Developmental psychology: Cognitive development Flashcards
What is meant by a scheme according to Piaget?
A mental representation of action and knowledge.
What three basic schemes do babies start out with?
Pulling, looking and grasping
What are operations?
Internal mental representations not based on physical activity
What two processes do children use to modify their schemes?
Organisation and adaption
What is meant by organisation?
Organising several schemes into a bigger scheme
What does adaptions consist of? Explain this
Adaption consists of assimilation and accommodation. Assimilation is incorporating new information into a preexisting scheme. Accommodation is modifying pre existing schemes or generating a new one to fit new information.
What is meant by equilibration?
Equilibrations is the state where children’s schemes are in balance and undisturbed by conflict.
What happens when there are two many conflicts that can’t be solved through assimilation or accommodation?
A qualitative shift in the child’s way of thinking occurs called a stage shift
How is the sensorimotor stage categorised?
By thinking is doing
Name and describe the first two stages of sensorimotor stage
Reflexive schemes (0-1 month): Infants use their reflexes to explore the month Primary circular reactions (1-4 months): starts to show a degree of coordination between the senses and their motor behaviour through the primary circular reactions. The infant keeps repeating actions that are almost always focused on the infants body rather than the external world.
Name and describe the middle two sensorimotor stages
Secondary circular reactions (4-10 months): Starts to direct still circular actions towards environment. begun to intentionally act on environment.
Coordination of secondary schemes (10-12 months): Begins to deliberately combine schemes to achieve goals
Goal directed behaviour arises and object permanence is adopted.
Name and describe the last two sensorimotor stages
tertiary motor reactions (12-18 months): The infant begins to search for novelty and begins to use trial and error to explore characteristics and properties of objects and develops new ways of solving problems.
Beginning of thought: (18-24 months): The infant becomes able to form enduring mental representations. This is shown by deferred imitation, imitation some while after seeing the action
What is the main criticisms for Piaget’s sensorimotor stages?
Object permanence and deferred imitation occur way earlier than Piaget suggested
What stage is after sensorimotor and how is it defined?
The pre operational stage proceeds the sensorimotor stage and is characterised by an increase in mental representations.
How is the pre operational stage divided?
Into the symbolic function substage (2-4 years) and the intuitive thought substage (4-7 years)
Describe the symbolic function substage
Children acquire the ability momentally represent an object which is not physically there. Symbols can be used. They start participating in pretend play and older children start to use objects pretending they are other objects. Children can use language at this stage and their vocabulary grows quick.
Describe the intuitive thought substage
There is a shift in a Childs reasoning, they begin to classify, order and quantify in a more systematic manner.
Name the two limitations of the preoperational stage
Egocentrism- the tendency to perceive the world from one’s own point of view
Animism- the tendency to attribute lifelike qualities to inanimate objects
What is a criticism of egocentrism?
Rational imitation- when a child completes an action the adult intended to do rather than what they actually did (using head to turn off a switch). Also children from 4 or 5 can understand other people’s mental may differ from their own.
What is meant by transitional interference?
The ability to mentally seriate individual entries of an ordinal series such as (A<b></b>
Can children complete transitional interference?
They can complete it as long as they remember the premise although Piaget predicted this would be difficult for children. Failure of this during the preoperational stage is due to failure of remembering all the relevant information.
What is meant by class inclusion?
The ability to coordinate and reason about parts and wholes simultaneously for classes and subclasses.
What experiments highlights the absence of class inclusion in the preoperational stage?
The conservation task.
What research provided criticism for the class inclusion concept
Showing children’s ability to draw inference on category membership based on non-observable characteristics.
What three limitations did Piaget propose that contributed to a lack of ability in conservation tasks?
Centration- The child’s inability to focus on more than one quality
Reversibility- Their inability to mentally reverse an action just completed
Focusing on the end state- focusing on the state its now in rather than the means
What does the age children are successful on the conservation task depend on?
Culture and the concepts and substances tinvolved
Distinguish between vertical and horizontal decolage
Horizontal decolage is the age differences between solving problems that would appear require the same cognitive functions (weight, mass, height etc in conservation.) Vertical decolage is where what the child understands at one level or stage must be reconstructed at a later stage on a different level of understanding (infants map of house.)
What makes it difficult for children to pass the appearance-reality task according to Piaget? Name number of possible reasons.
Young children tend to focus on exclusively the perceptual characteristics of objects. Children also make phenomenism and realism errors. Young children are also not good at dual encoding and may find it hard to envision an object in more than one way. It may also arise from a difficulty in putting the relationship of the objects in words.
What stage proceeds preoperational? How is this stage characterised?
The concrete operations stage is characterised by change in thought processes, children develop new thought processes called concrete operations
Why are they called concrete operations?
Because while the thoughts are more logical and flexible, they are still tied to concrete situations. The objects necessary for the problem still have to be physically present. Children in this stage are still highly dependent on the context to solve a problem.
What age does the concrete operations stage take place?
7-11
What cognitive development stages did Case propose?
sensorimotor stage (0-2) Inter-relational stage (2-8) dimensional stage (5-11) vectorial stage (11-19)
How did case’s approach to cognitive development differ to Piaget’s?
Case proposed a more information processing approach
What did Case attribute the changes within each stage to?
Increases in central processing speed and working memory capacity
What caused these changes to arise during development according to Case?
Brain development, atomisation and the formation of central conceptual structures. When children gain a new conceptual structure they move on to the next stage.
How does Case explain the variety in results from different processing tasks
They vary in their processing requirements and working memory capacity requirements
How does Siegler suggest children solve tasks
They use multiple competing strategies to solve tasks, over time the less efficient ones are replaced by more effective ones.
How did Vygotsky’s view of cognitive development differ?
He viewed them as active seekers of knowledge and placed more emphasis on social and cultural influences during development when developing psychological tools.
What happens as children master language according to Vygotsky
They develop an internal dialogue which can help guide their actions instead of speaking out loud.
What is meant by scaffolding?
Simplifying the environment by adults for kids, to improve learning.
How does pretend play assist kids?
In practicing symbols and social rules and cultural norms
Name the five systems of core knowledge
- Knowledge of objects and their motions
- Knowledge of agents and their goal directed actions
- Knowledge of numbers and the operations of arithmetic
- Knowledge of places in the navigable layout
- Knowledge of geometric forms and their lengths and angular reactions
What is meant by genetic epistemology?
Study of the formation of knowledge and how we know what we know
When is egocentrism and conservation problems overcome
preoperational -ego
Concrete - conservation
