COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT DURING THE FIRST THREE YEARS DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY

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 cognitive development that focuses on environmental influences, particularly parents and other caregivers. 

CLASSICAL CONDITIONING

a person learns to make a reflex, or involuntary, response to a stimulus that originally did not bring about the response.

OPERANT CONDITIONING

focuses on the consequences of behaviors and how they affect the likelihood of that behavior occurring again.

INTELLIGENT BEHAVIOR

Is presumed to be goal oriented, meaning it exists for the purposes of attaining a goal. 

IQ TEST

intelligence quotient, psychometric tests that seek to measure intelligence by comparing a test-taker’s performance with standardized norms.

BAYLEY SCALES OF INFANT AND TODDLER DEVELOPMENT

Standardized test of infants’ and toddlers’ mental and motor development.

DEVELOPMENTAL QUOTIENTS

are most commonly used for early detection of emotional disturbances and sensory, neurological, and environmental deficits and can help parents and professionals plan for a child’s needs.

HOME OBSERVATION FOR MEASUREMENT OF THE ENVIRONMENT (HOME)

Instrument to measure the influence of the home environment on children’s cognitive growth.

EARLY INTERVENTION

is a systematic process of planning and providing therapeutic and educational services for families that need help in meeting infants’, toddlers’, and preschool children’s developmental needs. 

SENSORIMOTOR

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

USE OF REFLEXES (birth to 1 month)

• Infants exercise their inborn reflexes and gain some control over them. They do not coordinate information from their senses.

PRIMARY CIRCULAR REACTIONS (1 to 4 months)

Infants repeat pleasurable behaviors that first occur by chance (such as thumbsucking). 

SECONDARY CIRCULAR REACTIONS (4-8 months) 

Infants become more interested in the environment; they repeat actions that bring interesting results and prolong interesting experiences. Actions are intentional but not initially goal directed.

COORDINATION OF SECONDARY SCHEMES (8-12 months) 

Behavior is more deliberate and purposeful as infants coordinate previously learned schemes and use previously learned behaviors to attain their goals. They can anticipate events.

TERTIARY CIRCULAR REACTIONS (12-8 months)

They actively explore their world to determine what is novel about an object, event, or situation. They try new activities and use trial and error in solving problems.

CIRCULAR REACTIONS

an infant learns to reproduce events originally discovered by chance.

PRIMARY CIRCULAR REACTION

Action and response both involve the infant's own body

SECONDARY CIRCULAR REACTION

Action gets a response from another person or object, leading to baby’s repeating original action.

TERTIARY CIRCULAR REACTION

Action gets one pleasing result, leading baby to perform similar actions to get similar results

REPRESENTATIONAL ABILITY

The ability to mentally represent objects and actions in memory, largely through symbols such as words, numbers, and mental pictures—frees toddlers from immediate experience.

VISIBLE IMITATION

imitation that uses body parts such as hands or feet that babies can see.

INVISIBLE IMITATION

imitation that involves parts of the body that babies cannot see—at 9 months

DEFERRED IMITATION

reproduction of an observed behavior after the passage of time by calling up a stored symbol of it.

OBJECT CONCEPT

the understanding that objects have independent existence, characteristics, and locations in space

OBJECT PERMANENCE

the realization that something continues to exist when out of sight.

PICTORIAL COMPETENCE

the ability to understand the nature of pictures.

DUAL REPRESENTATION HYPOTHESIS

Proposal that children under age 3 have diffculty 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 from an unfamiliar one when shown both at the same time.

CROSS-MODAL TRANSFER

the ability to use information gained from one sense to guide another.

JOINT ATTENTION

A shared attentional focus, typically initiated with eye gaze or pointing.

CAUSALITY

 the principle that one event causes 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.

REASONING ABILITIES

innate learning mechanisms that help them make sense of the information they encounter or that they acquire these abilities very early.

COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE APPROACH

examines the hardware of the central nervous system to identify what brain structures are involved in specific areas of cognition.

IMPLICIT MEMORY

 refers to remembering that occurs without effort or even conscious awareness.

EXPLICIT MEMORY

 is conscious or intentional recollection, usually of facts, names, events, or other things that can be stated or declared.

PREFRONTAL CORTEX

 the large portion of the frontal lobe directly behind the forehead.

WORKING MEMORY

is short-term storage of information the brain is actively processing, or working on. 

GUIDED PARTICIPATION

refers to mutual interactions with adults that help structure children’s activities and bridge the gap between a child’s understanding and an adult’s. 

LANGUAGE

is a communication system based on words and grammar. 

PRELINGUISTIC SPEECH

Forerunner of linguistic speech; utterance of sounds that are not words. Includes crying, cooing, babbling, and accidental and deliberate imitation of sounds without understanding their meaning.

PHONEMES

are the smallest units of sound in speech.

GESTURES

seems to come naturally to young children and may be an important part of language learning

TELEGRAPHIC SPEECH

consisting of only a few essential words.

OVERREGULARIZATION

occurs when children inappropriately apply a syntactical rule. 

UNDEREXTENDING

they use words in too narrow of a category

OVEREXTENDING

by using words in too broad of a category. 

CODE MIXING

Bilingual children often use elements of both languages, sometimes in the same utterance.

CODE SWITCHING

This ability to shift from one language to another.

CLASSIC THEORIES OF LANGUAGE ACQUISITION: SKINNER (1957)

maintained that language learning, like other learning, is based on experience and learned associations.

CLASSIC THEORIES OF LANGUAGE ACQUISITION: CHOMSKY (1957)

For one thing, word combinations and nuances are so numerous and so complex that they cannot all be acquired by specific imitation and reinforcement. 

NATIVISM

emphasizes the active role of the learner.

LANGUAGE ACQUISITION DEVICE (LAD)

programs children’s brains to analyze the language they hear and to figure out its rules

CHILD DIRECTED SPEECH (CDS)

sometimes called parentese, motherese, or baby talk.

LITERACY

the ability to read and write.