Deck 9: Cognitive Development in Early Childhood

Question 1

Preschool children show the symbolic function through deferred imitation, pretend play, and language.

Answer 1

True

Question 2

Most children do not reliably grasp the relationships between pictures, maps, or scale models and the larger or smaller objects or spaces they represent until at least age 6.

Answer 2

False

Question 3

Naturalistic observations of 3- to 5-year-olds' everyday conversations with their parents show flexible causal reasoning.

Answer 3

True

Question 4

Ordinality is essentially the concept of comparing qualities of two similar objects.

Question 5

Socioeconomic status and preschool experience can affect how rapidly children advance in math.

Question 6

A classic example of centration is the failure to understand conservation.

Question 7

One fundamental deficit in children with autism is the failure to develop an adequate theory of mind.

Question 8

According to Jean Piaget, not until about age 8 or 9 do children begin to understand the distinction between what seems to be and what is.

Question 9

Some children develop theory-of-mind abilities earlier than others.

Question 10

Information-processing models depict the brain as containing two storehouses: sensory memory and short-term memory.

Question 11

Preschool children, like those in all age groups, do better on recognition than on recall, but both abilities improve with age.

Question 12

Autobiographical memory primarily helps a child know what to expect and how to act.

Question 13

The two most commonly used individual intelligence tests for preschoolers are the Otis-Lennon Intelligence Scale and the Denver Developmental Screening Test.

Question 14

An intelligence quotient (IQ) score is a measure of how well a child can do certain tasks at a certain time in comparison with others of the same age.

Question 15

The zone of proximal development in children can be assessed by traditional psychometric tests of intelligence that provide a better measure of children's intellectual potential than do dynamic tests.

Question 16

Many children who speak late, especially those whose comprehension is normal, eventually catch up.

Question 17

Prereading skills can be divided into two types: oral language skills and specific phonological skills.

Question 18

The Reggio Emilia approach is based on the belief that children's natural intelligence involves rational, spiritual, and empirical aspects.

Question 19

The best-known early intervention preschool program for children of low-income families in the United States is Project Head Start.

Question 20

Although some states do not require kindergarten programs, most 5-year-olds attend either a public or private kindergarten.

Question 21

During early childhood, children enter the second major stage of cognitive development that Jean Piaget called the

A) concrete operational stage.
B) formal operational stage.
C) preoperational stage.
D) sensorimotor stage.

Question 22

________ is Jean Piaget's term for the ability to use mental representations to which a child has attached meaning.

A) Symbolic function
B) Centration
C) Transduction
D) Egocentrism

Question 23

Pretend play is proof of children's ability to grasp

A) the use of symbols.
B) inductive reasoning.
C) deductive reasoning.
D) the logic of cause and effect.

Question 24

Which of the following scenarios illustrates the use of symbolic function by a child?

A) Two days after 3-year-old Kellie stole two cookies from her mother's cookie jar, the jar fell down and broke, and Kellie held herself responsible for this.
B) On Sunday morning, 3-year-old Betsy watched her father make pancakes. On Tuesday, she made pancakes with modeling clay.
C) Four-year-old Carmen walked up to her mother and asked her to beat the chair that made her fall.
D) After seeing another person eat chocolate pudding, 4-year-old Darren screams at her mother and tells her that he wants chocolate pudding.

Question 25

Which of the following is an example of pretend play?

A) During a game of hide-and-seek, 3-year-old Lindsay hides behind a car, thinking that her friend will never look for her there.
B) Three-year-old Nina takes her father's belt and makes it slither on the ground, trying to imitate the movements of a snake.
C) Four-year-old Jake narrates a story to his younger brother in a highly modulated voice.
D) Four-year-old Molly tells stories of what happened in her class, adding a few exaggerated details.

Question 26

Gannon and Cole, who are both 3 years old, ride their bikes around the driveway, making sounds of a moving train. They tell their parents that they are train conductors. What kind of play are they engaging in?

A) pretend play
B) guided play
C) narrative play
D) formal play

Question 27

Three-year-old Sarah playfully hit her brother, Adam, on Saturday evening. When Adam woke up with a fever the next morning, Sarah concluded that she made her brother sick by hitting him. This is an example of

A) categorization.
B) transduction.
C) conservation.
D) animism.

Question 28

Three-year-old Austin is playing with his toy cars. He arranges all his toy cars based on their color. Austin's ability to arrange things by color illustrates the concept of

A) categorization.
B) conservation.
C) transduction.
D) theory of mind.

Question 29

________ is the tendency to attribute life to objects that are not alive.

A) Symbolism
B) Conservation
C) Centration
D) Animism

Question 30

Renee pours a glass of water for her doll, telling her mother that her doll is thirsty. This act best illustrates the Piagetian concept of

A) conservation.
B) centration.
C) transitivity.
D) animism.

