Chapter 6: Cognitive Change - Cognitive-Developmental and Sociocultural Approaches Flashcards
What was Piaget the first scientist to do?
systematically explain and examine children’s thinking and reasoning
What are schemas?
concepts, ideas, and ways of interacting on the world
- plans to successfully interact with the world
- with each new experience, children need to adapt their thinking and organize what they learn to construct new schemas, and refine existing schemas
What is assimilation?
integrating a new experience into a pre-existing schema
ie. toddler has a dog, they discover the neighbour has a dog, and they recognize and understand the dog even if it may look different
What is accommodation?
modifying or creating a schema in light of new information
ie. toddler sees a cat and calls it a dog, but someone around her tells her it’s a cat and explains the difference—assists the child in creating a new schema of cats
What is cognitive disequilibrum?
our schemas don’t match everything in the world
- cognitive change is constantly occurring as a result of cognitive disequilibrium
ie. moment when the toddler was told that what they thought was a dog wasn’t a dog—cat did not fit into the toddler’s schemas
Stage 1: Infancy - The Sensorimotor Stage
What are reflexes?
first indicators that infants have the ability to interact with the world and understand it are reflexes
- infants are born with a number of involuntary autonomic reflexes
Stage 1: Infancy - The Sensorimotor Stage
Reflex: Palmar Grasp
- Response
- Developmental Course
curling fingers around objects that touch the palm
birth to 4 months, when it is replaced by voluntary grasp
Stage 1: Infancy - The Sensorimotor Stage
Reflex: Rooting
- Response
- Developmental Course
turning head and tongue toward stimulus when cheek is touched
disappears over first few weeks of life and is replaced by voluntary head movement
Stage 1: Infancy - The Sensorimotor Stage
Reflex: Sucking
- Response
- Developmental Course
sucking on objects placed into the mouth
birth to 6 months
Stage 1: Infancy - The Sensorimotor Stage
Reflex: Moro
- Response
- Developmental Course
giving a startle response in reaction to loud noise or sudden change in the position of the head, resulting in throwing out arms, arching the back, and bringing the arms together as if to grasp something
birth to 5-7 months
Stage 1: Infancy - The Sensorimotor Stage
Reflex: Babinksi
- Response
- Developmental Course
fanning and curling the toes in response to stroking the bottom of the foot
birth to 8-12 months
Stage 1: Infancy - The Sensorimotor Stage
Reflex: Stepping
- Response
- Developmental Course
making stepping movements as if to walk when held upright with feet touching a flat surface
birth to 2-3 months
Stage 1: Infancy - The Sensorimotor Stage
Reflex: Swimming
- Response
- Developmental Course
holding breath and moving arms and legs, as if to swim, when placed in water
birth to 4-6 months
Stage 1: Infancy - The Sensorimotor Stage
What are primary circular reactions?
repeating actions involving body parts that produce pleasurable or interesting results
- often begin by chance or action
- infant is learning more about their world
ie. accidentally discover their hand by their mouth and start sucking on their thumb (calming effect for them), playing with their feet
Stage 1: Infancy - The Sensorimotor Stage
What are secondary circular reactions?
repetitions of actions that trigger responses in external environment
- going beyond their own body, and realizing that there are things they can do to make something happen in the outside world
Stage 1: Infancy - The Sensorimotor Stage
What is object permanence?
understanding that objects continue to exist outside of sensory awareness
- object permanence signals to others that they now have the mental capacity for mental representation (can picture things in your hand even though you can’t see them)
ie. show a baby a toy and throw a blanket over it—if they don’t have object permanence, they think that the toy just went away (outside of their sensory awareness, therefore it doesn’t exist)
- once they acquire object permanence, they understand that toy continues to exist under the blanket even though they can’t see it, and will pull the blanket off
Stage 1: Infancy - The Sensorimotor Stage
What are tertiary circular reactions?
active, purposeful, trial-and-error exploration to search for new discoveries
- infant will vary their actions to see if something changes in the outcome
ie. dropping things from their high chair
Stage 2: Early Childhood (Age 2-6) - Preoperational Stage
What is preoperational reasoning?
characterized by a dramatic leap in the use of symbolic thinking, primarily with the use of language
- better able to organize their thoughts and imagination, and use it to guide their behavior
Stage 2: Early Childhood (Age 2-6) - Preoperational Stage
What us egocentrism?
