Chapter 6: Theories of Cognitive Development

Question 1

Basic of Piaget Theory

Answer 1

children are naturally curious. They want to make sense of their experiences and construct their understanding of the world

Question 2

Assimilation

Answer 2

Piaget
- the incorporation of new information into existing schemas

Question 3

Accommodation

Answer 3

Piaget
- is the modification of existing schemas based on new experiences

Question 4

Equilibration

Answer 4

Piaget
- When disequilibrium occurs, children reorganize their theories to return to a state of equilibrium

Question 5

Schemas

Answer 5

Piaget
- active, continually changing, and developing mental structures that drive cognitive development

Question 6

Sensorimotor stage

Answer 6

Piaget
-1st of Piaget’s four stages of cognitive development, which lasts from birth to approximately 2 years of age, in which infants progress from responding reflexively to using symbols.

Question 7

Reflexes

Answer 7

1-4 months reflexes are first modified by experience. An infant may inadvertently touch his lips with his thumb, which leads to sucking and the pleasing sensations associated with sucking

Question 8

Object Permanence

Answer 8

the understanding, acquired in infancy, that objects exist independently of oneself.

Question 9

“out of sight, out of mind.”

Answer 9

Piaget - made the astonishing claim that infants lacked object permanence understanding for much of the first year. That is, he proposed that an infant’s understanding of objects could be summarized as “out of sight, out of mind.”

Question 10

Pre-operational stage

Answer 10

Piaget
from 2 to 7 years of age, in which children first use symbols to represent objects and events

Question 11

ecocentrism

Answer 11

Difficulty in seeing the world from another’s point of view; typical of children in Piaget’s preoperational stage.

Question 12

Animism

Answer 12

A phenomenon common in preschool children in which they attribute life and lifelike properties to inanimate objects

Question 13

Concrete operational stage

Answer 13

The third of Piaget’s stages, from 7 to 11 years of age, in which children first use mental operations to solve problems and to reason.

Question 14

Formal operational stage

Answer 14

fourth of Piaget’s stages, from roughly age 11 into adulthood, in which children and adolescents can apply mental operations to abstract entities, allowing them to think hypothetically and reason deductively.

Question 15

deductive reasoning

Answer 15

Because adolescents’ thinking is not concerned solely with reality, they are also better able to reason logically from premises and draw appropriate conclusions. The ability to draw appropriate conclusions from facts is known as deductive reasoning

Question 16

constructivism

Answer 16

Piaget
- the view that children are active participants in their own development who systematically construct ever more sophisticated understandings of their worlds.

Question 17

Weaknesses of Piaget’s Theory

Answer 17

• Piaget’s theory underestimates cognitive competence in infants and young children and overestimates cognitive competence in adolescents.
• Piaget’s theory is vague concerning processes and mechanisms of change.
• Piaget’s stage model does not account for variability in children’s performance.
• Piaget’s theory undervalues the influence of the sociocultural environment on cognitive development.

Question 18

Sociocultural perspective

Answer 18

The view that children’s cognitive development is not only brought about by social interaction but is also inseparable from the sociocultural contexts in which they live.
- emphasize that cultures influence cognitive development by the tools that are available to support children’s thinking, such as an abacus (counting toy)

Question 19

Intersubjectivity

Answer 19

According to Vygotsky, mutual, shared understanding among people who are participating in an activity together

Question 20

zone of proximal development

Answer 20

The difference between what children can do with assistance and what they can do alone.

Question 21

Scaffolding

Answer 21

A teaching style in which adults adjust the amount of assistance that they offer based on the learner’s needs.

Question 22

Private Speech

Answer 22

• Sometimes a child talks to himself as he plays. This behaviour demonstrates private speech, comments not directed to others but intended to help children regulate their own behaviour. Vygotsky viewed private speech as an intermediate step toward self-regulation of cognitive skills
• Finally, as children gain ever greater skill, private speech becomes inner speech, Vygotsky’s term for thought.

Question 23

Information-Processing Theory

Answer 23

A view that human cognition consists of mental hardware and mental software.

Question 24

Working Memory

Answer 24

A type of memory in which information is held in raw, unanalyzed form very briefly (no longer than a few seconds).

Question 25

Long-term memory

Answer 25

A permanent storehouse that has unlimited capacity for memories

Question 26

central executive

Answer 26

the component of the information-processing system, analogous to a computer’s operating system, that coordinates the activities of the system.

Question 27

executive functioning

Answer 27

A mechanism of growth that includes inhibitory processes, planning, and cognitive flexibility.

Question 28

automatic processes

Answer 28

Cognitive activities that require virtually no effort.
- As children and adolescents acquire greater skill at new tasks such as typing, some aspects of the task are performed automatically, which means they require no effort

Question 29

Connectionist theories

Answer 29

IP theories that view the mind as a system of networks of processors.
- One advantage of the connectionist perspective is that it can explain issues such as the problems of over-regularization in children’s language
- Over-regularization is where children produce incorrect grammatical functions such as “goed” instead of “went.

Question 30

core-knowledge theories

Answer 30

The view that infants are born with rudimentary knowledge of the world that is elaborated upon based on children’s experiences

Question 31

teleological explanation

Answer 31

As applied to children’s naïve theories of living things, the belief that living things and parts of living things exist for a purpose.

Question 32

folk psychology

Answer 32

Our informal beliefs about other people and their behaviour.

A cornerstone of folk psychology is the idea that people’s behaviour is often intentional designed to achieve a goal

Question 33

theory of mind

Answer 33

Between ages 2 and 5, children develop a theory of mind, a naïve understanding of the relations between mind and behaviour.