Devleopment Exam II
Hypothetical deductive reasoning
Piaget's formal operational concept that adolescents have the cognitive ability to develop hypotheses about ways to solve problems and can systematically deduce which is the best path to follow in solving the problem
Assimilation
Piagetian concept in which children use existing schemes to incorporate new information
Accommodation
Piagetian concept of adjusting to fit new information and experiences
Organization
Piagetian concept of grouping isolated behaviors and thoughts into a higher-order, more smoothly functioning cognitive system
Triarchic theory of intelligence
Sternberg's theory that intelligence consists of analytical intelligence, creative intelligence, and practical intelligence
Zone of proximal development
Vygotsky's term for tasks too difficult for children to master alone but that can be mastered with guidance and assistance from adults or more-skilled children
Animism
a facet of peroperational thought—the belief that inanimate objects have lifelike qualities and are capable of action
Equilibration
a mechanism that Piaget proposed to explain how children shift from one stage of thought to the next
Working memory
a mental "workbench" where individuals manipulate and assemble information when making decisions, solving problems, and comprehending written and spoken language
Semantic memory
a person's knowledge about the world, including fields of expertise, general academic knowledge, and "everyday knowledge" about meaning of words, famous individuals, important places, and common things
Long-term memory
a relatively permanent and unlimited type of memory
Circular reaction
a repetitive action
Habit
a scheme based on a reflex tat has become completely separated from its eliciting stimulus
Primary circular reaction
a scheme based on the attempt to reproduce an event that initially occurred by chance
Normal distribution
a symmetrical, bell shaped curve with a majority of the cases falling in the middle of the possible range of scores and few scores appearing toward the extremes of the range
Adaptation
adjusting to new environmental demands
Reminiscence bump
adults remember more events from the second and third decades of their lives than from the other decades
Secondary circular reaction
an action repeated because of its consequence
Social constructivist approach
an emphasis on the social contexts of learning and construction of knowledge through social interaction. Vygotsky's theory reflects this approach
Mental age (MA)
an individual's level of mental development relative to others
Intelligence quotient (IQ)
an individual's mental age divided by chronological age multiplied by 100; devised in 1912 by William Stern
Symbol
an internalized sensory image or word that represents an event
Theory of mind
awareness of one's own mental processes and the mental processes of others
Mindfulness
being alert, mentally present, and cognitively flexible while going through life's everyday activities and tasks
False beliefs
beliefs that are not true
Disequilibrium
cognitive conflict; child is constantly faced with counterexamples to his or her existing schemes and with inconsistencies
Executive attention
cognitive process involving action planning, allocating attention to goals, error detection, and compensation, monitoring progress on tasks, and dealing with novel or difficult circumstances
Divided attention
concentration on more than one activity at the same time
Explicit memory
conscious memory of facts and experiences
Simple reflexes
coordination of sensation and action through reflexive behaviors
First habits and primary circular reactions
coordination of sensation and two types of scheme; main focus is still on the body
Coordination of secondary circular reactions
coordination of vision and touch—hand-eye coordination; coordination of schemes and intentionality
Analogy
correspondence in some respects between things that are dissimilar
Strategy construction
creation of new procedures for processing information
Cultural specificity hypothesis
cultural experiences determine what is relevant in a person's life and thus what a person is likely to remember
Habituation
decreased responsiveness to a stimulus after repeated presentations of the stimulus
Executive function
describes several functions (such as inhibition and planning) that are important for flexible, future-oriented behavior
Neo-piagetians
developmentalists who have elaborated on Piaget's theory, emphasizing attention to children's strategies; information-processing speed; the task involved; and division of ht problem into more precise smaller steps
Elaboration
engagement in more extensive processing of information, benefiting memory
Problem solving
finding an appropriate way to attain a goal
Joint attention
focus by individual on the same object or event; requires an ability to track another's behavior, one individual's directing another's attention, and reciprocal interaction
Attention
focusing of mental resources
Selective attention
focusing on a specific aspect of experience that is relevant while ignoring others that are irrelevant
Categories
grouping objects, events, and characteristics on the basis of their common properties
Expertise
having extensive, highly organized knowledge and understanding of a particular knowledge and understanding of a particular domain
Concepts
ideas about what categories represent; the sort of thing we think category members are
Schemes
in Piaget's theory, actions or mental representations that organize knowledge
Scaffolding
in cognitive development, a term Vygotsky used to describe the changing level of support over the course of a teaching session, with the more-skilled person adjusting guidance to fit the child's current performance level
Tip of the tongue phenomenon (TOT)
individuals can't quite retrieve familiar information but have the feeling that they should be able to retrieve it
Tertiary circular reactions, novelty, and curiosity
infants become intrigued by the many properties of objects and by the many things they can make happen to objects; they experiment with new behavior
Secondary circular reactions
infants become more object-oriented, moving beyond self-preoccupation; repeat actions that bring interesting or pleasurable results
Internalization of schemes
infants develop the ability to use primitive symbols and form enduring mental representations
