Developmental Psychology: Cognitive, Social, Language, and Intellectual Development

Comprehensive practice vocabulary flashcards covering the theories of social, cognitive, language, and intellectual development across lectures and attached figures.

Behaviorism

A foundational approach to learning founded by John B. Watson emphasizing the exclusive study of observable behaviors rather than internal mental states.

Classical Conditioning

A learning mechanism in which an organism learns through association by pairing an unconditioned stimulus that naturally evokes a response with a neutral stimulus until the neutral stimulus elicits the conditioned response.

Operant Conditioning

A learning theory formulated by B.F. Skinner where the likelihood of a behavior being repeated is shaped through reinforcements (which increase behavior frequency) and punishments (which decrease behavior frequency).

Extinction

In operant conditioning, the weakening and eventual disappearance of a learned or conditioned behavior by deliberately discontinuing the reinforcement that maintains it.

Intermittent Reinforcement

The inconsistent delivery of responses or rewards following a behavior, which makes that behavior significantly more resistant to extinction.

Behavior Modification

A therapeutic practice derived from operant conditioning principles that alters environmental reinforcements and consequences to encourage adaptive behavior, serving as the basis for Applied Behavior Analysis.

Social Learning Theory

Albert Bandura's theory positing that children acquire new behaviors indirectly through the observation and imitation of social models, rather than strictly through direct reinforcement.

Vicarious Reinforcement

A social learning process whereby an individual observes the consequences (rewards or punishments) that another person receives and adjusts their own likelihood of imitating that behavior accordingly.

Reciprocal Determinism

Albert Bandura's principle stating that a child's internal characteristics and behaviors bidirectionally interact with and shape the surrounding social environment over time.

Social Information Processing (SIP) Theory

Kenneth Dodge's cognitive framework proposing that children navigate social encounters through six sequential mental operations: noticing cues, interpreting cues, formulating social goals, generating strategies, evaluating probable effectiveness, and enacting a response.

Hostile Attribution Bias

A cognitive bias identified within Social Information Processing Theory wherein a child systematically misinterprets ambiguous social actions as stemming from hostile intent, frequently triggering aggressive counter-responses.

Ethology

The scientific study of the adaptive and evolutionary significance of animal and human behaviors in natural environments, exemplified by Konrad Lorenz's work on imprinting.

Imprinting

A rapid, innate attachment process occurring during a critical early period wherein newborn animals follow and bond with the first moving object they perceive.

Bioecological Model

Urie Bronfenbrenner's contextual framework modeling child development across nested contextual systems: the microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, macrosystem, and chronosystem.

Microsystem

The innermost level of Bronfenbrenner's bioecological model, consisting of the immediate environments, activities, and interpersonal relationships directly experienced by the child (such as family, school, and peers).

Mesosystem

In Bronfenbrenner's bioecological model, the network of linkages and interconnections between two or more of the child's microsystems, such as the communication between parents and teachers.

Exosystem

In Bronfenbrenner's bioecological model, settings that the developing child does not directly enter or participate in, but that nevertheless exert an indirect influence on their development (such as a parent's workplace).

Macrosystem

The overarching cultural, subcultural, and ideological context in Bronfenbrenner's model, encompassing shared societal beliefs, cultural values, economic systems, and laws.

Chronosystem

In Bronfenbrenner's bioecological model, the temporal dimension capturing historical changes, generational cultural shifts, and life transitions across an individual's lifespan.

Naive Psychology

A commonsense level of psychological understanding that children develop early in life to interpret, predict, and explain human behavior based on invisible mental states like desires, beliefs, and intentions.

Rouge Test

A classic mirror self-recognition experiment in which a researcher places a red spot on an infant's face; passing the test (typically between $18$ and $24$ months) occurs when the child touches their own face rather than the mirror image.

Theory of Mind

An organized understanding of how mental processes—including desires, intentions, perceptions, and beliefs—operate to influence human actions, and the awareness that others hold mental states different from one's own.

False-Belief Task

A standardized experimental measure of Theory of Mind (such as the 'Smarties' or 'Sally-Anne' task) assessing whether a child recognizes that another person can hold a belief about the world that contradicts actual reality.

Teleological Action

Goal-directed, self-initiated movement oriented toward fulfilling a purpose or need, which children recognize as a defining property distinguishing living organisms from non-living inanimate objects.

Essentialism

The intuitive biological belief held by children that living things possess a fundamental, unobservable inner essence that is inherited, innate, and immutable.

Self-Concept

A multi-dimensional conceptual system reflecting an individual's beliefs, attitudes, and evaluations concerning their own physical, social, and internal psychological characteristics.

Body-as-Obstacle Task

A physical self-awareness assessment (such as the shopping cart study) where a toddler must recognize that their own weight standing on an attached blanket or mat prevents the object from moving forward.

Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA)

An intervention approach derived from operant conditioning that uses an Antecedent-Behavior-Consequence framework to reinforce target behaviors and ignore undesired behaviors.

TEACCH Autism Program

A Carolina-developed intervention model alternative to ABA that prioritizes structuring the physical environment with clear expectations, visual cues, schedules, and routines to build daily living and vocational skills.

