Lecture 3: Piaget and Vygotsky Flashcards
Discontinuities in piagets theory
Hierarchial stages
central properties
Qualitative change
Broad applicability- applies to different examples of the same process
brief transitions
invariant sequence - cannot skip or go back a stage
4 stages of cognitive development
Sensorimotor
Preoperational
Concrete Operational
Formal Operational
Object permanence
The knowledge that objects continue to exist even when they are out of view, typically emerges about 8 months.
A baby will search for a hidden object
Stage 1: Sensorimotor stage
birth to 2 years
Infants get to know the world through their senses and through their actions.
critical cognitive achievements and errors include:
1. object permanence
2. A-Not-B error
3. start to form mental representations. The first being deferred imitation
deferred imitation
the repetition of other people’s behaviour a substantial time after it occurred
A-Not-B error
the tendency to reach to where objects were found before, rather than where they were last hidden until about 12 months
Piagets A-not-B task
This infant has already found the toy under the left cloth(A) on a number of trials.
When the toy is hidden under the cloth on the right (B), the infant returns to location (A)
Suggests that the child mentally represents the object after it has disappeared from view – but this representation is fragile
Stage 2: Pre-operational stage
2-7 years
Toddlers and young children start to rely on internal representations of the world based on language and mental imagery
A mix of impressive cognitive acquisitions and equally impressive limitations
- A notable acquisition is symbolic representation, the use of one object to stand for another, which makes a variety of new behaviours possible
-A major limitation is egocentrism, the tendency to perceive the world solely from one’s own point of view
-Pre-Operational children also make conservation errors, where they incorrectly believe that merely changing the appearance of objects can change their quantity
Symbolic representation
Egocentrism
Piaget and Inhelders (1956) three-mountains task
Conservation (liquid and number)
Procedures used to test conservation
Liquid quantity
Solid quantity
of number
the balance scale
-errors due to centration
Stage 3: Concrete operational stage
7-12 years
Children begin to reason logically about the world
They can solve conservation problems, but their successful reasoning is largely limited to concrete situations
Thinking systematically remains difficult
Pendulum problem
Inhelder and Piagets pendulum problem
The task is to compare the motions of longer and shorter strings, with lighter and heavier weights attached, in order to determine the influence of weight, string length, and dropping point on the time it takes for the pendulum to swing back and forth
Children below age 12 usually perform unsystematic experiments and draw incorrect conclusions
Stage 4- formal operational stage
12+ years
Cognitive development culminates in the ability to think abstractly and to reason hypothetically
Individuals can imagine alternative worlds and reason systematically about all possible outcomes of a situation
Piaget believed that the attainment of the formal operational stage, in contrast to the other stages, is not universal - Instead depends on environment and quality of education, and attainment is more common in industrialised societies
Critique of piagets theory
he stage model depicts children’s thinking as being more consistent than it is (but e.g., conservation of number vs. solid-quantity)
Infants and young children are more cognitively competent than Piaget recognized
Piaget’s theory understates the contribution of the social world to cognitive development (what about the role of other people in the child’s development?)
Piaget’s theory is vague about the cognitive processes that give rise to children’s thinking and about the mechanisms that produce cognitive growth (what are the processes that lead children to think in a particular way? Piaget doesn’t really elaborate…)
Interpreting adult intentions
Light, Buckingham & Robbins (1979)
By providing a clear reason for making the change of glass, many more children pass this version of the task
Task difficulty
Hughes (1975)
Children 3-and-a-half-, to five-years old
90% passed
Even with more walls and a third policeman, 90% 4-year-olds (preoperational) passed
Lev Vygotsky- Socio-cultural approach
Parent of sociocultural approach to child development
His theory presents children as social beings, intertwined with other people who are eager to help them gain skills and understanding
His work didn’t reach the attention of western psychologists until the 1960s
Subsequent psychologists (such as Jerome Bruner) extended and developed Vygotsky’s work by adding interpretations
Sociocultural approaches
Focus on the contribution of other people and the surrounding culture to children’s development - likely to emphasise guided participation
Emphasise guided participation, a process in which more knowledgeable individuals organise activities in ways that allow less knowledgeable people to engage in them at a higher level than they could manage on their own
Present interactions as occurring in a broader sociocultural context that includes cultural tools, the innumerable products of human ingenuity that enhance thinking
Vygotskys theory
Piaget considered children to be “little scientists” trying to understand the world on their own - who construct ideas of the world
Vygotsky portrayed them as social beings, shaped by and shaping their cultural contexts.
Children develop and learn by interacting with other members of their society
It sees development as continuous, with change as quantitative rather than qualitative- a quantitative. Not discontinuous with stages
Mental functions
Lower mental functions are regarded as elementary mental abilities closely tied to biological processes that are innate and involuntary, and involve simple perception, memory and responding directly to the environment
Higher mental functions are regarded as consciously controlled transformations of lower functions that are developed through cultural mediation, and involve voluntary attention, conceptual thought and logical planning
Childrens private speech
“egocentric speech”
Vygotsky viewed it as foundation for all higher cognitive processes. Indeed that language. and thought are integrally related
Helps guide behaviour
Used more when tasks are difficult, after errors, or when confused
Gradually becomes more silent
Children with learning and behavioural problems use it for longer
External-to-internal develops with age, but also experience
Behaviour regulation
- Children’s behaviour is controlled by other people’s statements
- Children’s behaviour is controlled by their own private speech
- Children’s behaviour is controlled by internalised private speech
Products of culture
The content that children learn varies greatly from culture to culture and these differences shape children’s thinking accordingly
English/ chinese counting systems - decade followed by digit
Brick counting
4 Processes that produce development
Intersubjectivity
Zone of Proximal Development
Social Scaffolding
Guided participation
Intersubjectivity
The mutual understanding that people share during communication - Serves as the foundation of human cognitive development
Joint attention: A process in which social partners intentionally focus on a common referent in the external environment
Social referencing: The tendency to look to social partners for guidance about how to respond to unfamiliar or threatening events
Joint attention
Infants between 9-15 months can increasingly follow the gaze of their social partners and adjust where they look if their partner’s gaze turns towards a new object (e.g., Adamson et al., 2004)
The younger the age at which infants begin to show joint attention, the faster their subsequent language development (Carpenter et al., 1998)/ earlier language development
Zone of proximal development
Refers to the range of performance between what children can do unsupported and what they can do with optimal support
Vygotsky: “What a child can do with assistance today she will be able to do by herself tomorrow”
Social scaffolding
A process in which more competent people provide a temporary framework that supports children’s thinking at a higher level than children could manage on their own (into the ZPD)
The quality of scaffolding that people provide tends to increase as people become older and gain experience – Adults and older children provide higher quality social scaffolding through guided participation than peers do through play
