Changes in the body and brain
Body growth tapers off in early childhood, and children gradually become thinner
Between ages 2 and 6, the brain increases from 70% of its adult weight to 90%
By age 4, many parts of the cerebral cortex have overproduced synapses, and fMRI evidence reveal
Development of the prefrontal cortex
Rapid growth from early - middle childhood in areas devoted to executive function (inhibition of impulses, attention, memory, and planning/organizing behavior)
Marshmallow task: if child waits and doesn't eat the marshmallow, the researcher will give chil
Activity in the brain
For most children: left hemisphere (language skills) is especially active between 3 and 6 years old, then levels off
Activity in right hemi (spatial skills) increases steadily throughout early and middle childhood
Left handed? Right handed?
Handedness reflects the greater capacity of one side of the brain (child's dominant cerebral hemisphere)
For right handed: language is housed in LEFT side of brain with hand control
For left handed (10%): lang is most often shared between the L and R hemi
Other advances in the brain
Fibers linking cerebellum (balance + control of body movement) and cerebral cortex grow and myelinate from birth through preschool years, contributing to dramatic gains in motor coordination
Reticular formation (alertness and consciousness): generates syn
Gross Motor Skills
Skills that involve large muscle groups.
As children's bodies become more streamlined and less top-heavy, their balance improves greatly.
By age 2, preschoolers' gait become smooth and rhythmic, enabling them to run, jump and skip.
As children become stea
Fine Motor Skills
Skills that involve the use of fine-tuned small muscle groups.
Drawing: typically begins with scribbles, followed by 1st representational forms around age 3, and then by more realistic drawings around 5-6 yo. Compared with younger children, 5-6 y.os creat
Piaget: Preoperational Stage
years 2-7
Marked by an extraordinary increase in representational (symbolic) activity
Children experience an increase in representational thought
Advances in Mental Representation, according to Piaget
Did not regard language as a major ingredient in childhood cognitive change
Believed that sensorimotor activity leads to internal images of experience, which children then label with words
But, this psychologist underestimated the power of language to spu
Symbol - Real World Relations
Until 3 y.o. : children have trouble with dual representation
Dual representation = viewing a symbolic object as both an object in its own right and a symbol
Ex: when you enter an elevator and you press the button "4", you know that "4" stands for the 4th
Scale Experiment by Judy DeLoache
Tests dual representation in early childhood
Child was shown a scale model of a room in front of them, and child was shown a toy that was hidden inside an object resting on top of a table in the scale model
Then, child was taken to the actual room that th
Limitations of Preoperational Thought
According to Piaget, children in this stage of his cog dev theory are not capable of operations (mental operations that obey logical rules).
RATHER, their thinking is rigid and strongly influenced by the way things appear at the moment
Egocentrism
A limitation of pre-op thought
The failure to distinguish others' symbolic viewpoints from one's own.
Piaget regarded this as responsible for preop children's animistic thinking (belief that inanimate objects have lifelike qualities like thoughts, wishes,
Major criticism of Piaget in general
That he paints a pic of a children that shows them to be less smart than they actually are
His tasks are too cognitively demanding for children that's why kids all suck at them
Ex: Three Mountains Task
Three Mountains Problem
A way that Piaget tested egocentrism in preop kids.
