L14 & 15 - Piaget

Question 1

What are the questions Piaget aimed to address in development?

Answer 1

• Where does knowledge come from & nature of it?
  
  • How is it that we know anything?
• How does knowledge change with development?
• How do we use knowledge to understand & reason about the world?

Question 2

Where did Piaget think knowledge came from?

Answer 2

• Structured (smaller processes can lead to larger process), symbolic knowledge
  
  • Discrete knowledge (e.g. Knowledge for a cat etc.)
• His concept of adult thought is logico-mathematical operations, operating over structured symbolic representations.
• He rejected innate knowledge. How does the child go from no knowledge at birth, to structured symbolic representations?
  
  • Learn things from environment
  • We develop ideas such as object permanence (9 months)

Question 3

What are the four stages of Piaget’s theory? What age range?

Answer 3

Stage independent processes
Sensorimotor period (0-2)
Pre-operational (2-5)
Concrete operational (7-11)
Formal operations (11 years +)

Question 4

What are the key processes happening in the environment?

Answer 4

• Adaptation
  
  • Continuous process of adjusting the environment
    
    • Assimilation → Deal with new experiences in teams of existing schemes
    • Accommodation → Modify existing schema to deal with new experiences (e.g. going to a restaurant in a new country)
    • Underlying principle of organisation - part of the “function” of intelligence

Question 5

What is the sensorimotor period? (Gist)

Answer 5

Infant explores the world through direct sensory and motor contact.

Object permanence and separation anxiety develop in this stage

Question 6

What is the gist of the preoperational stage (2-6 years)?

Answer 6

The child uses symbols (words and images) to represent objects but does not reason logically

The child also has the ability to pretend.

Child is egocentric

Question 7

What occurs in the concrete operational phase? (7-12 years)

Answer 7

Child can think logically about concrete objects and thus can add and subtract

Child also understands conservation

Question 8

What occurs in the formal operational period (12 years - adult)?

Answer 8

Adolescence can reason abstractly and think in hypothetical terms

Question 9

What is a scheme and what are different types?

Answer 9

Scheme - A cognitive structure - organised o
pattern of though or action which is constructed by the individual to make sense of or respond to some aspect of experience

e.g. Behavioural, Cognitive, Operational schemes (add, compare, classify)

Question 10

Why is the sensorimotor period important?

Answer 10

• Core of Piaget’s theory = How children at birth go from not knowing anything, only having reflexes, to constructing knowledge from their environment
• We are going to largely stick with the necessary part because this takes us the the heart of his theory; to his assumptions and ‘needs’
• Before formal operations over symbolic representations, the child must get symbolic representations

Question 11

What are the different stages of the sensorimotor period? (Name only)

Answer 11

1. Modification of reflexes
2. Primary circular reactions (1 to 4 months)
3. Secondary circular reactions (4 to 8 months)
4. Coordination of secondary schemes (8 to 12 months)
5. Tertiary circular reactions (12 to 18 months)
6. Invention of new means through mental combinations (18 to 24 months)

Question 12

What is the modification of reflexes stage?

Answer 12

1. At birth, children are a bundle of reflexes, e.g., put a finger in its hand, the baby grasps it, present a nipple, it sucks it.
2. But then through this period, reflexes are modified, e.g., the hand position of grasping a rattle vs. a finger vs. whatever else.
3. “Behaviors such as sucking, grasping, and looking do not remain reflexes; babies can produce them spontaneously.”
4. “Piaget claims that there is an innate tendency for humans to exercise their skills”
   - Earliest notion of scheme: organized pattern of behavior
   - Throughout sensori-motor period it’s an organization in the head, but it is only about regularities in action and perception. No abstract understanding of e.g., the nature of objects.

Question 13

What is the primary circular reactions stage?

Answer 13

1. Baby see interesting result from behaviour = attempts to recapture this result
2. Repeat actions as some form of reward in those actions
3. Circular reactions are called ‘primary’ as they involve response consequences centered around the infant’s body rather than other objects

Question 14

What is the secondary circular reactions stage?

