Child Psyc

Describe typical age-related changes in metamemory.

(meta memory- one's knowledge about memory and memory processes) Preschoolers realized that remembering many items is more difficult than remembering a few and that the longer they study materials the more they will be able to retain them. Preschoolers seem to think they have a mental copy of reality that is filed away in one of the mind's drawers and will be available when needed. Between ages 4 and 12 children regard the mind as an active, constructive agent that stores only interpretations (rather than copies) of reality.

Describe the developmental course of questions and the use of negatives in conversation.

(transformational rules- rules of syntax that allow one to transform declarative statements into questions, negatives and compound sentences these rules are learned gradually.) Questions start by utterance with rising intonation "see dog" then Wh-words are added "where doggie" after this they then add correct helping verb but still have incorrect grammar "where doggie is going" finally verb is placed correctly "where is doggie going?" When children begin negating things they first start by using negative word in front of statement they wish to negate. "no sock"(which can be interpreted to mean many things) next they insert a negative word inside sentence in front of word it modifies. "I not wear sock" or "that not sock" finally they combine negative words with helping verbs to negate sentence "that is not a sock"

Discuss how an infant's perception of 3 dimensional space develops during the first year

1 month old will react defensively by repetitive blinking when a looming object approaches. 3-5 month olds will react defensively to looming objects, but not looming openings (new rooms, etc.). They also begin to display size constancy (recognizing that an object is the same size regardless of how far or close it is to them). Becomes more refined by one year of age, but not fully developed until 10-11 years.

*Explain what telegraphic speech is, and provide examples of the most common semantic relations that emerge in telegraphic speech.

18-24 months early sentences that consist of content words and omit the less meaningful parts of speech such as articles, prepositions, and pronouns. Example more milk= I want some more milk. Two word utterances follow specific orders it is always daddy eat instead of eat daddy or my toy instead of toy my.

Explain what metalinguistic awareness is and how it contributes to a growth in communication skills.

A knowledge of language and its properties, an emerging awareness that language is an arbitrary and rule bound system and may have important educational implications. (positively correlated with reading abilities). As children get older they are better able to take another's perspective helps them communicate.

Discuss the main developments in semantics during the preschool years.

Ability of children to generate clear verbal messages to recognize when other's messages are unclear, and to clarify any unclear messages one transmits or receives.

Describe the research evidence which suggests that Piaget may have underestimated the cognitive abilities of the preoperational child

Animism: children will attribute lifelike qualities to inanimate objects Transductive Reasoning: they see things that co-occur & believe they are linked specifically, such as darkness meaning it is time for bed Egocentrism: they sometimes believe that others are seeing things that they themselves see (mountains & train example) Appearance/Reality Distinction: the younger children had problems truly identifying a cat in a dog mark, while the older range did not

Describe formal operational thought, focusing on the features that distinguish it from concrete operational thought.

Beginning to think rationally & systematically about ABSTRACT, hypothetical events. Using the scientific method: deductive (general to specific) & inductive (specific to general) reasoning

Distinguish between behavioral schemes, symbolic schemes, and operational schemes.

Behavioral: organized patterns of behavior used to represent & respond to objects and experiences, such as looking at a rattle and realizing what it is, instead thinking of what to do with that object. (dominating scheme for the 1st two years of life) Symbolic: internal mental symbols used to represent aspects of experience, such as witnessing something and mimicking it. (seen in second year) Operational: mental activity that a person performs on objects thought to reach a logical conclusion, such as doing math in your head. (characteristic in children ages 7+)

Summarize the interactionist view of language acquisition and identify biological, cognitive, and environmental contributors to language development.

Biological factors and environmental influences interact to determine the course of language development, linguistic universals exist bc we are all apart of the same species. As brain matures it predisposes children to develop similar ideas that they are motivated to express. This view stresses that language develops in context of social interactions as children and their companions strive to communicate with one another.

