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What is the primary role of cultural tools in the context of planning?
Which of the following describes recognition memory?
When does autobiographical memory typically begin to develop?
What is the main characteristic of scripts in memory development?
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What is infantile amnesia commonly associated with?
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Which factor is crucial for the development of autobiographical memory?
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How does memory span change with age?
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Which statement about recall is accurate?
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What characterizes the Reflexive Schemes substage in the Sensorimotor Stage?
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Which of the following abilities emerges during the Coordination of Secondary Circular Reactions?
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At what age does Piaget's Preoperational Stage typically begin?
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What is a significant feature of Make Believe Play in the Preoperational Stage?
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What does the term 'Mental Representations' refer to within Piaget's theories?
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What is the focus of DeLoache's 1987 study involving children and scale models?
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Which substage involves babies beginning to explore objects through novel actions?
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Which of the following best describes Symbolic Representation?
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At what age do children show a marked improvement in describing their experiences?
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What factor is likely to increase inaccurate reporting in children's eyewitness testimony?
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Which statement is true about the critical period for language development?
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According to the nativist perspective, what is the purpose of the language acquisition device (LAD)?
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What is a significant limitation of the nativist perspective on language development?
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Which of the following describes the typical outcomes after the critical period for language acquisition?
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Which aspect of cognitive development is particularly difficult to ascertain?
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What is a notable way children have been observed to create new language systems?
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What is the primary characteristic of the sensorimotor stage in Piaget’s theory?
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Which term refers to the process of adjusting existing cognitive structures to fit new information according to Piaget?
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What does the A-not-B error demonstrate in Piaget’s research?
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Which of the following concepts is associated with Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory?
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In the context of classical conditioning, what role does the unconditioned stimulus play?
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What is an important aspect of deferred imitation in early cognitive development?
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Which of the following is NOT a characteristic of the preoperational stage in Piaget’s theory?
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What does the violation-of-expectation method assess in infants?
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Which of the following is true about the concept of infantile amnesia?
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What concept does Vygotsky emphasize regarding language's role in cognitive development?
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What is a limitation commonly associated with Piaget's theory of cognitive development?
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Which psychological perspective is characterized by the idea that children actively construct their understanding of the world?
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In terms of language perception, what does categorical perception of phonemes refer to?
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At what age do infants begin to divide the speech stream into word-like units?
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What is the primary characteristic of Infant Directed Speech (IDS)?
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What stage of speech production occurs at 6 months?
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What is an example of a protodeclarative gesture?
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What vocabulary size is typically expected for a child by 18 months?
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During which period do infants show a rapid increase in vocabulary acquisition after the age of 18 months?
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What is underextension in the context of early language development?
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How can early media use influence word learning in young children?
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Study Notes
Habituation
- Habituation occurs when an infant becomes familiar with a stimulus, causing attention to decrease.
- Habituation provides researchers with a way to examine an infant's cognitive abilities.
Classical Conditioning
- Involves pairing a neutral stimulus with a stimulus that evokes a reflexive response.
- The Little Albert experiment, conducted by John B. Watson, demonstrated that a fear response could be conditioned in a child.
- The experiment involved pairing a neutral stimulus (a white rat) with an unconditioned stimulus (a loud noise) that elicited an unconditioned response (fear).
- The child eventually showed a conditioned fear response to the rat even without the loud noise.
Operant Conditioning
- Reinforcement increases the probability of a behavior occurring again.
- Punishment decreases the probability of a behavior occurring again.
- Positive reinforcement involves adding a pleasant stimulus to increase a behavior.
- Negative reinforcement involves removing an unpleasant stimulus to increase a behavior.
- Positive punishment involves adding an unpleasant stimulus to decrease a behavior.
- Negative punishment involves removing a pleasant stimulus to decrease a behavior.
- Rovee-Collier and colleagues' mobile studies demonstrated infants' ability to learn and retain simple motor behaviors.
- Babies who were rewarded with visual stimulation (moving mobile) were more likely to repeat the behavior that caused the reward (kicking their legs), showing evidence of operant conditioning principles.
Imitation
- It is the ability to learn by observing and copying the actions of others.
- Infants are capable of imitation from birth, potentially due to a reflexive mechanism.
Piaget's Cognitive Developmental Theory
- Focused on how children actively construct their understanding of the world through interactions with their environment.
- Emphasizes the importance of the learner's active role in building knowledge.
Schemes
- Mental structures that organize information and guide an individual's interactions with the world.
- Adaptation: The process of adjusting schemes to incorporate new information.
