Term
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Definition
| Spans the first two years of life. Piaget believed that infants and toddlers "think" with their eyes, ears, hands, and other sensorimotor equipment. They cannot yet carry out many activities inside their heads. |
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Term
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Definition
| Specific psychological structures - organized ways of making sense of experience. |
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Definition
| Building schemes through direct interaction with the environment. |
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Definition
| Use our current schemes to interpret the external world. |
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Definition
| We create new schemes or adjust old ones after noticing that our current ways of thinking do not capture the environment completely. |
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Definition
| An internal process, apart from direct contact with the environment. Once children form new schemes, they rearrange them, linking them with other schemes to create a strongly interconnected cognitive system. |
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Term
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Definition
| Provides a special means of adapting their first schemes. Involves stumbling onto a new experience caused by the baby's own motor activity. The reaction is "circular" because, as the infant tries to repeat the event again and again, a sensorimotor response that originally occurred by chance becomes strengthened into a new scheme. |
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| Goal-Directed (Intentional) Behavior |
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Definition
| Coordinating schemes deliberately to solve simple problems. |
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Term
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Definition
| Understanding that objects continue to exist when they are out of sight. |
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Definition
| If they reach several times for an object at a first hiding place A, then moved to a second B, they still search for it in the first hiding place A. |
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Definition
| Internal depictions of information that the mind can manipulate. |
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Definition
| The ability to remember and copy the behavior of models who are not present. |
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Definition
| Children act out everyday and imaginary activities. |
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Term
| Violation-of-Expectation Method |
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Definition
| They may habituate babies to a physical event (expose them to an event until their looking declines) to familiarize them with a situation in which their knowledge will be tested. Or they may simply show babies an expected event (one consistent with reality) or an unexpected event (a variation of the first event that violates reality). Heightened attention to the unexpected events suggests that the infant is "surprised" by a deviation from a physical reality and, therefore, is aware of that aspect of the physical world. |
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Term
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Definition
| The realization that words can be used to cue mental images of things not physically present. A symbolic capacity that emerges around the first birthday. |
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Term
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Definition
| Poorer performance after a video than a live demonstration. |
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Term
| Core Knowledge Perspective |
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Definition
| Babies are born with a set of innate knowledge systems, or core domains of thought. Each of these "prewired" understandings permits a ready grasp of new, related information and therefore supports early, rapid development. |
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Term
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Definition
| In information processing, procedures that operate on and transform information, thereby increasing the efficiency and flexibility of thinking and the chances that information will be retained. |
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Definition
| Where information first enters and where sights and sounds are represented directly and stored briefly. |
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Term
| Short-Term (Working) Memory |
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Definition
| Second part of the mind where we actively apply mental strategies as we "work" on a limited amount of information. |
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Definition
| Special part of the working memory for managing its complex activities by directing the flow of information. It decides what to attend to, coordinates incoming information with information already in the system, and selects, applies, and monitors strategies. |
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| Our permanent knowledge base. |
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| Noticing when a stimulus is identical or similar to one previously experienced. |
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| More challenging because it involves remembering something without perceptual support. |
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Definition
| Most of us cannot retrieve events that happened to us before age 3. |
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Term
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Definition
| Recollections of personally meaningful one-time events from both the recent and the distant past. |
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Term
| Zone of Proximal Development |
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Definition
| Range of tasks that the child cannot yet handle alone but can do with the help of more skilled partners. |
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Term
| Intelligence Quotient (IQ) |
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Definition
| Indicates the extent to which the raw score (number of items passed) deviates from the typical performance of same-age individuals. |
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Term
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Definition
| Giving the test to a large, representative sample and using the results as the standard for interpreting scores. |
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Term
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Definition
| Most scores cluster around the mean (or average) with progressively fewer falling toward the extremes. This bell-shaped distribution results whenever researchers measure individual differences in large samples. |
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Term
| Developmental Quotients (DQs) |
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Definition
| Infant test scores are conservatively labeled because they do not tap the same dimensions of intelligence measured at older ages. |
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Term
| Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment (HOME) |
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Definition
| Checklist for gathering information about the quality of children's home lives through observation and parental interview. |
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Term
| Developmentally Appropriate Practice |
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Definition
| Standards, devised by the U.S. National Association for the Education of Young Children, specify program characteristics that serve young children's developmental and individual needs, based on both current research and consensus among experts. |
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Term
| Language Acquisition Device (LAD) |
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Definition
| An innate system that contains a universal grammar, or set of rules common to all languages. It enables children, no matter which language they hear, to understand and speak in a rule-oriented fashion as soon as they pick up enough words. |
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Term
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Definition
| Vowel-like noises that appear around 2 months; pleasant "oo" quality. |
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Term
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Definition
| Appears around 6 months, in which infants repeat consonant-vowel combinations, often in long strings, such as "bababababa" or "nananananana." |
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Definition
| Child attends to the same object or event as the caregiver. |
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Term
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Definition
| When young children first learning words apply them too narrowly. |
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Term
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Definition
| As vocabulary expands, applying a word to a wider collection of objects and events than is appropriate. |
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Term
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Definition
| Two-word utterances that like a telegram, focus on high-content words, omitting smaller, less important ones. |
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Definition
| The words and word combinations children use. |
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Definition
| The language children understand. |
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Term
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Definition
| Vocabularies consisted mainly of words that referred to objects. |
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Definition
| Produce many more social formulas and pronouns (than referential). |
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Term
| Child-Directed Speech (CDS) |
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Definition
| A form of communication made up of short sentences with high-pitched, exaggerated expression, clear pronunciation, distinct pauses between speech segments, clear gestures to support verbal meaning, and repetition of new words in a variety of contexts. |
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