Midterm
1 Study Questions
The midterm on Wednesday January 30 will
be based on lectures and readings (assigned through January 23). You will need
to answer 4 of 5 short essay (1/2 page) and 1 of 2 long essay (1 page)
questions. The following study questions
will be useful in guiding your preparation for the exam. Note that these questions are not intended
to exhaust all of the possible topics that might be covered on the exam.
1) Describe the habituation-dishabituation (or
the preferential looking) paradigm.
Give an example of how this method has led to the discovery of
previously unsuspected abilities in young infants.
2) What is meant by intermodal perception? What was Piaget’s theory concerning the
development of intermodal perception?
Evaluate Piaget’s theory in the light of current evidence.
3) Describe Piaget's account of the development
of the object permanence. What evidence
did Piaget marshal in support of his theory?
Are there other ways to interpret this evidence? What has more recent research shown
concerning the development of object permanence?
4) Describe Spelke’s 4 principles of object
motion. Present evidence for or against
the view that young infants’ physical reasoning is constrained by these
principles.
5) Describe Piaget's account of the development
of causality in childhood. What
evidence did Piaget marshal in support of his theory? Are there other ways to interpret this evidence? What has more recent research shown
concerning the development of causality?
6) In the text, Flavell et al. discuss several
different theoretical approaches to cognitive development (e.g., Neo-Piagetian,
Theory-Theory, Dynamic Systems, etc.). Compare and contrast two of these
approaches.
7) Are infants capable of auditory perception
before birth? How has this issue been investigated?
8) What is categorical speech perception? Are
infants capable of categorical speech perception? What happens to categorical speech perception with development?
9) In Baillargeon’s model of the development of
reasoning about the physical world, two developmental patterns are described
that illustrate how an initial concept is transformed into a more sophisticated
concept. What are these patterns? Give
examples of research evidence from infancy that fits these patterns.
10)
Describe one example of research showing that older children are sometimes
surprisingly ignorant concerning basic aspects of physics.
11) According to Piaget, what are the major
processes (mechanisms of change) that account for development? Give an example of each of these processes.
12) Describe four general properties of Piaget’s
stage theory of development (i.e. properties that apply to the stages as a
whole rather than to any particular stage).
Why do many developmental psychologists now think that development is
not as stage-like as Piaget and others once thought it was?
13)
What is the major difference between Siegler’s overlapping waves model of
development and Piaget’s stage theory of development?
14)
Schlottmann argues that perceptual causality both promotes and impedes the
development of causal understanding.
What does she mean by this?
15) What, according to Piaget, is the major
intellectual advance in the preoperational stage compared to the sensorimotor
stage (or in the concrete-operational vs. preoperational stage, or in the
formal-operational vs. concrete-operational stage)? Give one example of how
this intellectual advance is reflected in the development of new abilities (or
in task performance).
16) What has developmental research revealed
about face perception in early infancy?
What kinds of faces do infants prefer?
17)
What has research using the visual cliff shown concerning the role of
locomotion in the development of fear of drop-offs?