Critical Thinking in Psychology: Child Cognition

Flashcards covering key vocabulary and concepts from a lecture on critical thinking in psychology, focusing on child cognition and Piaget's stages of cognitive development.

Sensorimotor Stage

Piaget's first stage of cognitive development, from birth to 2 years old, where infants explore the world through movements and sensations.

Object Permanence

The understanding, gained in the sensorimotor stage (around age 1), that objects continue to exist even when they cannot be seen.

Preoperational Stage

Piaget's second stage of cognitive development, from 2 to 7 years old, characterized by symbolic thinking, egocentrism, and a lack of understanding of concrete logic.

Conservation

The understanding that certain physical characteristics of objects remain the same, even when their outward appearance changes; not yet understood in the preoperational stage.

Egocentrism

The tendency to see things from one's own perspective and struggle to see things from the perspective of others; common in the preoperational stage.

Concrete Operational Stage

Piaget's third stage of cognitive development, from 7 to 11 years old, during which children begin to think logically about concrete events and understand conservation.

Formal Operational Stage

Piaget's fourth stage of cognitive development, from 12 years old and up, marked by the ability to utilize hypothetical and deductive reasoning and abstract concepts.

Bistable Illusion

These scenarios, such as the Spinning Dancer Illusion and the Message d’Amour des Dauphins, can be equally valid in interpretation. The image can be seen one way, or another.

Critical Period Hypothesis

A time frame, thought to be active only from roughly birth to age 12, when our brains are primed and particularly efficient during this time at acquiring and processing language.

Infant-Directed Speech

Speech that utilizes simpler sentences, more common words, higher pitch, and more variable prosody (intonation & pitch changes). Helps the infant with sentence segmentation, pronunciation (by exaggerating changes in prosody), as well as keeping their attention better.