Chapter 6- Cognition

Question 1

_________ refers to the inner processes and products of the mind that lead to “knowing.” It includes all mental activity- attending, remembering, symbolizing, categorizing, planning, reasoning, problem solving, creating, and fantasizing.

Answer 1

Cognition

Question 2

Theorist that believed in 4 stages of development

Answer 2

Piaget

Question 3

Piaget viewed children as discovering, or constructing, virtually all knowledge about their world through their own activity. What type of approach is his theory?

Answer 3

Constructive

Question 4

According to Piaget, specific psychological structures called _______- organized ways of making sense of experience-change with age.

Answer 4

Schemes

Question 5

For Piaget, this change marks the transition from a sensorimotor approach to the world to a cognitive approach based on _________ _________- internal depictions of information that the mind can manipulate.

Answer 5

Mental Representations

Question 6

__________ involves building schemes through direct interaction with the environment.

Answer 6

Adaptation

Question 7

In ____________, we create new schemes or adjust old ones after noticing that our current way of thinking does not capture the environment completely.

Answer 7

Accommodation

Question 8

Piaget’s term for this back-and-fourth movement between equilibrium and disequilibrium is ______________.

Answer 8

Equilibration

Question 9

Schemes also change through ___________, a process that occurs internally, apart from direct contact with the environment. Once children form new schemes, they rearrange them, linking them with other schemes to create a strongly interconnected cognitive system.

Answer 9

Organization

Question 10

Piaget’s first stage of development, spans the first two years of life. Its name reflects Piaget’s belief that infants and toddlers “think” with their eyes, ears, hands, and other sensorimotor equipment. They cannot yet carry out many activities mentally.

Answer 10

Sensorimotor Stage

Question 11

___________ ___________ provides a special means of adapting their first schemes. It involves stumbling onto a new experience caused by the baby’s own motor activity. The reaction is “circular” because, as the infant tries to repeat the event again and again, a sensorimotor response that originally occurred by chance strengthens into t new scheme.

Answer 11

Circular Reaction

Question 12

Around 1 month babies start to gain voluntary control over their actions through the __________ circular reaction, by repeating chance behaviors largely motivated by basic needs.

Answer 12

Primary

Question 13

Children develop cognitive structures ___________.

Answer 13

Actively

Question 14

Infants sit up and become skilled at reaching for and manipulating objects- motor achievements that strengthen the _________ circular reaction, through which they try to repeat interesting events in the surrounding environment that are caused by their own actions.

Answer 14

Secondary

Question 15

What is the understanding that objects continue to exist even when they are out of sight?

Answer 15

Object Permanence

Question 16

When babies reach several times for an object in one hiding place (A), then they see it moved to another (B), they still search for it in the first hiding place (A).

Answer 16

A-not-B Search Error

Question 17

The ability to remember and copy the behavior of models who are not present.

Answer 17

Deferred Imitation

Question 18

By 10-12 months, infants can engage in __________ problem solving-applying a solution from one problem to other relevant problems.

Answer 18

Analogical

Question 19

Piaget’s second stage of development. Spans from 2-7 years. The most obvious change is an extraordinary increase in representational, or symbolic, activity.

Answer 19

Preoperational Stage

Question 20

How does language increase the efficiency of thought?

Answer 20

It is the most flexible means of mental representation. When we think in words we can deal with past, present, and future at once and combine concepts in unique ways.

Question 21

Later children combine pretend schemes with those of peers in __________ ________, the make-believe with others that is underway by the end of the second year and increases rapidly in complexity during early childhood.

Answer 21

Sociodramatic Play

Question 22

Piaget believed that young children are not capable of _______- mental representations of actions that obey logical rules.

Answer 22

Operations

Question 23

For Piaget, the most fundamental deficiency of preoperational thinking is __________- failure to distinguish others’ symbolic viewpoints form one’s own.

Answer 23

Egocentrism

Question 24

_________ refers to the idea that certain physical characteristics of objects remain the same, even when their outward appearance changes.

Answer 24

Conservation

Question 25

First, their understanding is centered, or characterized by ___________. They focus on one aspect of a situation, neglecting other important features.

