Developmental psychology: Cognitive development

Question 1

What is meant by a scheme according to Piaget?

Answer 1

A mental representation of action and knowledge.

Question 2

What three basic schemes do babies start out with?

Answer 2

Pulling, looking and grasping

Question 3

What are operations?

Answer 3

Internal mental representations not based on physical activity

Question 4

What two processes do children use to modify their schemes?

Answer 4

Organisation and adaption

Question 5

What is meant by organisation?

Answer 5

Organising several schemes into a bigger scheme

Question 6

What does adaptions consist of? Explain this

Answer 6

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.

Question 7

What is meant by equilibration?

Answer 7

Equilibrations is the state where children’s schemes are in balance and undisturbed by conflict.

Question 8

What happens when there are two many conflicts that can’t be solved through assimilation or accommodation?

Answer 8

A qualitative shift in the child’s way of thinking occurs called a stage shift

Question 9

How is the sensorimotor stage categorised?

Answer 9

By thinking is doing

Question 10

Name and describe the first two stages of sensorimotor stage

Answer 10

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.

Question 11

Name and describe the middle two sensorimotor stages

Answer 11

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.

Question 12

Name and describe the last two sensorimotor stages

Answer 12

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

Question 13

What is the main criticisms for Piaget’s sensorimotor stages?

Answer 13

Object permanence and deferred imitation occur way earlier than Piaget suggested

Question 14

What stage is after sensorimotor and how is it defined?

Answer 14

The pre operational stage proceeds the sensorimotor stage and is characterised by an increase in mental representations.

Question 15

How is the pre operational stage divided?

Answer 15

Into the symbolic function substage (2-4 years) and the intuitive thought substage (4-7 years)

Question 16

Describe the symbolic function substage

Answer 16

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.

Question 17

Describe the intuitive thought substage

Answer 17

There is a shift in a Childs reasoning, they begin to classify, order and quantify in a more systematic manner.

Question 18

Name the two limitations of the preoperational stage

Answer 18

Egocentrism- the tendency to perceive the world from one’s own point of view
Animism- the tendency to attribute lifelike qualities to inanimate objects

Question 19

What is a criticism of egocentrism?

Answer 19

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.

Question 20

What is meant by transitional interference?

Answer 20

The ability to mentally seriate individual entries of an ordinal series such as (A<b></b>

Question 21

Can children complete transitional interference?

Answer 21

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.

Question 22

What is meant by class inclusion?

Answer 22

The ability to coordinate and reason about parts and wholes simultaneously for classes and subclasses.

Question 23

What experiments highlights the absence of class inclusion in the preoperational stage?

Answer 23

The conservation task.

Question 24

What research provided criticism for the class inclusion concept

Answer 24

Showing children’s ability to draw inference on category membership based on non-observable characteristics.

Question 25

What three limitations did Piaget propose that contributed to a lack of ability in conservation tasks?

Answer 25

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

Question 26

What does the age children are successful on the conservation task depend on?

Answer 26

Culture and the concepts and substances tinvolved

Question 27

Distinguish between vertical and horizontal decolage

Answer 27

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.)

Question 28

What makes it difficult for children to pass the appearance-reality task according to Piaget? Name number of possible reasons.

Answer 28

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.

Question 29

What stage proceeds preoperational? How is this stage characterised?

Answer 29

The concrete operations stage is characterised by change in thought processes, children develop new thought processes called concrete operations

Question 30

Why are they called concrete operations?

Answer 30

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.

Question 31

What age does the concrete operations stage take place?

Answer 31

7-11

Question 32

What cognitive development stages did Case propose?

Answer 32

sensorimotor stage (0-2)
Inter-relational stage (2-8)
dimensional stage (5-11)
vectorial stage (11-19)

Question 33

How did case’s approach to cognitive development differ to Piaget’s?

Answer 33

Case proposed a more information processing approach

Question 34

What did Case attribute the changes within each stage to?

Answer 34

Increases in central processing speed and working memory capacity

Question 35

What caused these changes to arise during development according to Case?

Answer 35

Brain development, atomisation and the formation of central conceptual structures. When children gain a new conceptual structure they move on to the next stage.

Question 36

How does Case explain the variety in results from different processing tasks

Answer 36

They vary in their processing requirements and working memory capacity requirements

Question 37

How does Siegler suggest children solve tasks

Answer 37

They use multiple competing strategies to solve tasks, over time the less efficient ones are replaced by more effective ones.

Question 38

How did Vygotsky’s view of cognitive development differ?

Answer 38

He viewed them as active seekers of knowledge and placed more emphasis on social and cultural influences during development when developing psychological tools.

Question 39

What happens as children master language according to Vygotsky

Answer 39

They develop an internal dialogue which can help guide their actions instead of speaking out loud.

Question 40

What is meant by scaffolding?

Answer 40

Simplifying the environment by adults for kids, to improve learning.

Question 41

How does pretend play assist kids?

Answer 41

In practicing symbols and social rules and cultural norms

Question 42

Name the five systems of core knowledge

Answer 42

1. Knowledge of objects and their motions
2. Knowledge of agents and their goal directed actions
3. Knowledge of numbers and the operations of arithmetic
4. Knowledge of places in the navigable layout
5. Knowledge of geometric forms and their lengths and angular reactions

Question 43

What is meant by genetic epistemology?

Answer 43

Study of the formation of knowledge and how we know what we know

Question 44

When is egocentrism and conservation problems overcome

Answer 44

preoperational -ego

Concrete - conservation