Question 31

Four-year-old Hatim thinks that it is cloudy because the sun is angry and is hiding behind the clouds. This belief of Hatim is an example of

A) egocentrism.
B) centration.
C) pretend play.
D) animism.

Question 32

Five-year-old Rebecca plays a game on her iPad in which she needs to tap on all red-colored objects that appear on the screen and ignore objects of other colors. At the end of every game, an animated character of a girl appears to congratulate Rebecca. When asked who the character is, Rebecca says that it is a girl who lives inside the screen and watches her games. This illustrates

A) egocentrism.
B) transduction.
C) pretend play.
D) animism.

Question 33

Jacob, a Piagetian researcher, claims that all children during early childhood exhibit animism. Which of the following examples weakens his claim?

A) Three-year-old Martin believes that his brown teddy talks to him at night and eats his candies.
B) Four-year-old Stella does not believe her brother when he says that walls can listen to them talking.
C) Eight-year-old Hunan successfully distinguishes living things from nonliving things in his class test.
D) Four-year-old Jenny refers to the potted plants in her house as "they" and sings to them every morning.

Question 34

Ms. Wang, a kindergarten teacher, gives her students a math problem to solve. She asks them to decide who has more crayons: Jamie who has five crayons or Juan who has seven. Which of the following abilities is Ms. Wang specifically testing through this question?

A) ordinality
B) categorization
C) centration
D) animism

Question 35

Caroline has given her kindergarten class a worksheet with small addition sums. Which of the following cognitive abilities is she specifically testing through this worksheet?

A) number patterns
B) number transformation
C) categorization
D) centration

Question 36

While reading aloud one day, Callie pointed to a word in the book and asked her father, "What does this word mean?" Callie, however, did not realize that she needed to turn the book so that her father could see the word. This is an example of

A) seriation.
B) transductive reasoning.
C) egocentrism.
D) animism.

Question 37

In the context of Jean Piaget's cognitive theory, which of the following best describes the term egocentrism?

A) the inability to consider another person's point of view
B) the ability to empathize with another person's pain
C) the ability to plan ahead and set goals
D) the inability to develop the concept of self and use "I" in sentences

Question 38

Jean 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 is known as

A) decentration.
B) conservation.
C) irreversibility.
D) ordinality.

Question 39

Four-year-old Hugo is shown two rows of six candles each. The candles in one row are spaced farther than the candles in the other row. When Hugo is asked if there are an equal number of candles in both rows, he replies that the row with more distance between the candles has more candles. In the context of Jean Piaget's cognitive theory, this illustrates Hugo's inability to grasp

A) theory of mind.
B) object permanence.
C) conservation.
D) transduction.

Question 40

Four-year-old Nina is shown two balls of play dough of the same weight. One ball is then mashed into a flat shape. When Nina is asked if the two objects have the same weight, she replies that the flat-shaped dough is heavier. In the context of Jean Piaget's cognitive theory, this illustrates Nina's inability to grasp

A) theory of mind.
B) object permanence.
C) conservation.
D) transduction.

Question 41

Jean Piaget's term for a preoperational child's failure to understand that an operation can go in two or more directions is known as

A) irreversibility.
B) ordinality.
C) transitivity.
D) decentration.

Question 42

Ivan's mother takes some play dough from a small box and makes a long cylindrical model of a rocket for him. Ivan believes that the play dough will not fit into the box anymore because the shape of the play dough has now changed. The limitation of Ivan's preoperational thought illustrated in the scenario is referred to as

A) decentration.
B) seriation.
C) irreversibility.
D) ordinality.

Question 43

________ is the awareness and understanding of the mental processes of others.

A) Egocentrism
B) Mind-body dualism
C) Theory of mind
D) Conservation

Question 44

Four-year-old Sheena knows that her mother will be upset when she comes into her room and sees the mess that she and her friends made. This awareness implies that

A) Sheena is unable to understand the principle of object permanence.
B) Sheena is unable to distinguish between living and inanimate objects.
C) Sheena is able to understand the mental processes of others.
D) Sheena is able to understand that two contradictory realities can coexist.

Question 45

Which of the following is true about the development of theory of mind in children?

A) Theory of mind accompanies the decline of egocentrism and the development of empathy.
B) Children develop theory of mind when they can differentiate between false beliefs and true beliefs.
C) Theory of mind develops when children realize that the mind is continuously active.
D) Children develop theory of mind after the age of 6.

Question 46

Which of the following illustrates a child in the early childhood period who has an understanding of theory of mind?

A) Pam uses her brother's toy without asking him and is surprised when her brother gets angry.
B) Martin talks to himself as he finishes a drawing.
C) Jake suspects that his father is lying to him about taking him to the movies.
D) Jenny throws a tantrum when her mother refuses to play with her.

