PSYC 302 Chapter : Conceptual Development.docx
Document Summary
General ideas or understandings that can be used to group together objects, events, qualities, or abstractions that are similar in some way. Crucial for helping people make sense of the world: help us understand the world, allow us to generalize from prior experience to act effectively in the world. Nurture is important to children"s developing the concepts beyond this initial level, but not for forming the initial understanding: empiricists argue that concepts arise from basic learning mechanisms. Nature endows infants with only general learning mechanisms, such as the ability to perceive, associate, generalize, and remember. The rapid and universal formation of fundamental concepts such as time, space, causality, number, and mind arises from infants" massive exposure to experiences that are relevant to these concepts. Two key questions children must answered to begin to understand the objects that they encounter: How are these things related to each other: dividing objects into categories:
