Knowledge Representation Flashcards
Piaget:
Moved beyond behaviourism and founded the field of cognitive development
Piaget’s theory of cognitive development is called:
constructivism
Constructivism says that ;
1) Children construct knowledge on the basis of their experiences in the world
2) Children proceed through stages of development
Does Piaget say that there are basic learning mechanisms:
yes, while he has a discontinuous model of development, he thinks we are born with innate mechanisms
Assimilation:
a process by which children translate information into a form they understand eg. known concept of a dog can help them understand a new dog they see falls in the category, even without having seen it (basic learning mechanism)
Piaget sees children as:
Active Learners
Accommodation:
a process in which children revise current knowledge structures in accordance with new experiences (basic learning mechanism) eg. seeing a dog as a 4 legged animal, seeing a dog with three legs, revising
Equilibration:
balancing accommodation and assimilation (basic learning mechanism)
What does Piaget mean by discontinuous:
as you progress you can’t go back
Piaget Stages
- Sensorimotor (birth to 2 years)
- Preoperational (2-7 years)
- Concrete Operational (7-12 years)
- Formal Operational (12+)
Sensorimotor stage
(birth to 2 years)
- Children live in the here and now, restricted to sense
- Basic motor reflexes; sensory perceptual systems, basic learning mechanisms
- Failure of object permanence
Preoperational stage
(2-7 yrs)
- Represent experiences in symbolic thought, language, and imagery
- Cannot perform operations (reversible mental activities) Eg. failure of conservation (diff glasses of water)
- Focus on a single aspect of event (centration)
- Failure of transitivity (red better than blue, blue better than green, is red better than green?)
- Failure of egocentricity (cant take another perspective)(theory of mind)
- Failure of appearance vs reality (ex confused at woman with short hair)
Concrete Operational Stage
(7-12 yrs)
- Children can reason logically about concrete events
- Difficulty thinking abstractly
- Faliure in deductive reasoning (this, this, therefore this)
- Failure of systematic testing (pendulum options, picking randomly)
Formal Operational stage
(12+ yrs)
- Not everyone reaches
- Thinking about abstractions and hypotheticals
- Can experiment and draw conclusions
Problems with Piaget:
- competence/performance distinction (when a child fails they COULD lack the ability OR they were unable to perform true ability
- Poverty of experience (some children show some kinds of knowledge without experience)
- Inconsistency of timeline (some abilities occurring earlier, some lacking early abilities later)
- Children can understand coherence, continuity and contact young
Motivation can change failures and successes (water vs. mnms)
Zone of proximal development:
Range of what children can do unsupported and what they can do with optimal social support
Social scaffolding:
social support, more competent other provides structure to help child learn
Joint attention:
intentional focus on common referent, ex parent pointing at what they talk about
Intersubjectivity:
child arrives at mutual understanding shared by teacher “meeting of minds”
Social referencing:
children look to others to know how to respond to unfamiliar events
Sociocultural constraints
- Physical (home, school)
- Social (family, peers)
- Economic (wealth - national, family)
- Cultural (language, values)
- Historical (war, policies, economy)
Vygotsky looked at development:
in relation to others, interpersonal contact, emphasized play, product of culture, active learners, continuous (sociocultural perspective)
Information processing theories view children as:
undergoing continuous change, not restricted to stages, constantly occurring changes, problem solvers
Basic processes:
simplest and most frequently used mental activities
Basic processes are (info processing):
1 Associating events with one another
2 Recognizing objects as familiar
3 Recalling facts and procedures
4 Generalizing from one instance to another
5 Encoding
encoding:
the process of representing in memory information-specific features of objects and events
Processing speed:
speed which children execute basic processes increases across dev, biological maturation and experience contributing to speed
The two biological processes that increase speed processing are :
myelination and increased connectivity among brain regions
Memory system components:
Sensory, Working and Long Term
Sensory memory:
Sensory memory:
- sights, sounds and other sensations that enter into the cognitive system that are briefly held in raw form until identified
- Con hold a moderate amount of information for a very short time
- Consistent over development
Working Memory:
- workspace where information and relevant knowledge are brought together, attended to and actively processed
- Limited in capacity and duration
- Capacity and speed increase over childhood into adolescence
Long-Term Memory
- Information retained on an enduring basis
- Can retain unlimited information indefinitely
- Contents of it increase enormously over development
Memory strategies (emerge 5-8):
Rehearsal: repeating info over and over
Selective attention: intentionally focusing on information most relevant to current goal
Content Knowldge:
A foundation of information
with age and experience, childrens long term memories become more detailed and accessible
Core knowledge theory principles:
Children have innate cognitive abilities
Focuses on areas that have been important through evolutionary history
Brofenbrenners ecological model:
Nested model, Layers of social and environmental influence
Microsystem (family, peers), Mesosystem (School, parents job), Exosystem (Government, parental leave), Macrosystem (overarching values), Chronosystem (time)
