Cognition Flashcards
Cognition
is the process of organizing and making meaning (sense) of experience.
Equilibrium
According to Piaget, every organism strives to achieve equilibrium. Equilibrium is a balance of organized structures, whether motor, sensory, or cognitive. When structures are in equilibrium, they provide effective ways of interacting with the environment.
Knowledge in this theory
is an active process of achieving and reachieving equilibrium, not a constant state (Miller, 1993). Knowledge is discovered and rediscovered in the continuous interaction of the person and the environment.
Scheme
SCHEME Piaget and Inhelder (1969) defined a scheme as “the structure or organization of actions as they are transferred or generalized by repetition in similar or analogous circumstances” (p.4). Piaget preferred the term scheme to the term concept to describe coordinated patterns of action, since the term concept connotes coordinated mental representations and words. He used scheme to discuss what he thought of as the counterpart of conceptual networks during the period of infancy, before language and other symbolic systems are developed.
Two kinds of schemes
Two kinds of schemes begin to form during infancy through the repetition of regular sequences of actions. The first guides a particular action, such as grasping a rattle or sucking on a bottle. The second links sequences of actions as climbing into the high chair in order to eat breakfast or crawling to the door to greet Daddy when he comes home (Uzgiris, 1976). Infants behave differently with people who are familiar and those who are unfamiliar. They differentiate between playful sounds, such as cooing and babbling, and sounds that will bring a caregiver such as crying and screeching. They differentiate between the foods they will eat readily and those they reject. Such groupings suggest schemes, developed by a mental coordination that evolves with an infant’s repeated transactions with aspects of the environment. Schemes are created and modified continuously throughout life. For our purposes here, a scheme is any organized, meaningful grouping of events, feelings, and related images, actions or ideas.
Two part of existing schemes and types of adaptation
Adaptation is a two-part process in which the continuity of existing schemes and the possibility of altering schemes interact. One part if the adaptation process is assimilation, the interpretation of new experiences in terms of an existing scheme. Assimilation contributes to the continuity of knowing. For example, Karen thinks that anyone who goes to the private high school in her city is a snob, so when she meets Gail, who attends the private school, she expects Gail to be a snob. After talking with Gail for five minutes, she concludes that Gail really is a snob. Here we see assimilation: Karen interprets her interactions with Gail in light of her existing scheme concerning the kinds of students who attend the private school.
The second part of the adaptation process is accommodation, the modification of familiar schemes to account for new dimensions of the object or event that are revealed through experience. For example, Karen and Gail spend a little more time together, and Karen discovers that Gail is not rich and is attending the private high school on a scholarship. She and Karen actually have a lot of common interests. Gail is quite friendly and wants to see Karen again. Karen decides that not everyone who goes to the private school is a snob and realizes that she has to postpone her judgments of people until she gets to know them a little better. Here we see accommodation: Karen has modified her scheme concerning the private school’s students in order to integrate the new information she has received.
Sensorimotor Intelligence
Formation of increasingly complex sensory and motor schemes that allow infants to organize and exercise some control over their environment
Preoperational thought
Preoperational Thought 1 ½ yrs – 5or 6 yrs. Begins when a child learns a language. Children develop tools for representing schemes symbolically through language, imitation, imagery, symbolic play and symbolic drawing. Their knowledge is still very much tied to their own perception.
Concrete Operational Thought
Children begin to appreciate the logical necessity of certain causal relationships. They can manipulate categories, classification systems, and hierarchies into groups. They are more successful in solving problems that are clearly tied to physical reality than in generating hypotheses about purely hypothetical or abstract concepts.
Formal Operational Thought
Able to grasp many simultaneously interacting variables and to create systems of laws or rules that can be used for problem solving. This reflects the Quality of intelligence on which science and philosophy are built