- Assimilation: Integrating new information into existing schemes.
- Accommodation: Modifying existing schemes to fit new information.
- Organization: Combining existing schemes into more complex and interconnected systems.
- Equilibrium: A state of balance between assimilation and accommodation.
- Disequilibrium: A state of imbalance, in which existing schemes are not adequate to explain new experiences.
Piaget's Stages of Cognitive Development
- These stages represent a universal sequence of cognitive development.
- Each stage involves qualitatively different ways of thinking, moving from simple to more complex cognitive processes.
Sensorimotor Stage
- From birth to 2 years old.
- Infants develop their understanding of the world through sensory experiences and motor actions.
- Circular reactions are repetitive actions that help infants learn about their environment.
- Primary Circular Reactions: Repetitive actions focused on the infant's own body.
- Secondary Circular Reactions: Repetitive actions focused on objects in the environment.
- Tertiary Circular Reactions: Infants begin to experiment with objects in new and innovative ways.
- Object permanence is the understanding that objects continue to exist even when they are out of sight.
- Violation-of-expectation method: Studies that test infants' expectations about object permanence—infant's understanding of object permanence is shown by looking longer at an unexpected event.
- The A-not-B error describes the tendency for infants to reach for an object in a familiar location (A) even after seeing it hidden in a new location (B).
- Deferred imitation is demonstrating an action learned earlier at a later time.
Preoperational Stage
- From 2 to 7 years old.
- Children become increasingly capable of using mental representations, including language and symbolic thought.
- Children are able to engage in make-believe play, which helps them develop social skills, language skills, and practice new schemes.
- Make-believe play becomes more complex and less self-centered as children age, often incorporating other children into the play.
- Symbolic representation is the understanding that an object can stand for something else.
- DeLoache's study demonstrated children's ability to use a scale model as a representation of a larger room to find hidden objects.
- Egocentrism is the inability to see the world from another person's perspective.
- The Three Mountains Task is a classic experiment that illustrates egocentrism in children.
- Follow-up research has shown that egocentrism is less pervasive and more situation-dependent than Piaget initially thought.
- Animistic thinking is the tendency to attribute human qualities to inanimate objects.
- Follow-up research has shown that animistic thinking is common in preschool-aged children but decreases as children develop more advanced reasoning skills.
- Conservation is the understanding that the quantity of an object remains the same even when its appearance changes.
- Centration: Focusing on a single, perceptually salient feature of an object, ignoring other relevant features.
- Irreversibility: Inability to reverse mental operations.
- Hierarchical classification is the ability to group objects into categories based on shared characteristics, even including the ability to make connections between categories.
- Piaget's class inclusion problem is a classic task that demonstrates the development of hierarchical classification in children.
Concrete Operational Stage
- From 7 to 11 years old.
- Children develop more logical and flexible thinking skills.
- Children are able to focus on more than one aspect of a problem, making them more capable of performing tasks that require conservation or classification.
- Changes in thought related to conservation:
- Decentration: The ability to consider multiple features of a situation rather than getting fixated on one.
- Reversibility: The ability to mentally reverse operations.
- Hierarchical classification involves recognizing the relationship between classes and subclasses.
- Piaget's class inclusion problem demonstrated the ability to classify items both within a category and across categories (e.g., are there more flowers or more red flowers?)
- Seriation is the ability to arrange objects in a logical order based on size, shape, or another characteristic.
- Transitive inference is a related concept that involves understanding the relationship between objects based on comparisons—involves the ability to infer the relationship between two objects based on their relationship to a third object.
- Spatial reasoning involves the ability to navigate and understand spatial relationships, which often involves the ability to create mental maps.
- "Mental walk" is an example of a spatial reasoning task, where individuals are asked to imagine walking through a familiar environment.
- Cognitive maps represent one's spatial knowledge of an environment.
- The influence of culture on cognitive maps is important to consider as some cultures emphasize spatial reasoning more than others.
Formal Operational Stage
- From 11 years old (or later) onward.
- Individuals develop the ability to think abstractly and systematically.
- Hypothetical-deductive reasoning is a type of scientific thinking that involves forming a hypothesis, testing the hypothesis, and drawing a conclusion.
- Piaget's pendulum task is a classic experiment that examines hypothetical-deductive reasoning.
- Propositional thought is the ability to reason logically based on verbal statements or propositions.
- Propositions are statements that express a relationship between concepts.
- Piaget's Poker Chip problem is an example of a task that assesses propositional thought.
