Early Childhood Thought: Islands of Competence
Terms
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- mental operations
- in piaget's theory, the mental process of combining, separating, or transforming information in a logical manner.
- preoperational stage
- according to piaget, the stage of thinking between infancy and middle childhood in which children are unable to think through the consequences of an action.
- egocentrism
- in piaget's terms, to "center on oneself," to consider the world entirely in terms of one's own point of view.
- precausal thinking
- piaget's description of the reasoning of young children that does not follow the procedures of either deductive or inductive reasoning.
- Information-processing approach
- a strategy for explaining cognitive development based on an analogy with the workings of a digital computer
- sensory register
- that part of the information-processing system that holds incoming sensory information until it is taken up into long-term memory or forgotten.
- short-term memory
- that part of the information-processing system that holds incoming sensory information until it is taken up into long-term memory or forgotten.
- long-term memory
- memory that is retained over a long period of time.
- privileged domains
- cognitive domains that call upon specialized kinds of information, require specifically designated forms of reasoning, and appear to be of evolutionary importance to the human species.
- theory of mind
- the ability to think about other people's mental states and form theories of how they think.
- mental modules
- innate mental faculties that receive inputs from particular classes of objects and produce corresponding information about the world.
- autism
- a mental condition defined primarily by an inability to relate normally to other people and low scores on intelligence tests.
- skeletal principles
- domain-specific principles that get particular cognitive processes started and provide some initial direction, but require subsequent experience in order to realize their potential.
- scripts
- event schemas that specify who participates in an event, what social roles they play, what objects they are to use during the event, and the sequence of actions that make up the event.