Cognitive Development Flashcards
Cognitive Development
Developmental psychology is the field of study that explores patterns of stability, continuity, growth and change that occur throughout a person’s life
Development (physical)
Growth of body and its organs, the functioning of physiological systems including brain, physical signs of ageing, changes in motor abilities
Maturational changes
Evidence of physical changes from birth to death
Development (cognitive)
Changes and continuities in perception, language, earning, memory, problem solving and other mental processes
Patterns of growth and change and cognitive skills
How does thinking change across life
Development (psychosocial)
Changes and continuities in personal and interpersonal aspects such as motives, emotion, personality traits, interpersonal skills, relationships and roles played in the family and society
Intra and inter personal processes
What might change in personality, social relationships
How do we interact with peers, relationships, siblings
Looking how we broaden out in social world
Piaget’s Cognitive Theory
Jean Piaget (1896-1980) - children actively construct new understandings of the world based on experiences
STAGES
- sensorimotor (birth-2)
- pre-operational (2-7)
- concrete operational (7-11)
- formal operational (11-adulthood)
Assimilation
New information fits into existing schemes
e.g. horse - fitting own info into new info - looking at horse and saying dog (four legs and furry)
Accommodation
Changes schemes to incorporation new information or ideas
Adaption
Changing thinking ways
Sensorimotor stage
World is understood through senses and actions
Through coordination and motor responses that they engage in
Object Permanence
Sensorimotor period
Understanding that objects continue to exist when they are not visible
4-8 - out of sight out of mind
8-12 - little sense of this
1 year - trouble with invisible displacement
18 months - is mastered
Pre-operational stage (POS)
Symbolic representations and capacity
- language
- pretend play
- can refer to future and past
Focus on perceptual salience - pre-schoolers can be fooled by appearance
Troubles with tasks that require logic
Difficulties with conservation
- properties don’t change when the appearance does
Engage in centration Irreversible thought Static thought Difficulties with classification Egocentric with thinking Extends to emotions, beliefs
POS (cognitive limitations - centration)
Focusing on one aspect of a problem or object
POS (cognitive limitations - irreversible thought)
Cannot mentally undo an action
POS (cognitive limitations - static thought)
Focusing on the end state rather than the changes that transform one state into another
POS (cognitive limitations - difficulty with classification)
Using criteria to sort objects on the basis of characteristics such as shape, colour, function
Lack class inclusion, the ability to relate the whole class (furry animals) to its subclasses (dogs, cats)
POS (cognitive limitations - egocentrism)
Notion that I see world is different from how others see the world
Are there more dogs or are there more animals? - this is what they struggle with
Classification skills are not quite their yet
What could someone else see?
Sit on other side and ask them
Egocentrism
Ability to attribute mental states—beliefs, intents, desires, pretending, knowledge—to oneself and others and to understand that others have beliefs, desires and intentions that are different from one’s own
Ability to understand that mental state is different from mine
How cognitive shifts affects psychosocial development
Concrete Operations Stage (COS)
Able to perform operation
Mental actions - still limited
Concrete objections or situations
Able to do tasks - long period of time
In this stage we see a shift from understanding being driven by perceptual salience to logical reasoning
Less egocentrism
COS (horizontal decalage)
Fundamental understandings before we can understand things overtime
COS (decentration)
Can focus on two or more dimensions of a problem at once
COS (reversibility of thought)
Can mentally reverse or undo an action
COS (reversibility of thought)
Can mentally reverse or undo an action
COS (transformational thought)
Can understand the process of change from one state to another
COS (seriation)
The ability to arrange items mentally along a quantifiable dimension such as weight or height
COS (transitivity)
Is the understanding of relationships among elements in a series
e.g. might compare blocks together
COS (classification abilities improve)
Can classify objects by multiple dimensions and can grasp class inclusion
Formal Operations Stage (FOS)
Takes place gradually over years
Formal operations are mental actions on ideas
They permit systematic and scientific thinking about problems, hypothetical ideas, and abstract concepts
e.g. can think about thinking
We can think in a different way - engage in systematic, scientific thinking - more abstract, creative
Responses would become more creative/abstract
Positive effects of FOS
Sense of identity, complex thinking, appreciation of humour
Negative effects of FOS
Confusion, adolescent idealism and rebellion against ideas that are not logical
Formal operational thought can also lead to adolescent egocentrism
Rebel against ideas that we don’t think follow the good rules of logic that we have mastered
Piaget’s Pendulum Task
Ask children which factor contributes to swing of pendulum
Before this stage would change multiple things - didn’t really get anywhere and acting on utilising the objects
