Exam 2 Material

Question 1

Cognition

Answer 1

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.

Question 2

Constructivist approach

Answer 2

Piaget’s view of viewing children as discovering, or constructing, virtually all knowledge about their world through their own activity.

Question 3

Schemes

Answer 3

According to Piaget, these are specific psychological structures. They are organized ways of making sense of experience and change with age.

Question 4

Mental representations

Answer 4

Internal depictions of information that the mind can manipulate.

Question 5

Adaptation

Answer 5

Piaget’s concept which involves building schemes through direct interaction with the environment. Consists of assimilation and accommodation.

Question 6

Assimilation

Answer 6

We use our current schemes to interpret the external world.

Question 7

Accommodation

Answer 7

Creation of new schemes or adjustment of old ones after noticing that our current way of thinking does not capture the environment completely.

Question 8

Equilibration

Answer 8

Back and forth movement between equilibrium and disequilibrium of schemes.

Question 9

Organization

Answer 9

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.

Question 10

Sensorimotor stage

Answer 10

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.

Question 11

Circular reaction

Answer 11

Involves stumbling onto a new experience caused by the baby’s own motor activity. “Circular” because as the infant tries to repeat the event again and again, a sensorimotor response that originally occurred by chance strengthens into a new scheme.

Question 12

Intentional or goal-directed behavior

Answer 12

Coordinating schemes deliberately to solve simple problems

Question 13

Object permanence

Answer 13

The understanding that objects continue to exist when they are out of sight.

Question 14

A-not-B search error

Answer 14

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

Question 15

Sensorimotor substages

Answer 15

1. Reflexive schemes (birth to 1 month)
2. Primary circular reactions (1-4 months)
3. Secondary circular reactions (4-8 months)
4. Coordination of secondary circular reactions (8-12 months)
5. Tertiary circular reactions (12-18 months)
6. Mental representation (18 months - 2 years)

Question 16

Deferred imitation

Answer 16

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

Question 17

Make-believe play

Answer 17

Children act out everyday and imaginary activities.

Question 18

Violation of expectation method

Answer 18

Habituate babies to a physical event to familiarize them with a situation in which their knowledge will be tested. Or they may simply show babies an expected event and and unexpected event. Heightened attention to the unexpected event suggests that the infant is “surprised” by a deviation from physical reality and is aware of that aspect of the physical world.

Question 19

Analogical problem solving

Answer 19

Applying a solution strategy from one problem to other relevant problems.

Question 20

Displaced reference

Answer 20

The realization that words can be used to cue mental images of things not physically present.

Question 21

Preoperational stage

Answer 21

Spans the years of 2 to 7, the most obvious change is an extraordinary increase in representational, or symbolic, activity.

Question 22

Sociodramatic play

Answer 22

the make-believe with others that is under way by the end of the second year and increases rapidly in complexity during early childhood.

Question 23

Dual representation

Answer 23

Viewing a symbolic object as both an objet in its own right and a symbol. At age 3 this becomes mature.

Question 24

Operations

Answer 24

Mental representations of actions that obey logical rules

Question 25

Egocentrism

Answer 25

Failure to distinguish others’ symbolic viewpoints from one’s own.

Question 26

Conservation

Answer 26

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

Question 27

Centration

Answer 27

Focus on one aspect of a situation, neglecting other important features.

Question 28

Reversibility

Answer 28

The ability to go through a series of steps in a problem and then mentally reverse direction, returning to the starting point.

Question 29

Hierarchical classification

Answer 29

the organization of objects into classes and subclasses on the basis of similarities and differences.

Question 30

Concrete Operational Stage

Answer 30

Extending from about 7 to 11 years, marks a major turning point in cognitive development. Though becomes far more logical, flexible, and organized.

Question 31

Seriation

Answer 31

In relation to concrete operational stage, it is the ability to order items along a quantitative dimension, such as length or weight.

Question 32

Transitive Inference

Answer 32

In relation to concrete operational stage, it is the ability to seriate mentally.

Question 33

cognitive maps

Answer 33

In relation to concrete operational stage, mental representations of familiar large scale spaces.

Question 34

Egocentric speech

Answer 34

Utterances that young children say to themselves while playing.

Question 35

Private speech

Answer 35

Egocentric speech that becomes silent and internal as the child grows older.

Question 36

Zone of Proximal development

Answer 36

Vygotsky’s belief, a range of tasks too difficult for the child to do alone but possible with the help of adults and more skilled peers.

Question 37

Intersubjectivity

Answer 37

The process whereby two participants who begin a task with different understandings arrive at a shared understanding.

Question 38

Scaffolding

Answer 38

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

Question 39

Guided participation

Answer 39

A broader concept than scaffolding, it refers to shared endeavors between more expert and less expert participants, without specifying the precise features of communication.

Question 40

Reciprocal Teaching

Answer 40

Collaborative group between teacher and a few students where they take turns reading dialogues on the content of a text passage.

Question 41

Cooperative learning

Answer 41

Small groups of classmates work toward common goals

Question 42

Sensory register

Answer 42

In regards to the Informational processing approach, in the sensory register a broad panorama of sights and sounds are represented directly but stored only momentarily.

Question 43

Short term memory store

Answer 43

Here, we retain attended-to information briefly so we can actively “work” on it to reach our goals.

Question 44

Working memory

Answer 44

Here the number of items that can be briefly held in mind while also engaging in some effort to monitor or manipulate those items.

Question 45

Central executive

Answer 45

Directs the flow of information, implementing the basic procedures just mentioned and also engaging in more sophisticated activities that enable complex, flexible thinking.

Question 46

Automatic processes

Answer 46

Things so well-learned that they require no space in working memory and, therefore, permit us to focus on other information while simultaneously performing them.

Question 47

Long term memory

Answer 47

Permanent knowledge base

Question 48

Executive function

Answer 48

the set of cognitive operations and strategies necessary for self-initiated, purposeful behavior in relatively novel, challenging situations.