The first stage in Piaget’s theory of cognitive development which lasts from birth to about two years of age.

Infants who are in this stage are not capable of logical reasoning, but develop object permanence and symbolic representation during this stage. Schema from this stage are organized patterns of action only

Newborns are equipped with sensovry perceptual systems that enable them to interact with the environment. Young infants also explore their environment by sucking on objects, holding and manipulating objects, and visually tracking moving objects. Put of this sensoriomotor activity, infants construct sensorimotor schema.

In the first two years of life, children are in Piaget's sensorimotor stage of cognitive development. They construct motor schema and improve their ability to engage in coordinated action. A child in thisstage develops skills in problem solving when the problem involves sensorimotor activities or goals. Another achievement of the sensorimotor stage is object permanence.

The second stage in Piaget’s theory that lasts from about two years of age until about age seven.

The child in this stage can use symbolic representations but cannot think logically

It describes the way that children in preschool and kindergarten go about problem solving; also, many children int eh primary grades may be at this stage in their cognitive development. 

Preoperational thinkers are fooled by the perceptual change in how the liquid looks and believe the quantity has changed (for example, more liquid in the short, wide beaker).

The third stage in Piaget’s theory that lasts from about the age of 7 until age 11 or 12.

During this stage, children develop the ability to think logically with concrete objects and concepts. These children, however, fail to reason logically about abstract concepts

This is the fourth and final stage in Piaget’s theory. The stage generally begins at age 11 or 12.

This level of thought involves hypothetico-deductive reasoning. Adolescents develop the ability to reason logically and systematically even about abstract concepts

Piaget’s term for the process of constructing cognitive schema that aid children’s adjustment to the environment using the complementary processes of assimilation and accommodation

So, children construct cognitive schema to organize their experiences. It involves the complementary processes of assimilation and accommodation. 

Piaget’s term for the organized patterns of thought or action that the child constructs as a result of interacting with objects in the environment. These schema become more logical and organized with age

An example of a sensorimotor scheme is the graspong scheme. To successfully grasp an object, an infant must coordinate a sequence of actions. This sequence of action forms the grasping scheme. 

Vygotsky’s term for the range of a child’s competence from what she can do working alone at a task, to what she can do working with someone who is cognitively advanced. 

It describes children's problem-solving ability with and without the aid of an older guide. Teachers and parents serve as scaffolds orguides for children working on a problem-solving task. 

Working alone, the child performs at the lowest level of his or her zone of proximal development. 

Working with a teacher or parent, a child can perform at the upper level of that range.

The first memory storage system in the Information processing approach.

This storage system automatically holds information that has registered in a sensory system. This storage is very brief, and information will be lost unless it is transferred to working memory via the process of attention

working memory

(primary memory or short-term memory)

The second memory storage system in the information processing approach.

Memories are stored here for a brief period of time, up to a few minutes, unless one uses rehearsal. Information is worked on and encoded in this system in order to be transferred from short-term to long-term memory

The third memory storage system in the information processing approach.

Information that is encoded in working memory will be stored in this organized memory system. Some theorists argue that this is a permanent memory storage system and that forgetting is the result of failure to retrieve rather than a loss of the information

A much more difficult retrieval process, involves remembering after being given a less helpful cue. 

Answering the question, "What did you eat for breakfast?" is an example of the recall process.

The process of retrieving information by matching stored information with information presented at the time of the test. This produces the feeling of having experienced the information before

It is remembering when the cue for retrieval is the information to be remembered. Selecting the correct response to a multiple-choice question is an example of this.

A concept that develops during sensorimotor intelligence.

This is the understanding that physical objects have a separate existence from the perceiver

Piaget tested for object permanence by taking a toy and hiding it under a blanket in full view of the child and then observing the child's reaction. 

Infants who are four to eight months of age act as if an object that is no longer in their sight, no longer exists. They do not search for the hidden toy.

Between 8-12 months of age a child will search under the blanket for  the toy. However, these children have not fully grasped obect permanence. If you first hide the toy under a blanket and then move the toy to a hiding spot under the couch, children in this age range will first look under the blanket and then go to the couch. It is as if they retrace their actions because their own actions had something to do with making the toy reappear. According to Piaget, object permanence is not fully achieved until the end of the first stage.

The cognitive ability to use one thing to stand for or mean something other than itself.

A word is an example of a symbol. This ability comes in at the end of sensorimotor intelligence

It is illustrated by the pretend play of children. Children can and will use a broom as a horse. 

Piaget’s term for the ability to represent another person’s action, store this representation, and later retrieve it in order imitate it. Piaget argued this was a sign that a child had achieved symbolic representation

It is modeling someone else's behavior some time after observing the model. This requires the ability to create a mental representation of the behavior and later retrieve and use the representation. When a child engages in pretend play and shows deferred imitation, he or she has shifted into the second stage of preoperations. 

The understanding that even though the perceptual characteristics of matter may change, the amount of it does not change if you do not add or take anything away.

It is the understanding that the quantity of liquid, or number, or volume does not change unless you add or take some away. Conservation of liquid, for example, is the understanding that the quantity of liquid held in a tall, thin beaker does not change when it is poured into ashort, wide beaker. 

