L2 - History/Theories of Cognitive Development

Question 1

What are the theories and the main questions addressed? (What is continuity/dis split into)

Answer 1

• Piagetian: nature/nurture, continuity/discontinuity, active child
• C/D: split into assimilation: people incorporate incoming info into concepts they already understand,
• Accommodation: people improve current understanding in response to new experiences
• Equilibration: people balance two factors above for stable understanding

Question 2

What were the three stages of equilibration:

Answer 2

• Equilibrium: no issues with understanding a particular phenomenon
• Disequilibrium: issues because of new info
• Advanced equilibrium: more sophisticated understanding of phenomenon

Question 3

What were Piaget’s methods?

Answer 3

• Interviews with children
• Clinical method
• Largely biased on interactions with his own children BUT findings still maintained over time
• Constructivist - depicts children as constructing knowledge for themselves in response to their experiences: generating hypotheses, performing experiments and drawing conclusions

Question 4

What are the central properties of Piaget’s Stage Theory? (QBBI)

Answer 4

• Qualitative change: children of diff ages think diff
• Broad applicability: type of thinking influences children’s thinking across topics
• Brief transitions: fluctuation between types of thinking
• Invariant sequence: everyone progresses through the stages in the same order without skipping them

Question 5

What was Piaget Stage Theory?

Answer 5

• Sensorimotor stage: understanding = coordinating sensory experiences with physical actions (innate actions) (0-2 years)
• Pre-operational stage: before they use logical thinking = represents the world with words and images = reflect symbolic thinking (2-7 years) (volume liquid ex)
• Limitation: egocentrism: perceiving world solely from one’s POV, centration: focus on a single feature of object and exclude other relevant features
• Concrete Operational Stage: classify objects into different sets, child can reason logically about concrete events (7-11)
• Formal Operational Stage: Adolescent reasons in more abstract, idealistic and logical ways (believed not everyone could do it) (11- adulthood)

Question 6

Issues with Piaget?

Answer 6

• Vague about mechanisms that give rise to children’s thinking
• Infants are more cognitively competent than Piaget recognised
• Understates contribution of the social world to cognitive development
• Stage model thinks thoughts are more consistent than they are

Question 7

What is the overlapping waves theory?

Answer 7

• An information processing approach that emphasises the variability of children’s thinking.
• Accurately characterises children’s problem solving in a wide range of contexts and explains how problem solving improves over the course of development

Question 8

Why do children not plan when it is so beneficial in problem solving?

Answer 8

• Requires inhibition the desire to solve the problem immediately
• Children tend to overly optimistic about their abilities

Question 9

What is object permanence?

Answer 9

Objects continue to exist even after they are out of view

Question 10

Study showing development of height and width?

Answer 10

• Must focus on more than one dimension simultaneously, and to name the direction
• Have two plates with one having one graham cracker split into two or two sep graham crackers and children accepted the one even when the area is small

Question 11

What did vygotsky do?

Answer 11

• Sociocultural Theory
• 3 phases: Behaviour is controlled by other people’s statements, then by private speech and then internalised private speech.

Question 12

What is the sociocultural Theory?

Answer 12

1) Naturalistic and structured observations
- Viewed children as social beings and learners
- Development was seen as continuous and quantitative change
2) Humans are inclined to teach other and learn from each other
- Thought is process in which speech is internalised (adult’s internal monologue is said aloud for children)
3) Allows guided participation: where people organise activities where less knowledgeable people the activity at a higher level than they could manage on their own

Question 13

What is social scaffolding?

Answer 13

• Process where more competent people
  provide a temp framework that supports children’s thinking at a higher level than the children could imagine by themselves
• Helps them learn by themselves
• Called zone of proximal development = the right level of helping kids learn

Question 14

What is intersubjectivity?

Answer 14

• Mutual understanding that people share during communication
• Foundation of human cognitive development
• Sets stage for joint attention
• Continues to develop beyond infancy as children take on others perspectives

Question 15

What did Tomasello do?

Answer 15

• Extended Vygotsky’s Theory
• Proposed that human species has unique characteristics that are crucial to the ability to create complex, rapidly changing cultures
• Inclination to teach others and to attend to/learn from such teaching

Question 16

What were Spelke’s Methods?

