AP Psych 3.4 Cognitive Development

Jean Piaget

Studied children’s developing cognition-all mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating. Children develop schemas through accommodation and assimilation.

Schemas

Cognitive frameworks helping individuals organize and interpret info by categorizing experiences based on prior knowledge.

Assimilation

Process of incorporating new info into existing schemas, fitting new experiences into familiar categories to understand them better.

Accommodation

Process of altering existing schemas or creating new ones to adapt to new info that doesn’t fit existing categories,

Sensorimotor Stage

First of Piaget’s stages of cognitive development (birth to age 2) when infants learn about the world through sensory experiences and motor actions.

Object Permanence

Understanding objects continue to exist even when they cannot be seen, heard, or touched developing during Piaget’s sensorimotor stage.

Preoperational Stage

Cognitive development stage (age 2-7) where children develop language, symbolic thinking, and imagination but struggle with logical reasoning and understanding other’s perspectives. Children cannot perform conservation and reversibility such as animism.

Pretend Play

Children’s acting out scenarios, roles, situations using their imagination, developing creativity, social skills, and symbolic thinking.

Parallel Play

Early childhood stage where children play alongside each other without directly interacting, each focused on their own activity but observing and imitating.

Animism

Belief in early childhood common during Piaget’s preoperational stage, where children attribute lifelike qualities, like feelings and intentions to inanimate objects.

Egocentrism

Characteristic of the preoperational stage where children struggle to see things from another person’s POV, believing others share their perspective.

Theory of Mind

Ability to understand others have thoughts, feelings, and perspectives different from one’s own, developing around age 4-5.

Concrete Operational Stage

Piaget’s 3rd stage of cognitive development (ages 7-11) where children develop logical thinking about concrete objects and understand concepts like conservation and reversibility.

Conservation

Understanding certain properties such as volume or mass, remain consistent despite changes in form or appearance, developing in Piaget’s concrete operational stage.

Reversibility

Ability to mentally reverse an action or operational, understanding objects can be returned to original state, developing in Piager’s concrete operational stage.

Formal operational stage

Piager’s final stage of cognitive development (beginning at age 12), where individuals develop abilities such as abstract thinking, solving hypothetical problems, and deductive thinking.

Lev Vygotsky

Developmental psychologist known for his theory that social interaction plays a critical role in cognitive development, emphasizing the importance of culture, language, and the “zone of proximal development” in learning.

Scaffolding

Teaching method where a knowledgeable person provides tailored support to help a learner achieve new skills, reducing assistance as the learner becomes more proficient.

Zone of proximal development

The range between what a learner can do independently and what they can achieve with guidance, emphasizing the importance of social interaction in learning.

Crystallized intelligence

Refers to the knowledge and skills accumulated over time through education and experience, improving age and useful for problem-solving based on facts and prior learning.

Fluid Intelligence

Capacity to reason, solve novel problems, and think abstractly without relying on prior knowledge, generally peaking up in early childhood and declining with age.

Dementia

Decline in cognitive functioning that interferes with daily life, characterized by memory loss, impaired judgement, and difficulties in communication and reasoning often seen in older adults.