Preoperational thinkers are fooled by the perceptual change in how the liquid looks and believe the quanty has changed (for example, more liquid in the short, wide beaker). 

The ability to group items together that share a common characteristics or features. 

If a toddler is given some red and blue triangles and red and blue circles and is asked to put together what goes together, they do not group them in a logical way. rather than putting all the same shapes together or putting all the same colors together, their grouping is unsystematic.

The ability to classify objects in a hierarchical organization with subordinate and superordinate levels.

The ability to represent exemplars of categories in superordinate and subordinate levels. 

Toddlers have difficulty keeping multiple levels of a hierarchically organized system in mind at the same time. If you showed a toddler a collection of five green beads and three red beads and asked if there are more green beads than beads all together, the preoperational child will say there are more green beads.

A form of thinking typical of the preoperational child in which the child can only view the world from his or her own perspective and cannot take the perspective of others.

A characteristic of the illogical reasoning of the preoperational child.

This is inaccurate thinking about cause and effect in which the child believes that events that have simply occurred together are causally related

Characteristic of the thought of a preoperational child.

Children in this stage tend to project human qualities onto inanimate objects

Being consciously aware of one’s own cognitive processing. 

Metamemory is one's knowledge about memory, and it has been divided into person (everything we know about the memory abilities of ourselves and others), task (everything we know about memory tasks), and strategy (everything we know about techniques of learning and remembering) factors. 

As with strategy use, metamemory improves with age during childhood. At first, young children are unrealistic and make overly optimistic predictions about their memories (i.e., they believe they can remember everything!) and with age they become more realistic in their expectations. They also know more about possible strategiesfor remembering with age.

Involves reasoning from the specific to the general.

For example, drawing conclusions about all members of a category or concept based on only some of the members.

The mental activity used when we want to reach a certain goal that is not readily available. It includes understanding the problem; planning a solution; carrying out the solution; and evaluating the results. 

Problem representation or the way you think about a problem can make it easier or harder to solve. We can represent problems visually, verbally, with symbols (e.g., mathematically), or concretely with objects.

By age 12, children are sophisticated in determining all of the information relevant to the problem and then forming a rule to apply in solving it.

Older adults often perform best on problem-solving tasks in domains in which they have a great deal of knowledge and experience. They solve problems more efficiently in their area of expertise than outside their expertise. They also outperform younger subects on problem-solving tasks that involve everyday problems. 

As mentioned earlier, it may be that this build-up of domain-specific knowledge and experience in solving everyday problems compensates for the slowing down of cognitive processing tht has been found in older adults.

Involves changing an existing scheme to incorporate a new experience.

Accommodation occurs, for example, when a child first experiences a beach ball after only playing with small balls. the child is thrown into a state Piaget called disequilibrium because his or her ball scheme does not fit this new object that Daddy calls a ball.The child's understanding of the size of objects that can be picked up and bounced develops as the result of accommodating to this new experience and the child returns to a state of equilibrium.

talking aloud to oneself

3-4 year olds often talk aloud while engaged in an activity, but older children tend to use private speech when faced with a problem to solve. 

Preschool children talk aloud to themselves when engaged in atask because the language directs their thinking aobut hte task at hand. Often children increase the use of private speech when they get stuck on aproblem or with a task. Incorporated into the private speech of these children are solutions they remember fromt heir earlier collaborations with adults. Private speech goes inward to become inner speech, silent verbal thought, in the elementary school years.

This egocentrism takes two forms:

Imaginary audience and personal fable.

Imaginary audience comes from the belief that other people are focused on what you think is important. If a teenager has a pimple, he or she is very aware of it and believes other people will be too

Personal fable is believing that what you feel and experience is unique. The adolescent beleives that no one else has ever been as sad, as happy, as in love, or as disappointed as he or she is.

the process  of focusing on particular aspects of the sensory world. 

Infants, as we have seen, are quite capable of perceiving the world around them. Infants, however, have their attention captured by stimuli more than they are capable of controlling and directing their attention. An infant's looking is attracted by a novel stimulus rather than intentionally directed toward that stimulus. 

As a child develops, attention changes to become more selective and attention span lengthens.

Attention span increase from 18 minutes in 2-3 year olds to more than an hour in 6 year olds. Learning to read requires these attentional capacities and is probably the most significant attentional-perceptual challenge for children. throughout adolescence and adulthood attention span lengthens.

directing one's attention toward a particular aspect of the sensory field while at the same time ignoring other distracting stimuli.

Selective attention research has shown that the ability to guide one's attention begins around the age of two. During the school years this ability continues to improbe but children still have difficulty ignoring distracting stimuli. Adolescents are much better at selective attention tasks and do very well on tasks that require divided attention, which is systematically switching attention between two on-going tasks. Older adults perform more poorly than younger adults on selective attention and divided attention tasks. The more distracters during the task, the worse older adults perform. Therefore, the ability to ignore irrelevant stimulus appears to decline with age.

HOME

(Home observation for measurement of the environment)

The method used to assess the amount of cognitive (intellectual) stimulation in the home environment.

Home measures things such as:

- the amount of appropriate play materials, parental involvement with children, and the amount of intellectual stimulation (for example, the number of books in the home)

- Studies have shown that scores on the HOME scale positively correlate iwth later measures of intelligence.