1. During the first 9 months, babies develop “baby fat” in order to
a. maintain a constant body temperature.
b. ensure a consistent source of nourishment.
c. engage adults’ affectionate attention.
d. cushion the vital organs from violent trauma.
2. Examination of the epiphyses can determine the age of a child’s skeleton
a. the older the skeleton, the more fontanels at the epiphyses.
b. older epiphyses show a greater proximodistal trend.
c. the older the skeleton, the thinner the cartilage cells at the plates of the epiphyses.
d. the younger the epiphyses, the more sutures there are across the plates.
3. Skull growth is especially rapid between birth and age 2 because
a. the skull is developing many new fontanels.
b. all of the bones are producing epiphyses.
c. the birth sutures are disappearing.
d. brain size is increasing.
4. The major limitation of neurophysiological methods is that they
a. are unsuitable for infants and young children, since they require that the child remain as motionless as
possible.
b. cannot show that the research participant has processed a stimulus in a certain way.
c. depend on X-ray photography.
d. can determine only the stability and organization of brain-wave patterns.
5. The fact that damage to either hemisphere of the young brain affects early language competence indicates that
a. language and spatial skills develop in the frontal lobes.
b. the crowding effect slows the processing of verbal stimuli.
c. the brain is less plastic than researchers once thought.
d. language functioning is broadly distributed in the brain.
6. Rapid brain growth means that by age 2, most children
a. no longer nap.
b. need 12 to 13 hours of sleep.
c. nap between 16 and 18 hours.
d. take two daytime naps.
7. Breastfed infants become hungry quite often because
a. breast milk is so easily digestible.
b. they tend to be more active than bottle-fed infants.
c. mothers of such babies tend to introduce them to solid food later.
d. some of the nutrients in breast milk trigger hunger so that babies will consume more of it.
8. Infants can develop the signs of marasmus from
a. excessive bottle-feeding.
b. prolonged kwashiorkor.
c. nonorganic failure to thrive resulting from lack of parental love.
d. a diet too heavy in starch.
9. In classical conditioning, for learning to occur,
a. a conditioned stimulus must produce an unconditioned response.
b. a neutral stimulus that does not lead to the reflex must be presented just before, or at about the same
time as, the unconditioned stimulus.
c. extinction must cancel out all unconditioned responses.
d. the conditioned response must lead to a new reflex.
10. By focusing on how infants shift from a novelty preference to a familiarity preference, researchers use
habituation to assess infants’
a. recent memory.
b. recall.
c. remote memory.
d. attention.
11. Ninety percent of infants achieve the motor skill of scribbling vigorously at about age ______ months.
a. 9-16
b. 9-17
c. 10-19
d. 10-21
a. is motivated by exploration and the desire to master new tasks.
b. results from instabilities in the system.
c. is too complex for human genetic patterning to encode.
d. is hardwired.
13. Among the Kipsigis of Kenya, babies tend to hold their heads up, sit alone, and walk earlier than North American
babies because Kipsigi mothers
a. give babies more tummy time than North American mothers do.
b. deliberately teach these skills by seating very young babies in holes in the ground, with rolled blankets
to keep them upright.
c. leave babies lying on their backs in cribs for long hours, while the mothers are doing their work.
d. encourage babies to scoot on their bottoms rather than crawl.
14. By 5 to 6 months, infants can reach for and grasp objects in a room that has been darkened during the reach. This
skill suggests that
a. infants aim their reaching motions at an object through prereaching.
b. reaching is largely controlled by proprioception.
c. infants of that age have reached a higher level of cephalocaudal development.
d. reaching is a softly assembled skill.
15. Toilet training should be delayed until the months following the second birthday because (p.
a. prior to that time, the stimulation of training could undermine the development of motor skills.
b. younger children are generally uninterested in bowel and bladder control.
c. after age 2, children have the motor development to manipulate their own diapers.
d. at that time, children can consistently identify signals from a full bladder and rectum.
16. ERP brain-wave recordings indicate that around 5 months, infants
a. prefer rhythmically distinct foreign languages as much as sounds of their native tongue.
b. become sensitive to syllable stress patterns in their own language.
c. start to screen out sounds not used in their native language.
d. cannot yet distinguish most sounds in their own language.
17. Statistical analysis helps babies learn language by enabling them to
a. extract regularities from complex, continuous speech.
b. learn rules of grammar.
c. detect words that start with strong syllables.
d. distinguish between their own language and a foreign one.
18. Motion provides important information about depth because it
a. gives children binocular depth cues.
b. enhances children’s sensitivity to pictorial depth.
c. helps children learn that objects are not flat but three-dimensional.
d. enables children to perceive the visual cliff.
