Cognitive Development: Piaget’s Theory and Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Viewpoint, & Information-Processing Perspective Flashcards
Cognitive Development
the activity of knowing and the
processes through which knowledge is acquired.
Cognition
Looks at changes, or stages, in
the quality of cognitive functioning. It is concerned with how the mind
structures its activities and adapts to the environment.
Piagetian Approach
- in Piaget’s theory, a basic
life function that enables an
organism to adapt to its
environment.
Intelligence
- Piaget’s term for the state of
affairs in which there is a balanced,
or harmonious, relationship
between one’s thought processes
and the environment.
Cognitive Equilibrium
- one who gains knowledge by
acting or otherwise operating on objects and events to discover their properties.
Constructivist
- an organized pattern of thought or action that one constructs
to interpret some aspect of one’s experience (also called cognitive
structure).
Scheme
is the tendency to create categories, by observing the
characteristics that individual members of a category have in
common.
Organization
is a term used for how children handle new information about
the environment, achieved through processes of assimilation and
accommodation. An inborn tendency to adjust to the demands of
the environment.
Adaptation
is taking new information and incorporating it into
existing cognitive structures.
Assimilation
is adjusting one’s cognitive structures to fit the
new information.
Accommodation
Toddler who has
never seen
anything fly but
birds thinks that all
flying objects are
“birdies.”
Equilibrium
Seeing an
airplane in the
sky prompts
child to call
the flying
object a
birdie.
Assimilation
Toddler experiences
disequilibrium upon
noticing that the new
birdie has no
feathers and doesn’t
flap its wings.
Accomodation
Forms hierarchical
scheme consisting of
a superordinate class
(flying objects) and
two subordinate
classes (birdies and
airplanes)
Organization
- Sequencing fixed.
- Individual differences entering emerging stages
Invariant developmental sequence
- The tendency to
attribute life to objects that are not
alive.
Animism
- Children assume
everyone else thinks, perceives, and
feels as they do.
Egocentrism
- the ability to keep the true
properties or characteristics of an object in mind despite the
deceptive appearance the object has assumed; notably lacking
among young children during the preconceptual period.
Appearance/reality distinction
- the recognition that
the properties of an object or
substance do not change when its
appearance is altered in some
superficial way.
Conservation
- the process whereby we explain and predict what people do
based on what we understand their desires and beliefs to be. - develops after preschool age
Belief-desire reasoning
- a type of task used in theory of mind studies in which children must infer that another person does not
possess knowledge that they possess.
False-belief task
- Piaget’s term for a child’s uneven
cognitive performance; an inability
to solve certain problems even
though one can solve similar
problems requiring the same
mental operations.
Horizontal décalage
- a formal operational ability to
generate hypotheses and use
deductive reasoning - Benchmark for formal operations
- Thought is rational, systematic
and abstract.
Hypothetico-deductive reasoning
- development of an individual over his or her lifetime.
Ontogenetic Development
- change over relatively brief periods of time
Microgenetic Development
- changes over evolutionary time
Phylogenetic Development
- changes in one’s culture
Sociohistorical Development
- the temporary support that
parents, teachers, or others give a child in
doing a task until the child can do it alone.
Scaffolding
- Involved in planning and monitoring
what is attended to, and what is
done with the information
Control processes or executive
functions
– knowledge of one’s
cognitive abilities and processes
related to thinking
Metacognition
– thought without
awareness
-An early developing ability that
shows little difference across age
Implicit cognition
– thought with
awareness
- Large age differences
Explicit cognition
increases dramatically
- Myelination of reticular formation through puberty
Attention span
: Ignoring Irrelevant Info
- Also improves with age; less distraction
Selective Attention
: Dismissing Information That is
Clearly Irrelevant
- Improves with age; neurological maturation
Cognitive Inhibition
– schemes for recurring events
organized in terms of causal and
temporal sequences
- Organizes world
- Tend to remember info
Scripts
– based on repetition
- Older children use rehearsal more
efficiently
- Active or cumulative
–
repeating several earlier items as they
rehearse a successive word
Rehearsal
- Type of problem solving requiring
one to make an inference
Reasoning
- Applying existing knowledge to
help reason about something not
known yet
Analogical Reasoning
– knowing about
analogical reasoning is important
- Teaching children the value of
reasoning by analogy increases use of
this type of thinking
Metacognition