Question 47

Which of the following statements is true of the ability to lie in early childhood?

A) Generally, children are capable of saying simple lies at 3 years.
B) The better the performance at a false belief task, the lower the child's ability to lie.
C) As children age, they are more likely to lie to hurt others' feelings.
D) Being able to lie at a young age is positively associated with autism.

Question 48

Which of the following is true about cognitive development in most children?

A) Children learn to distinguish between real and imagined events sometime between 18 months and 3 years.
B) Children develop the ability to pretend and can tell when someone else is pretending after the age of 5.
C) By the age of 2, most children complete stories with real-world causal laws rather than magical or fantastical elements.
D) Research on various theory-of-mind topics suggests that young children may have a less clear picture of reality than Jean Piaget believed.

Question 49

Which of the following factors is positively correlated with a child's ability to understand others' mental states?

A) being bilingual
B) being the only child
C) having a difficult temperament as an infant
D) being athletic

Question 50

Which of the following is true about the individual differences in theory-of-mind development in children?

A) Infants who are better at paying attention to others as infants show more facility with theory-of-mind tasks at 4 years of age.
B) Children whose teachers and peers rate them high on social skills are rarely able to recognize false beliefs and differentiate between reality and fantasy.
C) Theory of mind has been negatively related to reading storybooks.
D) Theory of mind has been negatively related to having siblings.

Question 51

________ is the process by which information is prepared for long-term storage and later retrieval.

A) Centration
B) Recall
C) Encoding
D) Recognition

Question 52

The retention of information in memory for future use is known as

A) retrieval.
B) storage.
C) centration.
D) recognition.

Question 53

Karen's mother asked her if she knew where her father had kept the gardening tools after the two of them did some gardening together last Sunday. To answer this question, Karen is following the process of

A) retrieval.
B) storage.
C) encoding.
D) ordinality.

Question 54

________ is a temporary storehouse for incoming sensory information that decays rapidly.

A) Working memory
B) Storehouse memory
C) Sensory memory
D) Procedural memory

Question 55

Which of the following statements is true of sensory memory?

A) Information is transferred from working memory to sensory memory if it is important.
B) It has an unlimited capacity.
C) It shows little change from infancy on.
D) It is responsible for the development of executive function.

Question 56

The growth of working memory permits the development of ________, the conscious control of thoughts, emotions, and actions to accomplish goals or to solve problems.

A) recognition
B) motor control
C) encoding
D) executive function

Question 57

In Baddeley's model of working memory, the element of working memory that controls the processing of information is referred to as

A) sensory executive.
B) central executive.
C) generic executive.
D) episodic executive.

Question 58

Which of the following statements is true of generic memory in children?

A) It emerges between ages 5 and 6.
B) It helps a child know what to expect and how to act.
C) It bears a special, personal meaning to the child.
D) It is linked to a specific event in a time and place.

Question 59

Which of the following is an example involving generic memory?

A) When asked what happens in a reading class in school, 4-year-old Simon recalls that students read their lessons aloud.
B) Five-year-old Janet writes an essay about the trip she took to Hawaii the previous summer.
C) When asked about the scariest incident he has experienced, 7-year-old Mike recalls getting locked in a room when he was 4 years old.
D) Six-year-old Peter refuses to travel by an airplane as he heard that a plane crashed a few days back.

Question 60

Molly, a 5-year-old, went to the circus 6 months ago with her family. She still remembers meeting the clowns and watching the trapezium show at the circus. Which of the following types of childhood memory helps Molly store this memory?

A) episodic memory
B) procedural memory
C) generic memory
D) sensory memory

Question 61

Which of the following is an example involving episodic memory?

A) Five-year-old Janet stands in a queue before boarding a bus as she always does.
B) Four-year-old Simon wants to go to the circus as he has fond memories of his last visit 3 months ago.
C) When asked what happens in a school, 5-year-old Alejandro recalls that teachers teach and students learn.
D) Six-year-old Luther fondly remembers the time he spent with his best friend in preschool.

Question 62

Which of the following is true about autobiographical memory?

A) It is highly susceptible to decay.
B) It is fully functional by 2 years of age.
C) It is a type of episodic memory.
D) It is a type of memory for routine and repetitive events.

Question 63

Unlike episodic memory, autobiographical memory

A) is usually temporary.
B) produces scripts to guide behavior.
C) begins at age 2.
D) bears a special significance to the person.

Question 64

Which of the following is true about influences on memory retention?

A) When events are rare or unusual, children seem to not remember them.
B) Children, as they get older, are less likely to remember unique details of an event for which they have a generic script.
C) Preschoolers tend to remember things they did better than things they merely saw.
D) Events with emotional impact seem to be difficult for children to remember.

Question 65

The ________ is an individual intelligence test for ages 2 and above that is used to measure knowledge, quantitative reasoning, visual-spatial processing, and working memory.

