Critical thinking questions

Your answers to these kinds of questions demonstrate an ability to comprehend and apply ideas discussed in this chapter.

1. Compare and contrast the methods used by Piaget and information processing researchers to study infant cognition.

2. What is the relationship between each of the substages in Piaget's theory of the sensorimotor period? How does the infant get from one stage to the next?

3. How do information processing theorists approach to development?

4. How would you convince a friend that imitation and deferred imitation demonstrate information processing by infants?

5. Summarize the milestones in the development of language by infants.

6. For a period of time, infants utter sentences of approximately one word. Explain whether these utterances accurately reflect the level of thinking of a child.

Ex.1. Skim over the text and give your comments on its ideas.

How Children Relate To Storybook Characters

approach – подход

evaluate – оценивать

immerse – погружаться, увлекаться

fictional characters – вымышленные герои

previous – предыдущий

orally – устно

with respect to – что касается

narrative ability – вербальная способность, способность рассказчика

impede – мешать, затруднять

comprehension – понимание

appear – казаться, оказываться

offer – предлагать

barn – коровник

September 2007 - A study from University of Waterloo researchers Daniela O'Neill and Rebecca Shultis published in Developmental Psychology used an innovative approach to evaluate young children's storytelling ability and found that they are able to immerse themselves in the thoughts and feelings of fictional characters.

Daniela O'Neill, associate professor of developmental psychology explained:

"Children around the ages of three to five are fairly limited in their verbal abilities, and many previous studies have relied on methods requiring children to tell a story orally, potentially underestimating what they can do."

"In essence, rather than looking at how children are able to tell stories, it looked at how children understand stories, and whether, like adults, children build up a 'mental model' of the story. … in their mind and 'step into the mind,' so to speak, of a character."

Researchers found that the youngest children were able to track a character that physically moved between two locations but not if the change only happened in the character's mind. Children were shown models of a barn and a field, both locations containing a cow. They were told that the character was in the barn, but was thinking about feeding the cow in the field. Children were then asked to point to the cow.

Daniela O'Neill explained:

" … there are two cows present. But we hypothesized that if children were tracking the thought of the character to the new thought-about location (the field), then they would point to the cow there. If they were only able to think about the character where the character physically is, then they would point to the cow in the physical location (the barn)."

Researchers conclude that these findings potentially offer insight into some of the difficulties and differences in perspective-taking ability that may impede comprehension.

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Questions:

1. What was the aim of the study?

2. What are the conclusions of the study?