Cognitive Development: Early Childhood Flashcards
What is Piaget’s sensorimotor stage and approximate years?
Birth - 2 years, Coordination of sensory and motor activity; achievement of object permanence. This is how infants perceive and interact with their world, they developed object permanence.
What is Piaget’s preoperational stage and approximate ages?
2-7 years, use of language and symbolic representations; egocentric view of the world, make-believe play.
What is Piaget’s concrete operational stage and approximate ages?
7-11 years, solution of concrete problems through logical operations; objects are organised into hierarchies and classes and subclasses; thinking is not yet abstract.
What is Piaget’s formal operational stage and approximate ages?
11-adulthood, Systematic solution of actual and hypothetical problems using abstract symbols.
Early childhood is correlated with Piaget’s preoperational stage, what do children in this stage form?
Symbolic representations and the capacity to evolve language, engage in pretend play (including imaginary companions) and are able to refer to the past and future as well as solidify object permanence.
Although children in early childhood are able to form symbolic representations, what phenomenon are they tripped up by in this period of development?
Perceptual salience - Meaning, the most obvious features of an object or a situation are represented over deeper meaning. Therefore, children have difficulty with tasks that require logic.
As children are reliant on perceptions and lack logical thinking between the ages of 2-7, what phenomenon do they have difficulty with?
Conservation - Certain properties of an object or substance do not change when its appearance is altered in a superficial way.
What are some criticisms of Piaget’s conservation tasks?
The language used by the experimenter had ambiguous meanings to the child, therefore conservation could be confused with language understanding.
Gestures, sometimes indicated understanding however the verbal responses didn’t align with what the gesture may have been.
Piaget’s key cognitive limitations to conservation tasks; what is centration?
Focusing on one aspect of a problem or object (i.e., the larger blue water, the length of the playdoh)
Piaget’s key cognitive limitations to conservation tasks; what is irreversible thought?
Cannot mentally undo an action (i.e., the child needs the action to be done in front of them to see the change)
Piaget’s key cognitive limitations to conservation tasks; what is static thought?
Focusing on the end state rather than the changes that transform one state into another.
Piaget’s key cognitive limitations to conservation tasks; what is “difficulty with classification” and two examples of this limitation?
Using criteria to sort objects on the basis of characteristics such as shape, colour, and function.
and/or
Lack of class inclusion, the ability to relate the whole class to its subclasses.
e.g. of an object; A child is given a group of buttons that are all different colours. The child is asked, “do you have more buttons or more red buttons”. If they can discern that “red” is a sub-class of a button then they have overcome this limitation.
e.g. of class inclusion; a “dog” is a subclass of an animal.
Piaget’s key cognitive limitations to conservation tasks; what is egocentrism?
this is a central idea in Piaget’s work where “my” perspective on the world is different from “your” perspective” - children find it difficult to separate the way they view the world as shared by others. This evolves later in adolescence and is part of social development.
How is egocentrism tested in a laboratory environment and the findings and criticisms of the task?
The three mounds task.
A child was still able to reach over the mounds and point out other objects, meaning egocentrism is not absolute.
Memory could be a limitation as well as an experimenter’s visual perspective on the scene.
What Theory takes egocentrism further, particularly into the social dimensions of development?
Theory of Mind - The 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.
Theory of mind experiments test “what we know” and what a “hypothetical other may know”, what are two false-belief tasks that test this and how are they conducted?
The Sally-Anne Task and the Smarties Task.
S-A task: Sally has a marble, she places it in the basket and leaves the room. Anne takes the marble out of the basket and puts it in the box. Sally comes back in, where does Sally think the marble is? the smarties task is a practical version of this.
What are the implications of theory-of-mind?
This has massive social implications, whereby being able to attribute a mental state to another creates a strong understanding of social dimensions. This is the synthesis of cognitive and social development.
What did Lev Vygotsky focus on as the driver of a child’s development and what was a key part of his theory?
He focused on the nature of human development particularly through culture as a tool “within” a person, stating that social interaction drives cognitive development. He theorised, the “Zone of Proximal Development”.
What is the Zone of proximal development?
A region that falls between what a child can do independently and a task that lies beyond their capability. Vygotsky argued that learning happens in the zone in-between. Referring to tasks that can be done by a child with the help of another.
What is the MKO?
More Knowledgeable Other. This is a person within a child’s proximity that can help them achieve tasks they cannot do on their own. Vygotsky focuses on the social plane rather than the cognitive.
What is the philosophy behind Vygotsky’s work?
A child has to external experience something before it can be internally regulated. For example, in emotion, we firstly experience something as an interpsychological interaction (a social interaction) where an MKO co-regulates emotion, but as a child develops they begin to internalise these skills, meaning they do not need an MKO to help regulate thus becoming an intrapsycholoigcal category.
What are the differences between Piaget’s and Vygotsky’s theories?
Sociocultural context
P: Little emphasis, V: Strong emphasis
Constructivism
P: Cognitive constructivist, V: Social constructivist
Stages
P: Strong emphasis on stages of development, V: No general stages of development proposed
Key processes in development & learning
P: Equilibration; schema; adaption; assimilation; accommodation, V: Zone of Proximal Development; scaffolding; language/dialogue; tools of the culture.
Role of language
P: Minimal- language provides labels for children’s experiences (egocentric speech), V: Major- Language plays a powerful role in shaping thought.
Teaching implications
P: Support children to explore their world and discover knowledge, V: Establish opportunities for children to learn with the teacher and more skilled peers.
Play is a crucial component of social development and is a large part of Vygotskian theory. As developmental psychologists, we need to have a common definition of play. What are the pillars or features proposed by Saracho & Spodek (1998) that are associated with play?
- Intrinsically, not extrinsically motivated
- Process-, not product-orientated
- Creative and non-literal
- Having implicit rules
- Spontaneous and self-initiated
- Free from major emotional distress
The ages of 2 to 5 are called the play years, what are the two changes that play undergoes between infancy to age 5?
- It becomes more social
- It becomes more imaginative