Answer 14

1. […] secondary circular reactions are oriented to the external world
2. “By chance, the infant does something that leads to an interesting effect in the environment: he shakes a rattle, which produces a noise […]”
3. “During stages 2 and 3, the infant achieves some simple coordination of his schemes. The integration of vision and grasping is especially useful for developing circular reactions. Now the infant can see an object, reach for it, and run through his repertoire of “things to do to objects””

Question 15

What is the coordination of secondary scheme?

Answer 15

1. In this stage, ”[i]nfants know what they want and can put together schemes to achieve that goal. They have differentiated between means and end”
   - means = instrumental behavior (scheme) & ends = goal behavior/outcome (scheme)
   - “A special feature of the means–end behavior […] is that it is applied to new situations. The schemes are now mobile; they are freed from their original contexts and can be used to achieve a variety of goals”
   - Trying to grasp a rattle, and there is something in the way, they can remove the object to get the rattle
   - Understanding means-ends behaviours leads to be able to anticipate events

Question 16

What is the tertiary circular reactions stage?

Answer 16

1. Infant scientists at work - environment is their lab - deliberately vary their action to see if variation changes the outcome
2. Trial & Error explanations - extends means and error to develop new means

Question 17

What is the invention of new means through mental combinations stage?

Answer 17

1. Innovation in how they are combining all different behaviour schemes to solve novel problems
2. Before stage 6 - overt is becoming covert. Physical exploration gives way to internal mental exploration. Children can now use mental symbols to represent objects and events
3. Has a representational stance
   
   1. e.g. the mouth opening can stand for the box opening
4. Think about how a child comes to engage in symbolic play [e.g., pretending his hand is an airplane]
   
   1. By the end of our description, the child had ‘acquired’ something Piaget described as the Semiotic Function
      
      1. Semiotic Function → Ability to use one object or event to stand for another: a signifier evokes a significate
   2. Piaget has solved, to his own satisfaction, one of the great problems of epistemology, the establishment of nascent mental representation (which allows the child to act on the world in a more adequate manner)
      
      1. Helps us solve problems
   3. The sensory motor period ends with the child rapidly learning words. After the insight of one object standing for another in physical correspondence, another insight is that there does not need to be physical correspondence for something to stand for something else (e.g., the sound of the “cat” has nothing to do with cats

Question 18

How did Piaget address/solve the problem of epistemology?

Answer 18

• Learn by association - either genes is driving development or infant is exploring environment
• Knowledge comes from exploration

Question 19

What is the notion of logical necessity?

Answer 19

• This notion of “logical necessity” is very important to Piaget’s ideas about the development of intelligence
• If you like, the development of intelligence has direction; in a logico-mathematical sense, it becomes more adequate in so far as it reflects true (truer) relations between the individual and the world
• The world is defined by mathematical operations, and so cognitive development is the continuing approximation of reflecting the world’s mathematical structure.
• There is a kind of idealism to Piaget’s notion of intelligence
• Central problem is how such operations come about
• It is necessarily the case for Piaget that the General Developmental Mechanisms, through their repeated action over time, create novel structures that are more than the sum of their parts

Question 20

What is going on in Piaget’s scheme?

Answer 20

• You can’t get to the semiotic function just via experience, that is anathema to Piaget’s complete rejection of empiricism
• If all there was, were Skinnerian reinforcement, how does symbolic reasoning emerge?
• Piaget is trying to explain not just the form of development (i.e., stages 1 though 6) and its relation to experience, but also the mechanisms pushing it forward: One such mechanism is assimilation/accommodation, etc

Question 21

What was Vygotsky’s general view on development & Piaget?

