3.4-3.5 Development and Learning

cognition

all mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating

schema

concept or framework that organizes and interprets information

assimilation

interpreting our new experiences in terms of our existing schemas

accommodation

adapting current schemas to incorporate new info

4 major stages according to piaget

sensorimotor, pre operational, concrete operational, formal operational

sensorimotor

birth to 2, world is observed through senses

preoperational

2 to 6-7, able to represent thing with words and images but too young to perform mental operation, using intuition instead of logic

concrete operational

7 to 11, thinking logically and grasping concrete analogies, performing more complex math operations

Formal operational

12 through adulthood, formal reasoning, abstract thinking

Object permanence

Awareness an object still exists even when not perceived

Conservation

Principle that quantity remains the same despite changes in shape

Egocentrism

difficulty taking another’s point of view

Difference between Piaget and current researchers

Piaget felt development was in stages, current researches feel it is more continuous

Difference between vygotsky and Piaget

Piaget emphases growth through interaction with environment, vygotsky emphasized growth through interaction with social-cultural environment

Scaffolding

Framework that offers children temporary support as they develop higher levels of thinking

Theory of mind

People’s ideas about their own and others mental states

Imaginary audience

Teens imagine what other are thinking about them

Personal fable

Believing they are unique and special and that what happens to “most people” would never happen to them

At peak of formal operations

Apply abstract reasoning to the world around them

Two crucial tasks of childhood and adolescence

Discerning right from wrong, developing character

New belief is that morality is rooted in

Moral intuition

Focus of today’s character education

Thinking, feeling, doing the right thing

Dementia

Cognitive disorder that impairs memory, cognition, and decision-making

Reason for adults remembering many events from teens and twenties

Lots of “firsts”

Prospective memory

Memory for doing future things

language

agreed-upon system of spoken, written, or signed words and the ways they are combined to communicate meaning

3 parts of Chomsky’s language acquisition

phonemes, morphemes, grammar

phonemes

smallest distinctive sound unit in a language

morphemes

smallest language unit that carries meaning

grammar

system of rules that enables people to communicate (semantics and syntax)

universal grammar

human’s innate predisposition to understand principles and rules in all languages

receptive language

4 months, can recognize differences in speech, sounds, and can read lips

7 months ability that adults struggle to do

segment spoken sounds into individual words

productive language

ability to produce words

babbling stage

4 months, sample sounds that can be made

one-word stage

age 1, sounds carry meaning, begin to use sound to communicate meaning

two-word stage

age 2, form two word sentences usually with very noun or adjective noun combinations

telegraphic speech

early speech stage in which a child speaks like a telegram, using nouns and verbs

age limit for critical period for learning a language

7 years

impact of culture and environment t on language development

lower-quality language leads to less language skill

challenges of deaf children

unable to communicate in customary ways, school achievement may suffer, socialization is difficult

major issue for adults that lose their hearing

spend more time trying to “hear” words that they can’t perceive, comprehend, or remember

aphasia

impairment of language

broca’s aphasia

left frontal lobe, struggle to form words

wernicke’s aphasia

left temporal lobe, can’t understand other’s sentences and only speak meaningless sentences

4 mental functions that occur when learning a language

speaking, perceiving, thinking, remembering

linguistic determinism

wharf’s hypothesis that language determines the way we think

linguistic relativism

idea that language influences the way we think

reason for bilingual children exhibit enhanced social skills

better able to understand another’s perspective

memory type when thinking in images instead of words

implicit memory (procedural)