Cognitive Development: Childhood & Adolescence I Flashcards
In middle childhood, what stage of Piaget’s theory do children move to after early childhood?
They move from the preoperational stage to the concrete operational stage. There is a transition to this stage that moves from non-conversing to conserving.
What is the new ability children in middle childhood transform into from early childhood ages 7-11, how is this realised?
Children in middle childhood are able to perform operations (mental actions) on concrete situations/objects. They are able to perform better on conservation tasks.
What is horizontal décalage in conservation tasks?
The idea that some tasks are easier and emerge earlier than others. Typically, we would see the conservation of liquid, mass and number (ages 3 - 6) emerge before area or volume (ages 7 - 11).
What shifts in a child’s thinking to move from non-conserving to conserving?
Centration to Decentration
Can focus on two or more dimensions of a problem at once
Irreversibility to reversibility of thought
Can mentally reverse or undo an action
Static to Transformational thought
Can understand the process of change from one state to another
This is the thinking capacity in middle childhood that allow children to perform conservation tasks.
What is the biggest shift identified in the concrete operations stage?
The shift from understanding being driven by perceptual salience to logical reasoning
What are the two new abilities formed in the concrete operational stage that evidence logical reasoning and examples of both?
Seriation
The ability to arrange items mentally along a quantifiable dimension such as weight or height
e.g., arranging rectangles from smallest to largest, perceptual reasoning allows them to get there.
Transitivity
The understanding of relationships among elements in a series
e.g, there would be success on this verbal problem “if john is taller than Mark, and mark is taller than sam, who is taller- John or Sam?”
A concrete operational child has the ability to not be dominated by perceptually driven thinking. With new abilities of seriation and transitivity, what are children able to improve upon as a result?
Reduced egocentrism
This facilitates less egocentric thinking, and theory of mind improves across childhood.
Classification abilities improve
Can classify objects by multiple dimensions and can grasp class inclusion.
Piaget argued that adolescence brings about the last major shift in the way we think, what stage is this shift (from concrete operational) and how does thinking change as a result?
The formal operations stage
This takes place gradually over years and is the performance of mental actions on ideas. They permit systematic and scientific thinking about problems, hypothetical ideas, and creative and abstract concepts.
When Piaget asked the question, “If you had a third eye where would you put it?”, how would a preoperational child and a formal operational child respond?
Preoperational
All children would place the third eye in the middle of the forehead.
Formal operational
There would be a myriad of responses as children could think abstractly about the best use of the eye on different body parts.
How did Piaget’s pendulum task operationalise formal operations?
Those that were in formal operations approached the task in a systematic way. They were able to vary many variables to see how they could make the pendulum swing the furthest, therefore the mental actions were quite conceptually realised by thinking about thinking.
Socially, how do formal operations underpin social interactions in adolescents positively and not so positive?
It allows for a sense of identity, complex thinking and an appreciation of humour.
It can generate confusion, adolescent idealism and rebellion against ideas that are not logical. It can also lead to adolescent egocentrism.
What are the two notions that are involved with adolescent egocentrism?
Imaginary audience
We spend so much time thinking about our thinking that we must assume that people are thinking in the same way. This is convincing yourself others are thinking in the same way.
Personal fable
The idea is that your experience is so unique that no one else has gone through it.
In terms of brain development, what is an important recognition of the nervous system?
The nervous system is not a static network of interconnected elements; rather, it is a plastic (changeable), living organ that grows and changes continuously in response to its genetic programs and its interactions with the environment.
What is one of the largest systems in the body that correlate with the change in the development of adolescence?
The endocrine system. This is how hormones impact the changes in the nervous system in response to hormonal changes.
What are neurons?
The basic functional units of the nervous system. They take in information from other neurons (reception), integrate those signals (conduction), and pass signals to other neurons (transmission).