19. Not until around the middle of the first year can blind infants
a. initiate meaningful contact with peers and caregivers.
b. use sound as a precise clue to object location.
c. explore their world through reaching and crawling.
d. produce definite emotional expressions.
20. At 12 months, infants’ pattern perception has developed to the point that they
a. are more contrast sensitive than they were at 6 months.
b. stare at a single, high-contrast feature in a pattern.
c. can perceive subjective boundaries in patterns that are not really present.
d. detect objects represented by incomplete drawings.
a. possess only size constancy.
b. see only two-dimensional objects.
c. have both size and shape constancy at birth.
d. perceive only the constantly shifting images that objects cast on their retina.
22. Intermodal perception engages our capacity for
a. assembling varied sensory information into integrated wholes.
b. object unity.
c. size and shape constancy.
d. depth perception.
23. Intermodal sensitivity advances perceptual development by
a. helping infants to develop contrast sensitivity.
b. making amodal properties stand out.
c. enabling children to ignore distracting social cues.
d. making infants’ statistical speech analysis more precise.
24. According to the Gibsons’ differentiation theory, infants search for invariant features because those
a. have the greatest object unity.
b. offer the richest array of intermodal relationships.
c. have the simplest patterns.
d. are the stable features in a constantly shifting perceptual world.
25. A baby’s sensitivity to affordances makes his or her exploratory
a. future oriented and largely successful.
b. less likely to be overwhelmed by complex intermodal stimuli.
c. more sensitive to invariant features.
d. reactive and blundering until around age 18 months.
CHAPTER SIX
26. According to Piaget, at times when children are not changing much, they
a. adapt through equilibrium.
b. assimilate more than they accommodate.
c. shift from assimilation to accommodation.
d. accommodate to disequilibrium.
27. According to Piaget, in the second year, the circular reaction
a. enters the tertiary substage.
b. centers around the child’s body.
c. declines because it is no longer adaptive.
d. becomes experimental and creative.
28. Because infants in Piaget’s Substage 4 can better anticipate events, they
a. try to use their capacity for intentional behavior to change those events.
b. no longer make the A-not-B search error.
c. repeat events caused by their own behaviors.
d. repeat behaviors with variation.
a. does not take make-believe play into account.
b. reveals babies’ limited capacity to assimilate many new experiences.
c. indicates only limited awareness of physical events.
d. merely confirms the effects of deferred imitation.
30. Recent studies of deferred imitation and problem solving reveal that
a. toddlers do not imitate rationally until about 18 months.
b. deferred imitation is present as early as 6 weeks of age.
c. infants lead purely sensorimotor lives.
d. babies use representational thought at birth.
31. Contrary to Piaget, core knowledge theorists argue that
a. babies construct all mental representations through sensorimotor activity.
b. the violation-of-expectation method reveals very little about babies’ cognitive abilities.
c. babies begin life with a limited set of biases for attending to certain information.
d. babies are born with a set of innate knowledge systems that permit a ready grasp of new, related
information.
32. Follow-up studies of Piaget’s sensorimotor stage have led researchers to
a. reaffirm Piaget’s basic model.
b. agree that many cognitive changes in infancy are gradual and continuous.
c. reject Piaget’s description of the later sensorimotor substages.
d. propose that various aspects of infant cognition develop together.
33. To aid retrieval of information from long-term memory, we
a. categorize information as it is taken in.
b. use the central executive to direct the flow of information.
c. practice using it.
d. associate it with particular mental strategies.
34. Information-processing researchers believe that the human mental system (
a. changes its structure through each stage of life.
b. gradually comes to prefer long-term memory to working memory.
c. enlarges its capacity throughout life.
d. is due almost entirely to brain development.
35. In toddlerhood, sustained attention typically improves because
a. attraction to novelty declines.
b. children attend to more aspects of the environment.
c. habituation time rises to 3 or 4 minutes.
d. children become long lookers.
36. Habituation research on infants’ memory of actions confirms that
a. novelty preference is stronger than familiarity preference.
b. Piaget’s model of sensorimotor development is essentially correct.
c. memory is context dependent.
d. infants need not be physically active to acquire new information.
37. Categorization allows infants to
a. reduce the huge amount of new information they encounter and thus make sense of experience.
b. successfully solve object permanence tasks.
c. increase the huge amount of new information they encounter and thus make sense of experience.
d. accurately sort objects by name, color, size, and function.
38. Vygotsky believed that complex mental activities, such as voluntary attention and deliberate memory, originate in
a. conditioning.
b. dynamic systems.
c. social interaction.
d. conceptual categories.