Outline a newborn's sensory capabilities in the areas of taste, smell, touch, temperature, and pain

Born with definite taste preferences (choose sweet over sour/bitter) that are evidenced through facial expressions. Will also show their disgust of certain odors such as ammonias or vinegar. Prefer the smell of milk to amniotic fluid almost immediately regardless of the 9 months just spent in it. 1-2 week old breast fed infants recognize their mother's scent. Touch is the primary way infants learn about their environment. Neonates also habituate to stroking in one area and respond if the stimulation changes to a different area. They are also sensitive to temperature (prefer not to drink hot milk, move around to warm themselves if the room temperature drops). Appear to be quite sensitive to pain (crying with subsequent needle pricks, stress due to circumcision).

Describe basic developmental trends in attentional processes.

Changes in sustained attention. When children are young they have very short attention spans and are easily distracted, this gradually improves throughout childhood and early adolescence which are probably due to maturational changes in central nervous system. Selective attention-young children have little ability to display this (ability to take what is important and throw out irrelevant details) this also concludes that older children are better at concentrating on relevant information and filtering out parts that may interfere with task performance.

Discuss the evidence from research studies that have investigated the accuracy of children's eyewitness testimony.

Children can be lead to believe events happened that have not actually happened if lead by leading questions a repeated amount of times. Children may remember the details pretty clearly but when asked a specific detail that could be true children will often respond affirmatively to please adults. However, when children are recalling false information they are unable to recover details and mostly answer using yes or no responses. If not lead to a specific question or response children seem to have a pretty good idea about events and can tell them either using fuzzy details or more verbatim ones.

Describe the development of prelinguistic vocalizations.

Cooing are vowel sounds that young infants repeat over and over during periods of contentment. Babbling are vowel consonant combinations that infants produce around 4-6 months. Vocables are unique paterns of sounds used to represent objects, actions, or events example from video- nunu

Trace the developmental progression of event memory.

Deferred imitation- remembering after a significant delay represents first evidence of event memory Recurring events that happen in familiar contexts are remembered best by toddlers and preschool children, they organize familiar routines into scripts, children who talk about their experiences (usually with a parent) are more likely to retain and remember the event that occurred.

Describe how an infant's perception of pattern and form develops during the first year

Early Pattern Perception (0-2 months): prefer to look at high contrast patterns eiht many sharp boundarlies between light & dark areas. (face & scrambled face are equally fascinating to them) Cannot accomidate the fine details (see more of a blob-like, rounded-edge shape). Later Form Perception (2 months - 1 year): capable of making more complex visual discriminations & perceive separate forms. On the younger end, will perceive a rod & block as one object, but as the child gets closer to one year, will start to see it as two separate objects - one in front of the other.

Distinguish between event memory and strategic memory.

Event memory- long term memory for events Strategic memory-processes involved as one consciously attempts to retain or retrieve information

Describe the role of executive control processes in the processing of information.

Executive control processes are involved in regulating attention and determining what to do with the info just gathered or retrieved from long term memory. This also selects appropriate memory processes and problem-solving strategies.

Outline the main findings from studies designed to investigate the advantages and disadvantages associated with a bilingual education

Findings: children were exposed to two languages before age 3 had little difficulty becoming proficient in both languages, and preschoolers who acquired a second language at age 3 often took only a year to achieve proficiency in the second language. Advantages: Higher scores seemed to be found in areas of I.Q., piagetian conservation tasks, general language proficiency, and on measures of met linguistic awareness.

Identify Piaget's main contributions and outline the major challenges to his theory of cognitive development.

Founder of cognitive development (behaviorism was dominate before) Believed kids were curious, active explorers Relatively accurate overview of how kids at different ages think One of the first to explain rather than describe developmental process Major influence on thinking of educators - tailoring education based on where the child is at developmentally & promotion of discovery based education (learning by doing) Underestimated kids' developing minds (particularly younger kids/2,3,4) Failed to distinguish competence from performance (tasks chosen didn't show what they were really capable of...not as ego-centric as he believed they were) Question of whether development really does occur in stages. Does he really explain cognitive development, or is he too vague? Devoted too little attention to social/cultural influences

Describe the correlation between knowledge base and memory.

Having a greater knowledge base (being an 'expert' on many things) will inevitably increase the amount of processing speeds and ability to memorize and recall information. Older children know more in general, and their greater knowledge base improves their ability to learn and remember.