Selman's Stages of Perspective-Taking

Robert Selman's developmental model outlining the progressive growth of social perspective-taking from Stage 0 (Egocentric) to Stage 1 (Social-informational/Subjective), Stage 2 (Self-reflective), Stage 3 (Mutual/Third-party), and Stage 4 (Societal).

Phoneme

The smallest elementary unit of meaningful sound in a given language that serves to distinguish one word from another (e.g., the sounds /c/, /a/, and /t/ in 'cat').

Morpheme

The smallest unit of semantic meaning in a language, composed of standalone words, prefixes, or suffixes (e.g., 'cat' plus the plural marker 's' forming 'cats').

Syntax

The prescriptive and descriptive grammatical rules governing how morphemes and words are ordered and combined to construct acceptable phrases and sentences.

Generativity

The fundamental characteristic of human language whereby a finite inventory of words and grammatical rules allows the production and comprehension of an infinite number of distinct sentences and ideas.

Pragmatics

The cultural and contextual rules dictating how language is effectively and appropriately used in social communication, including turn-taking, intonation, gestures, and code-switching.

Infant-Directed Speech (Motherese)

A distinct, expressive speaking style characterized by a high pitch, slow tempo, exaggerated intonations, and clear pronunciation used by caregivers across many cultures when communicating with infants.

Word Gap

A concept originating from Hart and Risley's study reporting an estimated cumulative disparity of approximately $30$ million words addressed to children from high-SES professional households compared to low-SES households by age $3$.

LENA (Language Environment Analysis)

A child-safe digital wearable audio recorder and analytical software suite designed to measure, track, and provide feedback on language exposure and conversational turns in natural environments.

Statistical Learning

A domain-general cognitive process wherein infants track regularity, co-occurrence frequencies, and transitional probabilities within continuous streams of auditory input to discern word boundaries.

Pragmatic Cues

Social indicators within a conversational interaction—such as gaze direction, emotional expressions, and communicative intentionality—that infants utilize to deduce the meaning of novel words.

Syntactic Bootstrapping

A word-learning strategy where children use the surrounding grammatical structure of a complete sentence to infer the meaning of an unfamiliar word or novel verb.

Mutual Exclusivity

A developmental lexical assumption wherein children expect each entity to have only one category label, prompting them to map an unfamiliar word onto a novel object lacking a known name.

Cross-Situational Word Learning

The cognitive ability to resolve referential ambiguity by tracking word-object co-occurrences and calculating statistical overlaps across multiple distinct contexts.

Overextension

An early vocabulary error where a child uses a specific word too broadly to encompass a wider array of objects than is linguistically correct (e.g., referring to all four-legged animals as 'dogs').

Underextension

A language acquisition error in which a child applies a general categorical word too narrowly, restricting its meaning to an idiosyncratic, single exemplar (e.g., using 'bottle' only for their own bottle).

Overregularization

A developmental error in morphology where children overapply regular grammatical inflection patterns to irregular verbs or nouns (e.g., saying 'runned' or 'foots').

Dual Representation

The cognitive capability to treat a symbolic artifact (such as a map or miniature scale model) simultaneously as a physical real object in its own right and as a mental representation of something else.

Phonological Recoding Skills

The mechanical reading skill of translating written letters into sound sequences to pronounce and decipher unfamiliar printed words.

Simple View of Reading

A theoretical model proposing that reading comprehension is entirely the product of two foundational abilities: word decoding skills and oral language comprehension.

Comprehension Monitoring

The metacognitive process by which a reader actively tracks and evaluates their ongoing understanding of text, adjusting reading pace and rereading confusing passages when comprehension falters.

General Intelligence ($g$)

Charles Spearman's concept of a unitary, innate cognitive trait that influences an individual's performance across all intellectual reasoning tasks and academic domains.

Fluid Intelligence

The aspect of intelligence involving working memory, cognitive flexibility, and processing speed required to solve novel, abstract problems on the spot without prior instruction.

Crystallized Intelligence

The component of intelligence comprising accumulated factual knowledge, verbal capability, and learned semantic memory acquired through education and cultural experience.

Primary Mental Abilities

Louis Thurstone's theory proposing seven distinct intellectual faculties rather than a single $g$ factor: word fluency, verbal meaning, reasoning, spatial visualization, numbering, rote memory, and perceptual speed.

Three-Stratum Theory of Intelligence

John B. Carroll's hierarchical taxonomy organizing human intelligence into general intelligence ($g$) at the top, eight broad intellectual abilities in the intermediate stratum, and dozens of specific processes in the bottom stratum.

Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC)

A standardized assessment tool designed to evaluate intellectual functioning in children across five primary cognitive domains: Verbal Comprehension, Visual-Spatial Processing, Working Memory, Fluid Reasoning, and Processing Speed.

Ratio IQ

An early mathematical formula for computing intelligence defined as $\text{ratio IQ} = \frac{\text{mental age}}{\text{chronological age}} \times 100$.

Flynn Effect

The documented historical trend of consistent increases in average standardized intelligence test scores across populations throughout the twentieth century.