- Follow-up research on Piaget's theory emphasizes that formal operational thinking is not universal and that individuals may develop different abilities at different rates.
Piaget's Legacy
- Piaget's theory has been influential in the field of cognitive development; many researchers have been influenced by the work that he did.
- Strengths of the theory include its emphasis on children's active role in learning.
- Weaknesses of the theory include underestimation of children's abilities, failing to adequately explain variability between children, and overlooking cultural influences on cognitive development.
Core Knowledge Theories
- These theories suggest that infants are born with innate knowledge systems, known as "core domains," that provide a foundation for learning.
- Core domains may encompass:
- Physical knowledge: Understanding the properties of objects and their motion.
- Numerical knowledge: Understanding basic quantities and arithmetic.
- Biological knowledge: Understanding living things and their properties.
- Social knowledge: Understanding the intentions and beliefs of others.
- Violation-of-expectation method is an example of a research technique commonly used in core knowledge research.
- Studies using this method have shown that infants can make inferences about objects and their properties, even in the absence of direct experience.
- Infants show a preference for expected events, and an interest (looking longer) at unexpected events (e.g., an object disappearing and reappearing as if it were able to pass through a solid barrier).
- Strengths of core knowledge theory include its emphasis on innate knowledge and its ability to explain early learning.
- Weaknesses of core knowledge theory include difficultly identifying the specific content of core knowledge and the challenge of explaining how these innate abilities are acquired.
Vygotsky's Sociocultural Theory
- Focused on the role of social interaction and culture in shaping cognitive development.
- Social interaction is believed to provide scaffolding that advances development.
Zone of Proximal Development
- The gap between what a learner can accomplish independently and what they can accomplish with assistance from a more knowledgeable person.
Scaffolding
- Providing temporary support for learning, helping children move through the zone of proximal development.
- Scaffolding involves adjusting the amount of support provided as the learner becomes more competent.
- Vygotsky viewed make-believe play as a crucial tool for cognitive development.
- Make-believe play allows children to practice social skills, language skills, and to develop an awareness of the difference between reality and fantasy.
- Private speech, or talking to oneself, is an important tool for cognitive development according to Vygotsky.
- Vygotsky believed that private speech helps children guide their own behavior and plan their actions.
- Piaget viewed private speech as egocentric and a sign of immature thinking.
- Vygotsky's theory highlights the importance of social interaction and culture in shaping development.
- Strengths of Vygotsky's theory include its emphasis on the role of social interaction in learning and its focus on practical, culturally specific aspects of learning.
- Weaknesses of Vygotsky's theory include its lack of specific guidelines for how to apply its concepts to educational settings and its lack of emphasis on individual differences in cognitive development.
Information Processing Approach
- Views cognitive development as a series of changes in how information is processed.
- Focuses on the mechanisms of cognitive development (e.g., attention, memory, and reasoning).
Attention
- The ability to focus cognitive resources on a particular stimulus.
Sustained Attention
- The ability to maintain attention over time.
- Important for learning and goal-directed behavior.
- Heart rate decreases in infants as they focus their attention.
- Sustained attention develops dramatically during early childhood.
- Selective Attention: The ability to focus on a specific stimulus while ignoring distracting stimuli.
- Selective attention is crucial for goal-directed behavior, particularly as it allows individuals to focus on relevant information even in the presence of distractions.
- Selective attention improves as children develop.
- Inhibition: The ability to suppress irrelevant information or behaviors.
- Inhibition helps children control their impulses, resist distractions, and focus on relevant information.
- Inhibition contributes to cognitive development, as it is linked to success in academic, social, and emotional domains.
- Card sorting task is an example of a task that measures various aspects of attention.
- Performance on this task improves in early childhood.
Memory
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The ability to store and retrieve information over time.
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Memory span is the number of items an individual can hold in short-term memory at one time.
- Memory span increases with age.
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Memory is assessed through:
- Recognition: Recognizing a stimulus as being familiar.
- Recall: Generating a memory without any prompts.
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Types of Memory:
- Episodic memory: The recall of events that occurred at a specific time and place.
- Scripts: Generalized knowledge about routine and familiar events, often used to help predict what will happen next.
- Autobiographical memory: Memories of personally meaningful, one-time events.
- Infantile amnesia: The inability to recall memories from early childhood, often before the age of 3.
- Simcock and Hayne's Magic Shrinking Machine study concluded that the inability to encode and retrieve memories may be linked to language development.
- Infantile amnesia: The inability to recall memories from early childhood, often before the age of 3.