Describe Piaget's view of intelligence and intellectual growth

He defines intelligence as a basic life function that helps an organism adapt to its environment. Said children are active and curious explorers that act on novel objects & events to gain understanding of their essential features. These mental systems are called schemes (enduring knowledge base by which children interpret their world) & combining of these schemes into new complex, intellectual schemes is called organization.

*Explain what holophrases are and identify the communicative function they serve. What are some examples of holophrases?

Holophrases are the period of time when the child's speech consists of one word utterences, some of which are thought to be holophrases (single word utterences that represent an entire sentence worth of meaning)

Discuss and evaluate the basic features of the nativist view of language acquisition.

Humans come with built in model of the basic structure of human language that allows any child to develop an implicit theory of language (which governs the child's language comprehension and production) Some evidence includes humans have shown ability to acquire knowledge of syntax w/o formal training, and speech of young children is remarkably similar suggesting there are linguistic universals.

Explain what is meant by the term "horizontal decalage".

Inability to solve certain problems even though one can solve similar problems requiring the same mental operations.

*Differentiate between assimilation and accommodation and explain the role of each process in cognitive growth. What are some examples of each?

Inborn tendencies used to adjust to the demands of the environment. Assimilation: interpreting new experiences by incorporating them into existing schemes. Seeing a horse, already knowing about dogs, which have similar characteristics, so assuming that the horse is therefore a dog. Accommodation: modifying existing schemes in order to incorporate or adapt to new experiences. Maybe that horse is not a dog. It's similar, but there are some major differences. It is something I've not seen before, so I will find out what it is.

Describe how the rate of habituation changes with age and explain what individual differences in habituation rates may indicate about information-processing capabilities

Infants less than 4 months old require longer exposures to stimuli before habituating. 6-12 month olds may habituate to a stimuli after just a few seconds of attention (because they are processing information quickly and able to detect more about that stimuli). 10-14 months can habituate to objects, but also to the objects in relation to one another. Those who habituate sooner are better at understanding & learning language their second year than those who have slower habituating abilities (measures the speed at which information is processed).

Explain how culture and cultural influences can influence perception

Language: all babies are born with the ability to learn any language that humans speak, but become sensitive to the pattern important to the language exposed to. Music: 6 month old infants can detect mistuned notes of both Western & Javanese melodies, but adults are less sensitive to the opposite of what they are accustomed to or what their perceptions of music are. These two show that we add new skills, but also lose unnecessary ones & to determine what is distinctive and how things should be interpreted.

Describe observational learning and outline basic developmental trends in observational learning

Learning that results from observing the behavior of others and imitating what they've seen without the needs of reinforcement or prior performance. Newborn Imitation: voluntary, imitative responses - babies mimic the facial expressions seen, but this rapidly deteriorates/disappears over the first 3-4 months of life. By 9 months they start imitating simple acts. Deferred Imitation: ability to reproduce the actions of a model at some point in the future develops in the second year.

Describe a newborn's visual capabilities and outline how vision develops in the first year.

Least mature of all sensory capabilities. Are able to detect changes in brightness, tract objects that move slowly, see colour (have trouble with distinguishing blue from green, red from yellow). In the first year, improves rapidly from 20/600 to 20/20 by 1 year.

Describe how infant reactions to speech change over the first year.

Neonates recognize and show preference for mom's voice, capable of discriminating constant sounds.

*Differentiate between the 4 language components of phonology, semantics, syntax, and pragmatics.

Phonology: the sound system of a language & rules for combing the sounds to produce meaningful speech (sgop is not right, STOP is right. Zip & Sip mean two different things in our language) Semantics: the expressed meaning of words & sentences (Family pet is a dog. Dog is an animal. Jon hit Jill. vs Jon hugged Jill.) Syntax: structure of a language. Rules specifying how words & grammatical markers are to be combined to produce meaningful sentences (inflections, negatives, questions, passives, etc.) Pragmatics: principles that underlie the effective & appropriate use of language in social contexts (when to use polite forms, when to talk conversationally, adjusting speech levels to the listening, when & how to ask questions, etc.)

