1
Q
Cognition
A
- the process or faculties by which knowledge is acquired and manipulated
- Cognition cannot be measured directly but must be inferred by observing behaviors. Cognition is a reflection of the mind.
- includes both conscious and unconscious processes
- involves all types of mental activities, including higher order processes and basic processes
- reflects knowledge and develops
2
Q
Development (ontogeny)
A
- Changes in structure or function over time. Structure refers to some substrate of the organism (e.g., mental knowledge that underlies intelligence)
- CHANGE OVER TIME
- generally predictable
- CAN’T BE SEPARATED FROM ENVIRONMENT
3
Q
function
A
to actions related to a structure and can include actions external to the structure being studied.
- can include actions external to the studied structure or experience external to the structure
- can also be internal
4
Q
E. Developmental function
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The species-typical form that cognition takes over time.
5
Q
F. Individual differences
A
: Differences in patterns of intellectual aptitudes among people of a given age.
6
Q
Structure
A
some substrate of the organism (e.g., mental knowledge the underlies intelligence).
-includes mental constructs or mental organization
7
Q
Adaptive nature of cognitive immaturity
A
- Early or immature forms of development can serve important functions and help children to adapt to their environment.
- Limited cognitive abilities in infancy may be adaptive for their environment.
8
Q
Six truths of cognitive development
A
- Cognitive development proceeds as a result of dynamic and reciprocal transaction of internal and external factors.
- >two philosophical camps: nativism and empiricism
- >most psychologists argue both nature and nurture play a substantial role in cognitive development and involve a bidirectional relationship of the two - cognitive development is constructed within the social context
- > need to consider the broader social and cultural context to understand cognitive development
- >culture influences how one thinks - Cognitive development involves both stability and plasticity over time.
- F. Cognitive development involves changes in both domain-general and domain specific abilities
9
Q
Nativism
A
argues that human intellectual abilities are innate
10
Q
Empiricism
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argues that nature provides only species-general learning mechanisms, with cognition arising as a result of experience.
11
Q
Stability
A
the degree to which children maintain their same relative rank order over time in comparison with their peers in some aspect of cognition.
12
Q
Plasticity
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the extent to which children can be shaped by experience
13
Q
Domain-general abilities:
A
a child’s thinking is influenced by a single set of factors, with these factors affecting all aspects of cognition.
14
Q
Domain-specific abilities:
A
cognitive development occurs as a result of development of certain parts of the brain responsible for specific abilities
15
Q
Neuron
A
specialized nerve cell that allows transmission of neural signals
16
Q
a) Axon
A
a long fiber that carries messages away from the cell body to other cells.
17
Q
b) Dendrites
A
receive messages from other cells and transfer them to the cell body.
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Q
Axon
A
a long fiber that carries messages away from the cell body to other cells.
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Q
Dendrites
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receive messages from other cells and transfer them to the cell body.
20
Q
Synapses
A
small spaces between neurons
21
Q
Neurotransmitters
A
chemical messengers that send the message released from the axon of the sending neuron into the synaptic gap. The message is the “read” by adjacent neurons
22
Q
Myelin
A
- a fatty substance produced by supportive brain cells called glial cell which cover fully formed axons.
- Myelinated nerve fibers fire more rapidly, have lower thresholds of sensitivity to stimulation, and have greater functional specificity
23
Q
Myelination
A
- increases throughout childhood and adolescence
- increases throughout childhood and adolescence
24
Q
White matter,
A
reflecting mainly myelinated axons mostly beneath the surface of the brain
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Gray matter
reflecting mostly cell bodies in both cortical and subcortical regions
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Synaptogenesis
- The process of synapsis formation
- Rate is greatest during prenatal and early postnatal times
- Peak synapse formation is different for different parts of the brain
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Selective cell death/ apoptosis
- Pruning away underutilized neuron or synapses
- After peak synaptic production, the infant brain has more synapses and neurons that it needs, so more pruning is needed.
- influenced by age and IQ
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How do young brains get hooked up?
- Brain development involves an extended process that is greatly influenced by postnatal experience
- A reciprocal relationship exists between brain and behavioral development
- Experience-expectant processes
- Experience-dependent processes
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Experience-expectant processes (or experience-expected synaptogenesis):
- The processes whereby synapses are formed and maintained when an organism has species-typical experiences The processes whereby synapses are formed and maintained when an organism has species-typical experiences
- Studies investigate this by looking at species whom don’t experience the typical perceptual experiences for that species.
- Some of these studies supported the idea of different sensitive periods for different areas of development.
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Experience-dependent processes (or experience-dependent synaptogenesis):
Connections among neurons are made that reflect the unique experiences of an individual rather than the experience that all members of a species can expect to have.
