final psych chapters

Start Studying!

Terms

undefined, object

copy deck

Cognitive development: The investigation of how mental skills build and change with increasing physiological maturity and experience.
What do Cognitive-developmental psychologitst study?: the differences and similarities among people of different ages seeking to discover how and why people think and behave differently at different times in their lives
Why do differences and similarities occur?: genes, environments, and, especially, their interactions.
Most congitive psychologists agree that developmental changes occur as a result of what?: the interaction of maturation and learning, which refers to any relatively permanent change in thought or behavior that occurs simply as a result of aging, without regard to particular experiences.
What do the other psychologists accredit for this change?: the importance of learning, which refers to any relatively permanent change in thinking, as a reult of experience.
Very young infants apper to be innately predisposed to attend to stimuli that are what?: moderately novel - that is, neither so familiar that the stimuli are uninteresting, nor so novel that the infants cannot make sense of the stimuli.
What maffects cognitive development the most within families; nonshared environments or shared environments?: nonshared
What 4 basic principles crosscut the study of cognitive develpment and tie it together?: 1. As people grow older, they become capable of more complex interactions between thought and behavior.
2. People engage in more thorough information processing with age.
3. People become increasingly able to comprehend successively more complex relationships over the course of development.
4. over time, people develop increasing flexibility in their uses of strategies or other information.
define wisdom,: insight into themselves and the world around them.
Who is considered to have given the most comprehensive theory of cognitive development?: Jean Piaget (1896-1980)
What did Piaget propose?: Researchers could learn as much about children's intellectual development from examining their incorrect answers to test items as from examining their correct answers
T or F? Piaget concluded that coherent locical systems underlie children's thought.: true
T or F? Piaget believed that the function of intelligence is to aid in adaptation to the environment.: True
What are the 4 stages of cognitive development according to Piaget?: 1. Sensorimotor
2. Preoperational
3. Concrete operations
4. Formal operations
In accord with his focus on adaptations, what did Piaget believe accompanied cognitive development?: increasingly complex responses to the environment. Piaget further proposed that with increasing learning and maturation, both intelligence and its manifestations become differentiated - more highly specialized in various domains.
define equlibration: children seek a blance (equilibrium) between both what they encounter in their environments and what cognitive processes and structures they brin to the encounter, as well as among the cognitive capabilities themselves.
define accommodation.: Changing the existing schemas to fit the relevant new information about the environment
when is disequilibrium more likely to occur according to Piaget?: during periods of stage transition; that is, although Piaget posited that equilibrative processes go on throughout childhood as children continually adapt to their environment, he aslo considered development to involve discrete, dicontinuous stages.
What happens during sensorimotor stage?: increases in the number and complexity of sensory and motor abilities during infancy.
When does the sensorimotor stage occur?: roughly between brith and 2 years of age.
What are an infants earliest adaptions?: reflexive ones.
What compells reflexive actions in infants?: at first they do so to maintain or to repeat interesting sensations. Later, they actively explore their phusical world and seek out new and interesting sensations.
True or False. Infants do not conceive anything that is not immediately perceptible to them.: true
define object permanence: objects continue to exist even when imperceptible to the infants.
define representational thought. (children show signs by the end of the sensorimotor period).: internal representations of external stimuli
Define Egocentric and describe what Piaget conceived such a characteristic to be.: focusing on oneself. Piaget viewed eogcentrisism as a cognitive characteristic, not a personality trait.
When is the preoperational stage: from about 2 to 6/7 years of age.
What happens in the preoperational stage?: the child begins actively to develop the internal mental representations that started at the end of the sensorimotor stage.
What is the most important aspect of preoperational stage?: representational thought; which paves the way for the subsequent development of ligical thought during the stage of concrete operations.
T or F? A child is fully capable to manipulate concepts during the preoperational stage.: false
define centration: a tendency to focus on only one especailly noticeable aspect of a complicated object or situation.
T or F? children in the preoperational stage focus on one particular dimension of a problem ignoring other aspcets of the situation, even when they are relevant.: True
Name some of the developmental changes that occur during the preoperational stage.: Children's active, intentional experimentation with language and with objects in their environments results in tremendous increases in conceptual and language development.
What is the age range for the Concrete-operational stage?: roughly 7/8 to 11/12 years of age
what happens during the concrete-operational stage?: children become able to manipulate mentally the internal representatinos that they formed during the preoperational period. In other words, they now not only have thoughts and memories of objects, but they also can perform mental operations on these thoughts and memories. (they can do so ONLY in regard to concrete objects)
The most dramatic eveidence of the change from preoperational thought to the reresentational thought of the concrete-operational stage is seen in WHICH piaget classic experiment?: the Conservation of quantity! in which the child is able to mentally conserve a given quantity despite observing changes in the appearance of the object or substance.
regarding the conservation of quantity experiments, what can the concrete-operational child do that the preoperational child can not?: manipulate internal representations of concrete objects and substances, mentally conserving the notion of amount and concluding that despite different physical appearances, the quantities are identical.
