PSY5: DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY - Infancy: Cognitive Development

Vocabulary flashcards covering key concepts in infant cognitive development, based on lecture notes.

Behaviorist Approach

Studies the basic mechanics of learning and how behavior changes in response to experience.

Psychometric Approach

Measures quantitative differences in abilities that make up intelligence using tests.

Piagetian Approach

Looks at changes in the quality of cognitive functioning and how the mind adapts to the environment.

Information Processing Approach

Focuses on perception, learning, memory, and problem-solving from the time children encounter information until they use it.

Cognitive Neuroscience Approach

Seeks to identify brain structures involved in specific aspects of cognition.

Social-contextual Approach

Examines the effects of environmental aspects on the learning process, particularly the role of caregivers.

Classical Conditioning

Learning based on associating a stimulus with a response.

Operant Conditioning

Learning based on the association of behavior with its consequences.

Intelligent Behavior

Behavior that is goal-oriented and adaptive to circumstances.

IQ Tests

Tests that measure intelligence by comparing a test-taker's performance with standardized norms.

Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development

Developmental test designed to assess children from 1 month to 3½ years.

Developmental Quotients (DQs)

Indicates a child's competencies in cognitive, language, motor, social-emotional, and adaptive behavior.

Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment (HOME)

Scale where observers rate the intellectual stimulation and support in a child's home.

Early Intervention

Systematic process of planning and providing therapeutic and educational services for families.

Sensorimotor Stage

Stage from birth to age 2 where infants learn through sensory and motor activity.

Schemes

Organized patterns of thought and behavior.

Circular Reactions

Infant learns to reproduce events originally discovered by chance.

Tertiary circular reactions

Varying an action to get a similar result.

Representational ability

The ability to mentally represent objects and actions in memory.

Deferred Imitation

Reproduction of an observed behavior after the passage of time.

Object Permanence

Realization that something continues to exist when out of sight.

Symbolic Development

Intentional representations of reality.

Pictorial Competence

The ability to understand the nature of pictures.

Scale error

A momentarily misconception of the relative sizes of objects

Dual representation hypothesis

Proposal that children under 3 years of age have difficulty grasping spatial relationships because of the need to keep more than one mental representation in mind at the same time.

Habituation

A type of learning in which repeated exposure to a stimulus reduces attention to that stimulus.

Dishabituation

Increase in responsiveness after presentation of a new stimulus.

Visual Preference

Tendency of infants to spend more time looking at one sight than another.

Visual Recognition Memory

Ability to distinguish a familiar visual stimulus from an unfamiliar one.

Cross-modal Transfer

Ability to use information gained by one sense to guide another.

Joint attention

A shared attentional focus.

Implicit Memories

Unconscious recall, generally of habits and skills.

Explicit Memories

Conscious or intentional recollection of facts, names, events, or other things that can be stated or declared.

Working Memory

Short-term storage of information the brain is actively processing.

Guided participation

Mutual interactions with adults that help structure children's activities

Language

Communication system based on words and grammar.

Prelinguistic Speech

Utterance of sounds that are not words.

Babbling

Repeating consonant-vowel strings.

Phonemes

Smallest units of sound in speech.

Holophrase

Single word that conveys a complete thought.

Receptive Vocabulary

What infants understand.

Telegraphic Speech

Early form of sentence use consisting of only a few essential words.

Overregularization

When children inappropriately apply a syntactical rule.

Code Mixing

Use of elements of two languages, sometimes in the same utterance.

Code Switching

Changing one's speech to match the situation

Nativism

Theory that human beings have an inborn capacity for language acquisition.

Language acquisition device (LAD)

Programs children’s brains to analyze the language they hear and to figure out its rules

Child-Directed Speech

Speech slowly in a singsong, high-pitched voice with exaggerated ups and downs, simplify your speech, exaggerate vowel sounds, and use short words and sentences and much repetition