Psy 304
Browne/Castore
Study guide for Test 2
Note: All sections of the text may be tested on, except the two “Speaking of
Development” sections.
FROM THE TEXT:
Questions with an asterisk (*) are from both book and lecture.
Chapter 6
*1. What are the 2 main mechanisms of development proposed in Piaget’s theory, and
how do they work?
(Think of examples for each)
*2. What are the main hallmarks of each substage within the sensorimotor stage?
(Think of “typical” behaviors infants might display in each stage)
3. How does Karen Wynn test addition ability in 5-month-olds?
*4. What is the major strength of the preoperational stage (not present in the sensorimotor
period)?
*5. What is the major limitation of preoperational thinking, and what specific deficits
does this limitation lead to?
(Main limitation = centration)
6. Besides overcoming the specific limitations of the preoperational stage, what other
concepts do concrete operational thinkers achieve? What is their main limitation?
*7. What is the main hallmark of formal operational thinking? (It’s the same as the
limitation in the previous question.) How is formal operational reasoning different from
concrete operational reasoning?
*8. Who uses formal operational thinking? (E.g., do all adults use it all the time?) What
factors besides age determine its use?
9. What criticisms have been levied against Piaget’s theory, and on what evidence are the
criticisms based?
10. What has research shown about the effect of culture on developmental stage?
*11. According to Vygotsky, what is the role of other people and of culture as a whole in
children’s cognitive development?
*12. According to Vygotsky, how does development occur? (involves “scaffolding” or
“guided learning,” ZPD, and cultural tools)
*13. What is Vygotsky’s view of the function of private speech, and what does private
speech eventually become?
Chapter 7
*1. What unifies various information-processing approaches (what do they have in
common)?
*2. What is the distinction between cognitive architecture (structural features) and
processes in an i.p. system?
*3. What are the 3 basic components of memory/information processing (according to the
Atkinson-Shiffrin model)? What are the characteristics of each?
*4. Why can’t we remember everything we ever learned? (Or: If long-term memory is
permanent, why do we forget things we once knew?)
*5. How do things get from one part of memory to the next?
6. In the levels-of-processing theory, what distinguishes the different levels?
7. How do the three-system model and the levels-of-processing theory differ? (What does
each say about what changes and what remains stable?)
8. How do children’s control and planning of attention change with age?
9. What reasons have been proposed as to why young children are poor planners of
attention?
10. What is ADHD, and what is the nature of the controversy surrounding its treatment?
11. What evidence is there for and against the idea of infantile amnesia? What might
prevent people from retaining very early memories?
12. What limitations are present in preschoolers’ autobiographical memory?
13. According to the operating efficiency hypothesis, what accounts for increased
memory capabilities with age?
14. What are memory control strategies, and how does their use result in increased
memory capacity? (Involves “chunking”)
15. What are the roles of metamemory and content knowledge in memory development?
16. What criteria should be met when doing cross-cultural research on memory?
17. What evidence is there that preschoolers’ memories are influenced by suggestion?
18. What can be done to maximize accuracy when questioning preschoolers?
19. What is the difference between phonics-based and whole-language approaches to
reading?
20. What are the components of critical thinking?
Chapter 8
1. What do the following terms mean, and what are some examples of each: phonemes,
morphemes, syntax, semantics, pragmatics.
2. What is the difference between production and comprehension? Which comes first?
2. How does babbling change over the first several months?
3. Infants’ first words are often holophrases. How do these differ from other one-word
utterances?
4. What are children’s first sentences like?
5. What are 2 mistakes in word learning that young children often make?
6. What evidence shows that preschoolers are using grammatical rules?
7. What happens to the relative ratio of private speech to social speech as children get
older?
8. What are the linguistic achievements of school-age children, and what linguistic
limitation is mentioned? (Limitation involves understanding intonation.)
9. How does metalinguistic awareness help them in communication and self control?
*10. What are arguments for and against behavioral and nativist views of language
acquisition?
11. What evidence is suggestive of language shaping thought?
12. What evidence is suggestive of thought shaping language?
13. How might language differences partially account for differences in math ability
between Chinese and American children?
14. What are the characteristics of infant-directed speech?
15. How does speech directed toward girls differ from speech directed toward boys?
16. How does the language heard by children from lower-income homes differ from the
language heard by children from affluent homes? What factors might account for these
differences?
17. What is the Ebonics controversy about?
Siegler reading (handout)
1. What is a belief-desire theory of the mind, and what are the 3 types of understanding
upon which it is based?
2. How is early pretend play related to the later development of the understanding of the
mind?
