Chapter 6 Flashcards
(30 cards)
schemes
In Piaget’s theory, actions or mental representations that organize knowledge.
assimilation
Piagetian concept of the incorporation of new information into existing knowledge.
accommodation
Piagetian concept of adjusting schemes to fit new information and experiences
organization
Piaget’s concept of grouping isolated behaviors into a higher-order, more smoothly functioning cognitive system; the grouping or arranging of items into categories.
equilibration
A mechanism that Piaget proposed to explain how children shift from one stage of thought to the next. The shift occurs as children experience cognitive conflict, or disequilibrium, in trying to understand the world, Eventually, they resolve the conflict and reach a balance, or equilibrium, of thought.
sensorimotor stage
The first of Piaget’s stages, which lasts from birth to about 2 years of age. when infants construct an understanding of the world by coordinating sensory experiences (such as seeing and hearing) with motoric actions.
object permanence
The Piagetian term for one of an infant’s most important accomplishments urderstanding that objects and events continue to exist even when they cannot directly be seen, heard, or touched
A-not-B error
Also called AB error, this occurs when infants make the mistake of selecting the familiar hiding place (A) to locate an object, rather than looking in the new hiding place (B), as they progress into substage 4 in Piaget’s sensorimotor stage.
core knowledge approach
States that infants are born with domain-specific innate knowledge systems, such as those involving space, number sense, object permanence, and language
operations
Internalized actions that allow children to do mentally what before they had done only physically. Operations also are reversible mental actions.
preoperational stage
The second Piagetian developmental stage, which lasts from about 2 to 7 years of age, when children begin to represent the world with words, images, and drawings.
symbolic function substage
The first substage of preoperational thought, occurring roughly between the ages of 2 and 4. In this substage, the young child gains the ability to represent mentally an object that is not present.
egocentrism
An important feature of preoperational thought the inability to distinguish between one’s own and someone else’s perspective
animism
A facet of preoperational thought: the belief that inanimate objects have lifelike qualities and are capable of action.
intuitive thought substage
The second substage of preoperational thought, occurring between approximately 4 and 7 years of age, when children begin to use primitive reasoning.
centration
Focusing attention on one characteristic to the exclusion of all others.
conservation
The realization that altering an object’s or substance’s appearance does not change its basic properties.
concrete operational stage
Piaget’s third stage, which lasts from approximately 7 to 11 years of age, when children can perform concrete operations, and logical reasoning replaces intuitive reasoning as long as the reasoning can be applied to specific or concrete examples.
horizontal décalage
Piaget’s concept that similar abilities do not appear at the same time within a stage of development.
seriation
The concrete operation that involves ordering stimull along a quantitative dimension (such as length).
transitivity
Principle that says if a relation holds between a first object and a second object, ano holds between the second object and a third object, then it holds between the first object and the third object. Piaget argued that an understanding of transitivity is characteristic of concrete operational thought.
formal operational stage
Piaget’s fourth and final stage, which occurs between the ages of 11 and 15, when individuals move beyond concrete experiences and think in more abstract and logical ways.
hypothetical-deductive reasoning
Piaget’s formal operational concept that adolescents have the cognitive ability to develop hypotheses about ways to solve problems and can systematically deduce which is the best path to follow in solving the problem.
adolescent egocentrism
The heightened self-consciousness of adolescents, which is reflected in adolescents’ beliefs that others are as interested in them as they are in themselves, and in adolescents’ sense of personal uniqueness and invulnerability.
