EDEXCEL GCSE PSYCHOLOGY 2025
EXAM QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
Cognitive - answers Thinking, including problem-solving, perceiving, remembering,
using language and reasoning.
Operations - answers How we reason and think about things.
Object permanence - answers Knowing something exists even if it is out of sight.
Symbolic play - answers Children play using objects and ideas to represent other
objects and ideas.
Egocentrism - answers Unable to see the world from any other viewpoint but one's own.
Animism - answers Believing that objects that are not alive can behave as if they are
alive.
Centration - answers Focusing on one feature of a situation and ignoring other relevant
features.
Irreversibility - answers Not understanding that an action can be reversed to return to
the original state.
Morality - answers General principles about what is right and wrong, including good and
bad behaviour.
Schema - answers Mental representations of the world based on one's own
experiences.
Sensorimotor stage - answers Infants use their senses and movements to get
information about the world. at first they live in the present. They develop object
permanence and learn to control their movements.
Pre-operational stage - answers Children engage in symbolic play. They think in
pictures and use symbols, including some words (the beginning of language
development). Children are egocentric and show animism. Later in this stage they start
reasoning and show centration and irreversibility.
Concrete operational stage - answers Children begin to apply rules and strategies to
help their thinking. they have difficulty with abstract ideas e.g. morality. Abilities include:
seriation, classification, reversibility, conservation, decentration.
Formal operational stage - answers Children's thinking is about controlling objects and
events in the world. young people can think about more than 2 things and how time
,changes things. They can see that actions have consequences. They understand that
they and others exist in the real world and separate from each other.
Qualitative data - answers Data that is descriptive, not numbers, such as words or
pictures.
Observations of children were collected in Piaget and Inhelder's study.
Reliability - answers The consistency of an outcome or result of an investigation (a
measure).
Piaget and Inhelder repeated their study with many children and used different ways of
getting the children to show what they saw or thought the doll saw, and got reliable
findings.
Assimilation - answers Incorporating new experiences into existing schemas.
Accommodation - answers When a schema has to be changed to deal with a new
experience.
Adaptation - answers Using assimilation and accommodation to make sense of the
world.
Equilibrium - answers When a child's schemas can explain all that they experience - a
state of mental balance.
brain - answers the organ in your head made up of nerves that processes information
and controls behaviour.
forebrain - answers the anterior part of the brain, including the hemispheres and the
central brain structures.
midbrain - answers the middle section of the brain forming part of the central nervous
system.
hindbrain - answers the lower part of the brain that includes the cerebellum, pons, and
medulla oblongata.
anterior - answers directed towards the front, when used in relation to our biology.
posterior - answers directed towards the back, when used in relation to our biology.
cerebellum - answers area of the brain near to the brainstem that controls motor
movements (muscle activity).
medulla oblongata - answers connects the upper brain to the spinal cord and controls
automatic responses.
, involuntary response - answers a response to a stimulus that occurs without someone
making a conscious choice. they are automatic, such as reflexes.
neural connections - answers links formed by messages passing from one nerve cell
(neuron) to another.
building neural connections from birth - answers the number of neural connections
rapidly increases from birth to 3 years old, with 700-1000 new connections forming
every second. the brain doubles in size over the first year and reaches 80% of its size
by the age of 3 years.
piaget's four stages of cognitive development - answers in his theory of cognitive
development, he suggested we go through distinct stages of development. each stage
is fairly long and our thinking abilities do not change much during these stages. a
change in thinking indicates when the next stage is reached. during the transition from
one stage to another, features of both stages are sometimes there in a child, and
sometimes not. during each stage there is consolidation of developing abilities in
preparation for the next stage. the first stage relates to the way babies use their senses
and movements, while the other three bring in the idea of 'operations.'
cognitive - answers thinking, problem-solving, perceiving, remembering, using language
and reasoning.
operations - answers how we reason and think about things.
sensorimotor stage - answers the stage (from birth to about 2 years of age) during
which infants know the world mostly in terms of their sensory impressions and motor
activities. they learn by linking their five senses to objects they are using, for example by
grasping and sucking objects. they begin with reflex actions and then learn to control
their movements. at around 6 months they develop object permanence, which means
they learn that objects exist even when they cannot see them. by the end of this stage
the child has a sense of themselves as existing separately from the world around them.
an interesting part of this stage occurs from around 4 months old, where babies tend to
repeat actions, like dropping something deliberately that they first dropped by accident.
object permanence - answers knowing something exists even if it is out of sight.
pre-operational stage - answers the stage (from about 2 to 7 years of age) during which
a child learns to use language but does not yet comprehend the mental operations of
concrete logic. there are two stages within the pre-operational stage, the symbolic
function stage and the intuitive thought stage.
symbolic function stage - answers a substage (from 2 to 4 years old) of piaget's pre-
operational stage where children start imitating others and can use objects as symbols.
symbolic play involves using one object to represent different objects, such as using a
EXAM QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
Cognitive - answers Thinking, including problem-solving, perceiving, remembering,
using language and reasoning.
