accounts.
Define statistical learning:
Learning based on the probability of events occurring both at the same time and in sequences over time.
Which hemisphere does brain activity occur during babbling?
Left hemisphere, which suggests that babbling may be an important precursor of the brain's language system.
Which hemisphere is the alerting network most prominent in?
Left hemisphere.
What situations do infants with disorganized attachment come from?
Likely to come from homes in which they have been maltreated. Also more likely to show aggressive behavior as preschoolers
What are universal constraints?
Limitations on the sets of language rules that are cognitively natural, resulting in consistent patterns of linguistic structure seen in all languages and thereby aiding in language acquisition.
Define chunking:
Linking together separate pieces of information into a larger unit that can be treated as one item in memory.
Describe how several aspect of intuitive biological thought are universal:
People in all cultures believe: Groups of animals and plants can be organized taxonomically--that is, systematically in hierarchical categories based on how they naturally relate to each other. Animal and plant types have distinct essences-- that is, their observable properties arise from crucial, defining, deeply rooted qualities. Organisms have properties that are adapted to their needs within their niches-- that is, the physical environments they inhabit.
Define shape bias:
Objects of roughly the same shape are assumed to have the same name. Children as young as 18 months will choose the object with the same shape as the first object, rather than choosing an object that shares its same colors or textures.
What is an accommodation?
Occurs when child alters her schemes--that is, her behavior or understanding--to better fit something new she has encountered
Define the counting principle of one-to-one correspondence:
One number label per object.
Describe referential communication tasks:
One of the most dramatic demonstrations of children's egocentric speech-- in which two children sit on opposite sides of a table, separated by a large, vertical panel. One child, designated the "communicator" is charged with telling the other child "the listener" how to stack a sequence of patterned blocks. As the communicator takes each block out of a dispenser on his side of the panel, he instructs the listener to select the same block from her set, and then put it on a stacking peg.
What is situation modification?
One way of regulating infants' emotions: to change the situation in which they are immersed. The change may be caused by a parent or other caregiver, and early in development, these adult-driven modifications will usually predominate in soothing the infant, such as when a parent removes a frightening toy or takes the infant out of her crib.
What are the three components of attention?
Orienting, altering, and executive functioning.
What is the most primitive attentional network and the earliest to develop?
Orienting.
When children first start to combine words into phrases, they usually drop out words that are less important to convey meaning. What kinds of words are dropped?
Prepositions and articles
Describe the hippocampus:
Plays an especially important role in forming and consolidating memories. It is involved in integrating information from the many memory traces that are stored throughout different regions of the cerebral cortex.
What are Bowlby's Phases of Attachment?
Preattachment, Attachment in the Making, Clear Cut Attachment, Reciprocal Relationships
Define holophrases:
Predominant one-word utterances. It can stand for a whole sentence that a child has in mind as a linguistic entity but simply cannot produce.
What are the three main areas of the brain that have to do with memory?
Prefrontal cortex, posterior cortex, and hippocampus.
Why did Piaget argue that children failed seriation tasks?
Preoperational children's cognitive structures don't allow them to use transitive reasoning when they attempt seriation tasks.
What does the Strange Situation experiment focus on?
Studying attachment styles
Describe Margaret Donaldson's experiment concerning conservation tasks:
Suggested that traditional number conservation task is confusing for kids because it's so pragmatically unusual. Repeating the same question may suggest to the child that the experimenter is asking again because she has changed the number. In Donaldson's variations, which is called the "clumsy experimenter" variation, the experimenter pretends to slip and accidentally change the length of one row of objects, so that it becomes either longer or shorter than the other row. In a different variation, the child sees a "naughty teddy bear" mess up the display, making one of the rows either shorter or longer than the other, before being schooled and sent away. In both variations, preschoolers succeed much more often than they do in Piaget's original version. The experimenter never intentionally changes the row of objects and seems to be asking the question a second time simply to make sure nothing has changed.
What is one form of response modification?
Suppression of certain emotions
What does damage in Broca's area do?
Syntactic abilities are damaged while semantic skills remain more intact, often leading to especially salient deficiencies in producing language and labored speech.
Describe social sharing of information:
Talking about past events with others makes those events easier to recall. Conversations create another means of cueing.
Define semantics:
Tells us not only the meanings of individual words but also how words combine to convey larger meanings.
What is Type A attachment?
Tend to spontaneously explore more than other types do when they are in the room alone with mom; not upset when mom leaves, less concern towards strangers; when mom returns, they avoid her
What is the only solution to the riddle of reference?
To assume that the child's choices among possible word meanings are limited somehow.
What is a longitudinal design?
To study a single group (i.e. of children) repeatedly, over a time period that includes the aspects of development you wish to research
Describe the differences in hemispheres pertaining to how children and adults process color category names:
Toddlers who are just beginning to learn color words seem to process color category names in the right hemisphere, whereas those who show more mastery of the same color terms do so in the left hemisphere.
On the basis of infants' behavior in the Strange Situation, what attachment styles did Ainsworth create?
Type A: Insecure/avoidant; Type B: Secure; Type C: Insecure/Resistant (Anxious)
What are the correlations between Secure attachment style and children's social interactions?
Type B infants seem to lead to more successful social abilities, engage in more reciprocal interactions in peer play, had more positive emotions, were less withdrawn, had smoother interactions with strangers when they were 3yrs, rated higher by teachers for competence in peer play, judged more social by peer
Describe the shift as it pertains to domains of words:
Words in some romans, such as terms for moral action (lying, stealing, cheating) shift in the preschool years, while words in other domains, such as terms for kinship (uncle, aunt, grandmother) shift much later. The shift does not occur for each word separately; instead, cluster related words shift at the same time, probably because the words have closer, interconnected meanings.
Describe Jean Berko-Gleason's linguistic experiment:
Wug Test She examined three different Englihs noun endings that make plurals: an "es"-sounding ending, as in "glasses"; a "z"-sounding ending, as in "dogs"; and an "s"-sounding ending, as in "books." A rule is considered generative if it creates novel patterns never heard before but that still honor the rule based on familiar patterns. Her clever insight was to ask kids to complete sentences that used novel, artificial words that nonetheless stronger obeyed the three plural patterns. "This is a wug. Now there is another one. There are two of them. [...] Now we have two ___________" Most children would immediately offer "wugs" as an answer. Like adults, they automatically inferred that the ending would be pronounced like a "z."
Describe children younger than 6's metacognitive abilities:
Young children tend to overestimate their abilities, often assuming they have learned far more than they really have.
Who has weak metamemory skills?
Young children.
Why does Donaldson claim children fail Piaget's conservation task?
Young kids often misinterpret the experimenter's intentions.
Children younger than what age show a production deficit partly because of a failure of metamemory?
Younger than about age 7.
What are some theories that explain why children succeed earlier using pictures instead of 3-D models?
[1] The child is trying not to confuse the model with reality and not to blend the real object and the model together. [2] Practice. Children have far more experience early on with pictures than they do with 3-D models of spatial layout.
Why are the 6 primary emotions considered, "basic"?
[1] They appear very early in development, and [2] they are considered human universals, in part because people in an extraordinary range of culture are able to infer these emotions consistently from facial expressions.
What are the five major component skills involved in learning to read?
[1] Understanding the idea of the alphabet and learning the letters [2] Developing an understanding of how letter patterns correspond to sounds [3] Learning to read aloud fluently [4] Expanding vocabulary [5] Learning to extract meaning from a passage and comprehend it