Answer 21

• He praised Piaget’s contribution to developmental psychology & his development of the clinical method for exploring children’s ideas (qualitative methods) even though his actual ideas were wrong
• Piaget’s theories shares the same fate as such theories as Sigmund Freud as it stems from the crisis of psychology
  
  • Sharp contradiction between between the factual material of science and its methodological and theoretical premises - a contradiction deeply rooted in history of knowledge, revealing a dispute between the materialistic and idealistic world concepts
    
    • AKA - all the theories have latent or explicit contradiction between what we can measure about human thought and how ideally conceive of it

Question 22

What was Vygotsky’s theory of development?

Answer 22

• Socio-cultural theory: the child in context is the unit of study
  
  • e.g. the ages between 3 & 5 is not just the child that changes but how parents interact with the child (might change their tone of voice)
• Whole system develops at once
• Child-in-context is constrained by culture, passes culture on and changes the culture
• What is internalised in the child is the culture
  
  • Piaget said the world is internalised across development whereas Vygotsky says culture is internalised across development
• Culture provides ways of thinking and tools for thinking
• Language is critical in showing how cultures think & helping children think
• Children speak to others & to themselves when solving a problem - eventually internalise that speech
  
  • When a more challenging problem arises they speak out loud to themselves

Question 23

How does Vygotsky’s theory critique Piaget?

Answer 23

• Vygotsky asks us to entertain the idea that
  
  • Language equates with thought
  • Complex psychological phenomena are demarcated (or modularized)
• Not going to learn about thought by excluding language so we should study semantic analysis (contains thought and speech as interrelated)
  
  • If we actually study thought and language = We study language
  • Language is not just word learning, it is a union of generalisation and communication
• A word is a cultural unit
  
  • Cultural tools are an object of study to understand psychology
  • Words as unit = generalizing thought and social interchange
• Piaget just thought language was a mere expression or measure of thought = Vygotsky believed Piaget is studying the wrong thing
  
  • By not focusing on the “child in context” and language as units of culture, Piaget falls prey to the same duality
  • Vygotsky suggests Piaget deliberately avoids generalising and hides behind detail
  • Problems are at the core of Piaget’s approach so his theories are doomed from the start
  • Piaget focuses that egocentrism is the original thought of children and realistic thought only emerges from long and sustained social pressure - a concept taken from psychoanalysis and is problematic - Vygotsky argues development is driven by motor activity

Question 24

How do Piaget and Vygotsky compare?

Answer 24

Piaget says the child constructs knowledge on his own. Only gradually becomes social, begins egocentric

Vygotsky says that human knowledge is cultural knowledge, the knowledge is essentially social. The infant is social from the beginning. Used in more practical applications

Question 25

What did Chomsky believe?

Answer 25

• Believed in innatism
  
  • Language in one component of the human mind
  • Every language, even if different syntax, has the same possible grammars, so must be innate

Question 26

What were Piaget’s two arguments against Chomsky?

Answer 26

1. Mutations, specific to humans, might have given rise to postulated innate structures are “biologically inexplicable”
   
   • Evolutionary development is biologically unexplained rather than inexplicable - same is said of human organs - their development is biologically unexplained
2. What can be explained on the assumption of fixed innate structures can be explained as well as the necessary result of constructions of sensorimotor intelligence
   
   • No substantial proposals including “constructions of sensorimotor intelligence” that offer any hope of accounting for the phenomena of language that demand explanation

Question 27

What is Chomsky’s critique on the history of ideas? (Piaget’s second argument)

Answer 27

• No reason why a neutral scientist would believe cognitive structures should be studied separately from physical structures developed by the body
• Chomsky defines an approach for doing such investigation
  
  • Measure child until reach steady state of language where not much improvement is occurring
  • Language development unfolds in a regular sequence, just as any other maturing aspect of the child
• Evidence from the specific properties of this mental organ
  
  • Expectation that constructions of sensorimotor intelligence determine the character of a mental organ such as language seems is not plausible
  • Humans have explicit and highly articulate linguistic knowledge that has no basis in linguistic knowledge