Developmental Psychology: Social Cognition, Language Acquisition, Infant Cognition, and Moral Development

Vocabulary practice flashcards covering childhood social cognition, early language acquisition, infant cognitive theories, and early moral development.

False Appearance Task

A theory of mind assessment (such as the classic "M&Ms" task) where a misleading container holds unexpected items, testing whether a child understands that another person will hold a false belief about its contents.

False Location Task

A theory of mind assessment (such as the "Sally and Anne" task) testing whether a child can predict that an agent will look for a hidden object in the location where the agent falsely believes it to be, rather than its true, relocated place.

Theory of Mind

The developing ability in early childhood to recognize and attribute mental states—such as desires, intentions, and beliefs—to oneself and others, recognizing that others can hold beliefs different from reality.

Deception in Early Childhood

The deliberate attempt to instill a false belief in another person, an ability closely linked to and emerging from advances in theory of mind development.

Role Play

Pretend play observed in early childhood, categorized into three distinct types where children adopt roles, enact scenarios, or animate objects.

Imaginary Companion

A fictional, invisible friend or personified entity created by a child; it is a normal phenomenon associated with positive social-cognitive outcomes rather than a sign of developmental psychopathology.

Head-Turn Procedure

An experimental behavioral method used in infant language studies to measure auditory discrimination and attentional preferences based on the direction and duration of an infant's head turns toward sound stimuli.

Perceptual Narrowing (Phoneme Perception)

A developmental tuning process during the first year of life where infants shift from being able to discriminate all human speech sounds to discriminating only the phonemic contrasts present in their native language environment.

Infant-Directed Speech (IDS)

A distinct speech register used by caregivers characterized by elevated pitch, exaggerated intonation contours, and slower tempo, which infants systematically prefer over adult-directed speech.

ManyBabies Study

A collaborative, multi-lab research initiative demonstrating that infants across diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds show a robust, universal preference for infant-directed speech over adult-directed speech.

Milestones of Speech Production

The developmental sequence of early vocal behaviors, progressing in order from reflexive crying and vegetative sounds, to cooing, babbling, and ultimately the emergence of first words.

Babbling in Congenitally Deaf Infants

Early production of vocalizations in deaf infants, showing that while early vocal sounds occur, canonical and mature babbling relies heavily on auditory linguistic experience or manifests manually in sign-exposed infants.

Statistical Learning (Dr. Saffran and colleagues)

The computational mechanism by which infants track transitional probabilities between syllables to identify statistical regularities and segment continuous, pause-free speech streams into distinct words.

Whole-Word Assumption

A word-learning constraint where a child assumes that a novel label refers to an entire object rather than its individual parts, color, texture, or actions.

Mutual Exclusivity

A cognitive assumption in vocabulary acquisition where children expect an object to have only one label, prompting them to map an unfamiliar word to an unfamiliar object rather than a familiar one.

Cross-Situational Word Learning

The process of determining a word's meaning by tracking co-occurrences of words and objects across multiple ambiguous environmental situations over time.

Social Referencing (Word Learning)

A toddler's use of an adult's social and communicative signals—such as eye gaze and pointing—to determine the intended referent of a newly introduced word.

Syntactic Bootstrapping

The strategy of using the grammatical structure and syntactic frame of a sentence to infer the meaning or category of an unfamiliar word.

Bilingual Vocabulary Size

The total conceptual vocabulary assessed across both of a bilingual child's languages combined, demonstrating that bilingual development does not inherently cause language delays or disorders.

Serve-and-Return

A five-step reciprocal, back-and-forth interaction process between a child and a caregiver (involving noticing the serve, returning the serve, naming it, taking turns, and practicing endings) that builds neural architecture.

Constructivist View (Jean Piaget)

Piaget's theoretical stance proposing that children actively build their own cognitive structures and understanding of reality through direct physical interaction with the environment.

Schemas

Mental structures or organized patterns of action and thought that individuals use to understand, categorize, and respond to incoming environmental information.

Object Permanence

The cognitive understanding that objects continue to exist in space and time even when they are hidden from sight or direct perception.

A-not-B Task

A classic Piagetian object-permanence task where an object is repeatedly hidden at location A before being hidden at location B; 7-month-olds typically err by searching at A, whereas 12-month-olds reliably search at B.

A-not-B Error

The perseverative tendency of infants (typically around 8 to 10 months) to search for a hidden toy in location A where it was previously found, despite watching it being moved to location B.

Violation-of-Expectancy Procedure

An experimental paradigm pioneered by Dr. Baillargeon assessing infant cognition by measuring looking times, predicated on the principle that infants look longer at unexpected or impossible physical events than expected ones.

Disappearing Carrot Top Experiment

A violation-of-expectancy study demonstrating that infants look significantly longer at an impossible event where a tall carrot moves behind a windowed screen without appearing, showing early object representations.

Core-Knowledge Theories

Theoretical perspectives arguing that infants enter the world equipped with innate, specialized cognitive systems for reasoning about evolutionarily important domains such as physical objects, numbers, and agents.

Information-Processing Theories

Perspectives that conceptualize infant cognitive growth as continuous changes in computational processing components, such as memory capacity, attentional control, and speed of processing.

Dynamic-Systems Theories

Perspectives viewing cognitive and motor milestones as emergent, self-organizing outcomes of interactions among multiple systems (e.g., posture, attention, motor history), explaining why altering posture can eliminate the A-not-B error.

Cornerstones of Moral Development (Bloom)

Innate capacities identified by Paul Bloom, suggesting infants possess early foundational capacities for moral judgment, including evaluating others' actions as helpful or unhelpful and displaying rudimentary empathy.

Hamlin et al. (2007) Study

An experiment using wooden shapes with googly eyes (a climber, a helper shape, and a hinderer shape) demonstrating that preverbal infants systematically prefer the prosocial helper over the antisocial hinderer.

Core-Knowledge of Morality (Wynn and Bloom)

The view argued by Wynn and Bloom that human infants are not morally indifferent but possess an evolved, innate core system for evaluating agents based on their cooperative or obstructive behaviors.

Altruistic Motivation

The intrinsic motivation to help others achieve their goals without the expectation of material rewards, praise, or social incentives.

Dr. Warneken Toddler Helping Tasks

A series of developmental experiments demonstrating spontaneous altruistic behavior in toddlers when an adult encounters a problem, such as dropping a clothespin or can, or trying to open cabinet doors with full hands.