Child Psychology - Exam 2 Studyguide

Constructivist

Piaget saw children as 'little philosophers' actively constructing their understanding.

Schemas

Organized knowledge units used to understand and respond to situations.

Mental Manipulation

Schemas become more 'cognitive' over time, allowing __ of information.

Assimilation

use existing knowledge or schemas to understand new experiences

Accommodation

Creating new schemas or improving old ones in light of new information

Equilibration

Balancing assimilation and accommodation to maintain stable understanding.

Sensorimotor Stage

Thinking through sensory and motor experiences from birth to 2 years.

Primary Circular Reactions

Infants repeat behaviors focused on their own body from 1 to 4 months.

Secondary Circular Reactions

Infants start repeating behaviors focused on external objects from 4 to 8 months.

Coordination of Secondary Circular Reactions

Begins at 8-12 months; schemas are combined into complex, goal-directed sequences. (hitting, reaching/grasping)

Object Permanence

the understanding that objects continue to exist even when they are out of sight. Gained during sensorimotor stage (around 8–12 months).

A-not-B Error

Infants look for an object where it was first hidden rather than where they last saw it placed.

Tertiary Circular Reactions

Toddlers experiment with new external objects to see different outcomes from 12 to 18 months. (throwing bottle on the floor)

Deferred Imitation

Appears in the Mental Representation substage (18-24 months); infants can remember and imitate behaviors seen at an earlier time.

Preoperational Stage

Characterized by a rapid increase in mental representation from 2 to 7 years. (Language, thoughts, make-believe play, drawings, etc)

Make-believe Play

Pretending reinforces representational schemes

Symbolic Representation

Ability to see a symbolic object as both an object and a representation of something else.

Egocentrism

Perceiving the world solely from one’s own point of view

Animistic Thinking

The belief that inanimate objects have lifelike qualities, commonly attributed by preschoolers.

Conservation

understanding that certain properties of objects (like volume, mass, or number) remain the same, even if their appearance changes

Centration

Focusing on only one aspect of a problem while ignoring others.

Irreversibility

Inability to go through a series of steps in a problem and then mentally reverse direction

Concrete Operational Stage

Thinking becomes more logical, flexible, and organized from 7 to 11 years.

Seriation

Ordering objects based on a quantitative trait (e.g., height).

Transitive Inference

Understanding relationships mentally (e.g., if A > B and B > C, then A > C).

Formal Operational Stage

Thinking becomes abstract and scientific from 11 years onward. (Piaget believed this stage was not universal / not everyone reached it)

Hypothetico-Deductive Reasoning

Ability to form hypotheses and test them systematically.

Propositional Thought

Ability to evaluate logic without needing real-world examples.

Imaginary Audience

Belief that others are always watching and judging you.

Personal Fable

Feeling unique and invincible, e.g., 'No one understands me' or 'Nothing bad will happen to me.'

Criticisms of Piaget's Theory

Underestimates infants' cognitive abilities and suggests cognitive development is more continuous.

Information Processing Theories

Focus on the structure of cognitive systems and how mental activities (attention and memory) solve problems.

Encoding

The process of transforming sensory input into a form that can be stored in memory.

Information Process Theories

Children's cognitive growth is continuous, occurring through expanding how much information they can process, increasing processing speed, and acquiring new strategies and knowledge.

What is store model?

Suggests that memory is processed in three parts: Sensory Memory, Working Memory, and Long-Term Memory. (Computer Metaphor)

Sensory Memory

Holds sensory input briefly.

Working Memory

Actively attending to, gathering, maintaining, storing, and processing information for a short amount of time.

Is limited in both capacity (amount of information that can be stored) and length of time information can be retained

Long-Term Memory

Stores knowledge for a lifetime.

Continuous Growth

Cognitive development is not stage-like (as Piaget suggested) but gradual and continuous.

Executive Functions

The mental skills that help you plan, make decisions, solve problems, control your impulses, and stay focused.

Selective Attention

Focusing on relevant information.

Rehearsal

Repeating information to remember it.

Organization

Grouping related items to aid memory.

Elaboration

Creating relationships between unrelated items.

Retroactive Interference

When new information makes it harder to remember old information. Organization reduces this.

They have limited working memory.

Why do younger children struggle with strategies in working memory?

Recognition

Noticing that a stimulus is identical or similar to one previously experienced

Recall

Generating a mental representation of an absent stimulus (harder).

Fuzzy-Trace Theory

suggests that people remember the gist of information rather than precise details.

Core Knowledge

Infants have innate knowledge in evolutionarily important domains.

Naïve Theorists

Children act as ___, naturally forming ideas about how the world works.

Violation-of-Expectation Tasks

Infants show surprise when expectations about physics or numbers are violated.

Vygotsky's Sociocultural Theory

Cognitive development happens through direct interactions with others (parents, teachers, friends).