Answer 25

Centration

Question 26

__________- the ability to go through a series of steps in a problem and then mentally reverse the direction, returning to the starting point- is a part of every logical operation

Answer 26

Reversibility

Question 27

Preoperational children have difficulty with ___________ __________- the organization of objects into classes and subclasses on the basis of similarities and differences.

Answer 27

Hierarchical Classification

Question 28

Piaget’s third stage of development. Extending from 7-11 years, marks a major turning point in cognitive development. Thought becomes far more logical, flexible, and organized, more closely resembling the reasoning of adults than that of younger children.

Answer 28

Concrete Operational

Question 29

The ability to pass _________ _______ provides clear evidence of operations- mental actions that obey logical rules.

Answer 29

Conservation Tasks

Question 30

What is a child’s ability to focus on several aspects of a problem and relating them, rather than entering on only one?

Answer 30

Decentration

Question 31

The ability to order items along a quantitative dimension, such as length or weight, is called _________.

Answer 31

Seriation

Question 32

The concrete operational child can also seriate mentally, an ability called _________ _________.

Answer 32

Transitive Inference

Question 33

Piaget’s fourth stage of development. Occurs at about age 11. Children develop the capacity for abstract, systematic, scientific thinking.

Answer 33

Formal Operational

Question 34

In adolescence children become capable of ________-_________ reasoning- when faced with a problem, they start with a hypothesis, or prediction about variables that might affect an outcome, from which they deduce logical, testable inferences.

Answer 34

Hypothetico-deductive

Question 35

An egocentric adolescent behavior. Their belief that they are the focus of everyone’s attention and concern. Heightened consciousness

Answer 35

Imaginary Audience

Question 36

An egocentric adolescent behavior. Their belief that others are observing and thinking about them. Teens develop an inflated opinion of their own importance- a feeling they are special and unique.

Answer 36

Personal Fable

Question 37

Theorist whose theory is no longer fully accepted. Researchers still draw inspiration from his vision of children as active, constructive learners and his lifelong quest to understand how children acquire new capacities. His findings serve as the starting point for virtually every major contemporary line of research on cognitive development.

Answer 37

Piaget

Question 38

According to the ____ _________ ___________ infants begin life with innate, special-purpose knowledge systems referred to as core domains of thought. Each of these “prewired” understandings permits a ready grasp of new, related information and therefore supports early, rapid development of certain aspects of cognition.

Answer 38

Core Knowledge Perspective

Question 39

According Vygotsky’s ___________ theory are infants endowed with basic perceptual, attention, and memory capacities that they share with other animals. These develop during the first two years through direct contact with the environment. Then rapid growth of language leads to a profound change in thinking. It broadens preschoolers’ participation in social dialogues with more knowledge individuals, who encourage them to master culturally important tasks.

Answer 39

Sociocultural

Question 40

Which theorist believed in a sociocultural theory?

Answer 40

Vygotsky

Question 41

Children’s self-directed speech is called _______ _______

Answer 41

Private Speech

Question 42

Vygotsky believed that children’s learning takes place within the ____ __ ________ ___________- a range of tasks too difficult for the child to do alone, but possible with the help of adults and more skilled peers.

Answer 42

Zone of Proximal Development

Question 43

Vygotsky believed what helps children think about mental activities and behavior and elect courses of action, he saw it as the foundation for all higher cognitive processes, including controlled attention, deliberate memorization and recall, categorization, planning, problem solving, abstract reasoning, and self-reflection.

Answer 43

Language

Question 44

__________- adjusting the support offered during a teaching session to fit the child’s current level of performance.

Answer 44

Scaffolding

Question 45

________ teaching- a teacher and two to four students form a collaborative group and take turns leading dialouges on the content of a text passage. Members apply 4 cognitive strategies: questioning, summarizing, clarifying, and predicting.

Answer 45

Reciprocal

Question 46

_________’s theory helps us understand the wide cultural variation in cognitive skills, leads us to expect highly diverse paths of development, underscores the vital role of teaching in cognitive development, focused on social and cultural influences, but said little about biological contributions to children’s cognition.

Answer 46

Vygotsky