Chapter 6: Cognitive Development: Piagetian, core knowledge, and Vygotskian perspectives Flashcards
Define cognition.
The inner processes and products of the mind that lead to ‘knowing’
Cognition includes all mental activity. What are the 9 types of mental activity given in the textbook?
- attending
- remembering
- symbolising
- categorising
- planning
- reasoning
- problem solving
- creating
- fantasising
What three main issues are addressed by researchers studying cognitive development?
- They chart its typical course, identifying transformations that most children undergo from birth to maturity.
- They examine individual differences: at every age, some children think more or less maturely and differently from others.
- They uncover the mechanisms of cognitive development – how genetic and environmental factors combine to yield patterns of change.
Piaget was one of the first theorists to stress the importance of children’s ________ __ _____.
readiness to learn
Why is Piaget’s theory described as a constructivist approach to cognitive development.
Because Piaget viewed children as discovering, or constructing, virtually all knowledge about their world through their own activity
What are the four stages of Piaget’s cognitive development theory?
sensorimotor
preoperational
concrete operational
formal operational
What are the three important characteristics of Piaget’s stage sequence?
- Stages provide a general theory of development, in which all aspects of cognition change in an integrated fashion, following a similar course.
- Stages are invariant; they always occur in a fixed order, and no stage can be skipped.
- Stages are universal; they are assumed to characterise children everywhere.
Piaget regarded order of development as rooted in the _______ of the human brain. But he emphasised that individual differences in genetic and environmental factors affect the _____ with which children move through the stages.
biology, speed
Define schemes.
Organised ways of making sense of experience
According to Piaget, what changes with age?
psychological structures called schemes
The toddler makes a transition from a sensorimotor approach to the world to a cognitive approach based on ______ _______________.
mental representations
Define mental representations
the internal depictions of information that the mind can manipulate
Our most powerful mental representations are ______ and ________.
images (mental pictures of objects, people, and spaces)
concepts (categories in which similar objects or events are grouped together into meaningful, manageable, memorable units)
In Piaget’s theory, what two processes account for this change from sensorimotor to representational schemes and for further changes in representational schemes from childhood to adulthood?
Adaptation
Organisation
Which two complementary activities does adaptation consist of?
Accommodation
Assimilation
What does adaptation involve?
building schemes through direct interaction with the environment
What is assimilation.
Using current schemes to interpret the external world.
What is accommodation?
creating new schemes or adjusting old ones after noticing that current way of thinking does not capture the environment completely.
True/False:
According to Piaget, when children are not changing much, they accommodate more than they assimilate.
False. When children are not changing much, they assimilate more than they accommodate – a steady, comfortable state that Piaget called cognitive equilibrium
What is another way to describe state of disequilibrium?
cognitive discomfort.
What is equilibration?
Piaget’s term for the back-and-forth movement between equilibrium and disequilibrium
Which of Piaget’s stages is the most complex period of development?
Sensorimotor
According to Piaget, schemes also change through organisation. What does organisation refer to?
a process that occurs internally, apart from direct contact with the environment
According to Piaget, how do infants and toddlers think?
Infants and toddlers ‘think’ with their eyes, ears, hands, and other sensorimotor equipment. They cannot yet carry out many activities mentally.
What are the six substages in the sensorimotor stage?
- Reflexive schemes
- Primary circular reactions
- Secondary circular reactions
- Coordination of secondary circular reactions
- Tertiary circular reactions
- Mental representation
What is a circular reaction?
The circular reaction provides a means of adapting first schemes. It involves stumbling onto a new experience caused by the baby’s own motor activity. The reaction is ‘circular’ because, as the infant tries to repeat the event again and again, a sensorimotor response that originally occurred by chance strengthens into a new scheme.
When do babies enter substage 2 (primary circular reactions)?
Around 1 month, they start to gain voluntary control over their actions through the primary circular reaction, by repeating chance behaviours largely motivated by basic needs.
When do babies start engaging in intentional behaviour, according to Piaget?
In substage 4, 8-12-month-olds combine schemes into new, more complex action sequences. They engage in intentional, or goal-directed, behaviour coordinating schemes into means-end action sequences to solve simple problems.
Define object permanence
the understanding that objects continue to exist when they are out of sight
What is an A-not-B search error?
Babies continue to search for a hidden object in the first hiding place (A) even after seeing it moved to another (B).
According to Piaget, when do toddlers develop the capacity to experiment?
In substage 5, the tertiary circular reaction, where toddlers repeat behaviours with variation, provoking new outcomes, emerges.
In substage 6, older toddlers can solve advanced object-permanence problems involving invisible displacement. What is invisible displacement?
Finding a toy moved while it is out of sight
Many studies suggest that infants display a variety of understandings _______ than Piaget believed.
earlier
Research shows that Piaget was right about the timing of three milestones during the sensorimotor stage. What are these three milestones?
Object search
A-not-B
Make-believe play
Research shows that Piaget was incorrect about the timing of four milestones during the sensorimotor stage. What are these four milestones, and how was Piaget incorrect?
Object permanence
Deferred imitation
Categorisation
Problem solving by analogy
All occur sooner than Piaget thought
What is the most obvious change in the preoperational stage?
The increase in representational, or symbolic, activity.
Piaget acknowledged that language is our most flexible means of mental representation, but he did not regard language as the primary ingredient in childhood cognitive change. What did he believe instead?
Sensorimotor activity leads to internal images of experience, which children then label with words.
What are the three developmental milestones of make-believe play in the preoperational stage?
- Play detaches from the real-life conditions associated with it.