3. What problems do 3-year-olds have with appearance-reality tasks (i.e., what does it
mean to fail these tasks)?
4. What is the false-belief task, and what incorrect response do younger children (3-yearolds) typically give?
5. What does the fact that autistic children do poorly on false-belief tasks and
appearance-reality tasks suggest about the possible origins of false-belief understanding?
.
6. Alternatively, what evidence suggests that false-belief understanding results from more
general cognitive mechanisms?
FROM LECTURES:
(Questions that have already been asked in the previous question are not included.)
Film: Playing the Language Game
1. What are the arguments for the view that some aspects of language are innate? (Much
of it was also covered in lecture.)
Guest lectures on language
(Melissa gave ages in class; don’t need to know specific ages, but do know order of
development as well as whether things happen in infancy (0-2), preschool (3-5), or later.
1. What are the main milestones of semantic development?
2. What are the three ways in which the linguistic environment has been deemed
deficient?
3. What are the milestones that children pass as they acquire greater understanding of
syntax?
4. Ellen Markman proposed three learning constraints that aid children when acquiring
the meanings of new words. What are these constraints and what problem do they help
children solve? (Also in the film.)
Piaget
1. Where does Piaget’s theory fall on the issues of nature vs. nurture, stability versus
change, and qualitative vs. quantitative? (doesn’t fall clearly on one side or the other on
all issues)
2. What is Piaget’s view about object permanence in each substage of the sensorimotor
period?
3. What is the relationship between object permanence and attachment/separation
distress?
4. What are some examples of preschoolers’ symbolic thought?
5. What are the 3 kinds of perspective taking that preschoolers have trouble with?
6. What is Piaget’s “3-mountain task,” and why has it been criticized?
7. What is the “revised” version mentioned in class, and why is it easier?
8. What distinguishes the 2 levels of visual perspective taking?
9. What classification tasks can preschoolers do, and which ones do they have trouble
with?
10. What evidence is there that preschoolers have trouble distinguishing appearance from
reality?
11. How do concrete operational and formal operational thinkers differ in their
approaches to the pendulum task?
12. How do they differ in how they evaluate logical statements?
Vygotsky
1. In formulating his theory, what did Vygotsky perceive his purpose to be?
2. What are the two traditional perspectives on the relationship between learning
(instruction) and development? What is Vygotsky’s alternative view of this relationship?
3. What is the role of internalization in the theory? What studies show evidence of
internalization?
4. What criticisms have been levied against the theory?
Information Processing
1. What are the assumptions shared by information processing theories?
2. What evidence is there that we have a sensory memory, and does it develop throughout
childhood?
3. What is one reason older children can maintain more information in short-term
memory than younger children? (This is different from why they tend to get more
information from short-term into long-term memory.)
4. What types of information are included in long-term memory?
5. What does the “tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon” tell us about how information is stored
in long-term memory?
6. What is the process of automatization, and how does it allow for more
learning/processing to occur?
7. Why is encoding especially important?
8. What evidence suggests that prior expectations influence encoding, and that encoding
influences what is subsequently learned? (The same study answers both questions.)
9. What evidence is there that during the 1st year of life children become faster at
encoding?
10. What are the major differences between rule-based and connectionist forms of
computer modeling?
11. How do connectionist models “learn”?
12. What are examples of what actual connectionist models have been shown to learn?
How is their learning “behavior” similar to that of people?
13. What are some criticisms of connectionist models?
Magical Beliefs
1. What is magical thinking?
2. What were the findings of the 1970’s study on children’s fantastical beliefs, in which
children were shown pictures of real and fantastical scenes involving people and animals?
3. What was a major problem with this study?
4. What were the method and results of the study addressing the role of emotion on
judgments of reality?
5. According to studies discussed in class, with what characteristics of parents does the
number of fantasy figures children believe in correlate?
6. How do Jewish and Christian children differ in the number of fantasy figures they
believe in? Why might this be the case?
Science as a metaphor for children’s thinking
1. In which 2 ways has children’s thinking been compared to science?
2. How is children’s thinking different from that of scientists and from science as a
whole?
3. What are the main characteristics of theories?
4. How is children’s knowledge of the mind theory-like?
IF YOU HAVE ANSWERED ALL THE ABOVE QUESTIONS THOROUGHLY,
AND YOU UNDERSTAND AND REMEMBER YOUR ANSWERS (CAN
REPHRASE THEM, ELABORATE ON THEM, ETC.), YOU WILL DO VERY
WELL ON THE TEST. GOOD LUCK!!