Operations - answers How we reason and think about things.
Object permanence - answers Knowing something exists even if it is out of sight.
Symbolic play - answers Children play using objects and ideas to represent other
objects and ideas.
Egocentrism - answers Unable to see the world from any other viewpoint but one's own.
Animism - answers Believing that objects that are not alive can behave as if they are
alive.
Centration - answers Focusing on one feature of a situation and ignoring other relevant
features.
Irreversibility - answers Not understanding that an action can be reversed to return to
the original state.
Morality - answers General principles about what is right and wrong, including good and
bad behaviour.
Schema - answers Mental representations of the world based on one's own
experiences.
Sensorimotor stage - answers Infants use their senses and movements to get
information about the world. at first they live in the present. They develop object
permanence and learn to control their movements.
Pre-operational stage - answers Children engage in symbolic play. They think in
pictures and use symbols, including some words (the beginning of language
development). Children are egocentric and show animism. Later in this stage they start
reasoning and show centration and irreversibility.
Concrete operational stage - answers Children begin to apply rules and strategies to
help their thinking. they have difficulty with abstract ideas e.g. morality. Abilities include:
seriation, classification, reversibility, conservation, decentration.
Formal operational stage - answers Children's thinking is about controlling objects and
events in the world. young people can think about more than 2 things and how time
,changes things. They can see that actions have consequences. They understand that
they and others exist in the real world and separate from each other.
Qualitative data - answers Data that is descriptive, not numbers, such as words or
pictures.
Observations of children were collected in Piaget and Inhelder's study.
Reliability - answers The consistency of an outcome or result of an investigation (a
measure).
Piaget and Inhelder repeated their study with many children and used different ways of
getting the children to show what they saw or thought the doll saw, and got reliable
findings.
Assimilation - answers Incorporating new experiences into existing schemas.
Accommodation - answers When a schema has to be changed to deal with a new
experience.
Adaptation - answers Using assimilation and accommodation to make sense of the
world.
Equilibrium - answers When a child's schemas can explain all that they experience - a
state of mental balance.
brain - answers the organ in your head made up of nerves that processes information
and controls behaviour.
forebrain - answers the anterior part of the brain, including the hemispheres and the
central brain structures.
midbrain - answers the middle section of the brain forming part of the central nervous
system.
hindbrain - answers the lower part of the brain that includes the cerebellum, pons, and
medulla oblongata.
anterior - answers directed towards the front, when used in relation to our biology.
posterior - answers directed towards the back, when used in relation to our biology.
cerebellum - answers area of the brain near to the brainstem that controls motor
movements (muscle activity).
medulla oblongata - answers connects the upper brain to the spinal cord and controls
automatic responses.
, involuntary response - answers a response to a stimulus that occurs without someone
making a conscious choice. they are automatic, such as reflexes.
neural connections - answers links formed by messages passing from one nerve cell
(neuron) to another.
building neural connections from birth - answers the number of neural connections
rapidly increases from birth to 3 years old, with 700-1000 new connections forming
every second. the brain doubles in size over the first year and reaches 80% of its size
by the age of 3 years.
piaget's four stages of cognitive development - answers in his theory of cognitive
development, he suggested we go through distinct stages of development. each stage
is fairly long and our thinking abilities do not change much during these stages. a
change in thinking indicates when the next stage is reached. during the transition from
one stage to another, features of both stages are sometimes there in a child, and
sometimes not. during each stage there is consolidation of developing abilities in
preparation for the next stage. the first stage relates to the way babies use their senses
and movements, while the other three bring in the idea of 'operations.'
cognitive - answers thinking, problem-solving, perceiving, remembering, using language
and reasoning.
operations - answers how we reason and think about things.
sensorimotor stage - answers the stage (from birth to about 2 years of age) during
which infants know the world mostly in terms of their sensory impressions and motor
activities. they learn by linking their five senses to objects they are using, for example by
grasping and sucking objects. they begin with reflex actions and then learn to control
their movements. at around 6 months they develop object permanence, which means
they learn that objects exist even when they cannot see them. by the end of this stage
the child has a sense of themselves as existing separately from the world around them.
an interesting part of this stage occurs from around 4 months old, where babies tend to
repeat actions, like dropping something deliberately that they first dropped by accident.
object permanence - answers knowing something exists even if it is out of sight.
pre-operational stage - answers the stage (from about 2 to 7 years of age) during which
a child learns to use language but does not yet comprehend the mental operations of
concrete logic. there are two stages within the pre-operational stage, the symbolic
function stage and the intuitive thought stage.
symbolic function stage - answers a substage (from 2 to 4 years old) of piaget's pre-
operational stage where children start imitating others and can use objects as symbols.
symbolic play involves using one object to represent different objects, such as using a
