When students have studied the material in the chapter, they will be able to answer the following:

• Introduction
1. What major cognitive limitations do preschoolers have?
2. What can parents and preschool teachers do to foster preschoolers' cognitive development?
3. How does cognitive development in early childhood prepare children for the start of formal education?
• General characteristics of preschoolers' thought
4. How did Piaget characterize the preschool period?
5. Compare Piaget's ideas about preschoolers' causal reasoning and understanding of living and nonliving things to more recent research findings.
6. Trace the development of children's understanding of conservation.
7. What do preschoolers understand about number and measurement?
8. Summarize preschoolers' understanding of classification and other logical relations.
9. What problems do preschoolers have with the appearance-reality distinction?
• Preschoolers' attention and memory abilities
10. Describe preschoolers' attentional limitations.
11. Summarize preschoolers' memory strengths and weaknesses.
• Social cognition
12. To what extent do preschoolers show evidence of egocentrism?
13. Describe the development of preschoolers' theory of mind.
14. Explain how scripts help preschoolers to make the most of their cognitive resources.
• An overview of preschool cognitive development
15. What are the major cognitive advances made during the preschool years?