Chapter 4 - Theories of Cognitive Dev't Flashcards
What are the main questions addressed by the Piagetian theories?
- nature-nurture
- continuity/discontinuity
- the active child
What are the main questions addressed by the Information-processing theory?
- nature-nurture
- how change occurs
What are the main questions addressed by the Sociocultural theory?
- nature-nurture
- influence of the sociocultural content
- how change occurs
What are the main questions addressed by the dynamic-systems theory?
- nature-nurture
- the active child
- how change occurs
How are children seen in Piaget’s theory?
seen as…
- active learners
- learning many important lessons on their own
- intrinsically motivated to learn
According to Piaget’s theory, what are children’s most important constructive processes?
- generating hypotheses
- performing experiments
- drawing conclusions
What is the difference between assimilation and accommodation?
- Assimilation: incorporation into an existing schema
- Accommodation: modification of a prior schema
What is equilibrium within Piaget’s theory?
- the constant shift between assimilation and accommodation
How do accommodation, assimilation, and equilibrium work together to propel development forward?
- assimilation: people translate incoming info into terms they can understand
- accommodation: process of people adapting their current knowledge in response to new experiences
- equilibrium: process of people balancing accommodation and assimilation to create stable understanding
What are the 4 stages of Piaget’s theory?
1) sensorimotor
2) preoperational
3) concrete operational
4) formal operational
What are the central properties of Piaget’s stage theory?
- qualitative changes between stages
- invariant sequence (for order of stage occurrence)
Describe the Piaget’s sensorimotor stage.
(Age range and key characteristics)
- birth to 2 years old
- initially, activities center on their own bodies
- later, their activities include the world around them
- later, infants are able to form mental representations
- object permanence(around 8 months)
What is object prominence?
a child’s ability to know that objects continue to exist even though they can no longer be seen or heard
Explain the A not B Task
- a toy is hidden under the same cloth several times and retrieved by a baby.
- toy is then relocated to a different location
- Babies under 8 months usually look in the original hiding spot while older infants find the toy in the new spot
Describe Piaget’s Preoperational stage.
(age and key characteristics)
- 2 to 7 years old
- toddlers and preschoolers begin to represent experiences in language and mental imagery
- symbolic representation
- egocentrism
- centration
Describe the 3 mountains task
- child asked to look at 3D modeled landscape
- child asked to describe what they see
- child then asked to describe model from researcher’s pov
- child often only describe what they see and not the other pov (egocentrism)
Describe the conservation tasks. (Preoperational stage)
- experiments on children’s understanding of conservation, which is the concept that certain properties of objects remain the same despite changes in appearance.
- conservation of liquid quantity, solid quantity, and of number
- younger children often think volume/ quantity changes when there’s an elongation to change in shape
Describe the Piaget’s concrete operational stage.
(age range and key characteristics)
- 7-12 years old
- begin to reason logically about concrete objects and events in their world
- can solve conservation problems
- cannot think in purely abstract terms or generate systematic scientific hypothesis - testing experiments
Describe Piaget’s formal operational stage (age range and key characteristics)
- 12 years old and beyond
- abstract thinking and hypothetical reasoning
- attainment of this stage is not universal `
What are some weaknesses in Piaget’s theories?
- Vague: how does change occur?
- infants and children are more competent than Piaget recognized
- understates the influence of the social world on cognitive development
- rigid (very discontinuous)
Does information processing theories view children as undergoing continuous or discontinuous cognitive change?
continuous
What are the key ideas of the information-processing theories?
- children are like computers who improve over time
- expanding information processing speeds
- expanding memory capacity
- acquisition of new strategies and knowledge
Describe the Atkinson and Shiffrin memory model.
Sensory storage to short term storage to long term storage
- sentory storage is the first stop for memory (last for seconds)
- then to short term memory (lasts 12-18 seconds)
- then transferred to longer memory and can be retrieved through rehearsal
Name the 3 components of the memory system.
- sensory memory
- working memory
- long-term memory
Describe sensory memory
- can hold a moderate amount of information for a fraction of a second
- its capacity is relatively constant over much of development
Describe the working memory
- its limited in both capacity and duration
- its capacity and speed of operation increases greatly over childhood
Describe the longterm memory
- can retain an unlimited amount of information indefinitely
- its contents increase enormously over development
What are the 3 areas of executive function according to the information-processing theories?
- inhibitory control (impulse control)
- working memory (holding memories)
- cognitive flexibility (ability to take another POV)
What is predictive validity?
something that has good predictive power about predicting future behavior
What does executive function have good predictive validity over?
- academic achievements in HS
- enrollment in college
- income
- occupational status
What are the primary mental strategies used according to the information- processing theories? Define these strategies.
- rehearsal: process of repeating information over and over to aid memory
- selective attention: process of intentionally focusing on information that is most relevant to the current goal
According to information-processing theories, how do children’s planning abilities vary when they younger vs as they continue to develop?
- when younger they have poor planning abilities b/c they aren’t patient with problem solving strategies
- also they simply have limited knowledge and strategy when younger which makes planning harder
Describe the overlapping waves model
- there is competition over which strategy a child may use at a given time
- as they get older, they may find a less used strategy to be more efficient and use it more, and find a previously used strategy to be inefficient and use it less
- children think about the same phenomena in different ways at a given time
What are the primary differences between the sociocultural theory and Piaget’s theory?
- Piaget’s doesn’t acknowledge social aspects of cognitive development
- Piaget theorizes discrete change, sociocultural suggests continual change
- Piaget suggests thought and language and dependent, sociocultural suggests they’re independent
- Piaget states children master scientific and mathematical concepts at same time, sociocultural suggests children participate in activities common in the place/ time in which they live
What are primary concepts in the Sociocultural theory?
- children are viewed as social being and social learners
- development is continuous, with quantitative changes
- we’re social creates **
- dev’t through private speech
What’s another name for the sociocultural theory?
Vygotsky’s theory
According to the sociocultural theory, How does cognitive change occur?
- intersubjectivity (by 6 months)
- joint attention (by 12 months)
- social scaffolding
What is social scaffolding?
- When someone guides someone else ot reaching their cognitive potential
- pushing/ challenging someone to think more broadly
- Ex: teaching to the smartest kid in the class
What is intersubjectivity?
the mutual understanding hat people share during communication
Describe the primary focuses of the dynamic-systems theory
- view how change occurs over time in complex systems
- focus on relations among motor activities, attention, and other children’s behavior
(combines aspects of all other theories)
What does the dynamic systems theory emphasize from each other theory?
Piaget: child’s innate motivation to explore environment
Information - Processing: precise analysis of problem-solving activity
Sociocultural - the formative influence of other people
Describe the centrality of action within the dynamic-systems theory.
An emphasis on how children’s specific actions shape their development
- reaching and grasping
- categorizing
- aiding vocabulary acquisition and generalization
- shaping memory
