Psych 2110 Chapter 5 (Uleth)

What is social cognition?

The subfield of child psychology that examines how children process, store, and apply information about people in social situations

What is the social brain hypothesis?

The idea that the large brains of humans, as well as the general intelligence of humans, has evolved in response to social conflicts and challenges that are an inherent part of group living

What is the “parental-investment” theory?

Explains why parents spend so much time and energy in raising their children. Evolutionary psychologists believe that the lengthy period of human children’s immaturity and dependence has adaptive benefits

What is joint attention?

The shared attention of 2 individuals on the same object or event; shifts in gaze, head turning, and pointing are ways that infants engage in joint attention

How do 5-6 month olds attribute goals?

They attribute goals to people’s actions

What can 9 month olds distinguish between when it comes to actions?

Distinguish between intentional and accidental actions

What do 2 year olds begin to do with actions?

They begin to imitate actions that other people intended, while ignoring actions that were accidental

What is a false belief? When does it end?

A thought about another person’s knowledge that does not match reality, such as believing that someone knows where a toy is located when they were not around to see the toy moved. This ends by 2.5 years

What are goal-directed reaching studies? What is the purpose?

Infants observe actors reaching for a desired object, and then reaching for a different object suggests that infants understand other people’s intentions to access a goal

To asses infants ability to understand the intentionality of actions

What are fals-belief tasks? What is the purpose?

Infants observe actor place an object in location A and leave the room, after which the objects’s location is switched; when the actor returns, if infants look longer when the actor looks for the objects in the new location, it suggests they realize the actor has a false belief of the objects location

To examine whether infants recognize that people can have false or wrong beliefs

Why do we use developmental theories?

Developmental theories provide a framework for understanding important phenomena

Developmental theories raise crucial questions about human nature

Developmental theories motivate research

What is Piaget’s theory on cognitive development?

Baby scientists

Children construct knowledge in response to experiences

Children learn many thing on their own → no intervention needed

Children are intrinsically motivated to learn → no rewards needed

What are the stages in the stage theory?

Sensorimotor stage

Preoperational stage

Concrete operational stage

Formal operational stage (not universal)

What are the substages in the sensorimotor stage?

Substage 1 (birth to one month):

Building knowledge through reflexes

Substage 2 (1 to 4 months):

Reflexes are organized into larger, integrated behaviours

Substage 3 ( 4 to 8 months):
Repitition of actions on the environement that bring out pleasing or intetesting results

Substage 4 (8 to 12 months): Mentally representing objects when objects can no longer be seen, thus achieving “object permanence”

Substage 5 (12 to 18 months):

Actively exploring the possible uses to which objects can be put

Substage 6 (18 to 24 months): Able to form enduring mental representations

What is Object permanence?

The understanding that objects continue to exist independant of one’s immediate perceptual experiences

What is A-not-B error?

Infants repeated and unsuccessful searches for hiden objects at location A, not B. The tendency to reach to where objects have been found before, rather than to where they were last hidden

What are trends in the sensorimotor stage?

Focus of their activities → their own bodies

Goals of their activities → concreate

Formation of mental representations → lack of object permanence

What is Symbolic Representation?

Using on object to stand for another

What is Egocentrism?

The tendency of children to think that other people view the world from their perspective, and thus an inability to consider another person’s perspective

What is centration?

The characteristic to focus on a single, perceptually salient feature or characteristic of an entity to the exclusion of other features

What happens in the Preoperational stage?

Development in symbolic representation

What happens in the concrete operational stage?

Stage in which logical thinking begins. Thry can solce consetvation problems, but their successful reasoning is largely limited to concrete situations

What are the characteristics of the formal operational stage?

Hypothetical thinking, truth, justice, and morality

What are citisisms of piaget’s theory?

Children’s thinking is not as consistent as the stages suggest

Infants and young children are more competant than piaget recognized

Piaget understates the social components of cognitive development

Piaget was better at describing processes than explaining how they operate

What is the information-processing theory?

View children as undergoing continious cognitive change

Describe how cognitive change occurs

Active problem solver

Are concerned with the development of learning, memory, and problem-solving skills

A cluster of theories

Limited capacity processing system

Hardware → memory capacity, speed to execute tasks

Software → strategies and info available for a particular task

What is Hardware: execution speed?

The speed with which children execute basic processes increases greatly over the course of childhood

What are software: strategies?

Memory and learning strategies emerge between 5 and 8 years

What is selective attention?

The process of directing attention to relevant information in the enviornment while ignoring irrelevant information

What is Utilization deficiency?

Failure to benefit from using good strategies owing to the high cost of mental effort

What is the over-lapping-waves model?

When solving a problem, children employ several strategies/ways of thinking. As a certain strategy is discovered, the frequency of which it is used will initially increase but then decrease when children discover more advanced strategies. Different strategies compete with each other

What are core knowledge theories?

Children as well-adapted product of evolution

Born with domain specific understanding of the world

Children actively orgnize their understanding into informal theories related to important domains like other people, plants and animals, and objects

What is core knowledge theories: Nativism?

Some knowledge is innate, or part of our initial condition

Concepts and learning mechanisms are innate

the brain is well-suited and evolved for language

Also known as “nature”

What is core knowledge theories: empiricism?

All knowledge is based on experience

We are born with powerful learning capacities

Learning from experience applies equally to any taks domain

Also known as nurutre

What is Vygotsky’s socio-cultural theory?

Children are social beings shaped by their cultural contexts

Children are both learners and teachers

Children are products of their culturs

Cognitive change originates in social interaction

What is intersubjectivity?

The way a person understands and relates to others.

Shared agreement, shared communication, shared experience, shared values, an important dimension of human sociality, originates from reciprocal social exchanges

What is social referencing?

Children look to social partners for guidance about how to respond ot unfamiliar events

What is social scaffolding?

More competant people provide temporary frameworks that lead children to higher-order thinking