Chapter 7: Physical and Cognitive Development in Early Childhood Flashcards
What age is early childhood?
2-6 years
Three areas of motor development in early childhood
Gross motor skills, fine motor skills, brain development
Gross motor skills
- Increase in physical strength
- Learning new motor skills
- More proximodistal development
- Not learning gross motor movements, but increasing efficiency and combining movements (ex. climbing)
Fine motor skills
Interaction between cognitive and motor domains (ex. writing and gripping development)
Brain development in early childhood
- Period of rapid brain growth
- Myelination
- Demonstration of plasticity
Children sleep about __% less than infants and toddlers
20
Problems with sleep
- Trouble developing a sleep schedule
- Nightmares and night terrors
Piaget: characteristics of ____ ____
preoperational reasoning
Preoperational reasoning
- Trying to connect with things
- Mental representation of what an object is
- Egocentrism
- Animism
- Centration
- Irreversibility
Egocentrism
Children have a hard time taking in another’s point of view. Children being to realize that other people have different thoughts and observations. (ex. the three mountain task)
Three mountain task
Child describes what they [and the adult] see on their side of the mountain, not realizing that the adult doesn’t see what they see.
Animism
Inanimate objects have feelings and intentions
Centration
The appearance-reality distinction, hyperfocusing one thing
Example of centration
Calling a person with a bear mask on a bear, not a person
Irreversibility and conservation
Once and object changes form, it can never go back (ex. taking the cap off a pen destroys it).
Vygotsky’s sociocultural perspective
Emphasis on culture on development, including scaffolding and zone of proximal development
Scaffolding
Activities to help the child learn what is on their ZPD
Zone of proximal development
Skills that are close to the ones that have already been mastered. Lower than the zone is current understanding, above it is out of reach.
Characteristics of effective scaffolding
Demonstrating how to do something, finding most efficient way changes with age
Private speech
Self-talk that turns into inner speech and aids in self-regulation.
Four key parts of information processing in early childhood
Attention, working memory and executive function, memory, theory of mind
Changes to attention in early childhood
Improvements in sustained attention, but still have difficulty with selective attention.
Changes to working memory and executive function in early childhood
Improvements in holding information in working memory as we think through the things we’re learning, improvements in creating and carrying out a plan.
Changes to memory in early childhood
- Autobiographical memory
- Important or unique events are more easily recalled - Long-term descriptions of things