A) Gardner Intelligence Scale for Children
B) Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale
C) Apgar Scale
D) Denver Test of Multiple Intelligences

Question 66

The ________ is an individual intelligence test for children ages 2½ to 7 that yields verbal and performance scores as well as a combined score.

A) Gardner Intelligence Scale for Children
B) Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale (SBIS)
C) Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence, Revised (WPPSI-III)
D) Denver Test of Preschool, Elementary, and High School Scale of Intelligences

Question 67

Which of the following statements is true of the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence, Revised (WPPSI-III)?

A) It is used for ages 7 and up.
B) In includes subtests designed to measure both verbal and nonverbal fluid reasoning.
C) It includes nonverbal methods of testing the five dimensions of cognition.
D) In addition to providing a full-scale intelligence quotient (IQ), it yields separate measures of verbal and nonverbal IQ.

Question 68

Unlike the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale, the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence, Revised (WPPSI-III)

A) takes 60 to 90 minutes to complete.
B) has separate levels for ages 2½ to 4 and 4 to 7.
C) yields separate measures of verbal and nonverbal intelligence quotient (IQ).
D) includes nonverbal methods of testing all five dimensions of cognition.

Question 69

Which of the following statements is true of intelligence quotient (IQ) scores in childhood?

A) IQ scores represent inborn intelligence.
B) An IQ score is a measure of how well a child can do certain tasks in comparison with other children of the same age.
C) Since the 1970s, the IQ scores of children in industrialized countries have been steadily rising.
D) Twin studies suggest that the family environment's influence on a child's IQ is greatest at adolescence.

Question 70

Vygotsky's term for the difference between what a child can do alone and what the child can do with help is known as the

A) zone of innate ability (ZIA).
B) zone of proximal development (ZPD).
C) zone of passive construction (ZPC).
D) zone of cognitive assessment (ZCA).

Question 71

Vygotsky's theory of cognitive development describes ________ as temporary support to help a child master a task.

A) encoding
B) conserving
C) stakeholding
D) scaffolding

Question 72

Marcus, a 4-year-old, finds it difficult to add two single-digit numbers. Which of the following should his kindergarten teacher do as part of the scaffolding approach to help Marcus learn addition?

A) The teacher should ask him math problems and provide clues to help him learn addition.
B) The teacher should ask him to indulge in pretend play along with other students.
C) The teacher should give him an intelligence test to develop his addition skills.
D) The teacher should ask him to solve math problems in a group that has students whose intelligence quotient (IQ) scores are less than his.

Question 73

Five-year-old Josh heard his father say "Water drips into my room when it rains."This was the first time Josh heard the word "drip."Two days later, Josh said to his mother, "The tap drips if you don't close it properly."Josh's ability to use the new word "drip"is an example of

A) egocentrism.
B) scaffolding.
C) fast mapping.
D) dual coding.

Question 74

Four-year-old Ned travels with his family by car to a hiking spot. On the way, his parents discuss that the car is running out of fuel and needs fuel. After a few minutes, they stop the car and fill it with a liquid. Ned understands that this liquid is called "fuel." This ability of Ned is an example of

A) conservation.
B) centration.
C) fast mapping.
D) differentiation.

Question 75

Which of the following statements is typically true of the language abilities of 5-year-old children?

A) They frequently use the auxiliary verb "have" in statements.
B) They frequently use conditional sentences.
C) They are able to use imperatives and interrogatives.
D) They are able to use the passive voice.

Question 76

Which of the following is true about the use of grammar and syntax by most 3-year-olds?

A) They typically use multiclause sentences and are able to tell stories.
B) They are unaware of the difference between "I," "you," and "we."
C) They typically begin to use plurals, possessives, and past tense.
D) They rarely use the passive voice.

Question 77

Which of the following is an example of a child applying pragmatics in communication?

A) Three-year-old Angela refuses to look at her father when she speaks as he did not allow her to play.
B) Four-year-old Salma shares a secret with her pet and giggles.
C) Five-year-old Habid describes a lion as a big cat when he converses with his 3-year-old brother.
D) Four-year-old Samantha frequently uses direct commands when speaking to adults.

Question 78

Talking aloud to oneself with no intent to communicate with others is referred to as ________ speech.

A) telegraphic
B) private
C) personal
D) social

Question 79

Which of the following statements is typically true of language development in early childhood?

A) At age 5, children begin to use plurals and possessives.
B) Between ages 2 and 3, sentences average four to five words.
C) By age 5, children frequently use the passive voice.
D) At age 3, children know the difference between "I," "you," and "we."

Question 80

________ refers to preschoolers' development of skills, knowledge, and attitudes that underlie reading and writing.

A) Transformational grammar
B) Dual coding
C) Theory of mind
D) Emergent literacy