Ch 7 - cognition Flashcards
Cognition is
the activity of knowing and the processes through which knowledge is acquired and problems are solved
Cognitive structures
Piaget
- organized patterns of action or thought that people construct to interpret their experiences
- Rules or procedures that structure our cognition
Piaget viewed infants as
active agents, learning about people and things by observing, investigating, and experimenting
the brain responds by creating schemes/schema/schemata through..
exploration
Organization –
existing schemes are systematically combined into new and complex schemes
Adaptation –
process of adjusting to the demands of the environment that occurs through assimilation and accommodation
Knowledge is created by -
building schemes from experiences using two inborn functions, organization and adaptation
Assimilation –
an adaptive process through which we interpret new experiences in terms of existing schemes or cognitive structures
- Eg we have a scheme for dogs and fit our experience with a new animal into our existing scheme for dogs
Accommodation –
an adaptive process of modifying existing schemes in order to better fit new experiences
- Example: We have a scheme for dogs, but the animal we see is larger or barks in a different way, so we must change our scheme in order to account for the animal
According to Piaget, cognitive conflict occurs
when new events seriously challenge old schemes or prove our existing schemes to be inadequate
- Stimulates cognitive growth
- Motivated to reduce cognitive conflict through equilibration
Sensorimotor Stage
Piaget - infant
- The world is understood through the senses and actions
- The dominant cognitive structures are the behavioral schemes that develop through coordination of sensory information and motor responses
Reflexes –
- first month
- Reflexive reaction to internal and external stimulation
Primary circular reactions
- 1-4 months
- Infants repeat actions relating to their own bodies
Secondary circular reactions
– 4-8 months
- Repetitive actions involving something in the infant’s external environment
Substages of sensorimotor stage
- Coordination of secondary schemes
- Tertiary circular reactions
- Beginning of thought
Coordination of secondary schemes
– 8-12 months
- Secondary actions are coordinated in order to achieve simple goals (i.e., pushing or grasping)
Tertiary circular reactions
– 12-18 months
- Experimentation; actions are repeated with variations
Beginning of thought
– 18 months
- Symbolic thought permits mental representation, imitation, and recall
Object permanence develops during the
sensorimotor period
- From 4-8 months, “out of sight, out of mind”
- By 18 months, object permanence is mastered
What is the crowning achievement of the sensorimotor stage?
Symbolic capacity
Symbolic capacity
- greatest cognitive strength of the preschooler
- Ability to use images, words, gestures to represent or stand for objects and experiences
- Can use internal behavioral schemes to construct mental symbols that can guide future behavior
- By 24 months, children are deliberate thinkers with a symbolic capacity that lets them solve problems in their heads
perceptual salience
– the most obvious features of an object or a situation – means that preschoolers can be fooled by appearance
Why do preschoolers have difficulty with the conservation task?
- Unable to engage in decentration
- engage in centration
- lack reversibility
- static thought
- lack transformational thought
decentration
the ability to focus on two or more dimensions of a problem at once
centration
the tendency to center attention on a single aspect of a problem
reversibility
the process of mentally undoing or reversing an action
static thought
thought that is fixed on end states rather than the changes that transform one state into another
transformational thought
the ability to conceptualize transformations or processes of change from one state to another
Additional limitations of preoperational thinkers
- Egocentrism
- Difficulty with classification
- Lack class inclusion
- The preoperational child does not understand that the subclasses are included within the whole class
Egocentrism
A tendency to view the world solely from one’s own perspective and to have difficulty recognizing other points of view
Classification
Using criteria to sort objects on the basis of characteristics such as shape, color, function
Class inclusion
the ability to relate the whole class (furry animals) to its subclasses (dogs, cats)
Concrete operations involve
mastering the logical operations missing in the preoperational stage
- Conservation - can decenter and can use reversibility and transformational thought
- Operational abilities evolve in predictable order
Horizontal décalage –
different cognitive skills related to the same stage of cognitive development emerge at different times
Seriation enables the concrete-operational child to ..
arrange items mentally along a quantifiable dimension such as weight or heigh
Transitivity is ..
the understanding of relationships among elements in a series
Formal operations are ..
mental actions on ideas
- More abstract than concrete operations
- permit systematic and scientific thinking about problems, hypothetical ideas, and abstract concepts
Adolescent egocentrism can take two forms
- Imaginary audience
2. Personal fable
Imaginary audience
The phenomenon of confusing one’s own thoughts with those of an hypothesized audience for your behavior
Characterized by self-consciousness
“They’re all thinking that I am a slob”
Personal fable
A tendency to think that you and your thoughts are unique
“You could never understand how I feel!”
Characterized by a sense of specialness
Adults are likely to use formal operations in
a field of expertise
Adults more likely to use concrete operations on
unfamiliar problems
Theorists have proposed two forms of postformal thought or ways of thinking that are more complex than formal operations
- Relativistic thinking
2. Dialectical thinking
Relativistic thinking -
understanding that knowledge depends upon its context and the subjective perspective of the knower
Dialectical thinking -
detecting paradoxes and inconsistencies among ideas and trying to reconcile them
- Advanced dialectical thinkers challenge and change their understanding of what constitutes “truth”
Vygotsky’s theory - sociocultural perspective
Culture and society are pivotal
- Knowledge depends on social experiences
- Cognitive development varies from society to society depending upon the mental tools such as language that the culture values and makes available
- Children acquire mental tools through interaction with parents and other more experienced members of society and by adopting their language and knowledge
Vygotsky’s ideas about how social interaction fosters cognitive children’s growth
- Zone of proximal development
2. Guided participation
Zone of proximal development -
Vgotsky
- The gap between what a learner can accomplish independently and what she can accomplish with the guidance and encouragement of a more skilled partner
Guided participation
Vgotsky
- Children’s active participation in culturally relevant activities with the aid and support of parents and other knowledgeable guides
- Parents provide scaffolding when they give structured help and gradually reduce the help as the child becomes more competent
Private speech –
- speech to oneself that guides one’s thoughts and behavior
- Helps children think their way through challenging problems
- Allows them to incorporate into their own thinking the problem-solving strategies learned during collaborations with adults
Vgotsky criticism
placing too much emphasis on social interaction and insufficient attention upon individual construction of knowledge