Explain how concrete-operational thinking si 'reversible': the conctrete-operational child can judge the quantities to be identical because the child understands that potentially, the liquid could be poured back into the origional container, thereby reversing the action. Once the child internally recognizes the possibility of reversing the action and mentally can perform this concrete operation, the child can grasp the logical implication that the quantity has not changed. This only works if the operations are concrete- that is, the cognitive operations act on cognitive representations of actual physical events.
what age does the formal-operational stage take affect?: roughly 11/12 and onwards.
what happens during the formal-operational stage?: mental operations on abstractions and symbols that may not have physical, concrete forms. Moreover, children begin to understand some things that they have not directly experienced themselves.
T or F? During formal operations, children are finally fully able to take on perspectives other than their own, even when they are not working owith concrete objects.: True, futhermore, people in the formal operations stage purposefully seek to create a systematic mental representatin of situtations they confront.
define permutations.: variations in combinations.
breifly sum Piaget's theory of cognitive developemnt.: It occurs in stages. these stages occur at roughly the same ages for different children, and each stage builds on the preceding stage. Stages occur in a fixed order and are irreversible: Once a child enteres into a new stage, the child thinks in ways that characterize that stage regardless of the task domain, the specific task, or even the context in which the task is presented. He or she never thinks in ways that characterize an earlier stage of cognitive development.
T or F? Piaget's methodology was largely environmental?: False. It was largely clinical.
T or F? Piaget believed that developmental processes were derived from environmental factors.: False. Although Piaget observed that developmental processes result from children's adaptations to their environment, he held that internal maturational processes, rather than environmental contexts or events, determine the sequence of cognitive-developmental progression.
Is there evidence that may contradict Piaget?: Yes. eveidence of environmental influences on children's performance on piagetian taks shows that particular experiences, training, or other environmental factors may alter paerformance.
What is one major critisism of Piaget's fundamental theory?: The assumption that cognitive development occurs in a fixed sequence of discontinuous spurts across task domains, tasks, and contexts.
What is another major critisism of Piaget's fundamental theory?: Theorists have suggested that other kinds of limitatinos at least partly may influence children's performance on Piagetian tasks. Such limitations include children's motor coordination, working-memory capacity, memory strategies, and verbal understanding of questions.
What is a third major critisism of Piaget's fundamental theory?: the estimates of the ages at which people demonstrate mastery of Piagetian tasks. In general, the trend has been toward demonstrating that children can do things at ages earlier than piaget had thought possible.
In 1972, What changes did Piaget make regarding his theory?: he modified it to acknowledge that the stage of formal operations may be more a product of an individual's domain-spcific expertise, based on experience, than of the maturational processes of cognitive development.
define competence theory: a theory of what people of various ages are maximally capable of doing
define performance theory: a theory of what perople of various ages naturally do in their day-to-day lives
name 3 conditions that a majority of Neo(new)-Piagetian theorists agree on.: 1. accept Piaget's broad notion of developmental stages of cognitive development.
2. concentrate on the scientific or logical aspects of cognitive development (often observing children engage in many of te same tasks as those used by Piaget)
3. retain some ties with the notion that cognitive development occurs through equilibration.
T or F. Fifth stage theorists posit an entirely differnt throry of cognitive development than Piaget.: False, instead they build on Piaget's four stages by suggesting a fifth stage beyond formal operations; problem finding.
What happens during the 'fifth stage' of problem finding?: individuals come to master the tasks of figuring out exactly what problems they face and deciding which problems are most important and deserving of their efforts toward solution.
define dialectical thinking.: recognizing that in much of life, there is no one final, correct answer, but rather a progression of beliefs whereby we first propose some kind of thesis; then later see its antithesis; and finally effect some kind of synthesis between the two which then serves as the new thesis for the continuing evolutino of thought.
What does post-formal thought allow adults to do?: manipulate mentally the vagaries and inconsistencies of everyday situations, in which simple, unambiguous answers rarely are available. Trhough postformal thinking, we can consider and choose among alternatives, recognizing that other alternatives may offer benefits not obtainable from the chosen one. We also may take into account the sociocultural context in which wa are making our decisions.
Who is considered to be second, only to Piaget, in terms of his importance to the field of cognitive development?: Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934).
What were Vygotsky's two main idea's?: internalization and the zone of proximal development.
T or F? Vygotsky suggested that cognitive development proceeds largely from the outside in, through internalization.: True. Thus, social, rather than biological, influences are key in Vygotsky's theory of cognitive development.
define internalization: the absorption of knowledge from context.
define ZPD (zone of proximal development): the range of potential between the child's observable level of realized ability (performance) and the child's underlying latent capacity (competence), which is not dirctly obvious.
define static assessment environment.: an examiner asks questions and expects the person to answer them.
T or F? Vygotsky argued that we only need to reconsider how we think about cognitive abilities.: False. We should also reconsider how we measure their abilities.
T or F? Piaget and Vygotsky were both interested in not only the correct reponses to questions answered by the child, but also to the incorrect responses.: true
Where did Vygotsky recommend that testing move to from staic assesment environment?: a dynamic assessment environment