inability to take another person’s perspective
- have a tendency to view the world only in their perspective
- think that other people share their feelings, knowledge, physical view
- physical view test: 3-mountain problem (seeing different things of the mountain model when on opposite sides of a table)
Stage 2: Early Childhood (Age 2-6) - Preoperational Stage
What is animism?
belief that inanimate objects are alive and have feelings and intentions
ie. give dolls, action figures personality and feelings, and treat them like another human (why they get upset when they lose the toy)
Stage 2: Early Childhood (Age 2-6) - Preoperational Stage
What is irreversibility?
lack of reasoning to see that reversing a process can often undo and restore it to the original state
Stage 2: Early Childhood (Age 2-6) - Preoperational Stage
What is conservation?
understanding that the quantity of a substance is not transformed by changes in its appearance
Stage 3: Middle Childhood (Age 6-11) - Concrete Operational Stage
What is the concrete operational reasoning stage?
- can use logic to solve problems
- have a more sophisticated understanding of the real world
- acquire reversibility and conservation skills
Stage 3: Middle Childhood (Age 6-11) - Concrete Operational Stage
What is classification?
ability to understand hierarchies, to simultaneously consider relations between a general category and more specific subcategories
Stage 3: Middle Childhood (Age 6-11) - Concrete Operational Stage
What is seriation?
ability to order objects in a series according to a physical dimension (putting things in size order)
Stage 3: Middle Childhood (Age 6-11) - Concrete Operational Stage
What is transitive inference?
ability to infer the relationship between two objects by understanding each object’s relationship to a third
Stage 3: Middle Childhood (Age 6-11) - Concrete Operational Stage
Describe cultural differences in concrete operational reasoning.
- differences in how children represent skills of concrete operational reasoning
- performance can be a result of methodology, level of education
Stage 4: Adolescence - Formal Operational Stage
What is the formal operational stage?
- being able to think abstractly, logically, and systematically
- being able to understand the hypothetical
Stage 4: Adolescence - Formal Operational Stage
What is hypothetical-deductive reasoning?
ability to consider problems, generate and systematically test hypotheses, and draw conclusions
- many adults fail
- not consistent across people and intellectual domains
- formal education plays a big part in these skills (better opportunities to use this reasoning to develop cognitive skills)
Stage 4: Adolescence - Formal Operational Stage
What is adolescent egocentrism?
separating one’s own perspective from that of another person
Stage 4: Adolescence - Formal Operational Stage
What is imaginary audience?
heightened level of self-consciousness
- each individual is concerned about themselves, but each of them think everyone else in the world is watching them
Stage 4: Adolescence - Formal Operational Stage
What is personal fable?
sense of self-importance and invincibility
- believe that emotions they are experiencing are unique and way more intense for themselves than anyone else—think it’s not happening to anyone else (“nobody understands me”)
- puts them at higher levels of depression and suicidal thoughts
- think something bad that can happen to others won’t happen to them, which increases risk-taking behaviour
Beyond Formal Operations
What us postformal reasoning?
integrates abstract reasoning with practical considerations
- recognizes that most problems have multiple causes and solutions (some solutions better than others)
- all problems involve some level of uncertainty
Beyond Formal Operations
What is relativistic thinking?
most knowledge is viewed as relative, dependent on the situation and thinker
- all beliefs are suggestive, and everyone takes a different perspective
- all perspectives are defensible (how you can have an intellectual discussion or debate, and not assume there is a right answer)
Beyond Formal Operations
What is pragmatic thought?
emphasizes the use of logic to address everyday problems
- allows us to accept inconsistency, ambiguity, and uncertainty
- nothing we think about is concrete anymore
Beyond Formal Operations
What is cognitive affective complexity?
capacity to be aware of emotions, integrate positive and negative feelings about an issue, and regulate intense emotions to make logical decisions about complicated issues
- combining emotions and logical thinking to come to a solution or decision
Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Perspective
What is the sociocultural perspective?
we are embedded in a context that shapes how we think and who we become
- social experiences teach children how to think
- our thinking changes as we interact with people and their environment
Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Perspective
What is scaffolding?
assistance that permits the child to bridge the gap between his or her current competence level and the task at hand
Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Perspective
What is guided participation?
more skilled partner is attuned to needs of the child and helps her accomplish more than she could do alone
Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Perspective
What is zone of proximal development?
gap between a child’s competence level (what she can do alone) and what she can do with assistance
Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Perspective
What are cultural tools?
includes physical items and ways of thinking about phenomena and problem solving
- facilitate learning about phenomena and problem solving
- used to advance your knowledge and understanding
ie. cell phones, tablets, laptops
