Conceptual Development Flashcards
Introduction
To understand their experiences, children must learn that the world includes several types of objects: people, other living things, and inanimate objects. children also need a basic understanding of causality, space, time, and number, so that they will be able to code their experiences in terms of why, where, when, and how often events occurred.
concepts are general ideas or understandings that can be used to group together objects, events, qualities, or abstractions that are similar in some way. For example, objects can have similar shapes (all football fields are rectangular), materials (all diamonds are made of compressed carbon), sizes (all skyscrapers are tall), tastes (all lemons are sour), colours (all colas are brown), functions (all knives are for cutting), and so on.
Concepts:
- help us to understand the world and act effectively in it by allowing us to generalise from prior experience (if we like the taste of one carrot, highly likely we like the taste of others).
- tell us how to react emotionally to new experiences, as when we fear all dogs after being bitten by one.
- without having them, we would have no idea what past experience would be relevant in a new situation
4 themes in conceptual development:
- nature and nurture - children’s concepts reflect the interaction between their specific experiences and their biological predispositions to process information in particular ways.
- active child - from infancy onward, many of children’s concepts reflect their active attempts to make sense of the world
- how change occurs - researchers who study conceptual development attempt to understand not only what concepts children form but also the processes by which they form them
- sociocultural context - the concepts we form are influenced by the society in which we live
Self-concept is a conceptual system made up of one’s thoughts and attitudes about oneself. self-concept in infancy starts as an appreciation of one’s physical self. infants first must differentiate themselves from the environment, which they do by developing the sense that they are physical beings. They do this by realising that some things are always present (their hands), while other things come and go (parents/toys). begin to realise their bodies are always present.
Nativists vs. Empiricists beliefs:
N - innate understanding of basic concepts plays a central role in development. infants born with some sense of fundamental concepts such as time, space, number, causality, and the human mind, or with specialised learning mechanisms that allow them to acquire rudimentary understanding of these concepts unusually quickly and easily. Nurture plays an important role in helping children move beyond this initial level of conceptual understanding, but not in forming the basic understanding
E - nature endows infants with only general learning mechanisms, such as the ability to perceive, attend, associate, generalise, and remember. Fundamental concepts are developed through exposure to experiences that are relevant to these concepts.
Piaget and Vygotsky both believe children learn by interacting with their environments. one important aspect children learn is that they can affect their environments.
Understanding Who or What?
Dividing Objects into Categories
Early categories of objects are based in large part on perceptual similarity, especially similarity in the shape of the objects.
To make sense of the innumerable objects they encounter, they seem to adopt a divide-and-conquer strategy, in which they quickly divide the objects into 3 general categories: inanimate objects, people, and other animals
Forming these general categories of objects allows children to draw accurate inferences about unfamiliar entities, For instance, when told that a platypus is a kind of animal, children know immediately that a platypus can move, eat, grow, reproduce, and so on.
In addition to this, children form various specific categories: cars, tools, furniture and others. These are organised into category hierarchies (organised according to set) to help them make finer distinctions among the objects within each level.
CATEGORISATION OF OBJECTS IN INFANCY
Infants can form categories of objects from in the first months of life. They can accomplished this through the frequent use of perceptual organisation, which is the grouping together of objects that have similar appearances (including colour, size, shape and movement).
CATEGORISATION OF OBJECTS BEYOND INFANCY
They increasingly grasp not only individual categories but also hierarchical and causal relations among categories. By age of 2 or 3yrs, children form category hierarchies -
Category Hierarchies:
- basic level
for example, a ‘tree’ has a number of characteristics such as bark, branches, large size, and so on.
- subordinate level (specific)
same characteristics as basic level and some additional ones; for example, all oaks but not all trees have rough bark and pointed leaves.
- superordinate level (general)
for example, ‘plant’ has fewer characteristics, plants come in a wide range of shapes, sizes, and colours.