-Experiences determine what neurons are kept and strengthened and what ones are pruned
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a) Plasticity
the ability to change. The potential outcomes that are possible for a single neuron, a bundle of neurons, or a larger brain structure.
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b) Neuronal plasticity
- In the cerebral cortex, there is little or no plasticity in the production of new neurons (there are in the hippocampus and olfactory bulb).
- New synaptic connections can be formed throughout life.
- Healthier, thicker neocortexes, larger neurons with more dendrites and more synapses are seen in animals when raised in enriched environments
- Synaptic plasticity greatest in infancy
- >Experiences make new connections and make others impossible or unlikely.
- >Decreases with age, but doesn’t disappear.
- >With age, the degree to which experience can change the brain and the intensity of the experience needed to produce change changes.
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Perception
- the organization of sensations
- Cognition focuses on what is done with perceived sensations, but it is hard to see where perception ends and cognition begins
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Core knowledge
infants’ understanding of object representation and babies’ abilities to make sense of quantitative information
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Basic-perceptual abilities of young infants
- Touch:
- >infants feel pain
- >Touch reduces pain sensation and helps promote growth and development.
- >Kangaroo care is helpful for newborns to grow and develop
- Chemical senses
- >Develop early and are well developed by birth or even before
- >Infants can be influence by experiences in the womb.
- >Within days of birth infants can discriminate between different odors and modify their behavior based on the preference.
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Methodologies used to assess infant perception
- implicit v explicit measures
- infant sucking
- visual preference paradigm
- habituation/ dishabituation
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implicit measures
: Measures that capture aspects of cognition that are unconscious and cannot be expressed directly or verbally
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explicit measures
require that the participant report on the contents of his or her cognition or behave in observable ways that are directly related to the task at hand.
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“This Sucks”: Using infant sucking to provide insight into infant perception
- Infants have the ability to control their sucking
- DeCasper and Spence (1986) used it to show infants have auditory member from the last 6 weeks in the utero
- >Familiar passages were more reinforcing for sucking behavior than nonfamiliar passages
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Visual preference paradigm:
developed by Frantz to see if infants preferred one visual stimuli over another based on what stimuli they looked at more
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Habituation
the decrease in response as a result of repeated presentation of a stimulus
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Dishabituation
-following habituation, a new stimulus is presented that increases the level of responding
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Habituation/dishabituation paradigm
- The longer infants are exposed to a visual stimulus, the less time they spend looking at it
- demonstrates that infants can discriminate between the two stimuli
- Useful in determining infants’ discrimination abilities and in studying concept formation
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Development of visual perception
- Development of visual perception
- >Newborns are able to see light, but they don’t see very well overall.
- >Mixed experimental results. Very poor at birth but improves greatly in the first year of life. Doesn’t reach adult levels until 6 years of age.
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acuity
the ability to see clearly
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auditory development
- Can hear during time in utero. Often hear mother’s voice and mother’s bodily functions (e.g., heartbeat)
- Hearing not adultlike until age 10 years
- Able to localize sounds at birth
- Infants appear to be more sensitive to high-frequency than to low-frequency tones and prefer women’s voices
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Speech perception
- Newborns prefer to listen to language relative to comparably complex non-language sounds
- Babies can hear all of the phonemes produced in every language
- Can recognize frequently heard sound patterns by 4.5 months
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Phonemes
The basic unit of speech
- Babies can hear all of the phonemes produced in every language
- Can recognize frequently heard sound patterns by 4.5 months
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Perceptual narrowing:
the process by which infants use environmental experience to become specialists in perceiving stimuli relevant to their species and culture.
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Perceptual narrowing for facial discrimination
* Infants’ increasing specialization at making distinctions between the faces of men and women and between different species clearly illustrates the importance of experience in processing this most important of social stimuli.
* The other-race effect
* Early on, they make no distinction among faces from different species, races, or genders. This changes with experience.
* There are dedicated and complex areas of the brain for processing faces, and these areas develop as a result of experience over infancy and childhood.
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The other-race effect:
- discriminate between faces of their own race relative to those of other races
- By 9 months, infants were only able to recognize faces in their own race Infants, but retain the neural plasticity to modify their face discrimination abilities.
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Perceptual narrowing in speech perception
* These findings parallel results on infant face perception and suggest that a species-specific preference for speech develops across the first 3 months.
* Before about 6 months of age, infants can discriminate all consonant contrasts in native and nonnative languages, but by 10–12 months, perception becomes more adult like, with infants losing the ability to discriminate nonnative contrasts but maintaining the distinction between those that are native.
