Cognitive Development Flashcards
Jean Piaget
Swiss psychologist influential in the field of cognitive development. Paige based hypotheses on observations of his own children.
Schema
A mental idea of what something is and how to act on it. According to Piaget, schemata are the basic building blocks of intelligent behaviour.
Action Schemata
Inborn survival reflexes, like sucking and grasping. This enables infants to interact with the world from birth. Our schemata becomes more sophisticated as we mature and our environment expands.
Assimilation
When new information is fit into existing schemata.
Accommodation
When schemata are altered to let in new information.
Sensorimotor Stage (0-2 Years)
Characterised by infants learning about their surroundings through their senses and motor interactions with their environment.
Sensorimotor Stage - Key Achievements
- sensory and motor coordination
- increased goal-directed behaviour
- acquire object permanence
Pre-Operational Stage (2-7 Years)
Characterised by egocentrism, animism and centration.
Egocentrism
The tendency to perceive the world solely from ones own point of view.
Animism
The belief that everything that exists has some kind of conscious.
Centration
The inability to focus on more than one feature of an object at a time. Pre-operational children are unable to grasp conservation of mass/volume/number because of centration.
Pre-Operational Stage - Key Achievements
- symbolic thinking
- transformation
- reversibility
Transformation
The understanding that something can change from one stage into another.
Reversibility
The ability to mentally follow a sequence of events back to its starting point.
Concrete Operational Stage (7-12 Years)
Characterised by children being able to perform mental operations, which involve being able to accurately imagine the consequence of an action without it actually needing to happen.
