Psychology 2410A/B Study Guide - Midterm Guide: Recapitulation Theory, Multiplication Table, Sensory Deprivation

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 2410A/B
• Professor: J.Bruce Morton

Document Summary

Chapter 2: babies who count: the human brain is endowed with an innate mechanism for apprehending numerical quantities, one that is inherited from our evolutionary past and that guides the acquisition of mathematics. In the first year of life, babies already understand some fragments of arithmetic. In the first year, children are in sensorimotor stage, and begin to notice some salient regularities: these babies progressively construct a series of refined and abstract mental representations of the world. In this view, the development of abstract thought consists in climbing a series of steps in mental functioning: piaget believed that number must be constructed in the course of sensorimotor interactions with environment. The silly teddy bear mixed up everything! : now, when the experimenter asks which has more, the question seems more sincere (the adult actually doesn"t know which has more now) and is more likely to be interpreted literally.