Chapter 5: Cognitive development during first three years

• behaviorist approach


  approach to the study of cognitive development that is concerned with basic mechanics of learning.
• psychometric approach


  approach to the study of cognitive development that seeks to measure intelligence quantitatively.
• Piagetian approach


  approach to the study of cognitive development that describes qualitative stages in cognitive functioning.
• information-processing approach


  approach to the study of cognitive development that analyzes processes involved in perceiving and handling information.
• cognitive neuroscience approach


  approach to the study of cognitive development that links brain processes with cognitive ones.
• social-contextual approach


  approach to the study of cognitie development that focuses on environmental influences, particularly parents and other caregivers.
• classical conditioning


  learning baed on associating a stimulus that does not ordinarily elicit a response with another stimulus that does elicit the response.
• operant conditioning


  learning based on association of behavior with its consequences.
• intelligent behavior


  behavior that is goal oriented and adaptive to circumstances and conditions of life.
• IQ (intelligence quotient) tests


  psychometric tests that seek to measure intelligence by comparing a test-taker's performance with standardized norms.
• developmental tests


  psychometric tests that compare a baby's performance on a series of tasks with standardized norms for particular ages.
• Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development


  standardized test of infants and toddlers mental and motor development.
• Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment (HOME)


  instrument to measure the influence of the home environment on children's cognitive growth.
• Early intervention


  systematic process of providing services to help families meet young children's developmental needs.
• sensorimotor stage


  Piaget's first stage in cognitive development , in which infants learn through senses and motor activity.
• schemes


  Piaget's term for organized patterns of thought and behavior used in particular situations.
• circular reactions


  Piaget's term for processes by which an infant learns to reproduce desired occurrences originally discovered by chance.
• invisible imitation


  imitation with parts of one's body that one cannot see.
• visible imitation


  imitation with parts of ones' body that one can see.
• deferred imitation


  Piaget's term for reproduction of an observed behavior after the passage of time by calling up a stored symbol of it.
• elicited imitation


  research method in which infants or toddlers are induced to imitate a specific series of actions they have seen but not necessarily done before.
• object permanence


  Piaget's term for the understanding that a person or objects still exists when out of sight.
• dual representation hypothesis


  proposal that children under age 3 have difficulty grasping spatial relationships because of the need to keep more than one mental representation in mind at the same time.
• habituation


  type of learning in which familiarity with a stimulus reduces, slows, or stops a response.
• dishabituation


  increase in responsiveness after presentation of a new stimulus.
• visual preference


  tendency of infants to spend more time looking at one sight than another.
• visual recognition memory


  ability to distinguish a familiar visual stimulus form an unfamiliar one when shown both at the same time.
• cross-modal transfer


  ability to use information gained by one sense to guide another.
• violation-of-expectations


  research method in which dishabituation to a stimulus that conflicts with experience is taken as evidence that an infant recognizes the new stimulus as surprising.
• implicit memory


  unconscious recall, generally of habits and skills; sometimes called procedural memory
• explicit memory


  intentional and conscious memory, generally of facts, names, and events.
• working memory


  short-term storage of information being actively processed
• guided participation


  adult's participation in a child's activity that helps to structure it and bring the child's understanding of it closer to the adult's.
• language


  communication system based on words and grammar.
• prelinguistic speech


  forerunner of linguistic speech;utterance of sounds that are not words, includes crying, cooling, babbling, and accidental and deliberate imitation of sounds without understand their meaning.
• linguistic speech


  verbal expression designed to convey meaning
• holophrase


  single word that conveys a complete thought.
• telegraphic speech


  early form of sentences use consisting of only a few essential words.
• syntax


  rules for forming sentences in a particular language.
• nativism


  theory that human beings have an inborn capacity for language acquisition.