Contrast Vygotsky's and Piaget's views on the role of language in cognitive development and use research evidence to evaluate each of these views.

Piaget felt that speech played a very little part in a child's cog development, he observed egocentric speech within children of preschool ages. Egocentric speech describes children as being play by play announcers that reflect their ongoing mental activity "put the big piece in the corner, not that one, the pink one". Eventually Piaget observed that this speech progressively shifts to a more communicative speech. Vygotsky agreed that child's earliest thinking is pre linguistic and early language reflects what the child already knows. However they differ in the idea of egocentric speech, Vygotsky felt that this speech illustrates the child's transition from pre linguistic to verbal reasoning. He observed that this speech did not occur at random but usually when the child was trying to walk themselves through a difficult task and this speech was not egocentric but actually communicative. He described it as being a 'speech for self' or private speech- this helps children plan strategies and regulate their behavior so that they are more likely to accomplish their goals. This information leads us to the conclusion that language is an important part of cognitive development because it makes children more organized and more efficient problem solvers.

*Distinguish between positive and negative reinforcement, and positive and negative punishment. What is an example of each?

Positive Reinforcer: any stimulus presented after an act that increases the probability that the act will recur. (giving a child candy or praise for good behavior) Negative Reinforcer: any stimulus that is removed/terminated after an act that increases the probability that the act will occur. (taking away a child's chores for good behavior) Postive Punishment: presentation of something unpleasant following an act that will decrease the probability of the act reoccurring. (spanking or scolding a child for bad behavior) Negative Punshiment: the removal of something pleasant following an act that will decrease the probability of the act reoccurring. (taking away television time for bad behavior)

Describe Piaget's two substages of preoperational thought and identify the major developments and limitations found during each substage.

Preconceptual Period: emergence of the symbolic function or the ability to make something stand for something else, such as a hairbrush representing a microphone. Limitations: animism, transductive reasoning, egocentrism, reality distinction. Intuitive Period: children's thinking about objects and events is dominated by salient perceptual features such as size, shape & categories (for example, taking equal amounts of water & separating one into a taller, thinner container in front of the child. The child will then believe that the taller one has more, even though it is obviously equal). Limitations: class inclusion problems and failure to conserve.

*Describe how the preference method, the habituation method, evoked potentials, and high amplitude sucking can be used to assess sensory and perceptual capabilities in infants.

Preference Method: presenting two (or more) stimuli to an infant and observing which stimulus the infant prefers. This shows whether or not the infant has the ability to differentiate patterns, but if no preference is shown, it's not necessarily that the child doesn't notice differences, or if she just finds the two equally interesting. Habituation Method: using habituation (decrease in response to a stimulus that has become familiar through repetition) and dishabituation (increase in responsiveness that occurs when a stimulation changes). Habituation is a simple form of learning to show that the child recognizes or has learned specific stimuli/people/things. Evoked Potentials: recording brain waves and looking for changes that indicate that the individual can detect a stimulus or discriminiate between various sights and sounds. High Amplitude Sucking: using a special pacifier, infants are able to make certain events (such as a type of music) last longer by varying the rate at which they suck in order to see their preferences.

Differentiate between production deficiencies and utilization deficiencies.

Production deficiency- a failure to spontaneously generate and use known strategies that could improve learning and memory Utilization deficiency- a failure to benefit from effective strategies that one has spontaneously produced; thought to occur in the early phases of strategy acquisition when executing the strategy requires much mental effort.

Distinguish between receptive and productive vocabulary.

Receptive vocabulary is the comprehension of words which tends to develop before the production vocabulary (the ability of the child to express these words.

*Identify 3 different memory strategies. What is an example of each strategy?

Rehearsal- a strategy for remembering that involves repeating the items one is trying to retain (ABC's the song) Organization- strategy for remembering that involves grouping or classifying stimuli into meaningful (or manageable) clusters that are easier to retain (phone numbers remembered by area code-prefix-suffix) Elaboration-finding ways to connect the material to be remembered in a way that is meaningul and important to the person trying to remember it.

Identify the cognitive skills and abilities that emerge during the concrete operational stage.

