Cognitive Development and Intelligence Flashcards
Physical Development
• Physical development: The growth of the body and its organs, the functioning of the physiological systems including the brain, physical signs of ageing, changes in motor abilities etc.
Cognitive Development
• Cognitive development: Changes and continuities in perception, language, learning, memory, problem solving and other mental processes
Psychosocial development
• Psychosocial development: Changes and continuities in personal and interpersonal aspects such as motives, emotions, personality traits, interpersonal skills, relationships and roles played in the family and society
Perceptual and cognitive development in infants:
• Perceptual and cognitive development in infants:
o Infants able to distinguish between happy and sad faces
o Neural systems responsible for identifying categories of facial expressions emerge before language acquisition
o Will stop responding to a stimulus once it gets used to it
What can infants sense and perceive?
• What can infants sense and perceive?
o Born with many sensory capabilities
o Even before birth fetal heartrates increase in response to loud sounds
o Can hear and know mothers voice before they are born
o Vision not well developed at birth
o Vision is 20/500 (object 20m away look as clear as an object 500m away) but improves to 20/100 by six months
o Focus best on objects between 18-20cm away
Intermodal Understanding
o When infants hear their mothers talking and see their mouths moving different parts of the brain are activated
o Research of last 30 years suggests more capable of intermodal processing ( ability to associate sensations of an object from different senses or to match their own actions to behaviours they have observed visually.)
o By 3 months infant pays attention to a person if speech sounds are synchronized with lip movements
o By 4-5 months they will follow a conversation
Perceiving Meaning
• Perceiving meaning
o Ecological theorists argue that the nervous system is wired to recognise certain dangers and to recognise potential ‘value’ of some stimuli, without prior learning
o As early as 2 weeks infants show defensive response to an object that may be coming to hit them
Piaget’s theory of cognitive development (1896-1980)
- First psychologist to trace cognitive development systematically
- Children actively construct new understandings of the world based on their experiences. They do this through a process of equilibration which means balancing assimilation (fitting reality into their existing knowledge) and accommodation (modifying schemas to fit reality)
o Sensorimotor (Birth-2 Years):
- Infants think with their hands, mouths and senses→ This is how they understand the world
- Achievement of object permanence
- Practical knowledge infants develop during this period forms basis for their later ability to represent things mentally
- They know about an object e.g. a duck only in terms of sensations and actions associated with it, not as an object reality
- Major achievement is object permanence: The recognition that objects exist in time and space independent of the child’s actions on or observations of them.
- According to piaget before the age of about 12 months and object such as a ball exists only for an infant when it is in sight. If it is hidden from view it no longer exists. When acquires object permanence will look for an object even if not in view
- During this stage children are extremely egocentric, thoroughly embedded in their own point of view.
• Preoperational stage (2-5/7)
o Emergence of symbolic thought- the ability to use symbols (e.g. words) to represent concepts.
o When children can play with the world in their minds they don’t need to think exclusively with their hands and mouths
o Allows preschool children to converse with other people and imagine solutions to problems before actually doing anything
o May have difficult with tasks that require logic
o E.g. when asked what view a doll sees they may answer the same view that they see
o However much more likely to be less egocentric in easier tasks such as not covering their eyes and saying ‘you can’t see me’ like a 3 year old would.
o Preoperational thinking is fairly literal. When mother explaining to child what compromise is when reading two books instead of three and then asks him if he remembers he will respond it is two.
(Preoperational) Centration
Tendency to focus or centre on one perceptually striking feature of an object without considering its other features that might be relevant e.g. when picking chocolate bars more likely to pick long one even though its same size as short thick one
(Preoperational) Static Thought
Static thought: Focusing on the end state rather than the stages that transform one state into another
(Preoperational) Irreversible thought
o Irreversible thought: Cannot undo an action
Middle Childhood: Concrete operational stage 7-11
o Children can imagine performing mental manipulations on a set of objects and then mentally put them back the way they found them e.g. imagining different ways to explain why they came home late from playing with their friends and pick the one with the best chance of acceptance
o Able to understand the concept of conservation: that basic properties of an object or a situation remain stable (are conserved) even though superficial properties may be changed. E.g. tall glass can have the same liquid as a smaller glass
o Less egocentrism
Concrete operational: Decentration
Decentration: Can focus on two or more dimensions of a problem at once