Difficult to differentiate subordinate with basic level categories. children’s basic categories do not always match adults. Children go on to develop subordinate and superordinate categories by parents and others using the child’s basic category as a foundation for explaining the more specific and more general categories. However, this path sometimes involves amusing detours;
In one such case, Susan Gelman (2003) gave her 2yr old a spoon and a container filled with bite-size pieces of fruit and said “this is a fruit cup”. the boy responded to her description by picking up the “cup” and attempting to drink the fruit in it.
From infancy onward, children differentiate people from other animals and inanimate objects. For example, children smile more at people than at a rabbit or robot.
Causal Understanding and Categorisation:
casual understanding is crucial in forming many categories. to understand how causes and effects influences category formation, Jrascum and Andrews (1998) told 4 and 5yr olds about two categories of imaginary animals; wugs and gillies. some of the preschoolers were provided only physical descriptions of the animals where as other children were provided with addition information of a simple causal story that explained why wugs and gillies are the way they are.
Both groups were then shown pictures and asked which animal was a wug and a gilly.
The children who were told why the animals have those physical features, did better at classifying the pictures into the appropriate categories. When tested the next day the children also remembered the categories better than the other children just told physical features with no explanation. Thus understanding cause-effect relations helps children learn and remember.
——————————————————————————-
Describe how the interpretation of pictures, movies, and three-dimensional objects as representations of something else develops from 2 to 5 years of age using examples and factors that play a role in this process:
2 year oldchildren can learn novel picture-word references (Carey, 2004) [1], but three dimensional objects are not interpreted as representations of something else before the age of 3 (studies with room model by Deloache, 1991) [1]. Studies with movies (Deloache, 1998) show that 2.5 year olds can understand the relation of a 3-d model with reality (albeit on TV) [1]. Factors at play are intentionality of the maker (knowledge that it is intended to represent something) [1] and social mediation [1] which increases learning picture-word references [1]. 3-d objects are more readily interpreted as a model when they are less proximate (behind glass) [1] and the child is not allowed to physically interact with it. [1] As soon as an object has a functional or spatial relationship with something else it is less likely to be interpreted as a representation of something else [1] with children younger than 3 most sensitive to this [1]
Understanding Who or what?
Knowledge of Other People and Oneself
Naive psychology (a common-sense level of understanding other people and oneself) is crucial to normal human functioning and is a major part of what makes us people. There are three concepts within the center of naive psychology that are used to understand human behaviour; desires, beliefs and actions. We apply these concepts when we think about why someone did something.
For example, why did Jimmy go to Billy’s house?
- He wanted to play with billy (desire)
- he expected Billy to be home (belief)
- so he went to Billy’s house (action)
Three properties of Naive Psychology:
- many of them refer to invisible mental states (can’t see beliefs or desires or other psychological concepts such as perception and memory)
- psychological concepts are linked to one another in cause-effect relations. For example, Jimmy might become angry with Billy if he wasn’t home which could cause him to be mean to his brother later.
- they develop surprisingly early in life
Theory of Mind
an organised understanding of how mental processes such as intentions, desires, beliefs, perceptions, and emotions influence behaviour.
By age 4 or 5yrs old, preschoolers develop a rudimentary but well organised theory of mind for understanding peoples behaviour. A key assumption of this theory is that desires and beliefs motivate specific action.
Infants and preschoolers naive psychology, together with their strong interest in other people, provides the foundation for a theory of mind. Preschoolers theory of mind includes, for example, knowledge that beliefs often originate in perceptions, such as seeing or describing an event; that desires can originate either from physiological states, such as hunger or pain, or from psychological states, such as wanting to see a friend, and that desires and beliefs produce actions.
important concept of theory of mind
- understanding the connection between other peoples desires and their actions emerges by the end of the 1st year.
The understanding that desires lead to actions is established by 2yrs old. By 3yrs old, children show an understanding of the relation between beliefs and actions. At the same time 3yr olds understanding of this is limited in important ways.
