Famous Theories & Researchers
This researcher is famous for the Bobo Doll Experiment.
Who is Albert Bandura?
Infants are repeatedly shown a stimulus until they lose interest; a new stimulus is shown to test if they notice the difference.
What is the habituation paradigm?
An individual who is credited as (one of) the founder(s) of cognitive development research; believed cognition consisted of mental representations & logical operations.
Who is Jean Piaget?
This is the stage where infants make vowel-like sounds such as “ooh” and “ah”.
What is cooing?
Infants look to a caregiver's emotional reaction to decide how to respond to an unfamiliar situation.
What is social referencing?
An experiment in which a caregiver and an infant are placed in a room with toys, the infant experiences a series of short separations and reunions with the caregiver.
What is the ‘Strange Situation’ Experiment?
A method used to measure where infants look and for how long, revealing attention and preference without requiring verbal responses.
What is eye-tracking?
The inability of young children to differentiate their own perspective or feelings from others, believing everyone sees things from their own perspective. The Three Mountain Task demonstrates this.
What is Egocentrism?
This refers to infants' loss of the ability to distinguish non-native speech sounds over time.
What is perceptual narrowing?
An experiment where a caregiver suddenly becomes unresponsive and expressionless, causing infant distress — demonstrating infants' sensitivity to social interaction.
What is the still face paradigm?
Providing a learner with temporary support to master a task beyond their current ability, gradually removing assistance as the learner gains independence.
What is scaffolding?
Infants are shown two stimuli simultaneously; researchers measure which one they look at longer to infer preference or recognition.
What is the preferential looking paradigm?
A stage in a child’s life where mental representations and capacity for pretend play have developed, but abilities for logical operations have not.
What is the Pre-Operational Stage?
The cognitive process of balancing new experiences with existing mental schemas to maintain a state of mental equilibrium.
What is equilibration?
The attachment style in which infants use caregivers as a safe base to explore, show distress upon separation, and are easily comforted upon reunion.
What is secure attachment?
A phenomenon in which infants search for a hidden object in a familiar location rather than in a new location, even after watching the object be moved.
What is the 'A not B' error?
Infants look longer at "impossible" events, revealing they have expectations about how the world works.
What is violation of expectation?
A learned or raised ability that has been noted to allow individuals to get a later Alzheimer's diagnosis, maintain cognitive functioning even with brain atrophy, and have better executive functioning in infancy.
What is Bilingualism?
This phenomenon shows that children overapply grammar rules, such as saying “bringed.”
What is over-regularization?
Biologically based individual differences in emotional reactivity and self-regulation that influence how infants respond to their environment.
What is temperament?
This researcher used rhesus monkeys and “cloth vs. wire mothers” to demonstrate that contact comfort, not just food, is critical for attachment.
Who is Harry Harlow?
A method that measures electrical brain activity in infants to study neural responses to stimuli without requiring behavioral responses.
What is EEG/ERP?
This brain area is believed to be the cause of the A not B error, due to immaturity of development.
What is the prefrontal cortex?
This system, created by deaf children without formal instruction, shows structured grammar and word order emerging naturally.
What is homesign?
An apparatus used to study depth perception and social referencing — infants hesitate to cross the "deep" side and look to caregivers for emotional cues.
What is the visual cliff?