PSYC 3440 Chapter Notes - Chapter 1: John Stuart Mill, Associationism, Cerebral Cortex
19 Mar 2013
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Children"s thinking: the thinking that takes place from the moment of birth through the end of adolescence. Defining what thinking is turns out to be quite difficult, as no boundary divides activities that involving thinking from activities that do not. Thinking involves the higher mental processes: problem solving, reasoning, creating, conceptualizing, remembering, classifying, symbolizing, planning, etc. Does children"s thinking progress through qualitatively different stages. How do changes in children"s thinking occur. Why do individual children differ so much from each other in their thinking. The question of infants" initial endowment has elicited many speculations: three of the most prominent come from the associationist perspective, the constructivist perspective and the competent-infant perspective. Competent-infant perspective: based on recent research, suggests that both of the other approaches seriously underestimate infants" capabilities, even young infants have a much wider range of perceptual skills and conceptual understandings that had previously been suspected.