- Episodic memory: The recall of events that occurred at a specific time and place.
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Strengths of the information processing approach include a focus on specific cognitive mechanisms, which allows identification of individual differences in development.
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Weaknesses include difficulty in combining different aspects of cognition into a broad picture of cognitive development and neglecting the influence of nature and nurture.
Language Development
- Language is a species-specific and universal ability that allows humans to communicate through a complex system of symbols.
Prerequisite for Language
- Human brain, especially the auditory cortex in the left hemisphere, assists in processing language.
- Experience with human language is crucial for language development.
Theories of Language Development
- The critical period refers to a specific period of time in which language acquisition is most efficient.
- Children who acquire language during the critical period typically develop language skills easily.
- Children who acquire language later, especially after puberty, may face greater challenges and less overall success.
- Genie, a case study involving a young girl who was severely neglected and deprived of language exposure during early childhood, demonstrates the effects of missing the critical language period.
Nativist Perspective
- Noam Chomsky proposed the idea of the Language Acquisition Device (LAD) as a specialized brain mechanism pre-programmed for language acquisition.
- The LAD is believed to contain universal grammar, which is considered to be a set of underlying principles that govern the structure of all languages.
- “Homesign,” a system of gestures developed by deaf children who lack exposure to sign language, supports the nativist perspective by showing the ability to create rudimentary linguistic systems even in the absence of a formal language.
- Nicaraguan Sign Language, a sign language developed by deaf children in Nicaragua, demonstrated that language can spontaneously emerge from limited input.
- Limitations of nativism:
- There is a lack of clear identification of the universal rules of "universal grammar."
- Language development is not solely innate and is also influenced by learning experiences.
Interactionist Perspective
- Emphasizes the interaction of innate abilities and environmental influences on language development.
- This perspective acknowledges the brain's predisposition for language but emphasizes that environmental input is crucial for shaping language development.
Speech Perception
- The ability to recognize and distinguish between different sounds in language.
Recognizing Phonemes
- Phonemes are the smallest units of sound in a language.
- Categorical perception of phonemes indicates that infants tend to perceive sound categories rather than minute variations in sound.
- Voice onset time (VOT) is the delay between the release of a sound from the lips (e.g., the initial /b/) and the onset of vocal fold vibration.
- Perceptual narrowing: An infant’s ability to categorize phonemes (e.g., similar sounds) changes as they age.
- Infants are born with the ability to distinguish between all phonemes in all languages, but as infants age they become more sensitive to the phonemes of their native language.
- Categorical perception of phonemes indicates that infants tend to perceive sound categories rather than minute variations in sound.
Word Recognition
- The ability to identify and understand spoken words.
- Rules for combinations of phonemes are essential for word recognition.
- Statistical learning helps infants learn to recognize words and understand their meaning.
- Saffran et al. conducted an experiment that demonstrated infants' ability to identify words by extracting statistical regularities in speech streams.
Early Speech Production
- Stage 1: Cooing (2 months)
- Stage 2: Babbling (6 months)
- Babbling is universal.
- It involves repetitive consonant-vowel combinations, such as “bababa” or “dadada.”
- Deaf babies exposed to sign language will babble using their hands.
- Stage 3: Babbling influenced by early words (10 months)
- Babbling begins to resemble patterns of first words as children learn specific sounds.
Early Gestures
- Protodeclarative gestures demonstrate the infant’s desire to communicate. They are often combined with a look at other people.
- Protoimperative gestures are used by an infant to get someone to do something, e.g., pointing at a desired object.
First Words
- Typically emerge between 10 and 13 months.
- Often include words with high salience or relevance to the child's life, such as “mama,” “dada,” and “bye-bye.”
- Infants can often understand more words than they can produce.
- Vocabulary typically reaches about 50 words by 18 months.
- Vocabulary spurt: A rapid increase in vocabulary that commonly occurs around 18 months.
Early Comprehension
- Infants are able to understand words before they can produce them.
- There is often a 5-month lag between comprehension and production.
- Underextension: Applying a word to a specific instance or category but not to other instances or categories.
- Overextension: Applying a word to a broader category than its actual meaning.
Early Media Use and Word Learning
- Studies examining the impact of early media use on language development show inconclusive results.
- Deloache et al. conducted research with children who frequently watched educational media (e.g., Baby Einstein).
- This research found that children who watched educational media frequently performed less effectively on language tasks.
- Researchers determined that the “video deficit” phenomenon could be contributing to the decreased results on language tasks in infants and toddlers who frequently watch educational media.
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