Week 11: Cognitive Development Across the Lifespan

Vocabulary practice flashcards covering cognitive development theories (Piaget, Vygotsky), attention and memory types, infantile amnesia paradigms, autobiographical memory, and adult cognitive aging.

Schema (Scheme)

A psychological structure that provides an organized way of making sense of experience, changing from sensorimotor action patterns in infancy to deliberate, creative thinking in later development.

Adaptation (Piaget)

The process of building schemas through direct interaction with the environment, consisting of two complementary activities: assimilation and accommodation.

Assimilation

Using existing or current schemes to interpret and make sense of the external world.

Accommodation

Creating new schemas or adjusting old ones to better fit new environmental information and experiences.

Cognitive Equilibrium

A steady, comfortable mental state during which children assimilate more information than they accommodate.

Cognitive Disequilibrium

A state of cognitive discomfort and rapid cognitive change that prompts a shift from assimilation to accommodation.

Sensorimotor Stage

Piaget's first stage of cognitive development ($0-2\text{ years}$), where infants understand the world by coordinating sensory experiences with physical motor actions.

Object Permanence

The understanding that objects, people, and things continue to exist even when they can no longer be seen, heard, or touched.

A-not-B Error

A perseverative error common in $8\text{- to }12\text{-month-olds}$ where an infant continues to search for a hidden object at location A after seeing it moved to location B, occurring because the concept of the object is not yet separated from the action used to find it.

Violation-of-Expectation Task

A research method using habituation and preferential looking (measuring longer looking times at impossible events) that demonstrated object permanence is evident in infants as young as $2\frac{1}{2}\text{ months}$.

Mental Representations

Internal cognitive symbols, images, models, or mental structures that stand for external objects, events, or abstract concepts, enabling make-believe play, advanced object permanence, and problem solving.

Deferred Imitation

The ability to observe an action and reproduce or copy it at a later time rather than immediately while the model is present.

Symbolic Thought

The capacity to use symbols—such as words, images, gestures, numbers, or physical objects—to represent ideas, concepts, or things that are not physically present or directly observable.

Preoperational Stage

Piaget's second stage of cognitive development ($2-7\text{ years}$), characterized by representing the world with words and images and using primitive reasoning rather than formal logic.

Concrete Operational Stage

Piaget's third stage of cognitive development ($7-11\text{ years}$), during which children develop logical reasoning applied to concrete physical objects and organize items according to interrelationships.

Conservation (Piaget)

The understanding that an object's core properties (such as mass, volume, number, or length) remain constant despite superficial changes in appearance, shape, or spatial arrangement, provided nothing is added or removed.

Decentration

The cognitive ability to focus on multiple aspects of a problem or situation simultaneously rather than fixating on only one single detail.

Reversibility

The ability to mentally reverse or undo an action, physical process, or logical operation to return an object or state back to its original condition.

Classification (Piaget)

The ability to group, sort, and categorize objects based on shared characteristics, features, or relationships (such as color, shape, size, or function).

Seriation

The ability to logically order or arrange a set of objects along a quantitative or qualitative continuum (such as length, size, weight, or color).

Transitivity

The ability to recognize and deduce the logical relationship between two objects by understanding their separate relationships with a third intervening object (e.g., if A is larger than B and B is larger than C, then A is larger than C).

Formal Operational Stage

Piaget's fourth stage of cognitive development ($11\text{ years onwards}$), characterized by systematic, hypothetical, and abstract logical reasoning.

Hypothetical-Deductive Reasoning

The formal operational capacity to consider all relevant factors, systematically formulate testable hypotheses, deduce predictions, and isolate variables to test solutions (as assessed by the pendulum task).

Propositional Thought

The ability to evaluate the logical validity of verbal statements and derive logical conclusions based strictly on the premises, independent of real-world truth or concrete evidence.

Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD)

Vygotsky's concept defining the optimal learning zone target for instruction—the difference between a learner's current independent ability level and the level achievable with guidance and support.

Scaffolding

Providing temporary instructional assistance and support tailored to a learner's needs, which is gradually withdrawn as their competence increases.

