Dan Learning pack 1 Flashcards
What is cognitive development?
Age-related changes in perceiving, learning, thinking, attending, remembering
What is the constructivist approach?
- Children construct their own knowledge of reality; they are active in development
- Based really heavily in idea OF cognitive schemas
What are cognitive schemas?
- Structures (organised patterns of thought) that we construct to interpret experiences
What are the 3 sources of continuity that Piaget thought children used to develop and adapt their cognitive schemas?
- Assimilation
- Accommodation
- Equilibration/Equilibrium (the balance of assimilation and accommodation)
What are the 3 main developmental stages of schemas?
Behavioural Schemas
- 0-2 years: infants know through direct (overt) actions
Symbolic Schemas
- 3-7 years: children can think about objects and events without acting on them
Operational Schemas
- 7+ years: children use cognitive operations; many of these correspond tto mathematic symbols and show reversibility (e.g. if a > b then b<a></a>
What are Piaget’s 4 stages of cognitive development?
- Sensorimotor stage (0-2 years)
- Preoperational stage (2-7 years)
- Stage of concrete operations (7-12 years)
- Stage of formal operations (12+ years)
What are the key principles (rules) of Piaget’s stage based theory?
- Qualitative change - children of different ages think in qualitatively different ways
- Broad applicability - the type of thinking a child develops at a particular stage in development is applicable to a wide range of situations
- Brief transitions - Whilst moving between different developmental stages the child will be displaying characteristics of both stages
- Invariant sequence - A child can only go through the stages in the correct order and they cannot skip any stages
- Horizontal and vertical decalage - Understanding certain parts of a thinking style (horizontal) but not understanding other styles until they get to another developmental stage (vertical)
What are the six sub-stages of the sensorimotor stage?
- Basic reflex activity (birth-1 month)
- Primary circular reactions (1-4 months)
- Secondary circular reactions (4-10 months)
- Coordination of secondary schemes (10-12 months)
- Tertiary circular reactions (12-18 months)
- Symbolic problem solving, beginning of thought, internal representations (18-24 months)
Sensorimotor substage: Basic reflex activity
- Cognitive ability only reaches to basic reflexes
Sensorimotor substage: Primary circular reactions
- Baby repeats certain actions with their body that they find enjoyable (e.g. wiggling fingers)
- Done intentionally
Sensorimotor substage: Secondary circular reactions
- Repeat enjoyable actions with body as well as other objects (e.g. shaking rattle)
Sensorimotor substage: Coordination of secondary schemes
- Don’t just prolong enjoyable activities for the sake of it, they want to reach a goal
Sensorimotor substage: Tertiary circular reactions
- Children start o explore objects by taking them apart and putting them back together
Sensorimotor substage: Symbolic problem solving, beginning of thought, internal representations
- Start to transition to preoperational stage
- Start to understand that symbols represent other objects
What is the key milestone of the sensorimotor stage?
- Object permanence
- Child understands that even when they can no longer see an object they know that it still exists
What are the mistakes children might make with object permanence?
- Babies approx 8-10 months old do not search for toys that are hidden (out f sight, out of mind)
- Infants <1 year old make a-not-b errors, they look for toys where they have found it before and where it may not actually be, as if their behaviour determines where an object is
Neo-nativists critiques of Piaget’s stage based theory of development (sensorimotor stage)
- Infants have more knowledge of the world than Piaget hypothesised
- Piaget’s tests are too difficult: infants can’t demonstrate their knowledge because of performance limitations
What happens in the final 6 months of the sensorimotor stage?
- Deferred imitation
- Children start to develop a certain mental representation of how other people act (e.g. children know how to unlock phones
What are the substages of the preoperational stage?
- Symbolic function (2-4 years)
2. Intuitive thought (4-7 years)
Substages of the preoperational stage: Symbolic function
- Representational insight
- Symbols stand for things (language, pictures, symbolic play)
Deficits in reasoning:
- Lack of dual representation: can’t think of objects in 2 ways at once
- Egocentrism: child can only see the world from their own perspective
- Animism: believe that everything that moves is alive (e.g. clouds, water), only exception is when something inanimate is similar to something that is animate (e.g. dog toy that looks like their own pet dog)
- No appearance/reality distinction: once the child understands something different about their environment they can no longer see it in the other way
Substages of the preoperational stage: Intuitive thought
- Begin to order things in a systematic way
- Lack of reversibility (cannot mentally “undo” action)
- Centration: focus on one feature, see things as they appear to be
- Show conservation failures for: number, liquids, mass, volume (taller thinner glass has more water than smaller fatter glass)