Exam 6: A: Theories of Cognitive Development

A four-year-old is not capable of realizing that a baby pig that is adopted by a cow would grow up to look and behave like a pig.

According to Vygotsky, the difference between what a child can do independently and what a child can do with assistance defines the zone of proximal development.

Formal operational thinkers can envision alternate realities and examine their consequences. They can create hypotheses and test them.

Preoperational children are able to juggle multiple aspects of a problem at the same time, thus correcting the centration that is seen in the sensorimotor stage.

Preoperational children typically believe that others see the world, both literally and figuratively, exactly as they do, a concept known as egocentrism.

Preschoolers' naïve theories of biology are complex but incomplete. For instance they believe that plants are not living things.

Some children move through the stages more rapidly than others, depending on their ability and experiences.

A weakness of Piaget's theory is that it undervalues the influence of the sociocultural environment on cognitive development.

Unlike adults, four-year-old children do not understand that animals grow (get physically bigger and more complex) but that inanimate objects do not change in this way.

According to information-processing, as children grow, they develop better strategies, increased capacity of working memory, and more effective executive function.

Research has shown that infants as young as one year do not have an understanding of intentionality, but by age two, children understand that people's behaviour is often intentional.

When a skill has been mastered, individual steps are no longer stored in working memory, which means that more capacity is available for other activities.

Concrete operational children are able to reverse their thinking, which allows them to perform conservation tasks that preoperational children cannot.

According to Piaget, infants are born with object permanence, the ability to understand that objects exist independently.

Long-term memory is like a computer's hard drive, a fairly permanent storehouse of programs and data.

Piaget claimed that understanding of objects develops slowly, however, modern researchers have shown that babies understand objects much earlier than Piaget claimed.

One of Piaget's greatest contributions to teaching was constructivism, the view that children are active participants in their own development.

Executive functioning is synonymous with skilled problem solving in that it involves a plan, often requires flexibility, and the ability to inhibit irrelevant responses.

Assimilation and accommodation are usually in balance, or equilibrium.

For Piaget, children at all ages are like scientists in that they create theories about how the world works.