Answer 16

• Visual habituation paradigms
• Violation of expectation with 5 month old infants

Question 17

What is the habituation experiment?

Answer 17

• Show infant something over and over until they get bored/habituated = drawbridge in this case
• Introduces something novel and looks at their interest
• Placed box in front of drawbridge to create different situations
• Condition possible event: if they know object permanence, they will expect the drawbridge to stop at the box, but in the other condition if they do not have object permanence, they will expect it to keep going and will be surprised when it stops
• Found that @5mo = infants have some form of object permanence

Question 18

What is habituation?

Answer 18

• After you watch something continually, you decrease attention to it
• Then you change it slightly and people make variations of it
• Pay attention to the novel one rather than the habituated one

Question 19

What is the core knowledge theory?

Answer 19

• Knowledge emerges early in development
• Initial knowledge is domain specific e.g physics, is constrained and innate and constitutes the core of mature knowledge and is task specific

Question 20

What are the core bits of core knowledge theory?

Answer 20

• Identify fundamental units for dividing relevant objects and events into a few basic categories
• Explain many phenomena in terms if a few fundamental principles
• Explains events in terms of unobservable causes

Question 21

What is Nativism?

Answer 21

• Infants are born with substantial knowledge of evolutionarily important domains as well as the ability to easily acquire more knowledge in these domains
  e.g language acquisition and its universality

Question 22

What is constructivism?

Answer 22

• Combines nativism, piagetian theory and info processing theories BUT that infants are born with rudimentary domain specific information but their quick learning reflects specific learning experiences within the domain.
• Children form naïve theories of physics, psychology and biology, but these grow with age and experience

Question 23

What is information processing theory?

Answer 23

• Idea that a child is a computational system
• Cognitive development arises from children’s gradually surmounting their processing limitations through
• Increasing efficient execution of basic processes
• Expanding memory capacity
• Acquisition of new strategies

Question 24

What is continuous cognitive change?

Answer 24

• Applies in two senses: important changes viewed as constantly occurring rather than being restricted to special transition periods between stages
• Small increments in cog growth rather than abruptly

Question 25

What was the microgenetic approaches?

Answer 25

• Characteristics by variability in responses
• More measurements over shorter periods of time are important for identifying these strategies
• Choice of strategy develops over time

Question 26

How are children active problem solvers?

Answer 26

• According to overlapping-waves theory, children use a variety of approaches to solve problems
• Children have several strategies for solving at one time
• With age/experience, the strategy that is most successful performance becomes more prevalent
• Hypothesises that children benefit from their strategic variability

Question 27

What is the dynamic systems theory?

Answer 27

• Emphasises how varied aspects of the child function as a single, integrated whole to produce behaviour
• Children are internally motivated to learn about the world around them
• View how change occurs over time in complex physical and biological systems
• Focus on relations among motor activities, attention and other aspects of children’s behaviour and how they organise themselves

Question 28

What is mechanisms of change?

Answer 28

• Children have affiliation when trying to achieve the same goal e.g walking down a ramp can be a belly slide, crawl or walk etc.
• They take into account the relative success of each approach = leading to efficiency OR novelty to try something new

Question 29

What is integrative perspective?

Answer 29

Emphasises:
- Children’s innate motivations to explore the environment
- Precise analysis of problem solving activity
- Early emerging competencies (core-knowledge)
- Formative influence of other people

Question 30

What is self-organisation in dynamic system theories?

Answer 30

• Involves bringing together and integrating components as needed to adapt to a changing env
• Called soft assembly as components and organisation of them is constantly changing

Question 31

What is an example of dynamic systems view?

Answer 31

• Early theory = after 2 month = newborn feet would do a stepping reflex but this instinct goes away because of maturation
• Reflex continues to show after 2 months when infants are given practise so cortical maturation does not stop it
• Later = normal disappearance is not caused by cortical maturation as when infants were put in water, they showed the same movement pattern but the weight of the leg in water does not matter, but in air = weight matters and they do not have the muscle