Human Development: Life Span (Broderick) #3

The Constructivist Stance on Learning

1. A child is an ACTIVE, MOTIVATED participant in learning. 2. A child's learning is ORGANIZED and ORGANIZING 3. Learning is STAGE-BASED where learning within a stage about many different things will have some similarities

What are some important issues in vocabulary growth?

1. Cross-cultural differences. English learn concrete nouns earlier and easier than verbs. 2. The amount and kind of language children have with adults (especially mothers) in parent-child conversations. Parents who spoke more with their children had a higher vocabulary, asked more questions, and elaborated more on topics. 3. Narrative skill differences. When mothers use an elaborative style, their children remembered past events and provided information

What was Piaget's the 3 mountains task?

A 3D model of 3 mountains to test a child's personal perspective (how it looked from where they were sitting) as well as his/her understanding of the perspective of a person sitting on another side of the display. Until age 7, children believe that other observers share their perspective no matter where they sat.

Decentration

A characteristic of concrete and formal operational though in Piaget's cognitive theory. Attending to multiple pieces of information (or aspects) at one time; a necessary ingredient for logical thinking; Occurring around age 7.

Centration

A characteristic of preoperational thought in which the child tends to focus on ONE salient feature of an experience AT A TIME

Habituation

A decrease in an infant's responses to a stimulus over time, including decreased looking, sucking, and return to resting heart rate. A biological response to "boredom" .

Zone of Promixal Development

A learner is able to grasp a concept or perform some skill only with support from someone else. Involves assessing thinking, provides support and cognitive tools which propels the child's development forward. Prompted questions answered by the child in order to find a solution.

Domain-Specific

A level of knowledge or skill that has been achieved in one subject area, but not in others, such as being able to think logically about math but not about baseball or biology.

Number Conservation Task

A procedure developed by Piaget to test children's understanding of number. Children must be able to recognize that the number of items in a set does not change when the appearance of the set changes; A row of buttons is spread out or bunched together

Habituation Paradigm

A research technique that takes advantage of a baby's tendency to orient to new stimulation and to habituate to repeated or old stimulation. Once an infant habituates to one stimulus a new stimulus can be presented. The baby's reorienting to the new stimulus (or failure to do so) reveals whether or not she perceives or notices the differences between the stimuli.

Orienting Response

A set of behaviors that suggest that the baby is attending to a stimulus. May include head turn toward the stimulus, looking, decreased heart rate, and increased sucking. For example, A baby is propped up on an infant seat in a darkened room in front of a large, blank video screen when a green circle flashes on the screen. the baby will look longer at the circle than the blank screen and suck more on a pacifier.

Narrative

A story of event description that conveys the full sense of an experience or gets at the point of an event while taking into account what the listener needs to hear to understand. Preschoolers begin to construct these around 2 or 3 years old.

Head-Shoulders-Knees-Toes

A test of executive functions that assesses the ability to do the opposite of the act described by a leader. For example, "Touch your toes" actually means "Touch your head". Working memory keep the rules in active mind (do the opposite); self-regulation keeps the child from doing the exact action; Cognitive flexibility helps them pay attention to direction while following the rules.

The Stroop Test

A test of executive functions that shows that it takes a higher level of cognitive function to call out the ink color of the text when it is different than the color spelled out by the word. The word "blue" that is written in red ink. It is more difficult to call out the color of the ink "red" than to simply read the word "blue";

Slow Mapping

After a word has been added to a child's vocabulary, it may take multiple exposures to the word in different situations for a child to work out the word's full meaning, including what features are defining versus characteristic, and the other words to which it is related.

Dishabituation

After habituating to one stimulus, an infant may show reinstatement of the orienting response if the stimulus is changed. This response indicates that the baby has noticed the DIFFERENCE BETWEEN the ORIGINAL stimulus and the NEW STIMULUS. Occurs around 3 months of age

Vygotsky's theory of Private Speech

Age 3: private speech is audible, directs thoughts, focus tasks; developed by scaffolding from the parents Age 6: lip moving/sub-vocalized; displays the general sense of the idea Age 8: private speech is internalized to become inner speech that is directing and executing cognitive control over behavior and thought

Semantics

An aspect of a language that children must learn, including the words and word parts that express meanings in that language, also called the meaning of language; Begins by the end of the 1st year

Deferred Imitation

An indicator of RECALL and critical for modeling/social learning; Children OBSERVE the ACTIONS of another on one occasion, and then IMITATE those actions at a LATER TIME (not immediately); For example, a toddler seeing a playmate's temper tantrum and then doing throwing a tantrum the following day. Piaget believed this begins around the middle of the baby's second year, but recent research shows it beginning late in the first year

