Developmental Psychology 1 - Cognitive Development

A set of vocabulary flashcards focusing on key concepts related to cognitive development in infants.

Object Permanence

The understanding that objects continue to exist even when they cannot be observed.

Statistical Learning

An unconscious cognitive process in which infants extract patterns or regularities from their sensory environment.

Habituation

A process where infants show decreased attention to a stimulus after repeated exposure, indicating familiarity.

Overt Behavior

Visible, measurable actions that can be directly observed, like an infant reaching for a hidden toy.

Covert Behavior

Hidden or indirect signs of mental processes that indicate what an infant knows, like looking longer at an impossible event.

Core Knowledge

The concept that infants are born with innate knowledge frameworks that help them understand the world.

Perceptual Categorization

Categorization based on the physical appearance of objects.

Conceptual Categorization

Categorization based on what objects are and their roles in events.

A-not-B Task

A test of object permanence where an infant searches for an object in a location where they previously found it, despite seeing it hidden in a new location.

Violate of Expectation Study

Research design to assess infants' understanding by measuring their looking times at unexpected versus expected events.

Causal Relationships in Categorization

The ability of infants to categorize based on the cause-and-effect relationships between objects.

Engagement Time

The amount of time infants spend looking at a stimulus, used to measure their interest or recognition.

Core System 1

Part of core knowledge that represents numerical magnitudes and helps distinguish between different quantities.

Core System 2

Part of core knowledge that allows infants to precisely recognize small numbers of individual elements.