Private Speech

self-directed talk that children use to guide their thinking and actions.

Guided Participation

A more knowledgeable person helps a child organize tasks, allowing them to develop independent skills.

Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD)

The gap between what a child can do alone and what they can do with help.

Intersubjectivity

Two people working together start with different perspectives but arrive at shared understanding.

Joint Attention

When social partners focus on the same object, supporting language and learning development.

Scaffolding

Adjusting support based on the child's current ability.

Reciprocal Teaching

A teaching strategy using dialogue where students take turns summarizing, questioning, clarifying, and predicting.

Cooperative Learning

Small groups work together to achieve common goals.

Comprehension

Understanding what others say, sign, or write. Develops before production.

Production

The ability to speak, sign, or write.

Nativist Perspective & Noam Chomsky

Who proposed that children take an active role in learning language.

Language Acquisition Device (LAD)

An innate system that enables children to understand and produce grammatically structured language.

Universal Grammar

A set of unconscious grammatical rules that govern all human languages.

Support for Nativist Perspective

Animal studies (e.g., Kanzi the bonobo) show that non-human primates can learn some semantics and basic grammar, but not complex syntax.

Broca's Area

Responsible for language production.

Wernicke's Area

Responsible for language comprehension.

Criticisms of Nativist Perspective

Doubts about universal grammar since children do not completely master grammar.

Interactionist Perspective / Language Acquisition Support System (LASS):

Parents help facilitate language learning.

Infant-Directed Speech (Motherese)

Short, simple sentences, exaggerated tones, and slower speech help babies learn language.

Expansion

Imitating/repeating a childs detail & expanding a child’s statement

Recast

Rendering incomplete sentence into more complex grammatical form (him,eat = yes he is eating)

Prosody

The melody, rhythm, and cadence of speech that infants can detect even before birth.

Categorical Speech Perception

Newborns can perceive speech sounds as distinct categories.

Cooing and Babbling

Cooing (6-8 weeks): Vowel-like sounds (e.g., "oo"). Babbling (4 months): Repetitive consonant-vowel combinations (e.g., "ba-ba").

Eye Gaze

By 4 months, infants follow an adult's gaze to learn about their surroundings.

Protodeclarative

Gestures used to draw attention to an object (e.g., pointing at something interesting).

Protoimperative

Gestures used to request something (e.g., reaching for a toy).

Phoneme

The smallest unit of sound in a language (e.g., /p/, /b/, /sh/).

Early Phase - When Do Babies Say Their First Words? What Are Typical First Words?

First words appear between 10-15 months. Common first words: People, objects, and common events (e.g., 'Mama,' 'Dada,' 'bye-bye').

Toddlers - Go from Focus on Stressed Syllables to Adding Unstressed Syllables (Be Able to Identify Examples)

Stage 1: Toddlers pronounce only stressed syllables (e.g., 'ju' for juice). Stage 2: They add ending consonants and unstressed syllables (e.g., 'pasghetti' for spaghetti).

Vocabulary Spurts

18-24 months: Vocabulary explodes to 1-2 words per day. Possible reasons: Fast mapping (learning words from contrast), categorization skills improving.

Fast-Mapping

Rapidly learning new words by contrasting them with known words (e.g., 'koob' experiment).

Syntactic Bootstrapping

Using sentence structure to determine word meaning (e.g., 'Will is pidding his cereal').

Gender Differences - What? Why?

Girls develop vocabulary faster than boys until age 2. Possible reasons: Faster left-brain development, parents talk more to girls.

What is the difference between Referential vs Expressive Style in learning language

Early vocabulary focused on object names. vs Early vocabulary focused on social phrases (e.g., 'thank you,' 'all done').

Underextension and Overextension

Underextension: Applying words too narrowly (e.g., calling only the family's dog 'dog'). Overextension: Applying words too broadly (e.g., calling all four-legged animals 'dog').

Syntax and Morphology

Rules for word order in sentences. & Rules for using grammatical markers (e.g., 'ing' for present tense).

Holophrastic Speech

1-1.5 years: Single words express entire thoughts (e.g., 'Eat!' meaning 'I want to eat').

Telegraphic Speech

1.5-2.5 years: Two-word phrases (e.g., 'Drink juice').

Overregularization

Applying grammar rules incorrectly to irregular words (e.g., 'goed' instead of 'went').

Turnabout, Shading, and Illocutionary Intent

Turnabout: Child comments on what was said and adds a request (e.g., 'You like pizza? What's your favorite?').

Shading: Gradually changing topics in conversation.

Illocutionary Intent: Understanding implied meaning (e.g., 'Can you open the window?' is a request, not a yes/no question).

Mental Representation

At 18-24 months, children develop the ability to “think” before you act, Arrival at solutions “suddenly” suggests mental representation of different actions

What is Control in working memory?

know strategies but don’t use them consistently