chapter 7 - physical and cognitive development in early childg

3 years old

⤹ what age do children lose "baby roundness"? in which their limbs lengthen, and height increases?

2-3 inches

how many inches are typically added to children's height each year?

night terrors

abrupt awakening; extremely frightened

nightmares

just a bad dream

is sleep walking and talking common for children?

yes, they are fairly common

bed-wetting or enuresis

makes up about 10-15% of 5 year olds

brain development at 6 years old

brain is at 95% peak volume

brain development at 6-11 years old

most rapid growth in areas that support thinking, language, and spatial relations

corpus callosum

links left and right hemispheres, it improves functioning

gross motor skills

involves large muscle groups (jumping and running)

fine motor skills

using eye-hand and small muscle coordination (buttoning a shirt, drawing pictures)

handedness

⤹ usually evident by age 3
⤹ this is heritable
⤹ single-gene theory (dominant alle for right handedness, 90%)

Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia

73% of deaths of children under 5 occur in poor, rural regions, such as?

parental smoking

increases child' risk of asthma and bronchitis

air pollution

increases risk of chronic respiratory disease

____ mostly occur in young children

pesticide poisonings

symbolic function

the ability to use symbols that have meaning, such as
⤹ words
⤹ numbers
⤹ images

after the age of 3

when does advanced spatial thinking occur? where using simple maps and models becomes easier

transduction

mentally thinking phenomena, whether logical or not ("my parents got a divorce because I was bad")

the five counting principles

⤹ cardinality
⤹ counting
⤹ ordinality
⤹ number patterns
⤹ abstraction

animism

the tendency to attribute life to inanimate objects ("the cloud is smiling at me!")

centration

tendency to focus on one aspect of situation and neglect others

decentering

thinking simultaneously about several aspects of a situation

the three-mountain task

a preoperational child is unable to describe the mountains from the doll's point of view, it is an indication of egocentrism

conservation

something remains the same even if its appearance is altered

irreversibility

failure to see that an action can go in two or more ways (for example, a belief that pouring juice from glass to glass changes the amount of the juice)

theory of mind

children's awareness of their own mental processes and those of other people

false belief and deception

m: what do you think is in the box?
b: smarties!

m: why don't you open the box and see?
b: oh, it's pencils

m: let's close the box. what do you think your friend jenny would say is in the box if she saw it?
b: pencils!

appearance vs reality

⤹ related to awareness of false beliefs
⤹ requires child to simultaneously refer to two conflicting mental representations

fantasy vs reality

distinguishing between real and imagined events

three steps of memory

⤹ encoding
⤹ storage
⤹ retrieval

type of memory

⤹ sensory
⤹ working
⤹ short-term
⤹ long-term

generic

a type of childhood memory that produces "scripts" - general outlines of repeated and familiar events

episodic

a type of childhood memory that remembers a specific event at a specific time

autobiographical

⤹ memories that form a person's life history
⤹ specific and long-lasting

intelligence: vygotsky's theory

⤹ children use "scaffolds" to learn - the temporary support of adults
⤹ zone of proximal development

language development by age 3

an average child knows 900-1000 words

language development by age 6

child knows about 2,600 words and understands more than 20,000

fast mapping

child learns the meaning of a word after hearing only once or twice