Relational Logic: mental seriation (questions that require ordering of statistics), transitivity (relations among ordered things - John is taller than Sam, Sam is taller than Joe, so therefore John is taller than Joe)

Describe each of the storage systems in human memory.

Sensory Store (or sensory register)- first information-processing store, in which stimuli are noticed and are briefly available for further processing. Short Term Store (STS)- second information-processing store, in which stimuli are retained for several seconds and operated on (working memory) Long-term Store (LTS)- third information processing store, in which information that has been examined and interpreted is permanently stored for further use.

Identify maturational and social influences that will affect a child's speed of processing.

Social influences- past experiences (being a chess expert-recognizing chess pieces) Maturational influences- increased myelination of neurons in the associative (thinking) areas of the brain. Not complete until adolescence or young adulthood, therefore being older leads to quicker processing.

Discuss and evaluate the basic features of the empiricist (learning) view of language acquisition.

That language is acquired through children imitating adult language & through those adults enforcing the correct use of language. This imitation is important in development of phonology & semantics. There is, however, little evidence of differential reinforcement of grammatically correct or incorrect utterances & the children do not immediately imitate highly advanced grammatical models , rather modify the syntax to fit their levels of competence or learning.

*Explain what is meant by intermodal perception and outline the developmental course of this ability in infants. What are some of the studies discussed in class that illustrate the intermodal abilities of young children

The ability for the child use one sense (touching a golf ball, for example) to identify an stimulus or pattern of stimuli that is already familiar to them through another sense (having previously SEEN a golf ball, for example). Seeing and hearing something and being able to discern that the two go together/are integrated. For example, seeing their mother in one place and hearing her voice come from a different location. The child will learn that the two go together - that they mother 's voice should come from her - so having it not so is disrupting to them. Another example is giving one-month-old infants objects they have previously sucked on & having them identify it based on what they had felt in their mouth (seeing a spongy cylinder bend & a rigid one not bend - able to determine which they had had in their mouth). Because they could "visualize" which had been in their mouth, they showed interest in the opposite, unknown cylinder. It is not observed in newborns, but begins to form in as little as one week to a month. By 6-7 months intermodal perception is seen for all sense combinations.

Describe a newborn's auditory capabilities and outline how hearing develops during the first year.

The prenatal environment can be influential (when hearing repeated passages, they are able to learn/recall them). Are particularly reactive to high pitched, female voices and have a preference for their mother's voice. Begin to detect phonemes very early in life (2-3 months). By 4 ½ months, are able to recognize sounds such as their name.

Trace the emergence of object permanence outlined by Piaget and discuss what Baillargeon's research (textbox 7.1, pg. 227) suggests about Piaget's conclusions

The realization that objects continue to exist when they are no longer visible or detectable through the senses.

Describe the fuzzy-trace theory of problem representation

Theory that postulates that people encode experiences on a continuum from literal, verbatim traces to fuzzy, gist like (preserves the central content but few precise details) traces. Fuzzy traces are more easily accessed and generally require less effort to use. Verbatim traces are more susceptible to interference and forgetting than fuzzy traces are. We tend to use whichever representation is easier or more appropriate for the problem we are trying to solve.

*Discuss how the human mind can be compared to a computer, focusing on the concepts of hardware and software

These ideas fall within the information-processing capacity. This focuses on specifically age changes within these systems and how they are effected by it. Hardware refers to how much children can hold in mind at one time and how quickly they can process information. Measured both by the short-term store (STS), and changes in processing speed. Short term memory has been tested in memory span (refers to the # of rapidly presented and unrelated items that a person can recall in exact order or more so, the amount of info that can be held in the STS) there is a highly reliable age difference within this test. It seems that what children know about the randomly presented items affects their memory span. (chess piece study) This is because of the ease of item identification-how quickly child identifies thing to be remembered. This is important because faster processing contributes to larger memory spans. While our past experiences can influence speed of processing within a particular domain (chess experts), but it is believed that biological maturation is primarily responsible for broad age-related differences in speed of info processing. Software generally refers to what children know about 'thinking', this is influenced by a child's hardware because their ability to memory and processing of that memory will influence how effectively that child can 'think'. Most thinking occurs without having to acknowledge that one is thinking, for instance we can look at a picture effortlessly and be able to decode what it represents instead of having to put together all of the lines to determine the picture. When we look more specifically our thinking is more complicated, for example 'where's waldo?' drawings take much more effort.