39. Of the following Bayley-III scales, which depends on parental report? (p. 230)
a. Adaptive Behavior
b. Cognitive
c. Language
d. Motor
a. computing how much the raw score deviates from the typical performance.
b. determining how scores cluster around the mean.
c. establishing the number of scales to be measured.
d. giving the test to a large, representative sample and using the results.
41. According to research findings, one of the best infant predictors of IQ from early childhood into adolescence is
a. developmental quotients.
b. habituation and recovery to novel visual stimuli.
c. the rate at which the infant becomes fatigued during testing.
d. the amount of fluctuation in IQ between infancy and toddlerhood.
42. The HOME correlational findings must be treated with caution because they
a. make too little of the genetic-environment correlation.
b. are based on too narrow of a sample.
c. do not account sufficiently for the association between home environment and mental test scores.
d. rely on developmental quotients that are too vague to be useful.
43. In the United States, children of middle-SES families tend to receive the poorest quality child care because
a. their parents are especially likely to place them in for-profit centers where the quality of care is often
low.
b. very few U.S. child-care centers offer high-quality care.
c. most of the families that use child care are in that socioeconomic category.
d. these families are most likely to take advantage of underfunded public centers.
44. Children who participate in center-based interventions and home-based interventions
a. showed greater intelligence gains in Canada than in the United States.
b. tend to come from more organized homes than children who do not participate.
c. mostly remain in the same SES as their parents.
d. score higher on mental tests by age 2 than children who do not participate.
45. According to the behaviorist perspective, children acquire language
a. through application of the universal grammar.
b. by imitation and reinforcement.
c. through the work of specialized language areas in the brain.
d. at a sensitive period during childhood.
46. Social-interactionist theorists of language development argue that children
a. learn language as their efforts to communicate cue caregivers to provide appropriate language
experiences.
b. make sense of complex language environments by applying general cognitive capacities.
c. master intricate grammatical structures with little experimentation.
d. learn language with the brain regions that also control social interaction.
47. Young children sometimes overextend words to groups of similar experiences because
a. they are still learning to assimilate adults’ intermodal perceptual cues.
b. their understanding of word meanings is too narrow.
c. they have difficulty recalling, or have not acquired, a suitable word.
d. emotion still influences their word learning more than cognitive achievements.
48. Young children’s comprehension of language precedes production
a. they can retrieve from their memories either the word or the concept for which it stands, but not both.
b. they still rely on adults’ perceptual cues.
c. until about 18 months, underextension limits production.
d. comprehension requires only that they recognize the meanings of words.
49. Effective CDS can stimulate children’s language development by
a. employing utterance length just ahead of the of the child’s.
b. urging the child to overextend and thus learn by error.
c. moving the child beyond his or her zone of proximal development.
d. discouraging joint attention while encouraging use of more complex sentences.
50. Ninety percent of deaf children experience delayed language development and have poor social skills in
toddlerhood through middle childhood because
a. schools are not sensitive to their needs.
b. their parents are not fluent in sign language.
c. they tend to develop extremely expressive styles to compensate for communication difficulties.
d. caregivers tend to only communicate with them visually.
51. According to Piaget, at times when children are not changing much, they
a. adapt through equilibrium.
b. assimilate more than they accommodate.
c. shift from assimilation to accommodation.
d. accommodate to disequilibrium.
52. According to Piaget, in the second year, the circular reaction
a. enters the tertiary substage.
b. centers around the child’s body.
c. declines because it is no longer adaptive.
d. becomes experimental and creative.
53. Because infants in Piaget’s Substage 4 can better anticipate events, they
a. try to use their capacity for intentional behavior to change those events.
b. no longer make the A-not-B search error.
c. repeat events caused by their own behaviors.
d. repeat behaviors with variation.
54. Some critics of the violation-of-expectation method of research believe that it
a. does not take make-believe play into account.
b. reveals babies’ limited capacity to assimilate many new experiences.
c. indicates only limited awareness of physical events.
d. merely confirms the effects of deferred imitation.
55. Recent studies of deferred imitation and problem solving reveal that
a. toddlers do not imitate rationally until about 18 months.
b. deferred imitation is present as early as 6 weeks of age.
c. infants lead purely sensorimotor lives.
d. babies use representational thought at birth.
56. Contrary to Piaget, core knowledge theorists argue that
a. babies construct all mental representations through sensorimotor activity.
b. the violation-of-expectation method reveals very little about babies’ cognitive abilities.
c. babies begin life with a limited set of biases for attending to certain information.
d. babies are born with a set of innate knowledge systems that permit a ready grasp of
new, related information.