Human Intention

An internal MENTAL STATE that is the source of an VOLUNTARY ACTION; Indicates a plan or desire; Infants as early as 6 months old understand this concept

Symbolic Artifacts

Analogical symbols, such as pictures or maps or scale models that are both concrete objects themselves and symbols for other things. To understand a symbolic artifact, a child must mentally represent the same thing in two ways at once; Because of this, children may think that an ice cream cone on TV will cause the TV itself to be cold. Also, this is the reason why scaled dolls are used with children who may have experienced sexual abuse

Preferential Response Paradigms

Approaches to studying infant behavior and mental functioning. Multiple stimuli are presented to an infant and researchers record by measuring looking time which stimulus the baby responds to more.

Means-End Behavior

Babies divert their attention from a goal, to produce another action that will help achieve the goal. For example, an examiner puts his hand in front of a desired toy. The infant will grasp at the hand to move it out of the way to get to the toy. Begins in the 8-12 month period. By 18 months, they are able to try out one variation after another to get to the goal. By 24 months, they problem solve first by studying the situation and creating a NEW means to end on the first try

What are some language characteristics of bilingual children?

Bilingual children may reach vocabulary milestones at the same time as monolingual children, but they are unlikely to know as many words in either language. However, they have sharper executive functions such as attention regulation and inhibitory controls.

Accommodation

CHANGING EXISTING KNOWLEDGE STRUCTURES (schemas)to fit the NEW INFORMATION; Becomes more difficult in adulthood; Examples are: When a child learns the word for dog, they start to call all four-legged animals dogs, but they are told that no, that's not a dog, it's a cat. The schema for dog then gets modified based on the new info to restrict it to only certain four-legged animals. "Not all four legged animals are dogs, some are cats." A child learns his father is called Daddy, so he calls other males ( e.g. the mailman) Daddy. He is quickly told that the other man is not Daddy, he is Mr. Jones. Again, the schema for Daddy is modified based on new info. Prejudices: schema of a certain group of people (a racist schema) -- your whole life you grew up with those around you just adding more and more information to that schema that made sense to you--you only notice information that fits your schema and confirms it. When you actually meet people from that group and realize what you have learned from real interactions requires a radical reorganization of your schema regarding that group. Your new schema is completely different, not just full of additional information.

Contents false belief

Child JUDGES ANOTHER PERSON'S FALSE BELIEF about what is in a distinctive container when child KNOWS WHAT IS IN THE CONTAINER

Knowledge Access

Child SEES what is in a box and JUDGES (yes-no) the KNOWLEDGE of ANOTHER PERSON WHO DOES NOT SEE WHAT IS IN THE BOX

Diverse Beliefs

Child judges that 2 persons (the child vs. someone else) have different beliefs about the same object, when the child does not know which belief is true or false

Diverse Desires

Child judges that 2 persons (the child vs. someone else) have different desires about the same object

Hidden Emotion

Child judges that a person CAN FEEL ONE THING, BUT SHOW A DIFFERENT EMOTION

Piaget's Constructivist Theory

Children learn by a process of adaptation when presented with new information by ASSIMILATION or ACCOMMODATION. They are COMPLEMENTARY activities involved in every interaction with the environment. Assimilation occurs first and progresses into accommodation.

Scientific Concepts

Culturally defined concepts that can provide children with a basis for organizing their thinking in line with the knowledge and skills of the culture

Separation Anxiety

DISTRESS of an infant or young child when a primary caregiver leaves the child in someone else's care. Usually begins around 8 months (second half of 1st yr), demonstrating the child's ability to RECALL the absent caregiver, and is viewed as a sign of ATTACHMENT to that person. Varies from "out of sight/out of mind" in infants to repeatedly looking for/asking for caregiver throughout the day in children up to age 2.

Theory of Mind

Degree of knowledge of the existence of mental processes in self and other people. Includes understanding that people have thoughts, beliefs, intentions, desires, feelings, and so on, that these mental experience may or may not reflect reality accurately, and that they may be different in other people than they are in the self. Makes possible the capacity to take the PERSPECTIVE OF OTHERS. Improvement of executive functioning is important to the development of theory of mind.

What are the tasks involved in Theory of Mind?

Diverse desires, Diverse beliefs, Knowledge access, Contents false belief, Hidden Emotion

Assimilation

Fitting NEW INFORMATION to EXISTING, UNCHANGED KNOWLEDGE STRUCTURE (schema); Examples are: When a child learns the word for dog, they start to call all four-legged animals dogs; A child learns his father is called Daddy, so he calls other males ( e.g. the mailman) Daddy. Prejudices: schema of a certain group of people (a racist schema) -- your whole life you grew up with those around you just adding more and more information to that schema that made sense to you--you only notice information that fits your schema and confirms it.

