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)
Critique of Piaget’s preoperational stage
- Children not always egocentric: may be able to see others’ perspectives n different tasks and think that’s the only way to perform a task (rational limitation)
- Animism not so frequent with familiar objects
- Conservation achieved when ‘naughty teddy’ muddles up the coins (McGarrigle and Donaldson, 1974)
- Horizontal decalage: children may ‘solve’ some conservation tasks, but not others at different rates
What happens in Piaget’s stage of concrete operations
- Children can decentre and mentally reverse, so they can solve conservation problems
- They can reason logically (e.g. arrange sticks from shortest to longest), but their reasoning is tied to concrete examples (not yet abstract)
- Reasons with transitivity (if a > b and b > c, then a > c)
What happens in Piaget’s stage of formal operations?
- Reasoning no longer solely based in concrete examples, but can be represented in abstract form and therefore be done mentally: can hypothetically reason (e.g. higher maths)
- Formal schooling plays a major part in this stage of development
- Not all adults are proficient formal operators (or sciences would be easy for everyone)
- Older children and adults always do best in familiar contexts (e.g. expertise)
What was Lev Vygotsky’s sociocultural perspective
- Infants are born with few foundational/basic mental functions (e.g. sensation, memory, attention)
- These are transformed by culture into higher mental functions by providing children with tools of mental adaptation (e.g. languages, mnemonic strategies for memory)
- Cultures therefore teach children how to thing, and what to think (values)
- Children are active learners but not solitary explorers: major discoveries occur in collaborative interactions with mature social partners (e.g. parents and teachers)
- Children internalise instructions and then use these to regulate their own behaviour and cognition
- This happens when social partners are operating within the child’s zone of proximal development
What is the zone of proximal development in the sociocultural perspective of cognitive development
- What a child can do with guidance
What is scaffolding?
The way in which a parent may simplify a task to guide a child through their zone of proximal development
What is guided participation?
Informal tuition (e.g. cooking, riding a bike)
Vygotsky’s thoughts on thinking and speech
- To begin thought proceeds without speech
- Early language reflects what children know
- Communicative speech vs. egocentric speech
- Private speech used to regulate own behaviour
- Speech for self becomes silent (i.e inner speech), but continues as a cognitive self-guidance system
What is the information processing perspective of child cognitive development?
- Brain is seen as a computer
- Theories centre around a specific aspect of cognitive development (e.g. arithmetic)
- Assess methods used to process information through system with limited capacity (e.g. strategies)
- Focus on how children try to solve problems, and why they might fail
What is the information processing framework?
- Induction
- Form laws based on experience
E.g. I have seen lots of white swans, I have never seen a swan of any other colour = all swans are white
What is hardware and software in terms of information processing?
Hardware - Information is stored in our brains/nervous system
Software - Our use of this information
What parts of the brain make up the hardware?
- Temporal lobe
- Parietal lobe
- Occipital lobe
- Cerebellum
- Brain stem
What parts of the brain make up the software?
- Frontal lobe
What are domain-general skills?
Knowledge or skills that apply across all domains (not just something specific e.g. reading skills)
What are domain-specific skills?
Knowledge or skills applicable to a specific domain (e.g. mathematical ability)
How does the information processing model view children’s development?
- Undergoing a continuous cognitive change
Continuous applies in two senses:
- Changes occur rapidly and constantly without being restricted by stages
- Incremental improvements in cognitive performance, rather than abrupt stage transitions
Attention definition
The identification and selection of particular sensory input for more detailed processing
How do you learn to shift attention in infancy?
- Young infants have the opposite problem: “sticky fixation” or “obligatory attention”
- 2-3 months: better at disengaging attention, smooth pursuit eye movement, and anticipation of an objects’ appearance
- Very young children can sustain their attention for only short periods, but this improves with time
Examples of inefficient processing in younger children
- Struggle with attending efficiently
- Remember irrelevant details at expense of crucial details
- Cannot just extract necessary information (“gist”)
- Process irrelevant verbatim details instead - Cannot inhibit task-irrelevant (but dominant) responses
- E.g. imitate instead of adjusting their behaviour according to instructions
Processing speed development in children
- Processing speed increases with age (but then declines in older age)
- Effect consistent across domains (domain-general)
- Results of brain maturation?
Siegler’s (1996) Overlapping Waves theory of problem solving
Assumptions:
- At any one time children think in a variety of different ways about most problems
- These varied ways of thinking compete with each other
- Cognitive development involves gradual development in the frequency of how children think
What are the 5 component processes of the overlapping waves theory
Siegler (1996)
- Acquiring new strategies
- Mapping the strategy to novel problems
- Strengthening the strategy in relation to new and old problems
- Refining choices among alternate versions of a strategy
- Increasingly effective execution of new strategies
What is the role of memory?
- Foundational to information processing
- Our memory determines how information is stored by the cognitive system, to be used later
- Recognition memory presents at birth (habituation shows this)
- Recall is more complex and happens later
What is the evidence for memory in infants?
- Habituation/novelty - Infants are more likely to stare at something for longer if it is new to them
- Deferred imitation - Around 18 months infants will start to imitate the things that their parents do
What are the 3 components of memory?
- Encoding
- Storage
- Retrieval
What is the capacity and duration of short term memory?
- Limited capacity: approximately 7 items (+/- 2)
- Limited duration: approximately 20-30 seconds
How is information lost from STM?
- Decay
- Interference (either retrospective or proactive)
How do we maintain memories in the STM
- If material is rehearsed then it can be maintained in STM for longer (and might get transferred into LTM)
- We can chunk information to increase capacity of STM
Memory span development
- STM capacity increases over the first years of life
- Performance is influenced by strategy use and knowledge, factors which also grow over time
- There is a prior knowledge advantage: remembering locations of chess pieces (Chi, 1978), 10 year old experts outperform novice adult students
- Domain-specific abilities facilitate performance (e.g. quicker to recognise items)
What is Baddeley’s (1974) model of working memory?
- Suggested that STM wasn’t just a “store” for holding information, but a “workspace” to manipulate information for some purpose
- Temporary storage and processing of information in order to:
1. solve problems
2. Respond to environmental demands
3. Achieve goals
What are the 4 specific aspects of the working memory model?
Baddley (1974)
- Central executive: attention, action control, problem-solving
- Phonological loop: manipulation and retention
- Visuospatial sketchpad: visual/spatial information
- Episodic buffer: episodic memories and memories related to life events
Prior to age 7, visuospatial sketchpad is more dominant than the phonological loop
This leads to poor subvocal rehearsal and greater focus on visual features
What is the fuzzy trace theory
Brainerd and Reyna
Memory can be understood by two types of representations:
- The verbatim memory trace
- Gist
Young children tend to favour verbatim memory
Improved memory performance may be explained by switch from verbatim memory to gist
