Chapter 5

• Cognitive development


  The development of mental processes such as perception, learning, memory, and problem solving
• 6 approaches to cognitive development

  • Behaviorist
  • Psychometric
  • Piagetian
  • Information-processing
  • Cognitive neuroscience
  • Social-contextual
• Behaviorist approach


  • Studies the basic mechanics of learning
  • Babies are born with the ability to learn from what they see, smell, taste, and touch and they have this capacity to remember
• Classical conditioning


  One of the two learning processes in the behaviorist approach
• Operant conditioning


  One of the two learning processes in the behaviorist approach
• Infantile amnesia


  The inability to remember events prior to the age of 3 years old
• Psychometric approach


  • Seeks to measure intelligence quantitatively
  • Measures quantitative differences in abilities that make up intelligence by using tests that indicate these abilities
• Intelligence


  Goal-oriented and adaptive, directed at adjusting to the circumstances and conditions of life
• IQ test


  Psychometric tests that seek to measure intelligence by comparing a test taker's performance with the standard norms
• Testing infants and toddlers

  • Developmental test: Psychometric tests that compare a baby's performance on a series of tasks with the standardized norms for particular ages
  • Bayley Scales of Infant & Toddler Development: Standardized test of infant's mental and motor development
  • Developmental quotients: Most useful for early detection of emotional disturbances and sensory, neurological, and environmental deficits that can help parents and professional plan for a child's needs
• Assessing the impact of the home environment

  • HOME Observation for Measurement of the Environment: 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
• Piagetian approach


  • Describes qualitative stages in cognitive functioning
• Sensorimotor stage


  One of the stages in the Piagetian approach to cognitive development
• Invisible imitation


  Imitation of one's body that one cannot see, such as mouth develops at about 9 months, after visible imitation
• Visible imitation


  Imitation with parts of one's body that one can see
• Deferred imitation


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


  Research method in which infants or toddler are induced to imitate a specific series of actions they have seen but have not necessarily done before
• Symbol minded


  Being attentive to symbols and their relationship to the things they represent
• Object concept


  Idea that objects have their own independent existence, characteristics, and location in space
• Object permanence


  Develops gradually at the sensorimotor stage, Piaget's term for the understanding that a person or object still exists when out of sight
• Dual representation


  Children under the age of 3 have difficulty grasping spatial relationship because of the need to keep more than one mental representation in mind at the same time
• Information-processing approach


  • Focuses on perception, learning, memory, and problem solving
  • It aims to discover how children process information from the time they encounter it until they use it
• Habituation


  Learning that results from repeated or continuous exposure to a stimulus
• Dishabituation


  An increase in responsiveness after the presentation of the stimulus
• Visual and auditory perceptual and processing abilities

  • Visual preference: Tendency to spend more time looking at the one thing than another
  • Novelty preference: Tendency to prefer new sights over familiar ones
  • Visual-recognition memory: Showing an infant two stimulus side by side one familiar and one new
  • Cross-modal transfer: Ability to use information gained by one sense to guide another
  • Joint attention: When babies follow an adult's gaze, by looking or pointing in the same direction
• Information-processing and the development of Piagetian abilities

  • Categories: Ability to classify or group thing into categories
  • Causality: Infants do not know that causes must come before the effects but it develops slowly in the first year of life
  • Violation-of-expectation: Familiarization phase; infants see a series of events happen normally. After the infant is habituated, the event is changed in any way that violates normal expectations
• Cognitive neuroscience approach


  • Examines the hardware of the central nervous system
  • It seeks to identify what brain structures are involved in specific aspects of cognition
• Memory system


  • In early infancy, memories are fleeting
  • Implicit memory: Unconscious recall, generally of habits and skills, sometimes called procedural memory
  • Explicit memory: Intentional and conscious memory, generally facts, names, and events
  • Working memory: Short term storage of information being actively processing
• Understanding of number


  The violation of expectations paradigm was also used to test babies' understanding of numbers
• Social-contextual approach


  • Examines the effects of environmental aspects of the learning process
  • Guided participation: Participation of an adult in a child's activity in a manner that helps to structure the activity and to bring the child's understanding of it closer to that of the adult
• Language


  A communication system based on words and grammar
• Sequence of early language development

  • Prelinguistic speech: Forerunner of linguistic speech, utterance of sounds that are not words, includes crying, cooing, babbling, and accidental and deliberate imitations of sounds without understanding their meaning
  • Early vocalization: Crying, cooing, babbling
• Phonemes


  Basic sounds of one's native language
• Gestures


  • Conventional social gestures: Waving goodbye, nodding the head to signify 'yes'
  • Representational gestures: Desired action directly, holding an empty cup to one's mouth to signify wanting a drink
  • Symbolic gestures: Much like words and symbolic, blowing to mean hot or sniffing to mean flower
• First words


  • Linguistic speech: Verbal expressions to convey meaning
  • Holophrase: Single word that conveys a complete thought
  • Passive: Referring to understood vocabulary
  • Expressive: Referring to spoken vocabulary
• First sentences


  • Telegraphic speech: Early form of sentence consisting of only a few essential words
  • Syntax: Rules for forming sentences in a particular language
• Characteristics of early speech

  • Young children simplify: They use telegraphic speech to say just enough to get their meaning across
  • Young children underextend word meanings
  • Young children overextend word meanings
  • Young children overregularize rules: They apply rules rigidly, not knowing that some rules have exceptions
• Nativism


  Theory that human beings have an inborn capacity for language acquisition
• Language Acquisition Device (LAD)

  An inborn mechanism that enables children to infer linguistic rules from the language they hear
• Influences on early language development

  • Brain development: Brain growth during the early months and years is closely linked with language development
  • Social interaction: Language is a social act, parents or other caregivers play an important role at each stage of language development by providing opportunities for communicative experience and models of language use