Syntax

Grammar; How to link words into meaningful sentences. By age 5, children can produce most sentence structures

How did Piaget observe infant cognition?

He focused on detailed analyses of babies' motor interactions (looking and following visual stimuli, turning head with sound, grasping, and sucking) with the environment by studying his own children.

What is Vygotsky best known for?

His emphasis on the critical role that the culture or society into which one is born plays in the transmission of knowledge; His theory is therefore called "sociocultural"--"child-in-context". The mind is no longer located entirely inside the head since human thinking is mediated by the tools humans use, a philosophy of Marxism. Language was the most important tool.

Pragmatics

How to use language effectively to communicate. Includes crafting a NARRATIVE and CODE SWITCHING using different language styles in different contexts

Mediation

In Vygotsky's theory, the intermediary role of other people in determining the meaning of signs and symbols, like words, which in turn affect the child's thinking. He believed that a child does not construct the meaning of a word, but learns the meaning that culture has ascribed to it.

Babbling

Infant vocal sounds, beginning around 6 months, consisting of repeated consonant-vowel-consonant sequences; By 9 months they tend to be limited to the sounds permissible by the baby's native language

Self-Regulation

Inhibitory Control; The ability to PREVENT yourself from making a dominant or AUTOMATIC RESPONSE and/or make yourself PERFORM a NON-DOMINANT RESPONSE instead. Vygotsky argued that language has a direct correlation with self-regulation.

Executive Functions

Intentionally controlling our own behavior and thought: setting goals, determining what we will pay attention to, and choosing to make one response over another. Occurs late in the 1st year of life

Intersensory Integration

Intermodal Perception or Cross-Modal Matching; The notion that the senses are already somewhat related very early in infancy, perhaps at birth, and that when babies perceive an object in one way, they can construct some notion of the object's other perceptual characteristics. For example, an infant will look longer at the smooth or bumpy pacifier's image that they have used. They relate the feel (tactile) of the pacifier's texture to the image (visual).

Intersubjectivity

JOINT focused effort by a teacher (parent) and child to problem solve using a scaffolding method.

Pretend Play

Make-believe that begins at age 2. It is a kind of as if behavior where objects or people may be treated as symbols as if they were simulating the actions or characteristics of other people ad interacting with other children playing other roles.

Modern Human Development vs. Piaget

Modern development notes that learning is not stage-based (organized in the same way at the same time), but is DOMAIN-SPECIFIC (proceeding at different rates in different domains: physical, numbers, morality)

How do Piaget's Number Conservation Test differ from modern-day number theory testing?

Modern-day testing give simple instruction and do not require explanation of thought--even if there is a disruption in the logical thinking process, it is still acknowledged as occurring. It is now believed that the breadth and depth of understanding increases and that the experiences to advance from one level to another need to be identified.

Making Interesting Sights Last

Occurs between 4 and 8 months when an infant's behavior accidentally produces an interesting event, the child notices the effect, and repeats the action; According to Piaget, it's a precursor to intentional behavior or simple operant conditioning; For example: When a mobile hanging over a baby's crib is tied to a baby's foot, the child will soon learn to shake her foot to make the mobile move. At some point, the baby appears to notice the connection (as if she were having an insight) and the baby shakes her foot more vigorously afterward. A baby throws a rattle out of a crib. The parent returns the toy only to have the child throw it out again

Exploratory Play

Play that involves manipulating objects, checking out their properties, sorting, and/or organizing them. Children learn object properties, spatial, numerical, and categorical relationships. Begins in infancy

Cognitive Flexibility

Purposefully SHIFT attention/goals AWAY FROM the NORM (what you are accustomed to) so that you can FOCUS on DIFFERENT ones.

Kinds of Memory

Recognition and recall.

Code Switching

Shifting from one form or style of speech to another depending on context, such as using slang with friends to more polite forms with authority figures

How do children's Theory of Mind differ from the US/Australia and China/Iran?

Slower progress in children in China/Iran which shifts focus to parental authority, curb individual desires and views that may be in conflict with family. Whereas in the US/Australia, middle class families encourage more independence, negotiation

Egocentric (Private Speech)

Speech for self, a use of language typical of preschoolers that has no apparent communication function. Piaget suggested that it serves no purpose, but Vygotsky argued that it is the precursor of inner speech an is important for problem solving, planning, and self-control

Symbols

Stand-ins for other things; Denotes thinking and the beginning of Piaget's Preoperational stage of development; Words serving as stand-ins for concepts or drawings for objects

Which common tests are used to demonstrate the 3 categories of executive functioning?

