Jean Piaget

Question 1

In Piaget’s theory, the second major stage of cognitive development, in which symbolic thought expands but children cannot yet use logic effectively.

Answer 1

preoperational stage

Question 2

accompanied by a growing understanding of space, causality, identities, categorization, and number.

Answer 2

advances in symbolic thought

Question 3

Use of symbols

Answer 3

Children do not need to be in
sensorimotor contact with an object, person, or event in order to think about it.

Children can imagine that objects or people have properties other than those they actually have

Question 4

Understanding of identities

Answer 4

Children are aware that superficial
alterations do not change the nature of things.

Question 5

Children realize that events have causes

Answer 5

Understanding of cause and effect

Question 6

Children organize objects, people, and events into meaningful categories.

Answer 6

Ability to classify

Question 7

Children can count and deal with
quantities.

Answer 7

Understanding of number

Question 8

Empathy

Answer 8

Children become more able to imagine how others might feel.

Question 9

Theory of mind

Answer 9

Children become more aware of mental activity and the functioning of the mind

Question 10

Immature Aspects of Preoperational Thought (According to Piaget):

Answer 10

Centration: inability to decenter

Irreversibility

Focus on states rather than transformations

Transductive reasoning

Egocentrism

Animism

Inability to distinguish appearance from reality

Question 11

Children focus on one aspect of a situation and neglect others.

Answer 11

Centration: inability to decenter

Question 12

Children fail to understand that some operations or actions can be reversed, restoring the original situation.

Answer 12

Irreversibility

Question 13

Children fail to understand the significance of the transformation between states.

Answer 13

Focus on states rather than transformations

Question 14

Children do not use deductive or inductive reasoning; instead they see cause where none exists.

Answer 14

Transductive reasoning

Question 15

Children assume everyone else thinks, perceives, and feels as they do.

Answer 15

Egocentrism

Question 16

Children attribute life to objects not alive.

Answer 16

Animism

Question 17

Children confuse what is real with outward appearance

Answer 17

Inability to distinguish appearance from reality

Question 18

Jacob teases his younger sister that he has more juice because his juice box is in a tall, skinny glass, but hers is in into a short, wide glass.

Answer 18

Centration: inability to decenter

Question 19

Jacob does not realize that the juice in each glass can be poured back into the juice box from which it came, which means the amounts must be the same.

Answer 19

Irreversibility

Question 20

In the conservation task, Jacob does not understand that
transforming the shape of a liquid
(pouring it from one container into another) does not change the amount.

Answer 20

Focus on states rather than
transformations

Question 21

Luis was mean to his sister. Then she got sick. Luis concludes that he made his sister sick

Answer 21

Transductive reasoning

Question 22

Kara holds a book so only she can see the picture she is asking her father to explain to her.

Answer 22

Egocentrism

Question 23

Amanda says the car is hungry and wants some gas to eat.

Answer 23

Animism

Question 24

Courtney believes that if she wears blue-tinted glasses, then everything she sees really did turn
blue.

Answer 24

Inability to distinguish
appearance from reality

Question 25

Piaget’s term for ability to use mental representations (words, numbers, or images) to which a child has attached meaning.

Answer 25

symbolic function

Question 26

Play involving imaginary people and situations; also called fantasy play, dramatic play, or imaginative play.

Answer 26

pretend play

Question 27

deferred imitation

Answer 27

children imitate an action at some point after having observed it,
becomes more robust after 18 months.

Question 28

It is not until at least age ___ that most children reliably grasp the relationships between pictures, maps, or scale models and the objects or spaces they represent

Answer 28

3

Question 29

Piaget’s term for a preoperational
child’s tendency to mentally link
particular phenomena, whether or not there is logically a causal relationship

Answer 29

transduction

Question 30

They mentally link two events, especially events close in time, whether or not there is logically
a causal relationship

Answer 30

transduction

Question 31

identities

Answer 31

concept that people and many things are basically the same even if they change in outward form, size, or appearance

Question 32

By age ___, many children can classify by two criteria, such as color and shape

Answer 32

4

Question 33

research findings:

Answer 33

researchers questioned 3- and
4-year-olds about something more familiar to them—differences between a rock, a person,
and a doll—the children showed they understood that people are alive and rocks and dolls are not

Question 34

Research suggests that infants as young as _____________ indicate, with longer looking times and increased staring, that if one doll is added to another doll, there should be two dolls, not just one.

Answer 34

4½ months

Question 35

By ___________ of age, they can
“count” higher and know that 8 dots are different from 16 dots

Answer 35

6 months

Other research has found that ordinality—the concept of comparing quantities
(more or less, bigger or smaller)—seems to begin around 9 to 11 months

Question 36

cardinality principle

Answer 36

children understand that the number of items in a set is the same regardless of how they are arranged and that the last number counted is the total number of items in the set regardless of how they are counted, starts to develop at about 2½ years of age.

Question 37

By age ___, most children can count to 20 or more and know the relative sizes of the numbers 1 through 10

Answer 37

5

Question 38

By the time they enter elementary school, most children have developed basic “number sense”

Answer 38

This basic level of number skills includes counting, number knowledge (ordinality), number transformations (simple addition
and subtraction), estimation (“Is this group of dots more or less than 5?”), and recognition
of number patterns (2 plus 2 equals 4, and so does 3 plus 1)

Question 39

In Piaget’s terminology, to think
simultaneously about several aspects of a situation.

Answer 39

decenter

Question 40

three-mountain task

Answer 40

A child sits facing a table that holds three large mounds. A doll is placed on a chair at the opposite side of the table. The investigator asks the child how the “mountains” would look to the doll. Piaget found that young children could only describe the mountains
from their own perspective.

Question 41

Piaget’s term for awareness that two objects that are equal according to a certain measure remain equal in the face of perceptual alteration so long as
nothing has been added to or taken away from either object.

Answer 41

conservation

Question 42

Tests of Various Kinds of Conservation

Answer 42

number
length
liquid
matter (mass)
weight

Question 43

Piagetian researchers have suggested young children’s failure to recognize false beliefs
stems from

Answer 43

egocentric thinking

Question 44

about ___ years of age children become capable of telling simple lies, such as claiming they received a winning card in a game or denying looking at a hidden toy they were instructed to avoid

Answer 44

3

Question 45

It is not until almost ___ years of age that children become better
able to think about what they should and should not know and thus conceal their transgressions more effectively

Answer 45

8

Question 46

Social competence

Answer 46

Children whose teachers and peers rate them high on social skills are better able to recognize false beliefs, to distinguish between real and pretend emotion, and to take another person’s point of view

Question 47

Young infants are extremely interested in other people’s

Answer 47

eyes

Question 48

children who were able to correctly reason about the mental states
of characters in animated scenarios showed brain wave activation in their _________________, much as the adults in the study did

Answer 48

left frontal cortex

Question 49

An __________________________ may be a sign of a cognitive or developmental impairment. Individuals with this type of impairment have difficulty determining the intentions of others, lack understanding of how their behavior affects others, and
have a difficult time with social reciprocity

Answer 49

incomplete or ineffective theory of mind

Question 50

Research suggests that children with autism are deficient in _______________ and that this is a core feature of autism

Answer 50

theory of mind