Orienting investigative process
involves directing attention to potentially important locations in he environment (where) and recognizing objects and their features (what)
Critical thinking
involves grasping the deeper meaning of ideas, keeping an open mind, and deciding for oneself what to believe or do
Metacognition
knowing about knowing
Metamemory
knowledge about memory
Private speech
language used for self-regulation
Thinking
manipulating and transforming information in memory in order to reason, reflect, evaluate ideas and solve problems and make decisions
Implicit memory
memory without conscious recollection—memory of skills and routine procedures that are performed automatically
Schemas
mental frameworks that organize concepts and information
Prospective memory
remembering to do something in the future
Episodic memory
retention of information about the where and when of life's happenings
Short-term memory
retention of information for up to 15-30 seconds, without rehearsal of the information. Using rehearsal, individuals can keep the information longer
Memory
retention of information over time
Operations
reversible mental actions that allows children to do mentally what before they had done only physically
Tertiary circular reactions
schemes in which the infant purposely explores new possibilities with objects, continually doing new things to them and exploring the results
Dual process model
states that decision making is influenced by two systems—one analytical and one experiential, which compete with each other; in this model, it is the experiential system—monitoring and managing actual experiences—that benefits adolescent decision making
Core knowledge approach
states that infants are born with domain specific innate knowledge systems. Among these domain specific knowledge systems are those involving space, number sense, object permanence, and language
Imaginary audience
that aspect of adolescent egocentrism that involves feeling one is the center of attention and sensing that one is on stage
Object permanence
the Piagetian term for one of an infant's most important accomplishments: understanding that objects continue to exist even when they cannot directly be seen, heard, or touched.
Transitivity
the ability to logically combine relations to understand certain conclusions. Piaget argued that an understanding of this is characteristic of concrete operational thought
Sustained attention
the ability to maintain attention to a selected stimulus for a prolonged period of time; also called vigilance
Automaticity
the ability to process information with little or no effort
Source memory
the ability to remember where something is learned
Intelligence
the ability to solve problems and to adapt to and learn from experiences
Conservation
the awareness that altering the appearance of an object or a substance does not change its basic properties
Preoperational thought
the beginning of the ability to reconstruct in thought what has been established in behavior
Perceptual categorization
the categorizations based on similar perceptual features of objects such as size, color, and movement, as well as parts of objects
Seriation
the concrete operation that involves ordering stimuli along a quantitative dimension (such as length)
Sensorimotor stage
the first of Piaget's stages, which lasts from birth to about 2 years of age; infants construct an understanding of the world by coordinating sensory experiences (such as seeing or hearing) with physical motoric actions
Symbolic function substage
the first substage of peroperational thought, occurring roughly between the ages of 2 and 4. The young child gains the ability to represent mentally an object that is not present
Centration
the focusing of attention on one characteristic to the exclusion of all others
Formal operational stage
the fourth and final Piagetian stage, which appears between the ages of 11 and 15; individuals move beyond concrete experiences and think in more abstract and logical ways
Adolescent egocentrism
the heightened self-consciousness of adolescents, which is reflected in adolescents' beliefs that others are as interested in them as they are in themselves, and in adolescents' sense of personal uniqueness and invincibility
Egocentrism
the inability to distinguish between one's own and someone else's perspective; an important feature of preoperational thought
Infantile amnesia
the inability to remember events from the first three years of life
Dishabituation
the increase e in responsiveness after a change in stimulation
Strategies
the mental activities to improve the processing of information; rehearsal and organizing
Personal fable
the part of adolescent egocentrism that involves an adolescent's sense of personal uniqueness and invincibility
Autobiographical memory
the personal recollection of events and facts
Encoding
the process by which information gets into memory
Intuitive thought substage
the second substage of preoperational thought, occurring between approximately 4 and 7 years of age. Children begin to use primitive reasoning and want to know the answers to all sorts of questions
Preoperationalstage
the secondPiagetian developmental stage, which lasts from about 2-7 years of age; children begin to represent the world with words, images, and drawings
Individual differences
the stable, consistent ways in which people are different from one another
Concrete operational stage
the third Piagetian stage, which lasts from 7-11 years of age; children can perform concrete operations and logical reasoning replaces intuitive reasoning as long as the reasoning can be applied to specific or concrete examples
Fuzzy trace theory
theory stating that memory is best understood by considering two types of memory representations (1) verbatim memory and (2) gist. In this theory, older children's better memory is attributed to the gist of the information
Schema theory
theory stating that people mold memories to fit information that already exists in their minds
Postformal thought
thinking that is reflective, relativistic, and contextual; provisional; realistic; and open to emotions and subjective
A not B error
this occurs when infants make the mistake of selecting the familiar hiding place rather than the new hiding place as they progress into substage 5 in Piaget's sensorimotor stage
Inner speech
thoughts
