PSC 140 Chapter Notes - Chapter 8: Motor Drive, Inductive Reasoning, Epiphyseal Plate
● Ossification: a process through which new bone tissue is formed at the growth plates of
long bones
● Motor drive: the pleasure young children take in using their new motor skills
● Food - insecure: lacking enough food to ensure good health
● Scale errors: young children’s inappropriate use of an object due to their failure to
consider info about the object’s size
● Mental operations: in Piaget’s theory, the mental process of combining, separating, or
transforming info in a logical manner
● Preoperational stage: according to Piaget, the stage of thinking between infancy &
middle childhood in which children are unable to decenter their thinking or to think
through the consequences of an action
● Centration: young children’s tendency to focus on only one feature of an object to the
exclusion of all other features
● Decentration: the cognitive ability to pull away from focusing on just 1 feature of an
object in order to consider multiple features
● Objectivity: the mental distancing made possible by decentration. Piaget believed the
attainment of objectivity to be the major achievement of cognitive development
● Egocentrism: in Piaget’s terms, the tendency to “center on oneself” that is, 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
● Elaborative style: a form of talking with children about new events or experiences that
enhances children’s memories for those events & experiences
● Privileged domains: cognitive domains that call on specialized kinds of info, require
specifically designated forms of reasoning, & appear to be of evolutionary importance to
the human species
● Theory of mind: coherent theories about how people’s beliefs, desires, & mental states
combine to shape their actions
● False - belief task: a technique used to assess children’s theory of mind; children are
tested on their understanding either of stories in which a character is fooled into
believing something that is not true or of situations in which they themselves have been
tricked into a false belief
● Mental modules: hypothesized innate mental faculties that receive inputs from
particular classes of objects & produce corresponding info about the world
● Autism: a biologically based condition that includes an inability to relate normally to
other people & low scores on false - belief tasks
● Theory theory: the theory that young children have primitive theories about how the
world works, which influence how children think about, & act within, specific domains
● Scripts: event schemas that specify who participates in an event, what social roles they
play, what objects they are to use during the event, & the sequence of actions that make
up the event
Document Summary
Ossification: a process through which new bone tissue is formed at the growth plates of. Motor drive: the pleasure young children take in using their new motor skills. Food - insecure: lacking enough food to ensure good health. Scale errors: young children"s inappropriate use of an object due to their failure to. Mental operations: in piaget"s theory, the mental process of combining, separating, or. Centration: young children"s tendency to focus on only one feature of an object to the. Decentration: the cognitive ability to pull away from focusing on just 1 feature of an. Objectivity: the mental distancing made possible by decentration. Egocentrism: in piaget"s terms, the tendency to center on oneself that is, to consider. Precausal thinking: piaget"s description of the reasoning of young children that does. Elaborative style: a form of talking with children about new events or experiences that. Theory of mind: coherent theories about how people"s beliefs, desires, & mental states.