These limitations are evident when children are presented with false-belief problems, in which another person believes something to be true that the child knows is false. The question is whether the person will follow their own false beliefs or the child’s correct understanding of the situation. studying such situations reveal whether children understand that other peoples actions are determined by the contents of their own minds rather than by objective truth of the situation. 3yr olds find this very difficult; many children (aged 5yrs) succeed in this task if it is presented in a way that facilities understanding.
Growth of Play
play refers to activities that are pursued for their own sake, with no motivation other than the enjoyment they bring. Play contributes to the understanding of other people.
- Earliest milestone in the development of play is pretend play (at 18mths old) which involves make-believe activities in which children create new symbolic relations. children act as if they were in a different situation than their actual one. often engage in object substitution when an object is used as something other than itself. pretend play is often thought of as limited to early childhood, but it actually continues far on that time. it expands their knowledge of the social world. the type of pretend play also matters; social pretend play, watching others pretend play
- ## about a year later children engage in sociodramatic play which involves a kind of pretend play where they enact miniatre dramas with other children or adults, such as “mother comforting baby”. this kind of play is more complex and social than object substitution. Typically more sophisticated when played with older people who can scaffold the play sequence than when they are pretending with a peer. this provides opportunities for learning, especially in improving storytelling skills.Knowledge of Living things
by age 4yrs, children develop an elaborate understanding of living things, including coherent ideas about invisible processes such as growth, inheritance, illness, and healing. Both their natural fascination with living things and the input they receive from the environment contribute to their knowledge about plants and animals
Distinguishing Living from Nonliving things:
Animals and plants, especially animals, are of great interest to young children. when animals are present, infants and toddlers pay careful attention to them.
Understanding Biological Processes:
Understanding many properties of biological entities - growth, heredity, illness, and death - is evident in the preschool years. they realise that growth is a product of internal processes. 3yr olds have heard of germs and have a general sense of how they operate as well as being aware of germs in one’s food do not cause illness. they also recognise the limits of living things recuperative processes: they understand that both illness and old age can cause death, from which recuperation is possible. not until children go to school, however, do most of them group plants and animals into a single category of living things.
Explanations for children’s relatively rapid acquisition of biological knowledge include the extensive exposure to biological information provided by families and the broader culture, children’s own questions that elicit useful info about plants and animals from other people, and the existence of brain mechanisms that lead children to be interested in living things and to learn about them quickly and easily.
Understanding why, where, when and how many
Causality:
the development of causal reasoning about physical events begins in infancy. By 6 to 12 months, infants understand the likely consequences of objects colliding. Understanding causal relations among actions helps 1yr olds remember them.
Space:
People, like animals, are biologically prepared to code space. Early in infancy, they code locations of other objects in relation to their own location and to landmarks. as they gain the ability to move around on their own, children gain a sense of locations relative to the overall environment as well as to their own body’s current location.
children who are born blind have surprisingly good representations of space, though some aspects of their spatial processing, especially processing of faces, remain poor even if corrective surgery is performed during infancy.
Time:
By age 5yrs, children can reason about time, in the sense of inferring that if two events started at the same time, and one stopped later than the other, the event that stopped later took longer. However, they can do this only when there are no interfering perceptual cues.
——————————————————————————–Number:
Infants discriminate differences between the number of objects, sounds, or events when the ratio of the numbers is large. during their 1st year, they become able to discriminate smaller ratios of objects and events, a trend that continues to adulthood. From infancy onward, representations of small sets, those with 1 to 4 items, is more precise than those with larger sets.
By age 3yrs, most children learn to count 10 objects. their counting seems to reflect understanding of certain principles, such as that each object should be labeled by a single number word. children’s subsequent rate of learning about numbers reflects their cultures number system and the degree to which their culture values numerical knowledge.
from infancy onwards, children also possess a general representation of magnitude that extends to space, time, and number.
