Cognitive Development Flashcards
What is cognitive development?
- Study of how our thinking and reasoning emerges over time
What is the Piagetian perspective on cognitive development?
- Children actively construct their own cognition
- Which leads to stages of development
What kind of theory is the Piagetian perspective of cognitive development?
Constructivist
What is the Vygotskian perspective on cognitive development:
- We share cognition with animals
- Children’s cognition is also constructed through social interactions
WHat is the Zone of Proximal Development?
- Frames development in terms of changing capacities, not just specificially age
- Acknowledges the role of others in our abilities, but also the construction of those abilities
Instead of development in stages, what does the Vygotskian perspective suggest?
Development proceeds through changes in levels of ability.
Explain the Vygotskian ZPD levels…
Level 1: Child can do it
Level 2: Child can do it with help
Level 3: Child can’t do it
What was Piaget interested in?
The emergence of knowledge
What are Piaget’s methods?
- Naturalistic observations
- Interviews
- Small samples
- Loosely-described methods
- Subjective interpretations
- Beleived results applied to all children
What is cognitive adaptation (Piaget)?
- Changing knowledge structures in response to the environment
- Conceptually like evolutionary adaptation, but not the same process
How does cognitive adaptation occur?
- Assimilation and accommodation
- Concepts and categorisation
What is Assimilation?
- Incorporate new information into already-existing schemas of thought
What is Accommodation?
Modifying already existing knowledge schemas
What are Piaget’s Stages of Development?
- Sensorimotor (0-2)
- Preoperational (2-7)
- Concrete operational (7-11)
- Formal operational (11+)
What does the sensorimotor stage involve?
- Learning about entities and properties in the world by interacting with objects
- Learning that objects can fall when you push them
What does the preoperational stage involve?
- Focussing on one characteristic e.g. spacing and the inability to focus on multiple characteristics of an object or set of objects at the same time
What does the concrete operational stage involve?
- children solve the problems that the preoperational can’t but they might not give as many or as sort of rich account compared to an adult
What problems are there with perspective taking in the sensorimotor stage|?
- Object permanence
- Imitation
What problems are there with perspective taking in the preoperational stage?
- Three Mountains Task
- Appearance-Reality Task
What is the Nativist view?
- Knowledge isn’t entirely learned but is rather built into the system
What is the Empiricist view?
- Capacities for learning are built into the system
- But knowledge itself is entirely learned
What is a concept in philosophy?
A constituent unit of thought
What is a concept in cognitive psychology?
An idea that allows us to organise objects, events, etc. on the basis of some similarity.
What is the role of categorisation?
- We can learn a lot about cognitive development by looking at how infants categorise the world.
What are the 3 characteristics of categories?
- Hierarchical structure
- Prototypicality
- Abstraction
How does the hierarchy of concepts develop?
Previously: basic category develops first, followed by super-ordinate and sub-ordinate categories.
Now: From super-ordinate to basic to sub-ordinate.
What is the Empiricist Account of categories?
- Infants are able to acquire concepts through perceptual information alone, and they don’t need anything else.
What do infants use to form categories?
- Basic Visual Features
- Higher Level Visual Features
- Auditory Cues
- Other Perceptual Cues: touch/texture
What does the Empiricist perspective suggest about object permanence through infancy?
0-8m: no search for hidden objects
8-12m: searching for moved objects in their original location
12-18m: don’t track objects that change locations out of sight
18-24m: full object permanence/tracking
What constraints are there of the empiricist perspective?
- there is also good evidence that infants represent hidden object, even if they do not search for them.
What is core object knowledge?
core system of object representation, centred on a set of expectations about how objects move:
- cohesion
- continuity
- contact
What is core number knowledge?
When you change the ratio, infants respond differently, which suggests it’s not just number or numerical magnitudes but it’s the ratio between magnitudes that the system is somehow able to process
What is core geometry knowledge?
Using cues to navigate a room.
What is core knowledge about Minds?
- Do children know that others have minds?
What constraints are there on the nativist perspective?
- How can we measure what is innate?
- How does perceptual experience change or shape innate categories?
- How have innate concepts evolved?
Theories of cognitive development are on a continuum from:
Empiricist to Nativist
Core Knowledge is a nativist theory that…
Infants have certain kinds of conceptual knowledge that emerges early, and it’s only learned
