PSYC 3520 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Tabula Rasa, Object Permanence, Unobservable

• School: York University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 3520
• Professor: Maria Legerstee

Document Summary

Cognition: mental process/mental abilities, not responding automatically, conscious thinking, can be broadly classified as general intelligence cognition as a whole, not only iq but memory, reasoning, etc, specific type of cognition- categorization, cognition refers to mental abilities. Iq type of cognition: thinking, memory, problem-solving categorization, reasoning, language development, etc, can be broadly classified as general intelligence. Aspects of cognitive development: categorization, perception and knowledge of the world, memory development. Fundamental question: what do infants know: nativist; innate knowledge of the world, programmed of the mind, empiricist; opposite to nativist, blank slate; experience accumulate, constructivist is a type of empiricist, psychologist fall in-between these 2. Infants have innate knowledge of the essential properties of the world: nativist account: the mind produces ideas that are not derived from external sources (e. g. , geometry, god) Infants externally learn knowledge of the essential properties of the world: constructivist account or empiricist account: experience, especially of the senses, is the only source of knowledge.