Developmental Psychology Review

Flashcards for exam review.

Piaget's Mountain Task involves children reasoning about what a doll would see if it were sitting in a chair across the table from the child. This task was designed to examine:

egocentrism.

Operant conditioning relies on the expectation that individuals:

tend to repeat behaviors that lead to favorable outcomes and stop behaviors that result in unfavorable outcomes.

Yancy calls all women "mommy." This is an example of:

Overextension

Identify the statement that is NOT true about infant-directed speech.

Infant-directed speech is necessary for language mastery.

Syntactic bootstrapping refers to children's use of the __ as a cue to figure out the meaning of a novel word.

grammatical category of the novel word

Wynn (1992) demonstrated that infants can do simple arithmetic for small sets of numbers (e.g., 1 + 1 = 2). Which system for representing numbers supports this ability?

Object tracking system

Which statement describes a characteristic of Piaget's stages?

Children proceed in a fixed order, thinking at each stage pervades diverse content areas, and thinking is qualitatively different from the previous stage.

What is the A-not-B error?

The tendency for an infant to reach for a hidden object where it was last found, rather than the new location where it was last hidden.

What indicates an infant has formed the category "furniture?"

After being shown pictures of tables, chairs, sofas, dressers, and grandfather clocks, the infant dishabituates to a picture of a car.

When young infants (younger than 2 months) look at complex shapes, pictures, or faces, they tend to look at:

The perimeter

What is the most specific level within a category hierarchy?

Subordinate level

What does the cue optical expansion help perceive?

Depth

Baby Reginald is holding a new toy. As he holds it, his father says, "ball," repeatedly. Baby Reginald must figure out whether the word "ball" describes the object he is holding, the color of the object, the sound the object makes when it is squeezed, or the way the object moves on and off the floor when he drops it. Baby Reginald is encountering the problem of:

Reference

An experimenter shows a child two clay "sausages" that are identical in size and shape and then allows the child to watch as she rolls one of the clay sausages into a longer, thinner sausage. The experimenter then asks the child whether the two clay sausages still contain the same amount of clay. A child in Piaget's preoperational stage would be MOST likely to say:

"No, the longer sausage has more clay than the shorter sausage."

According to dynamic systems theories, which aspect is a constant across the process of development?

Change

This refers to the idea that using the finite set of words and morphemes in humans' vocabulary we can put together an infinite number of sentences and express an infinite number of ideas.

generativity

 Six-month-old Liana, 12-month-old Joshua, and 18-month-old Sadie all live in English-speaking homes in English-speaking communities. Which statement is MOST likely to be true of their abilities to discriminate among sounds that are found in Mandarin Chinese but are not found in English?

Liana will be the most able.

An infant plays with a toy block in the dark, so they cannot see it. Later, they're shown a ball as well as the block. The infant realizes it was the block, not the ball, that they played with in the dark through:

Intermodal perception

The perspective that infants build increasingly advanced understanding by combining general learning mechanisms with subsequent experiences is referred to as:

empiricism

A child who holds essentialist beliefs about the concept of "race" might believe that:

people of different races are fundamentally different from each other because of some kind of internal cause (e.g., their DNA)

Grouping together objects that have similar appearances is referred to as __categorization

perceptual

What did the Magic Shrinking Machine task suggest about infantile amnesia?

Infants and toddlers do not form autobiographical memories because they do not have a sense of self

The understanding that each object MUST be labeled by a single number word represents:

one-one correspondence

Which of the following is TRUE of memory development?

The greatest development in the hippocampus comes after infancy