Cognitive Flashcards
What is Piagets theory about?
Basic assumptions
Basic processes
Stages of cognitive development
- characteristics of stage theories
- Piagets 4 stages
What are basic assumptions?
Child actively constructs knowledge
What is the constructivist approach?
Child learns on own, not just from others
Child is intrinsically motivated to learn
What are schemes?
Cognitive structure that forms the basis of organising actions and mental representations so that we can understand and act upon then environment
What are 3 processes that propel development?
Assimilation
Accommodation
Equilibration
What is assimilation?
Taking in information compatible with what is already known, incorporating into existing schemas
What is accommodation?
Changing existing knowledge based on new knowledge; modifying schemas based on experience
What is equilibration?
Balancing assimilation and accommodation to create stable understanding; reorganising schemes to achieve balance
How do children understand the world
With schemes
What are the characteristics of stage theories
Discontinuous
Invariant sequence
Hierarchical
Domain-general
What is discontinuous?
Tree = continuous - as age increases so does development
Butterfly = discontinuous - there are plateaus/stages
What are Piagets 4 stages?
Sensorimotor
Preoperational
Concrete operational
Formal operational
What is sensorimotor?
0-2
Intelligence expressed through sensory and motor abilities
Integration of motor movements with sensory experiences
What are the sub stages of sensorimotor?
Modification of reflexes (0-1month)
Primary circular reactions - organise repeated reflexes into larger behaviour, centred on own body, repetitive (1-4months)
Secondary circular reaction - environment is included in reactions (4-10 months) (infants lack object permanence)
Intentional coordinated behaviour (10-12months) means and end; cause and effect. Now have object permanence
Tertiary circular reaction - actively explore how objects can be used (12-18 months). Trial and error experimentation emerges
Mental representations and combinations (18-24 months)
What is preoperational stage?
2-7
Major advances - symbolic representation
- symbolic representation (2-4) (e.g., pretend play)
Major weakness - egocentric, centration
- egocentric = difficulty seeing the world from others points of view (rationale imitation, 14months)
- centration = narrowly focused thought; focus on a single feature of object or event, ignoring other features
What is concrete operational
7-11
Egocentric declines
Major advances:
- logical reasoning
- ability to attend to multiple dimensions
- solve conservation problems; class inclusion problems
Major weaknesses: limited to concrete situations; not abstract or hypothetical ones
Children performance on tasks can be influenced:
- context of task
- culture
- schooling
What is formal operational?
11+
Able to think abstractly and hypothetically
Able to reason systematically about all possible outcomes
Stage not attained universally
Weakness of Piagets theory?
Depicts children’s thinking as being more consistent than it is; does not account for variability in children’s performance
Underestimates cognitive competence of infants and young children
Undervalues influence of sociocultural environment on cognitive development
Vague about cognitive processes and mechanisms
What are alternative theories?
Information processing
Sociocultural
Core knowledge
Dynamic systems
What is info processing?
Cases neo-piagetian theory
Sieglers overlapping waves theory
What is Cases neo-piagetian theory?
Cognitive change occurs as a series of four stages
Changes due to increases in central processing speed and working memory capacity
What is Sieglers overlapping waves theory?
Child has number of strategies that can be used to solve problems
Overtime less efficient strategies are replaced by more effective ones
What is sociocultural?
Children are social learners - they advance most when they collaborate with others who are more skilled
Zone of proximal development
Social scaffolding
Private speech