57. Follow-up studies of Piaget’s sensorimotor stage have led researchers to
a. reaffirm Piaget’s basic model.
b. agree that many cognitive changes in infancy are gradual and continuous.
c. reject Piaget’s description of the later sensorimotor substages.
d. propose that various aspects of infant cognition develop together.
58. To aid retrieval of information from long-term memory, we (p. 221)
a. categorize information as it is taken in.
b. use the central executive to direct the flow of information.
c. practice using it.
d. associate it with particular mental strategies.
59. Information-processing researchers believe that the human mental system
a. changes its structure through each stage of life.
b. gradually comes to prefer long-term memory to working memory.
c. enlarges its capacity throughout life.
d. is due almost entirely to brain development.
a. attraction to novelty declines.
b. children attend to more aspects of the environment.
c. habituation time rises to 3 or 4 minutes.
d. children become long lookers.
61. Habituation research on infants’ memory of actions confirms that
a. novelty preference is stronger than familiarity preference.
b. Piaget’s model of sensorimotor development is essentially correct.
c. memory is context dependent.
d. infants need not be physically active to acquire new information.
62. Categorization allows infants to
a. reduce the huge amount of new information they encounter and thus make sense of experience.
b. successfully solve object permanence tasks.
c. increase the huge amount of new information they encounter and thus make sense of experience.
d. accurately sort objects by name, color, size, and function.
63. Vygotsky believed that complex mental activities, such as voluntary attention and deliberate memory, originate in
a. conditioning.
b. dynamic systems.
c. social interaction.
d. conceptual categories.
64. Of the following Bayley-III scales, which depends on parental report?
a. Adaptive Behavior
b. Cognitive
c. Language
d. Motor
65. Intelligence test designers reach the standard for interpreting scores by
a. computing how much the raw score deviates from the typical performance.
b. determining how scores cluster around the mean.
c. establishing the number of scales to be measured.
d. giving the test to a large, representative sample and using the results.
66. According to research findings, one of the best infant predictors of IQ from early childhood into adolescence is
a. developmental quotients.
b. habituation and recovery to novel visual stimuli.
c. the rate at which the infant becomes fatigued during testing.
d. the amount of fluctuation in IQ between infancy and toddlerhood.
67. The HOME correlational findings must be treated with caution because they
a. make too little of the genetic-environment correlation.
b. are based on too narrow of a sample.
c. do not account sufficiently for the association between home environment and mental test scores.
d. rely on developmental quotients that are too vague to be useful.
68. In the United States, children of middle-SES families tend to receive the poorest quality child care because
a. their parents are especially likely to place them in for-profit centers where the quality of care is often low.
b. very few U.S. child-care centers offer high-quality care.
c. most of the families that use child care are in that socioeconomic category.
d. these families are most likely to take advantage of underfunded public centers.
69. Children who participate in center-based interventions and home-based interventions
a. showed greater intelligence gains in Canada than in the United States.
b. tend to come from more organized homes than children who do not participate.
c. mostly remain in the same SES as their parents.
d. score higher on mental tests by age 2 than children who do not participate.
a. through application of the universal grammar.
b. by imitation and reinforcement.
c. through the work of specialized language areas in the brain.
d. at a sensitive period during childhood.
711. Social-interactionist theorists of language development argue that children
a. learn language as their efforts to communicate cue caregivers to provide appropriate language
experiences.
b. make sense of complex language environments by applying general cognitive capacities.
c. master intricate grammatical structures with little experimentation.
d. learn language with the brain regions that also control social interaction.
72. Young children sometimes overextend words to groups of similar experiences because
a. they are still learning to assimilate adults’ intermodal perceptual cues.
b. their understanding of word meanings is too narrow.
c. they have difficulty recalling, or have not acquired, a suitable word.
d. emotion still influences their word learning more than cognitive achievements.
73. Young children’s comprehension of language precedes production because
a. they can retrieve from their memories either the word or the concept for which it stands, but not both.
b. they still rely on adults’ perceptual cues.
c. until about 18 months, underextension limits production.
d. comprehension requires only that they recognize the meanings of words.
74. Effective CDS can stimulate children’s language development by
a. employing utterance length just ahead of the of the child’s.
b. urging the child to overextend and thus learn by error.
c. moving the child beyond his or her zone of proximal development.
d. discouraging joint attention while encouraging use of more complex sentences.
75. Ninety percent of deaf children experience delayed language development and have poor social skills in toddlerhood through middle childhood because
a. schools are not sensitive to their needs.
b. their parents are not fluent in sign language.
c. they tend to develop extremely expressive styles to compensate for communication difficulties.
d. caregivers tend to only communicate with them visually.