Chapter 4: Theories of Cognitive Development

1. Explain Piaget's theory of intellectual development.

2. Distinguish between assimilation and accommodation and explain their significance to Piaget's definition of intelligence.

3. Describe the approximate age and the new ways of knowing that characterize each of Piaget's four stages of cognitive development.

4. Describe the major acquisitions that occur at the end of the sensorimotor period and explain what acquisition is common to all.

5. Explain how new research has challenged many of Piaget's views of development. What is the present day assessment of Piaget's theory?

6. Describe Vygotsky's view of the social origins of cognitive development including his concept of "the zone of proximal development," the relationship between language and thought, and the role of culture in development.

7. Explain how guided participation or social scaffolding contributes to cognitive development, including the concepts of the zone of proximal development and intersubjectivity.

8. Describe the basic processes underlying the Information Processing approach to cognitive development (i.e., basic memory processes, speed of processing, memory and learning strategies, content knowledge) and explain how each of the components in the system changes with development?

9. What did Siegler discover in his microgenetic study of the development of the "min" strategy for solving single-digit arithmetic problems?

10. Explain the distinctions between traditional information-processing approaches and a) connectionist theories, b) dynamic systems theories, and c) overlapping-waves theories.

11. Describe how children's script knowledge develops and how script knowledge contributes to cognitive development.

12. What are core knowledge theories of development and how do they account for cognitive development?

13. Be able to compare each of the four theories discussed in Chapter 4 (Piaget, sociocultural, information-processing, and core knowledge) with respect to central developmental issues: a) nature vs. nurture; b) continuity and discontinuity; c) the active child; d) mechanisms of development; e) the sociocultural context of development; and f) individual differences in development.

Nelson article:

1. What is infantile amnesia and what are the explanations for this phenomenon: language development, cognitive restructuring, generic vs. episodic memories, and social interaction?

2. Explain how social interaction can contribute to autobiographical memory development.
 

Chapter 5: Infancy

1. Describe different methods for studying infant perception (i.e., preferential looking and habituation).

2. What visual abilities and preferences do infants show at birth? Why is the newborn's visual perception described as "obligatory" or "stimulus bound?"

3. What developments in visual perception occur at 2-3 months?

4. Describe the development of face perception in infancy.

5. Describe the development of depth perception in infancy. Explain the importance of size constancy, and the visual cliff experiment.

6. Explain Gibson's theory of perceptual learning.

7. What evidence is there for intermodal perception at birth?

8. Identify several reflexes that are present at birth? What is the function of these reflex behaviors?

9. Describe the developmental progression of reaching and self-locomotion.

10. Explain the role of culture and experience in the achievement of motor milestones.

11. Explain and be able to think of examples of each of the following forms of infant learning: habituation/dishabituation, differentiation, instrumental conditioning, classical conditioning, observational learning.

12. Compare the results of recent research on infants' object concept using the violation-of-expectancy procedure with expectations based on Piaget's theory.

13. Identify alternative explanations for the A-Not-B error.

14. Describe the development of means-ends problem solving in infancy.

Thelen Article:
1. Why did Thelen study babies' stepping behavior in a fish tank and on a treadmill? What did these demonstrate about motor development in infancy?

2. Explain how nature and nurture contribute to motor development in Esther Thelen's dynamic systems theory. What other variables need to be considered?

3. Explain the concept of "self-organization" in relation to Thelen's dynamic systems approach?
 

Chapter 6: Language and Symbol Use

1. Explain the components of language development, including phonological development, semantic development syntactic development, pragmatic development, and metalinguistic knowledge.

2. Describe the competencies in speech perception that are present in early infancy and the changes that occur in this aspect of language development before the end of the first year of life.

3. Explain how babies can distinguish words from non-words based on the the distributional properties of speech.

3. Describe the developmental progression of crying, cooing, and  babbling.  Explain Laura Pettito's views on why deaf children babble with their hands.

4. Describe the important characteristic of children's first words during the holophrastic period of language development (e.g., the principle of maximum contrast, selection in children's words, rate of acquisition, the word explosion and individual styles).

5. Explain the significance of overextensions, underextension, the "wug test" and overgeneralizations.

6. Explain what is meant by fast mapping and the rules that children use to learn new words quickly.

7. Describe the developmental progression in children's acquisition of syntax.

8. Summarize the development of children's conversational skills during the preschool period.

9. What evidence is used to support the innatist view of language development? (Hint: be able to discuss the importance of biological features, critical period, universals in language development, language as a uniquely human ability, and the role of negative evidence in language learning.)

10. What evidence is used to support the social interactionist view of language development? (Hint: be able to discuss the role of social scaffolding, infant-directed speech, fine-tuning, and indirect feedback).

11. What is the connectionist view of language development and what evidence is used to support this view?

12. Explain the concept of dual representation and its significance in the development of symbolic understanding.

13. Summarize the development of pretend play.

14. Describe characteristics of children's early drawings.
 

Chapter 7: Concept Development

1. Explain how nature and nurture contribute to concept development.

2. Why is perceptual categoization a key element in infants' thinking?

3. Describe children' development of category heirarchies by referring to superordinate, basic, and subordinate levels.

4. Explain what is meant by naive psychology and describe the psychological constructs included in the naive psychology of children from infancy through age 5.

5. Describe false-belief problems and appearance-reality problems and how they relate to children's developing theory of mind.

6. How does children's understanding of living and non living things develop?

7. Explain the role of essentialism in children's understanding of inheritance.

8. What is the significance of egocentric representations, landmarks, self-locomotion, and dead reckoning in the development of children's representation of space?

9. How does children's understanding of causal relations develop?

10. What is  the major change that characterizes children's understanding of numerical equality from infancy to age 4?

11. Explain two alternative explanations for the experimental evidence that infants understand simple arithmetic (be sure to consider the concept of subitizing).

12. Compare the development of counting and the development of numerical ordering.

13. Explain how core knowledge theories account for concept development.

Baillergeon article:

1. Explain how the violation-of-expectancy paradigm is used in these studies to examine infants' knowledge of the physical world.

2. Explain the difference between qualitative and quantitative concepts.