Child sits down, another side of table is experimenter. From angle of the child, there are 3 mountains (2 in front, 1 in back). From angle of experimenter, there is 1 mountain in front and 2 behind
Child
Failure of conservation
The inability of a preop kid to be able to understand that certain physical characteristics remain the same, EVEN when their outward appearance changes
Ex: 2 beakers of the same shape w. same amount of water
1 beaker gets poured into a taller, more narrow
Centration
Characterizes a preop child's understanding
Focusing on ONE aspect of a situation and neglecting other important features
Biases preop children from understanding conservation
In conservation: the way a preop child judges how much water something has is b
Irreversibility
Another feature/failure of preop thought
The inability to mentally go through a series of steps in a problem and then reverse direction in order to return to the starting point
Lack of Hierarchical Classification
Feature/failure of preop thought
Preop children can't organize objects into classes and subclasses on the basis of similarities and differences
Information Processing
Focuses on cognitive operations and mental strategies that children use to transform stimuli flowing into their mental systems
In early childhood: components of executive function that enable children to succeed in cognitively challenging situations are a
Development in Attention & Inhibitory Control
Sustained attention improves considerably in early childhood as a result of steady gains in children's ability to inhibit impulses and keep their mind on a competing goal
During early childhood: children become better at planning (thinking out a sequence
Dimensional Card Sorting Task (DCCS)
Used to measure child's inhibition. Involves shape and color game
Tell a child you're going to play a shape game. You present them with 2 buckets that have different shapes. 1st bucket has blue rabbit, 2nd bucket has a red boat
In shape game, child is ins
Cognitive flexibility
ability to be able to switch between multiple different mindsets
ability to look at the same thing through multiple different lenses
ex: multilingual kids. while they might be a bit slower to express their words as monolingual kids at first (which is arou
Developments in Memory
Preschoolers' recognition memory is remarkably good
BUT.. preschool recall (ability to generate a mental image of an absent stimulus) is garbage
Recognition = "multiple choice". Preschooler can recognize what is right after being offered a few possible sc
Theory of Mind
Metacognition
Thinking about your own thoughts
Develops as representation improves
Awareness of Mental Life
At the end of 1st year: babies view people as intentional beings (an understanding that develops through social interaction). A milestone that opens the door to joint attention, social referencing, preverbal gestures, and spoken lang. Babies here also und
False beliefs
From age 4 on, children say that both beliefs and desires determine behavior. Can understand that behavior can be a consequence of a person's desires, behaviors or wants
Evidence comes from games that test whether preschools realize that thoughts that don
Sally-Anne Task
A false belief task
Sally has a basket, Anne has a ball. Sally puts a red ball inside the basket. Then, Sally leaves the room
Anne saw Sally put ball in the red box. AS SALLY LEAVES ROOM, Anne takes ball out of the basket and places it into box
you ask a
Factors contributing to preschoolers' theory of mind
Language: use of mental state words (thinking, confused, believe). Parents who talk to their children using mental state words actually cause the baby to attribute a mental state word as if the baby is having all of these desires/thoughts. The way parents
Core knowledge theorists
Believe that to profit from social experiences, children must be biologically prepared to develop a theory of mind
Claim that children with autism are deficient in the brain mechanism enabling humans to detect mental state. Because autistic children are b
Limitations of preschoolers' understanding of mental life
Children younger than 5 believe that all events must be directly observed to be known. They don't know that mental inferences can be a source of knowledge
Children younger than 5 do not know that abstract knowledge exists
These young children pay little a
What are possible limitations of the experimental design?
Tasks sometimes are good at capturing something specific but leave other aspect's of children's knowledge behind
Variations of False-Belief Task
When children are told where the object is (without seeing it), they can pass the false-belief task. Reality is made less concrete (possibly related to inhibition)
Earlier emergence of false belief when using nonverbal tasks
Sometimes kids fail at tasks b
General point on methodology
ALWAYS consider HOW we measure phenomena can both constrain or expand our understanding of a given phenomena
Word learning
By age 6: child will have acquired around 10,000 spoken words
Fast mapping: children can learn a word based on a single exposure. They are fast at picking the word up and figuring out how to use it. One little exposure is all they need
Babies, on the othe
Mapping words to objects
Early in vocab growth: children adopt a mutual exclusivity bias, or an assumption that only one label can be applied to each object
Ex of mutual exclusivity bias:
"ball", is it a baseball? basketball? football?
"animal", is it a dog? snake? cat?
"tool", i
Grammar
Once children form 3 word sentences: they make small additions and changes to words (grammatical markers) that enable them to express meanings flexibly and efficiently. Can use adjectives and verbs
Development of grammar = 1) acquisition of nouns first, 2
Pragmatics
the practical, social side of language
how children learn to engage in effective and appropriate communication
How is language used? when is it used? Are there certain types of language that I need to use with certain people? What tone of voice is appropr
Supporting language and cognitive dev
Conversational give-and-take with adults is consistently related to language progress
Adults often provide indirect feedback about grammar by using recasts and expansions
Recasts = restructuring inaccurate speech into correct form
Expansions = elaborating
Do children learn language from TV and computer?
A lot of debate over this topic
The answer: it depends
Usually in infancy: infants don't learn from TV and comp bc there's no gesturing or social cues that would normally allow kids to learn language
Remember: to learn language in infancy, you need to hav