Against Piaget Flashcards
What does Piaget’s work focus on?
It focuses on development, rather than learning per se, so it does not address learning information or specific behaviours
What does Piaget’s work propose?
It proposes discrete stages of development, marked by qualitative differences, rather than a gradual increase in number and complexity of behaviours, concepts, ideas, etc
What did Piaget’s work fail to do?
Because Piaget focused on the universal stages of cognitive development and biological maturation, he failed to consider the effect that the social setting and culture may have on development
What did Vygotsky argue against Piaget?
He argues that the development of language and thought go together and that the origin of reasoning is more to do with our ability to communicate with others than with our interaction with the material world
What is the false-belief principle?
Understanding that a person might have a false belief and the ability to determine what information might have caused this
Implicit understanding that people have mental states (perceptions, beliefs, desires) and act according to them
What is animism?
Piaget focused on objects that children have little direct experience of
When asked about familiar inanimate objects, children did not think they were alive
Children did think some vehicles could be alive
What are neo-piagetian theories?
Based on information processing models
Computer is used as model for human cognitive functioning
Children make use of the available capacity (Case 1985)
What is evolutionary psychology?
Emphasis on phlogeny
Different kinds of thinking seen as adaptations maximising the fitness of the organism
Innate modularity - domain specificity
What is neuroconstructivism?
Theoretical framework focusing on the construction of representations (neural activation patterns) in the developing brain
Cognitive development is a trajectory originating from constraints (intrinsic and extrinsic) on underlying neural structures
