Chapter 10 Flashcards
(32 cards)
What is developmental psychology?
The study of how behavior changes over the life span
What is bidirectional influences?
Human development is almost always a 2-way street; parents influence children and children influence parents
What are cohort effects?
Sets of people who lived during one period can differ in some systematic way from sets of people who lived during a different period
What is nature via nurture?
Children with certain genetic predispositions often seek out and create their own environments
What is gene expression?
Activation or deactivation of genes by environmental experiences throughout development
What are the theories of cognitive development?
Numerous explanations of how we acquire the ability to learn, think, communicate, and remember over time
Who is Jean Piaget?
Swiss psychologist who presented first complete account of cognitive development
What is assimilation?
Absorbing new experience into current knowledge structures
What is accommodation?
altering a belief to make it more compatible with experience
What is the sensorimotor stage?
Birth-2 year
focus on the here and now without the ability to represent experiences mentally
lack of object permanence
What is object permanence?
The understanding that objects continue to exist even when out of view
What is preoperational stage?
2-7 years;
Ability to construct mental representations of experience;
Hampered by egocentrism;
Lack conservation
What is egocentrism?
Inability to see the world from others’ perspectives
What is conservation?
Understanding 10 dimes is the same amount as 1 loonie
What is the concrete operations stage?
7-11 years;
Ability to perform mental operations on physical events only
What is formal operations stage?
11-adulthood;
Understand hypothetical reasoning beyond the here and now;
Understand logical concepts and abstract questions
Who is Lev Vygotsky?
Theory focused on social and cultural influences on cognitive development
What is scoffolding?
Vygotsky’s learning mechanism where parents provide initial assistance but gradually remove it
What is zone of proximal development?
Children can benefit from instruction
What is stranger anxiety?
A fear of strangers, developing at 8 or 9 months
What is temperament?
Basic emotional style that appears early in development and is largely genetic in origin;
easy, difficult, slow-to-warm up
What is attachment?
Emotional connection we share with those to whom we feel closest
What is imprinting?
Young geese seemed to follow around the first large, moving object they saw after hatching
What is contact comfort?
Reassuring physical contact played huge role in developing attachment;
monkeys chose cloth mother over wire mother