- Play becomes less self-centred.
- Play includes more complex combinations of schemes.
In the preoperational stage, how does drawing develop from scribbles?
- Scribbles
- First representational forms - around age 3.
- More realistic drawings - older pre-schoolers drawings still contain perceptual distortions because they have just begun to represent depth but use of depth cues increases during middle childhood
Looking at evidence gained through the observation of cultural variations in drawing development, what is the universal starting point?
Simple stick or contour images intended to represent a human figure, similar to those of pre-schoolers, seem to be a universal beginning for drawing, which, despite cultural variations, follow the same developmental sequence overall.
According to Piaget, what are the three limitations to preoperational thought?
- Egocentric and animistic thinking
- Inability to conserve
- Lack of hierarchical classification
What has research confirmed about Piaget’s beliefs on the preoperational stage?
Pre-schoolers do develop beginnings of logical thinking
What has research shown Piaget to be incorrect about with regards to the preoperational stage?
Logical thinking develops more gradually than Piaget thought
In the concrete operational stage, a child becomes capable of decentration. What is decentration?
The ability to focus on several aspects of a problem, and relate them, rather than only focusing on one
The concrete operational child can also seriate mentally. What is this ability called?
Transitive inference
According to Piaget, what are the limitations in concrete operational thought?
- Children think in an organised, logical fashion only when dealing with concrete information that they can perceive directly.
- Children master Piaget’s concrete operational tasks step-by-step.
- Rather than coming up with general logical principles and applying them to all relevant situations, children seem to work out the logic of each problem separately.
Some investigators have concluded that the forms of logic required by Piagetian tasks do not emerge spontaneously but are heavily influenced by ________, ______, and ________ __________.
training, context, cultural conditions
What is the difference between the way children in the concrete operational stage and adolescents in the formal operational stage perform operations?
Concrete operational children can ‘operate on reality’ whereas formal operational adolescents can ‘operate on operations’
In the formal operational stage, Piaget believed that a new form of egocentrism arises due to two distorted images of relationship between self and others appear. What are these two distorted images called?
- Imaginary audience: Adolescents’ belief that they are the focus of everyone else’s attention and concern.
- Personal fable: Certain that others are observing and thinking about them, teenagers develop an inflated opinion of their own importance – a feeling that they are unique and special.
What are the four elements of good decision making that adolescents become capable of in the formal operational stage?
- Identifying pros and cons of each alternative
- Assessing the likelihood of various outcomes
- Evaluating one’s choice in terms of whether one’s goals were met and if not:
- Learning from the mistake and making a better future decision.
Why do teenagers behave irrationally?
Teenagers act more irrationally because changes in the brain’s emotional/social network outpace development of the prefrontal cortex’s cognitive-control network.
True/False:
Research has shown that all people reach the formal operational stage.
False. Even well-educated adults may fail hypothetico-deductive tasks and have trouble reasoning with sets of propositions that contradict real-world facts. People are most likely to think abstractly and systematically on tasks in which they have had extensive guidance and practice in using such reasoning.
What are the three educational principles derived from Piaget’s theory that continue to have a widespread influence on teacher training and classroom practices?
- Discovery learning
- Sensitivity to children’s readiness to learn
- Acceptance of individual differences
What is discovery learning?
In a Piagetian classroom, children are encouraged to discover for themselves through spontaneous interaction with the environment, and teachers provide a rich variety of activities designed to promote such exploration.
Why has Piaget’s theory been of limited practical value in devising teaching strategies that foster children’s optimum learning?
Because of its overemphasis on the child’s initiative
According to the core knowledge perspective, infants begin life with ______, _______________ _________ systems referred to as core domains of thought
innate, special-purpose knowledge
In the core knowledge perspective, what are children viewed as?
Children are viewed as naïve theorists, building on core knowledge concepts to explain their everyday experiences in the physical, psychological, and biological realms.
According to the theory theory (meaning theory of children as theorists), what do children do after they observe an event?
They draw on innate concepts to explain, or theorize about, its cause. Then they test their naïve theory against experience, revising it when it cannot adequately account for new information.
Define theory of mind.
The psychological knowledge of self and others that forms rapidly during the preschool years.
How does Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory of development differ from Paiget’s and the core knowledge perspective?
Piaget’s theory and the core knowledge perspective both emphasise the biological side of cognitive development. Both identify the most important source of cognition as the child himself – a busy, self-motivated explorer who forms ideas and tests them against the world.
Vygotsky also viewed children as active seekers of knowledge, but emphasised the profound effects of rich social and cultural contexts on their thinking.
What explanation did Vygotsky give for why children use private speech?
Children speak to themselves for self-guidance.
Why do children with learning and behaviour problems engage in higher rates of private speech over a longer period of development?
To help compensate for impairments in cognitive processing and attention.
According to Vygotsky, to promote cognitive development, social interaction must include certain features. Name these three features.
- Intersubjectivity
- Scaffolding
- Guided participation
What is intersubjectivity?
The process whereby two participants who begin a task with different understandings arrive at a shared understanding, which creates a common ground for communication.
What does scaffolding refer to?
Adjusting the support offered during a teaching session to fit the child’s current level of performance.
Vygotsky saw make-believe play as the central source of development in the preschool years, promoting development in which two ways?
- As children create imaginary situations, they learn to act in accord with internal ideas, not just in response to external stimuli.
- The rule-based nature of make-believe strengthens children’s capacity to think before they act, because they must follow the rules of the play scene.
Name two Vygotsky-based educational innovations.
- Reciprocal teaching
2. Cooperative learning
