chapter 4 human growth and development

• Mental categories of related events, objects, and knowledge
• Children adapt by refining their schemes and adding new ones
• Schemes change from physical to functional, conceptual, and abstract as the child develops

• fitting new experiences into existing schemes
• Required to benefit from experience

• modifying schemes as a result of new experiences
• Allows for dealing with completely new data or experiences

balance between assimilation and accommodation

experience of conflict between new information and existing concepts

• inadequate schemes are reorganized or replaced with more advanced and mature schemes
• Occurs three times during development, resulting in four qualitatively different stages of cognitive development

Middle and late elementary school

Adolescence and adulthood

• (0-2 years)
• Deliberate, means-ends behavior
• 8 months
• Object permanence: knowing an object still exists even if not in view
• Not fully understood until 18 months
• Using symbols
• Anticipate consequences of actions, instead of needing to experience them
• 18 to 24 months

knowing an object still exists even if not in view

• (2-7years) preschool years
• Egocentrism
• Animism
• Centration
• Appearance is reality

things really are a they appear (when someone puts on monkey mask, they ARE a monkey)

knowing that volumn, mass, number, length, area, or liquid quantity are the same despite superficial appearance changes

• concentrating on only one facet of a problem to the neglect of other facets
• interferes with conservation

difficulty seeing world from others' perspectives

crediting inanimate objects with life and lifelike properties

• Underestimates infants’ and young children’s cognitive ability
• Overestimates adolescents’ cognitive ability
• Vague about mechanisms and processes of change
• Does not account for variability in children’s performance
• Cognitive development is not as stage-like as Piaget suggested
• Undervalues the sociocultural environment’s influence on cognitive development

• Infants are born with rudimentary knowledge of the world
• Children elaborate knowledge based on experience

infants rapidly create a reasonably accurate theory of objects ’ basic properties

4.5 months

5 months

6 months

Infants: use motion to discriminate animate from inanimate objects

12-15 months

Living things and their parts exist for a purpose: dogs have fur so we can pet them

Although invisible, all living things have an essence giving them their identity

• Do not know genes are basis for inheritance
• Think body parts have intentions or desires
• Do not know plants are living things (because not moving)

neural and mental structures enabling the mind to operate

mental programs allowing for performance of specific tasks

when sensory information receives additional cognitive processing

• emotional and physical reactions to unfamiliar stimulus
• Alerts infant to new or dangerous stimuli

• lessened reactions to a stimulus after repeated presentations
• Helps infant ignore biologically insignificant events

• When an initially “neutral” stimulus (e.g., a bell) becomes able to elicit a response (e.g., salivation) that previously was caused only by another stimulus (e.g., food)
• Infants are capable of this conditioning regarding feeding or other pleasant events
• Infants are less capable of this regarding aversive stimuli

when a behavior’s consequence make this behavior’s future occurrence more likely (reinforcement) or less likely (punishment)

• learning a new behavior by observing others
• Older infants imitate, but do 2- to 3-week-olds? (controversial)

• exists for significant events in their own past
• is richer when parents engage children in conversations about the past, or ask for expanded descriptions of the past
• appears as a sense of self emerges

• Hippocampus and amygdala develop early
• 6-month-olds can store new information
• Frontal cortex develops in second year
• toddlers begin retrieving information from long-term memory

5 months old

• 6-month-olds compare quantities by ratio
• 10-month-olds know the larger of two quantities

• number name for each object counted
• master up to 5 numbers with preschoolers

• number names must be counted in the same order
• mastered up to 5 numbers with preschoolers

• last number in a counting sequence denotes how many objects there are
• mastered by preschoolers for numbers up to 5

preschooler

5-year-olds

• Russian psychologist; died young (37), did not fully develop his theory beyond the period of childhood
• scaffolding, zone of proximal development, private speech

all participants having a mutual, shared understanding of an activity (e.g., game rules)

cognition develops via structured activities with more skilled others

• the process during which a more skilled master teaches a skill or task to a less skilled “apprentice” such as a child
• Promotes cognitive development

• difference between what children can do with or without assistance
• Providing learning experiences within this zone maximizes achievement

giving just enough assistance to match learner’s needs

• “talking” to yourself to self-guide and self-regulate behavior
• Speech is audible, but isn ’ t directed at others, nor is it intended for others to hear
• Later becomes internalized as inner speech
• In its most mature form, inner speech is unintelligible to all but the thinker and it does not resemble spoken language

smallest, unique sounds

1-month-old

• adults speak slowly and exaggerate changes in pitch and volume when talking to infants
• Sometimes called motherese because it was first observed in mothers

2 months

6 months

8-11 months

• 1 year
• Usually consonant-vowel pairs, such as “dada” or “wawa ”

By 2 years

By age 6

infants will point, wave, smack lips to convey messages

12 to 18 months

18 months

rapid connection of new words to their exact referents

parents labeling objects, plus children relying on adults ’ behavior to interpret the label ’ s meaning

• An unfamiliar word refers to the object not already having a name
• Names refer to the whole object instead of its parts
• A new name (T-rex) for an already named object (dinosaur) denotes the object’s subcategory name

• children interpret unfamiliar words in a sentence using different cues
• Rely on words they already know and the sentence’s structure to infer a new word’s meaning or its function in a sentence
• Rely on the sentence’s context
• Knowing to which object a word refers by attending to the sentence’s adjective (e.g., the boz means the middle block with wings instead of any other blocks without wings)

• rapid cognitive growth and skill cause an explosion in new word learning
• Development of goals and intentions motivates children to learn language
• Improved attentional and perceptual skills (e.g., shape bias)
• Developmental changes in word meaning

18 months

• 24 months
• Greater use of language and social cues
• Reduced use of attentional cues

defining a word too narrowly (e.g., using “car” to refer only to the family car)

• defining a word too broadly (e.g., using “doggie” to refer to all four-legged animals)
• Less common in word comprehension
• More common in word production
• May reflect another fast-mapping rule
• If you cannot remember the object’s actual name, say the name of a related object (e.g., say “doggie” for a picture of a goat)

• social emphasis
• Vocabularies include social interaction and question words plus naming words

• intellectual emphasis
• Vocabularies consist mainly of words naming objects, persons, or actions
• Vocabularies consist of few social interaction words or question words

• speaking to children frequently
• naming objects that grab children’s attention
• using grammatically sophisticated speech
• reading to children while carefully describing pictures and asking questions
• encouraging watching TV programs that emphasize new word learning, tell stories, and ask questions (e.g., Sesame Street, Blues Clues)

18 months

using words directly relevant to meaning and no more (“I no sleep”)

applying rules to words that are exceptions to the rule (“I goed home”)

words or endings making a sentence grammatical

• innate neural mechanisms guide the learning of grammar
• Sentences breaking grammatical rules activate specific left hemisphere regions

birth to 12 years

• children look for patterns, detect irregularities, and create rules
• Grammatical knowledge reflects multiple examples stored in memory instead of being innate

eclectic integration of behavioral, linguistic, and cognitive solutions, plus the importance of accurate communication during social interaction promotes language and grammatical development

• making sure to speak in language the listener understands
• paying attention while listening and making sure the speaker knows if he/she is being understood
• taking turns as speaker and listener
• before 2 years: parents encourage conservational turn-taking and often model turn-taking
• after 2 years: spontaneous turn-taking is common
• by 3 years: adjust speech to listeners, but often ignore problems in received messages

10 months

12 months

Preschool age

Preschool age

Elementary school age