Reverse Flynn Effect

The phenomenon documented in recent decades indicating an apparent plateau or decline in average standardized cognitive scores across various educational strata.

BITCH-100 (Black Intelligence Test of Cultural Homogeneity)

A culturally oriented assessment developed by Robert Williams in 1972 demonstrating that standardized testing measures familiarity with specific cultural vocabulary and background rather than innate intellectual ability.

Pygmalion Effect

A self-fulfilling prophecy demonstrated by Rosenthal and Jacobson where higher teacher expectations lead to differential instructional behavior that causes measurable improvements in student performance.

Theory of Multiple Intelligences

Howard Gardner's model proposing eight distinct, independent cognitive competencies: linguistic, logical-mathematical, visual-spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalist intelligence.

Triarchic Theory of Successful Intelligence

Robert Sternberg's framework dividing human intelligence into three broad components: analytic abilities, practical everyday problem-solving, and creative innovation.

Fixed Mindset (Entity Theory)

Carol Dweck's concept describing the belief that intelligence and cognitive ability are fixed, unchangeable traits, predisposing individuals to avoid challenges and interpret effort as a sign of low ability.

Growth Mindset (Incremental Theory)

Carol Dweck's concept describing the belief that intelligence and competence can be cultivated and strengthened through effort, study strategies, and experience.

Grit

Angela Duckworth's psychological construct defined as passion and sustained perseverance toward achieving difficult, very long-term goals despite obstacles or setbacks.

Constructivism

Jean Piaget's core epistemological theory stating that children actively build their own cognitive structures and understanding of reality through direct self-motivated interaction with the world as 'little scientists.'

Assimilation

In Piaget's cognitive theory, the process of translating and incorporating incoming environmental information into existing mental schemas.

Accommodation

In Piaget's cognitive theory, the process of modifying existing cognitive schemas or creating entirely new schemas in response to novel environmental input.

Equilibration

The biological and cognitive regulatory mechanism in Piaget's theory whereby children balance assimilation and accommodation to resolve cognitive disequilibrium.

Sensorimotor Stage

Piaget's initial stage of cognitive development (birth to ~$2$ years), in which infants' knowledge of the world is largely tied to immediate sensory perceptions and physical motor actions.

Object Permanence

The foundational cognitive recognition that physical objects and people continue to exist in time and space even when they cannot be directly seen, heard, or touched.

A-not-B Error

A classic perseverative error observed in infants around 8 to 10 months who search for a hidden object at a familiar hiding location A where it was previously recovered, even after seeing it moved to location B.

Preoperational Stage

Piaget's second stage (~$2$ to $7$ years), marked by advances in symbolic representation, language, and imaginative pretend play, but constrained by cognitive egocentrism and centration.

Egocentrism

In Piaget's theory, the tendency of preoperational children to perceive, understand, and interpret the world exclusively from their personal vantage point, failing to recognize alternative perspectives.

Centration

A preoperational cognitive limitation characterized by focusing attention on a single salient perceptual dimension of an object or event while neglecting other equally important dimensions.

Concrete Operational Stage

Piaget's third developmental stage (~$7$ to $12$ years), during which children develop the ability to reason logically and perform operations on concrete, tangible objects, but struggle with abstract hypotheticals.

Formal Operational Stage

Piaget's final cognitive stage (~$12$ years and beyond), characterized by the emergence of hypothetical, abstract, and systematic scientific reasoning, which Piaget considered not to be universally attained.

Information-Processing Theories

A family of cognitive developmental approaches emphasizing continuous, quantitative changes in the computational capacities of memory, processing speed, attention, and executive function.

Overlapping Waves Theory

Robert Siegler's information-processing model positing that children generate and employ multiple problem-solving strategies simultaneously across development, with strategy use waxing and waning continuously over age.

Core-Knowledge Theories

Perspectives holding that infants enter the world possessing innate, specialized learning mechanisms and domain-specific knowledge shaped by evolutionary history in domains like objects, numbers, and living things.

Domain-Specificity

The organizational principle that specific cognitive mechanisms and innate knowledge structures are modular and specialized to process distinct classes of environmental information independently.

Theory-Theory

Alison Gopnik's constructivist core-knowledge approach proposing that young children construct, test, and revise foundational causal intuitive theories about physical objects, human psychology, and biological living things.

Sociocultural Theories

Theoretical perspectives originated by Lev Vygotsky positing that cognitive development occurs through social interactions within a cultural context, mediated by interpersonal scaffolding and cultural tools.

Intersubjectivity

The psychological mutual understanding and shared cognitive frame of reference that two individuals establish during communication and collaborative social interaction.

Joint Attention

A fundamental social cognitive process in which two individuals intentionally coordinate and focus their attention on the exact same external entity or event.

Dynamic-Systems Theories

Developmental theories that view behavior and cognitive growth as non-linear, self-organizing processes emerging from continuous interactions among motor, sensory, neurological, and physical systems across varying timescales.

Sticky Mittens Intervention

An experimental paradigm demonstrating that active training with Velcro-covered mittens accelerates independent motor grasping capabilities and subsequently advances visual attention to faces and objects.