PSY 2114 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Pacifier, Object Permanence, 18 Months

• School: University of Ottawa
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSY 2114
• Professor: Wendy Lee

Document Summary

Believes that children are naturally curious and they are constantly trying to understand their world. They experiment, test, and revise theories in their own way. They use schemes to try and understand their environment. Schemes are mental structures that organize information and regulate behaviour. Mental categories of related events, objects, and knowledge. Ex: infants suck and grasp, and they soon learn what objects can be sucked and which ones can be grasped. As they get older, schemes become more based on functional or conceptual relationships, not action. Assimilation: taking in information that is compatible with what one already knows. Ex: if a baby starts sucking their thumb, and is given a pacifier, he will soon realize that he can suck the pacifier as well. This is an example of the baby relating two things together to learn more about the world around them. Accomodation: changing existing knowledge based on new knowledge.