Chapter 4 Practice Test

Which is the best analogy for the way Vygotsky described cognitive development?

A supervisor showing a new worker harder tasks, only after the worker understands simpler tasks

Which process most determines what sensory information will receive additional cognitive processing?

Attention

Which term refers to the mental and neural structures that are built-in and allow the mind to operate?

Mental hardware

Bonita believes children need lots of stimulating objects in their environment so they can form their own theories about objects and operations. She does not believe children's development is improved or accelerated much by increasing their interactions with family members, peers, and teachers. Most likely, Bonita is a follower of ________ .

Piaget only

Latoya shows her child a baseball card that had writing on one side and a picture on the other. While the child is looking at the picture, Latoya asks her what was on the other side. The child, holding the card with the picture toward her, said, "See Mommy, it's a baseball player." Latoya's child is probably in what stage?

Preoperational

What is the correct order of stages in Piaget's theory?

Sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, formal operational

Adolf scolds his son Gephart for talking to himself while performing a new task, believing it to be a symptom of poor psychological health. Which theorist would most likely defend Gephart's actions as beneficial?

Vygotsky

A child who says her teddy bear feels sad is showing ________ .

animism

Research has shown that ________ .

children use private speech on more difficult tasks and after mistakes

Judy is two months old. Her mother usually feeds her while wearing a yellow smock. One day, her mother notices that Judy coos and becomes alert when she is wearing yellow. Judy's behavior most likely reflects ________ .

classical conditioning

Little Omar thought he knew all about dogs, but recently, Omar saw a Chihuahua and realized he needed to find out more about dogs. Omar is in a state of ________ .

disequilibrium

By 18 months, children talk, gesture, and have begun to learn new words rapidly, all of which reflect their ________ .

emerging understanding of symbols and use of symbols

A preschoolers' memory can be best described as ________ .

having good memory, but are more suggestible than adults

Although both are developmental psychologists, Dr. Connelly adopts the ________ view, which involves studying the neural mechanisms that control children's ability to learn grammar, whereas Dr. Sanari adopts the ________ view in her studies of children's ability to detect grammatical regularities.

linguistic; cognitive

Fundamental to adults' ________ theories is the distinction between living and nonliving things.

naive

The idea of a "zone of proximal development" recognizes that children's development of cognition ________ .

occurs in social settings, only gradually coming under independent control

A child smiles and gains attention from a caretaker, so the child begins to smile more often. This is an example of ________ .

operant conditioning

Jena is teaching little Casey to tie his shoes. She first focuses Casey's attention on doing the first cross-over, after which she directs his attention on how to loop and hold the strings, but then Jena finishes the knots herself. Jena understands the concept of ________ .

scaffolding

Preschool children begin using grammatical morphemes in their speech, which is attributable to ________ .

their growing knowledge of grammatical rules instead of just memory for words

Some researchers believe that infants show imitation as young as ________ .

two to three weeks

Overall, Piaget ________ infants' and children's cognitive abilities, but ________ those of adolescents.

underestimated; overestimated