THE STROOP TEST and HEAD-SHOULDERS-KNEES-TOES;

False Belief Task

Tasks in which ONE PERSON has CORRECT KNOWLEDGE of a situation, but ANOTHER PERSON (or same person at a different time) has INCORRECT KNOWLEDGE. Used to test children's Theory of Mind, specifically, their understanding of other's mental states

Human Agency

The ABILITY TO ACT WITHOUT AN EXTERNAL TRIGGER; SELF-MOTIVATED behavior that involves generating, creating, and producing things, ideas, people, and events as powerful extension of themselves. People can operate under agency, whereas objects need to be "pushed" in order to move/act. Infants understand this by the end of the 1st year.

Representational Thought

The CAPACITY to think about things or events that are not currently stimulating our senses AND FORM MENTAL REPRESENATIONS; Develops late in the first year of life and improves through the end of the second year.

Recall

The ability to BRING TO MIND a PAST EXPERIENCE; Occurs later in infancy; The remembered experience is not presently occurring and must have a mental representation or image associated with it. Tied to DEFERRED IMITATION

Recognition

The ability to DIFFERENTIATE between EXPERIENCES that are NEW and those had before (OLD); The habituation paradigm is typically used to assess this. Newborns are capable of this as noted by them sucking harder for the reward of hearing its own mother's voice which is experienced before birth (vs. a stranger's voice). The duration and speed of this increases with age.

Level I Visual Perspective Taking

The ability to understand that other people have a different line of sight to ourselves. Occurs around age 2

Infantile Amnesia

The difficulty people have in remembering events that took place in our lives before the age of 3 or 4. Our mastery of language seems to be the biggest reason why we can't recall these experiences.

Object Permanence

The fact that objects have a separate existence from the perceiver--they exist even when no one perceives them. For example, a ball hidden under a blanket still exists even though it can no longer be immediately seen. According to Piaget, children gain this ability around 8 to 12 months of age, but recent research found it to exist earlier in infancy and continuing beyond the second year.

Visual Acuity

The level of detail that one can see. Young infants have substantially less visual acuity than adults until about 8 month.

Working Memory

The part of our cognitive system that holds information that we are actively thinking about at the moment. SHORT-TERM MEMORY

Scaffolding

The process whereby more advanced thinkers or more capable members of a culture provide novice learners with a supportive temporary prop that enables the novice to learn and to reach higher levels of thinking

Vocabulary Spurt

The rapid growth of productive vocabulary from 50 to 500 words in just a few months. Occurs between 18 and 24 months and some consider it the end of the Sensorimotor period. By age 5, the typical child may understand 15,000 words, with an average of 9-10 words per day for 3 years.

Fast Mapping

The rapidity with which young children add new words to functional vocabulary after only one or two exposures

Phonology

The sound system of language that includes rules for arranging the basic sounds or "phonemes" of the language; Development begins before birth. By 6 months babies exposed to just one language show signs of sharpening their ability to perceive distinctions that are important, but begun to lose the ability to perceive distinctions that are unimportant

Preoperational Egocentrism

The tendency of preschoolers to be aware only of their own perspective. Demonstrated in their expectations that others will know what they know, believe what they believe, and so on; An aspect of Theory of Mind

Level II Visual Perspective Taking

The understanding that two people viewing the same item from different points in space may see different things. Occurs around ages 4 to 5; They also being to reason more about what other people may desire, believe, or know

Object Concept

Understanding of what an object is, including recognition that an object has properties that can stimulate all of our senses and that an object has "permanence", it continues to exist even when we do not perceive it. For example, a pacifier is the same when sucked as the pacifier that mom/dad holds in front of them.

Voicing

Using our vocal cords to make some consonant sounds but not others; Children master most sound distinctions by age 3. If a child's speech is still difficult for nonfamily members to follow by age 4, then a speech pathologist is advised

How does Vygotsky's Sociocultural Theory compare to Piaget and Bronfenbrenner?

Vygotsky's mediated learning is similar to Piaget's assimilation and accommodation, but Vygotsky focused on the context, whereas Piaget focused on cognitive development. Bronfenbrenner also focused on the influence of the environment in his Bioecological theory, however Vygotsky believe the person could not be separated from their context. Vygotsky also believed that progress in thinking is both possible and desirable

What are the 3 fundamental skills of Executive Functions (EFs)?

Working memory, self-regulation, and cognitive flexibility