define dynamic assessment environment: the interactions between the subject and the examiner does not end when the subject responds, especially if the subject repsonds incorrectly. The examiner is then suppose to give the subject a graded sequence of guided hints to facilitate problem solving.
How does dynamic assessment relate to the ZPD?: the ability to use hints is the basis for measuring the ZPD because this ability indicates the extent to which the child can expand beyond her or his observable abilities at the time of the testing. Two children may answer a given problem incorrectly. However, a child who can profit from instruction potentially can go far, wheras a child who cannot is unlikely to acquire the skills needed to solve not only the problem
What do information-processing theorists seek to understand?: cognitive development in terms of how people of different ages process infromation, particularly when solving challenging mental problems.
List some of the mental activities that fall withing the purview of infromations-processing approaches.: noticing, taking in, mentally manipulating, storing, combining, retrieving, or acting on infromation.
what are the 2 fundamental approaches to studying information processing?: primarily domain-general, and primarily domain-specific.
what do domain-general theorists try to describe?: how we mentally process infromation. They want to show how general principles of information processing apply and are used across a variety of cognitive funtinos, from making perceptual judgments to understanding written text to reading maps to solving calculus problems.
what do domain-specific theorists try to describe?: emphasize the role of the development of competencies and knowledge in specific domains, arguing that most development is of this domain-specific kind.
T or F? Some researchers have suggested that older children may have greater processing resources, such as attentional resources and working memory, which may underlie their overall greater speed of cognitive processing.: true
T or F? 4 and 5 year old children do not yet clearly perceive the distinction between appearance and reality.: true.
T or F? In memory exercises, the performance of preschoolers is much better in the memory condition than the looking condition: false. there was no distinguishable differnce.
t or f? the major difference between the memory of younger and older children (as well as adults) in not in basic mechanisms, bu in learned strategies, such as rehearsal.: true
list 3 things that affect the use of memory enchancing strategies.: Culture, experience, and environmental demands.
What is the main difference in memory strategies between western and non-western children?: western children are given much more practice using rehearsal straegies for remembering isolated bits of infromation, non western children have more opportunities to become adept at using memory-enhancing strategies that rely on spatial location and arrangements of objects.
define cognitive monitoring: an individual tracks and readjusts an ongoing train of thought.
define self-monitoring: at bottom-up process of keeping track of current understanding, involving the improving ability to predict memory performance accurately.
define self-regulation: a top-down process of central executive control over planning and evaluation.
define 'theory of mind': an understanding of how the mind operates.
T or F? autistic children seem to have no difference from ordinary children when looking soley at theory of mind.: false. Autistic children have serious defects or lack it all together.
Name the main components of early models for understanding quantitative skills.: 1. some type of mental counter that starts at some value, then adds increments ass needed.
2. once children encode a problem, they first attempt to retrieve a potential correct answer from memory. If the answer they retrieve exceeds their own preset level of confidence in the accuracy of the answer, they state the retrieved answer. If it does not, they again try to retrieve a correct answer from memory.
List some of the fundamental notions of quntity within the range of smaller mumbers.: 1. Prelinguistic infancts seem to know that adding leads to greater quantities and subtracting leaves smaller quantities.
2. young children appear to build on this fundamental knowledge to apply omore abstract mathematical concepts in counting and to reason about addition and subtraction.
3. context effects, from problem wording to cultural environment, greatly influence mathematical learning beyond the formulation of infromal strategies.
define spatial visualization.: our ability to orient ourselves in our surroundings and to manipulate images of objects mentally.
T or F? the speed of mental rotation increases with age and with the degree of familiarity of the objects.: true
define the 'use without meaning' phenomenon: Sometimes, children use words whose meanings they do not understand and only gradually acquire the correct meaning after they have started to use the words.
T or F? Preschoolers may make decisions based on perceptual appearances rather than on induced general principles.: False... other way around.
discuss what happens during the first 2 years after birth in reference to micro level changes in the neural networks of the brain.: Use it or lose it! cells that are not needed and that do not form connections to other cells acctually die. Likewise, synaptic connections between neurons that are not used will become overwhelmed by competing connections that are used. After the first few years, however, the rate of neural growth and development declines dramtically. In fact 90% of neural growth is complete by age 6 (which coincides with the critical period in language acquisition.)
True or False? At birth, the brain stem (which comprises the hindbrain, the midbrain, and part of the forebrain) is almost fully developed.: true
What enhancements correspond to maturation of the hippocampus.: recognition memory enhancements.
which area of the brain develop most rapidly after birth?: sensory and motor cortex; subsequently, the association areas related to problem solving, reasoning, memory, and language develop.
T or F? In infants, maturation of the frontal lobes preceeds the significant cognitive developments of this period.: false. they seem to parallel the developments.
In regards to EEG patterns associated with age, describe the variations between left and right hemispheres.: The right hemishpere appears to have continuous, gradual changes while the left hemisphere has abrupt shifts
(at least up to the time of early adulthood.)
True or False. The brain can affect cognitive funtioning, however, cognitive functioning can not affect the brain.: False!
