Physical Development
- Maturation: biological (e.g. puberty, brain development)
- Critical Period: language, perfect pitch
- Imprinting: certain animals (e.g. ducks) form attachments with the first object it comes in contact with during a critical period
- Motor skills: fine vs gross
- Reflexes: born instincts (rooting - turn face; sucking; swallowing; grasping; moro/startle; Babinski - toes splay out when stroked)
- Visual cliff experiment: depth perception
- Habituation: less interest to repeatedly presented stimuli
- Teratogen: toxic substances that influence fetus; alcohol causes fetal alcohol syndrome
- Puberty (secondary sex characteristics; impulsive behavior with diminished executive control)
- Other concepts: Menarche/Spermarche, Menopause, Aging (crystallized intelligence remains stable while fluid intelligence declines with mobility, reaction time, etc.), Dementia
Jean Piaget's Cognitive Stages
- Sensorimotor: object permanence (stranger anxiety)0-2
- Preoperational: egocentrism (vs. theory of mind), animism, artificialism 2-7
- Concrete Operational: conservation, calculation, simple rules 7-11
- Formal Operational: hypothetical (what if), abstract (rule-based, logical, algorithm) 11+
Schemas
- Assimilation: take new things into one's preexisting schemas
- Accomodation: adjust one's schemas to fit new things
Vygotsky's Sociocultural Theory: continuous not stages (discontinous), language affect thinking, zone of proximal development, importance of scaffolding