* At the same time that infants are losing their abilities to discriminate among “foreign” phonemes, they are becoming more sensitive to the speech regularities in the language they hear every day.
* As children become more experienced with their native tongue, they lose some perceptual plasticity, becoming specialists in their own language.
* Bilingual children are able to discriminate among a broader range of phonemes than monolingual children.
53
Piaget’s theory's importance
-Changed the emphasis of child development to focus on the unique ways children think, not just viewing children as incomplete adults
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Some assumptions of Piaget’s theory
* Stage theorist: children’s thinking at any particular stage is qualitatively different from that which preceded it and that which will follow it.
* Children are intrinsically active.
* Cognition is a constructive process.
* Scheme: the basic unit of knowledge for Piaget.
55
Adaption
The organism’s tendency to adjust its schemes to environmental demands.
has two aspects assimilation and accommodation
--->Piaget stressed that every act of intelligence involves both assimilation and accommodation
56
Assimilation
the incorporation of new information into already-existing schemes
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Accommodation
a current scheme is changed to incorporate new information
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Equilibration
- the organism’s attempt to keep its cognitive schemes in balance
- Equilibration is achieved by altering one’s cognitive schemes
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Stages of development
sensorimotor
preoperational
concrete operational
formal operational
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Sensorimotor
-From birth to approximately 2 years of age, children’s intelligence is limited to their own actions.
• Infants progress from an action-based to a symbol-based intelligence.
• Infants realize that they are independent from others and their surroundings.
• Infants move from cognition centered on their own bodies and actions to cognition that displaces them in time and space from the things they think about.
Six substages: Central to each substage is children’s problemsolving skills, particularly the extent to which they display intentionality, or goal-directed behavior.
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sensorimotor substage 1
Basic reflexes
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sensorimotor substage 2
- Primary circular reactions (1–4 months)
| - The first class of repetitive actions, and they are based on hereditary reflexes.
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sensorimotor substage 3
- Secondary circular reactions (4–8 months)
- With no intention beforehand, babies cause something interesting to happen and then attempt to recreate the interesting event.
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sensorimotor substage 4
- Coordination of secondary circular reactions (8–12 months).
- Major change in intentionality → goal-directed behavior
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sensorimotor Substage 5:
- Tertiary circular reactions (12–18 months)
- Infants are not restricted to applying previously acquired and consolidated schemes to achieve a goal. Rather, when faced with a problem, children can now make subtle alterations in their existing schemes that are directly related to obtaining a solution to their conundrum, reflecting a process of active experimentation
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sensorimotor substage 6
- Invention of new means through mental combinations (18–24 months)
- With the advent of mental representation, the process of children’s problem-solving can be done mentally.
- Symbolic function develops.
67
Operations
mentally manipulate the things they perceive.
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Development of operations
-The three stages that follow the sensorimotor period are all similar in that children have mental representations, but they differ in how children are able to use these symbols for thought
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Preoperational
Child’s thinking between the ages of 2- and 7 years-old in which they lack the logical characteristics of concrete operational thought
-Piaget described preoperational children as being more influenced by their immediate perceptions and more egocentric.
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Concrete operational
Child’s thinking between the ages of 7- and 11-years-old.
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Formal operational
Thinking from age 11 years and beyond.
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Four characteristics of operations
(1) They are mental; thus, they require the use of symbols
(2) Derive from action, so operations can be thought of as internalized actions
(3) Exist in an organized system
(4) Follow a system of rules
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reversibility
The knowledge that an operation can be reversed or that, for any operation, another operation can compensate for the effects of the first.
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Transition from preoperational to concrete operational thought
Table 5.3 outlines these
| -conservation
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Conservation
- The realization that an entity remains the same despite changes in its form.
- conservation of liquid task
- An operational knowledge of conservation does not develop simultaneously for all properties of material.
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Egocentricity:
- Cognition is centered around themselves, and they have a difficult time putting themselves in someone else’s shoes.
- Young children’s tendencies to relate new information to themselves might thus give them a learning advantage, making egocentricity beneficial and not detrimental for the young child.
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Transition from concrete to formal operational thought
(1) Thinking is no longer restricted to things but can be applied to itself.
(2) Hypothetico-deductive reasoning
(3) Thinking during the formal operational period can be done solely on the basis of symbols, with no need for referents in real life.
(4) Inductive reasoning
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Hypothetico-deductive reasoning
- going from the general to the specific.
| - Hypothetical thinking is also critical for most forms of mathematics beyond arithmetic.
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Inductive reasoning:
Hypotheses are generated and then systematically tested in experiments.
Psych 133B Cognitive Development
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