between our peak of neural growth and about age 80, how much of our brain weight do we lose?: about 5%. However, changes in neural connections help to compensate for our cell loss; that is, over the life span, our brains show continually increasing specificity of neural connections.
define fluid intelligence: the cognitive-processing skills that enable us to manipulate abstract symbols, as in mathematics.
define crystallized intelligence.: our stored knowledge, which is largely declarative, such as vocabulary, but also may be procedural, such as the expertise of a master chess player.
What is the relationship between fluid/crystallized intelligence, and younger and older adults?: crystallized intelligence is higher, on average, forolder adults thant for younger adults, fluid intelligence is higher, on average, for younger adults that for older ones. At college level, both fluid and crystallized abilities are increasing.
T or F? In general, Fluid cognitive abilities seem to increase throughout the life span, whereas crystallized cognitive abilities increase up until the 20's or 30's, and then slowly decrease after 40's: False. switch crystallized and fluid.
T or F? the preservation of crystallized abilities suggests that long-term memory and the structure and organization of knowledge representation are preserved across the life span: true.
T or F? not all coginitive abilities decline.: True.
T or F? Although short term memory seems to decrease over time, lont-term memory and recognition memory performance remain quite good.: true.
list 3 general factors that have been suggested as contributing to age-related slowing of cognitive processing.: 1. generalized decline in central nervous system funtioning.
2. Decline in working-memory capacity.
3. decline in attentional resources.
name 2 speed-related issues that might slow proccessing in cognitive functioning.: 1. limited time.
2. simultaneity.
---Slowed processing may prevent certain operations from being computed because such operations may need to occur within a limited amount of time and the operations may need to overlap because of storage limitations.
T or False? Priming effects and tasks requiring implicit memory seem to show little or no evidence of decline, but tasks involving explicit memory do show age-related decline: true
list the 3 basic principles of cognitive development in adulthood.: 1. Although fluid abilities and other aspcets of infromation processing may decline in late adulthood, this decline is balanced by stabilization and even advancement of well-preacticed aspects of mental functioning.
2. despite the age-related decline in infromation processing, sufficient reserve capacity allows at least temporary increasesin performance, especially if the older adult is motivated to perform well.
3. when adults lose some of the speed and physiology-related efficiency of information processing, they often compensate, in a given task, with other knowledge and expertise-based infromation-processing skills.
name 2 ways that older adulds maintain high levels of functioning: 1. develop practical strategies to retain it.
2. draw on practical knowledge that younger people may not have.
define wisdom: exceptional insight into human development and life matters, including exceptionally good judgment and advice and commentary about difficult life problems. Also, wisdom can be seen as reflecting a positive gain in culture-based meaningful uses of dognitive skills in the face of the more physiologically controlled losses in cognitive mechanics.
list 6 factors that people's conceptions of wisdoom pertain to.: 1. reasoning ability
2. sagacity (shrewdness)
3. learning from ideas and from the environment
4. judgment
5. expeditious use of information
6. perspicacity (intensely keen awareness, perception, and insight).
Define intelligence ( 3 factors): the capacity to learn from experience, using metacognitive processes (people's understanding and control of their own thinking processes) to enchance learning, and the ability to adapt to the surrounding environment, which may require different adaptions within different social and cultural contexts.
T or F? Implicit theories of intelligence remain the same from one culture to another.: False. They may differt quite significantly.
define emotional intelligence.: the ability to perceive and express emotion, assimilate emotion in thought, understand and reason with emotion, and regulate emotion in the self and others.
define social intelligence: the ability to understand and interact with other people.
Contemporary measurements of intelligence usually can be traced to one of two very different historical traditions. Name them.: 1. Lower-level, psychophysical abilities (such as sensory acuity, physical strenght, and motor coordination)
2. higher-level, judgmental abilities (which we traditionally describe as related to thinking).
Afred Binet said ______ is the key to intelligence; not psychophysical acuity, strength, or skill.: judgment.
define mental age: the average level of intelligence for a person of a given age.
what was the formula for ratio Intelligence quotient (IQ): a ratio of mental age (MA) divided by chronological age (CA) multiplied by 100.
what are todays IQ tests called?: deviation IQ's; based on deviations from the middle score in a normal distribution of scores.
What are the 3 levels of the Wechsler intelligence scales?: 1. verbal score
2. performance score
3. overall score.
what does the verbal score rate: based on tests such as vocabulary and verbal similarities, in which the test-taker has to say how two things are similar
what does the performance score rate: based on tests such as picture completion, which requires identification of a missing part in a picture of an object, and picture arrangement, which requires rearrangement of a scrambled set of cartoonlike pictures into an order taht tells a coherent story.
what does the overall score rate?: a combination of verbal and performance scores.
define factor analysis: a statistical method for separating a construct-intelligence in this case- into a numver of hypothetical factores or abilities that the researchers believe to form the basis of individual differences in test performance. *based on the studies of correlation*
Name some of the main competing factorial theories.: Spearman, Thurstone, Guilford, Cattell, Vernon, and Carroll.
Who is credited with inventing factor analysis.: Charles Spearmen, in 1927
What did Spearman concluded to be understood about intelligence?: both a single general factor that pervades performance on all tests of mental ability and a set of specific factors
According to Spearman, which factor provides the key to understanding intelligence?: the general factor...labeled "g"
Who contrasted Spearman by colncluding that core intelligence resides in 7 factors instead of 1.: Louis Thurstone (1887-1955).