* List the major characteristics of, and achievements in, each of Piaget's substages of sensorimotor development.

This is the stage where major changes take place. Coordination of motor and sensory inputs. Forming behavioral schemes that permit them to "act on" and "get to know" their environment. Reflex Activity: exercising innate reflexes (birth to 1 month) Primary Circular Reactions: connections begin to occur by chance within themselves, such as realizing they can suck their own thumb because they like it. (1-4 months) Secondary Circular Reactions: still making connections by chance, but with things outside of themselves, such as shaking a rattle because it makes sound. (4-8 months) Tertiary Circular Reactions: actively and purposefully experimenting with objects to observe the results, such as throwing food they don't like. Also called the "Problem Solving Stage." (end of 1st year) Inner Experimentation: making and constructing mental symbols. (last 6 months of year 2)

Discuss what research studies have concluded about the consequences of hearing loss during infancy and early childhood

Those with reoccurring infections that cause hearing loss (otitis media) may have difficulties understanding others' speech, which could hamper their language development as well as other cognitive and social skills (less contact with classmates because of communication problems). Also show delays in language development & impaired auditory attention skills.

Define the four key elements in classical conditioning (e.g., unconditioned stimulus, conditioned response, etc.)

Unconditioned Stimulus: stimulus that elicits a particular response without any prior learning. Conditioned Stimulus: an initially neutral stimulus that comes to elicit a particular response after being paired with an UCS that always elicits that response. Unconditioned Response: the unlearned response elicited by an unconditoned stimulus. Conditioned Repsonse: learned response to a stimulus that was not originally capable of producing the response.

Discuss how depth perception changes during the first year and explain how a visual cliff can be used to assess an infant's ability to perceive depth

Using clear planes (one with a drop off, one without), the child either will or will not perceive that there is a difference and will crawl across. The majority of children under 6.5 months were not scared of the drop off as they were not aware of what that meant to their safety. Their heart rate decreased because of intrigue. The 6.5 month olds and up would not crawl over the "drop off" side because they had learned to accurately perceive the depth and were afraid of falling.

Identify the potential benefits of using cooperative learning exercises in the classroom

Using cooperative learning exercises in the classroom are beneficial to children because it teaches them the importance of teamwork and how to work with someone else to work towards a common goal/task.

Describe some of the continuing advances that are made in communication skills during middle childhood and adolescence.

Vocabulary continues to increase, morphological knowledge is one's knowledge of meaning of morphemes that make up words. This enables them to analyze the structure of words that are unfamiliar and helps them to make sense of these words. They are also able to understand linguistic inferences and understand subtle messages, such as sarcasm.

Contrast Vygotsky's and Piaget's views on general cognitive development.

Vygotsky: Cognitive development varies across cultures Piaget: Cognitive development is universal across cultures Vygotsky: Cognitive growth stems from social interactions from guided learning within the zone of proximal development as children and their partners co-construct knowledge Piaget: Cognitive development stems largely from independent explorations in which children construct knowledge on their own

*Explain what Vygotsky meant by "zone of proximal development" and "scaffolding"

ZPD: the range of tasks too complex to handle alone, but that can be handled with support/help/guidance of those wiser, skilled people (this is how learning takes place) Scaffolding: the way the person helping the child tailors their message to where the child is cognitively (different ways of teaching the children)

Explain what overregularization is, and discuss what it suggests about children's understanding of language.

over regularization of grammatical rules to irregular cases where the rules do not apply. Mouses instead of mice, tooths instead of teeth, runned instead of ran. These mistakes happen, but are pretty rare they are more of a problem of retrieval.

*Identify 3 key components in the definition of learning

relatively permanent change in behavior that results from one's experiences or practices) 1.Thinking, perceiving, or reacting to the environment in a new way. 2.That the change is a result of a person's experiences rather than hereditary or maturational processes (not development). 3.The change is relatively permanent & consistent over time