Chapter 7 - Conceptual Development

Concepts

• general ideas/understandings that can be used to group together objects, events, qualities, or abstractions that are similar in some way

Nativists vs Empiricists

• Nativists argue infants are born with some sense of fundamental concepts or with specialized learning mechanisms that allow them to acquire rudimentary understanding of these concepts quickly.

• Empiricists argue that nature only gives infants general learning mechanisms and the rapid formation of fundamental concepts comes from infant’s exposure to experiences that are relevant to these concepts.

  • This debate reflects the fundamental question about human nature: do children for all concepts through the same learning mechanisms, or do they also possess special mechanisms for forming a few particularly important concepts?

Causal connections

unite dicrete events into coherent wholes (cause + effect)

Empiricists argue that children only acquire ______ through general learning_ mechanisms and experiences that produce cognitive growth in general and that children combine spatial and nonspatial info to learn, and these experiences with locomotion, language and cultural tools (jigsaws) shapes spatial development.

spatial representations

Numerical equality

• the realization that all sets of N objects have something in common (two dogs, two cups and two shoes all share the property of “twon

Cultural difference has an ____ on counting proficiency in mathematical skill.

impact

Piaget hypothesized that infants possess only a ________ of magnitude, lack specific concepts of space, time and number.

general concept