Piaget’s cognitive development

Beanpole plays basketball. During the past month, his arm has grown an inch, and he overshoots. His error reflects ____ of the shooting scheme.

• hypothetico-deductive reasoning

• deferred imitation

• assimilation

• accommodation

In space, astronauts must become experts at ____ because behavioral schemata that work on Earth must be adjusted for space’s weightlessness.

• reversibility

• accommodation

• assimilation

• animism

Snow White loses a small doll but does not search for the toy. Snow White’s actions suggest that she has not yet acquired

• object permanence.

• representational insight.

• compassionate conservatism.

• context-independent learning.

Children’s stories that make objects or materials come alive with humanlike properties encourage ____ thinking.

• mentally seriated

• decentrated

• egocentric

• animistic

The preoperational principle called centration means that the child

• receives help from parents on difficult tasks.

• attends to each object’s single most salient feature.

• seeks perceptual balance on objects’ spatial layouts.

• looks directly at objects, so that images are centered.

Hala and Chandler found that two-and-a-half to five-year-olds delight in deceiving a second player in a treasure-hunt game by destroying evidence of the location of the treasure or by laying down false trails. These results

• contradict Piaget’s claim that preschoolers are incapable of perspective-taking.

• support Piaget’s claim that preschoolers are incapable of perspective-taking.

• are irrelevant to the issue of preschoolers’ perspective-taking capability.

• support Piaget’s view that perspective-taking first emerges during the sensorimotor stage.

Which of these is LEAST characteristic of teens’ formal-operational thinking?

• Thinking based on logical reasoning

• Thinking guided by intuitive hunches

• Emphasis on deriving abstract principles

• Systematic consideration of possibilities

A criticism of Piaget was that he did not distinguish competence from performance. This implies that

• real competence might not be shown on particular tests.

• a performance test typically overestimates competence.

• the examiner might cheat on the scoring of performance.

• application of psychic power can inflate performance.