concepts

general ideas/understandings that can be used to group together objects, events, qualities, or abstractions that are similar in some way

Nativist perspective

children are born with an innate understanding of basic concepts

empiracle perspective

children form fundamental concepts quickly, but after they are exposed to relevant experiences

Category hierarchies

a category that is organized by subset relations, basic level, subordinate level, supersubordinate level

Quinn & Eimas (1996)

Found that 3–4-month-olds can be habituated to one animal, but not to another, proving that they start categorizing at a young age

Perceptual catrogization

Method used by infants, they group things that have similar appearances together

naïve psychology

a commonsense level of understanding of people and oneself, the idea that we all use desires, beliefs, and actions to understand/justify human behavior

Infant self-conscious abilities

they have an implicit understanding that they are their own person, and that they can act to achieve their own goals

Infants start to understand what the can and cannot do

4 months

Infants start to understand their appearance

18-24 months

Infants' understanding of others

They start to understand that actions of others are goal-oriented, and they can also understand the intentions of non-living things and differentiate between living and non-living things.

Infant's understanding of differences between people

they do understand, and we can tell based on their preferences to people that appear nicer, or speak the same language they do

Piaget's Perspective on theory of mind tasks

Children struggle because of their natural egocentrism

Information processing perspective of theory of mind

the capacity of children's working memory inhibits the correct response; they struggle to think about the fact, appearance, and their knowledge all at once

Children develop theory of mind around

age 4.5, at age 3, they fail the tasks

Theory of Mind is not

all or nothing

basic ToM and infants

18 month olds can give an adult the snack they say they prefer, while 14 year olds cannot

Sabbagh et al (2006)

Studying Chinese and American kids, Chinese kids generally have better executive functioning children were given Day-Night Stroop Tests (shown a day card and told to say it was night), and false belief tests The Chinese kids did better on the executive functioning, but there was no difference on false belief tests; these ideas matching with the experience based hypothesis for executive functioning

The hypothesis to why children fail ToM tasks

expression- they understand but cannot yet express experience- they need to experience thinking like others

Cassidy et al (2005)

Studying the role of siblings on ToM performance. Only children and twins do worse on tasks, twins because parents are too tired to teach social interaction/perspective children with siblings who were close in age did better, and children with siblings who were close in age and of opposite sex did even better on these tasks

Dimensional Card Sort Task

The transition between cards is abrupt, potentially because of a working memory capacity, or because of the inability to inhibit the correct response

Theory of mind

Organized understanding of how mental processes, such as intentions, desires, beliefs, perceptions, and emotions influence behavior

Pretend play starts at

12-18 months, using other objects to represent a different object

Dramatic play starts

toddler age

Young children start by justifying the existence of living things for

other human purposes- "the money exists for the zoo"

Children start with incorrect beliefs of

- why living things exist - what is actually living - plants being non-living

Infants can distinguish

between what is living and non-living (with the exception of plants)

understanding biological processes

preschoolers can understand that biological processes are different from psychological processes

Children's understanding of inheritance

3-4 year olds understand, though they will sometimes misunderstand, thinking desire also plays a role

essentialism

the view children have that living things have an essence inside of them that makes them what they are

Nativists view biological understanding as

nautral

Empiricists view biological understanding as

learned through experience

Infants start to understand casual relationships by

6 months of age

Infants start to reproduce cause and affect relations when they're demonstrated

9-11 months old, with the flaw that if it is a similar, but not causal relationship, they cannot replicate it, at preschool age, they tend to leave out other factors that may play a role in the effect

Duckworth & Seligman (2005)

Longitudinal study looking at self-control, asking parents, teachers, and other students about self control. All participants were given $1, and told if they gave it back in a week, they would receive $2. They looked at self control, and IQ score. The biggest predictor was self-control, over IQ

Mischel's marshmallow study

Children were put in a room and told that if they wait to eat the marshmallow while the adult left the room, they would get a second marshmallow. Young kids who waited for the marshmallow did better and were more successful as teens.

Self-control

like a muscle, it can be taught, strengthened with practice, depleted after being used, and low blood sugar makes it harder to have self-control

Theories on understanding space

Nativist: children have an innate representation of space Empiricist: children learn special concepts as they cognitively grow

Developing space relative to oneself

Infants understand things in relation to themselves, and from there they continue to grow, especially as they start crawling - at this age, finding hidden objects also helps children to learn space

egocentric spatial representations

coding of spatial locations relative to one's own body, rather than their surroundings (follows Piaget's theory)

development relations to space in external environments

infants can use a landmark to code location, but only if the landmark is obvious, and by 5 years old they can represent something in relation to multiple landmarks - the development of these skills often develop based on cultural relevance

Understanding time in infancy

3-month-olds can predict the time at which a new, timed showing of a photo would appear, 4-month-olds can notice a pattern of duration of flashing lights

Understanding time in toodlerhood

preschoolers can recognize what holidays happened more recently than others, and when taught, they can understand even more

Reasoning about time

preschool aged children tend to get wrong the length of time between when something happened and when it will happen again (lunch, holidays, ect), they also struggle to tell when two objects started at the same time and one moved longer, so ended after the other object

Understanidng number in infancy

They seem to understand basic quantity of sets and basic properties, they can discriminate between basic ratios, which improves as they get older 4-5 months, they can tell when something has been added or subtracted to a set, as they became dishabituated to the set

Understanding numbers at 2 years old

they can count but at first will not realize what those numbers mean until later