Primary mental abilities.
List the 7 primary mental abilities.: 1. Verbal comprehension
2. Verbal fluency
3. inductive reasoning
4. Spatial visualization
5. Number
6. Memory
7. Perceptual speed.
who developed the 'structure-of-intellect' model: J.P. Guilford
how many aspects does the 'S-O-I' have.: 150
what 3 main dimensions does the s-o-i have?: 3.....
1. various operations
2. contents
3. products
define various operations: mental processes, such as memory and evaluation, such as determining whether a particular staement is of fact or opinion
define contents: kinds of terms that appear in a problem, such as semantic and visual.
define products: kinds of responses required, such as units, classes, and implications.
what type of model was proposed by John B. Carroll in 1993?: a hierarchy model comprising of 3 strata;
What kind of indicator did Ted Nettelbeck and his colleagues suggest?: a speed-related indicator of intelligence, involving the encoding of visual infromation for brief storage in working memory.
Arthur Jensen suggested that a smart person is_____: someone whose neural circuits conduct information rapidly. Higher IQ's are associated with faster reaction times
Earl Hunt believes that intelligence can be measured in terms of speed, like Jensen, but focuses on what?: verbal intelligence....lexical-access speed-the speed with which we can retrieve information about words stored in our long-term memories.

Start Studying!

Deck Info

Number of cards 142