Private Speech

Self-directed speech used by children during social and cognitive problem solving to guide thoughts, regulate behavior, and foster intellectual independence.

Selective Attention

Focusing on a specific aspect of experience that is relevant while intentionally ignoring irrelevant stimuli.

Divided Attention

Concentrating on more than one activity or competing task at the same time.

Sustained Attention

Maintaining focused engagement on a selected stimulus over a prolonged period of time; also referred to as vigilance.

Executive Attention

A type of attention focused on action planning, allocating resources to goals, detecting errors, compensating for mistakes, monitoring progress, and handling novel or unknown situations.

Joint Attention

An interactive state beginning around $7\text{ to }8\text{ months of age}$ in which two individuals focus on the same object or event, involving tracking another's behavior and reciprocal gaze/interaction.

Infantile Amnesia (Freud)

A term coined by Sigmund Freud to describe childhood amnesia—the lack of conscious memories from early childhood, resulting in individuals having very few, if any, memories from early in life.

Infantile Amnesia (Rate of Forgetting)

A cross-species definition describing the significantly faster rate of memory forgetting observed in younger individuals compared to older individuals.

Forward Telescoping Effect

A dating error in autobiographical memory where individuals perceive distant past events as having occurred more recently than they actually did.

Backward Telescoping Effect

A dating error in autobiographical memory where individuals perceive recent events as having occurred more distantly in time than they actually did.

Postdating of Earliest Memories

The empirical finding by Wang & Peterson (2016) showing that as children grow older, they systematically shift estimated ages of early memories forward (e.g., shifting from $35.81\text{ months}$ initially to $39.6\text{ months}$ at $2\text{ years}$ and $52.54\text{ months}$ at $8\text{ years}$), demonstrating that memories are not lost but dated later.

Campbell & Campbell (1962) Avoidance Experiment

The first empirical demonstration of faster forgetting in younger subjects, showing that infant rats conditioned to fear shock in a two-compartment box forget learned fear much faster than older rats over $7$, $21$, and $42\text{ days}$.

Mobile Conjugate Task

An operant memory task used by Rovee-Collier for infants aged $2-6\text{ months}$, in which an infant's ankle is connected to an overhead mobile via a ribbon; retention is measured by comparing kicking rates at test against baseline.

Train Task (Rovee-Collier)

An operant conditioning task used for infants aged $6-18\text{ months}$ where infants learn to move a toy train along a track by pressing a lever, with retention measured by lever-press rates relative to baseline.

Retrieval Failure (in Infancy)

Rovee-Collier's finding that infants who show complete forgetting after a $2\text{-}$\text{or }4\text{-week}$delay can fully reactivate and express kicking behaviors when given a$3\text{-minute}$reminder exposure$24\text{ hours}$$ before testing, showing memories remain stored but inaccessible.

Neurogenic Hypothesis of Infantile Amnesia

A biological theory proposed by Josselyn & Frankland (2012) stating that high levels of neurogenesis in the infant hippocampus disrupt existing memory circuits, and the developmental decline in neurogenesis allows memories to stabilize around ages $3-4$.

Reminiscence Bump

The heightened proportion of autobiographical memories recalled by older adults for novel, culturally significant life events that occurred during adolescence and early adulthood (roughly ages $10-30$).

Narrative Identity Theory (McAdams)

A theoretical framework proposing that people reconstruct autobiographical episodic memories into an internalized, coherent life story that defines self-concept, facilitates self-regulation, and enhances wellbeing.

Fluid Intelligence

Basic information-processing skills—including processing speed, visual pattern recognition, and working memory—that peak in early adulthood and show progressive fall-off starting in the mid-twenties.

Crystallized Intelligence

Cognitive capabilities dependent on accumulated knowledge, experience, good judgment, vocabulary, and mastery of social conventions, which increase across adulthood, peak in midlife, and do not decline until the eighties.

Selective Optimization with Compensation (SOC)

A strategy for adapting to aging by selecting personally valued activities, optimizing performance through continued practice, and compensating with new strategies or tools to offset cognitive and physical declines.

Flynn Effect

The documented global increase in intelligence test performance over successive generations, driven by improvements in education, living standards, nutrition, and parental engagement.