Lecture 4 - Learning About The Physical World

Question 1

What were Piaget’s 2 Main Propositions?

Answer 1

1) Children think qualitatively different than adults.
2) Cognition develops through ordered stages.

Question 2

What are the 4 stages of Piaget’s Cognitive Development?

Answer 2

Sensorimotor (Birth - Age 2)
Preoperational (2 - 7)
Concrete Operational ( 7 -11)
Formal Operational (12+)

Question 3

What are 4 unique traits of Piaget’s Stages?

Answer 3

1) Thinking at each stage is unique.
2) Thinking influences all thoughts.
3) Brief transitional period after each stage.
4) Stages are universal and always in the same order.

Question 4

Sensorimotor Stage

Answer 4

Infants live in the “here and now”
Gain knowledge through movements and sensation

Question 5

Sensorimotor Stage Progression

Answer 5

0-4 months= Interact via reflexes and repeat pleasurable actions, interest is solely in own body.
4-8 months= Repeat actions towards objects to acquire desired outcomes. Begin to show interest in things outside own body and start associating actions with consequences.
8-12 months= Several actions are combined in order to achieve goals, actions become clearly intentional and object permanence emerges.
12-18 months= Trial and error experimentation to see how outcomes change, allows for understanding of cause-effect relations.
18-24 months= Mental representations exist, mature object permanence, symbolic thought emerges, deferred imitation.

Question 6

Object Permanence

Answer 6

Understanding the objects still exists despite not being seen or heard.
Develops around 8 Months.

Question 7

A not B Error

Answer 7

tendency to reach for an object where it was last found rather than where it was last hidden.
Evidence that object permanence is initially fragile.
Disappears at 12 months.

Question 8

Symbolic Thought

Answer 8

In preoperational stage, the ability to think about objects not in the immediate environment. Enables language acquisition and symbolic representation (using one thing to represent another).

Question 9

What are two standout emergences from the preoperational stage?

Answer 9

Egocentrism
Centration

Question 10

Egocentrism

Answer 10

Perceiving the world solely form one’s own point of view. Ei; egocentric speech.

Question 11

How do we see progress away from egocentrism in children who are in the preoperational stage?

Answer 11

Increased verbal arguments: shows that they are acknowledging someone else’s opinion.

Question 12

Centration

Answer 12

Tendency to fixate a single, perceptually striking feature and minimise/disregard the rest.

Question 13

What is a common struggle that comes with centration?

Answer 13

Conservation Concept, the fact that merely changing the appearance of an object does not change its key properties.

Question 14

What are 2 key traits about the Concrete Operation Stage?

Answer 14

Reduced Egocentrism
Logical reasoning about concrete objects and events

Question 15

What are 3 key concepts that allow for logical reasoning about concrete objects in the concrete Operation stage?

Answer 15

Decentration: Understanding that something can stay the same in quantity despite being arranged differently.
Reversibility: Ability to mentally think through steps and once finished, retrace the steps and end up a step 1.
Seriation: Ability to order items along a quantitative dimension like weight or height.

Question 16

What is a caveat of the Concrete Operational Stage?

Answer 16

Cannot think abstractly/hypothetically.

Question 17

What are 2 key traits about the Formal Operation Stage?

Answer 17

Abstract/Hypothetical Thinking
Deductive Reasoning

Question 18

What is a caveat of the Formal Operation Stage?

Answer 18

It is not universal, thus possible that some never reach it, even as adults.

Question 19

Piaget’s Pendulum Problem

Answer 19

Test of deductive reasoning. Children asked to determine the influence of weight and string length on a pendulum. Children under 12 conducted unsystematic experiments and drew incorrect conclusions.

Question 20

How do children progress through to other stages of Piaget’s theory?

Answer 20

By brain maturation and active exposure to concepts.
Children take active steps in learning due to intrinsic motivation and independent learning capabilities.

Question 21

Strengths of Piaget’s Theory

Answer 21

Intuitively realistic depiction of children as active learners and how their learning progresses. Stages progress realistically, wide span of application (across all ages and cognitive operations).

Question 22

Weaknesses of Piaget’s Theory

Answer 22

Not scientific method usage
Children depicted as more consistent thinkers
Vague about mechanisms of growth
Children are more competent than Piaget suggests
Underestimation of social world’s contributions to cognitive development

Question 23

How can we apply Piaget’s theory in school?

Answer 23

Consider how children are taught at each age (differently)
Incorporate hands on learning and encourage experimentation

Question 24

Nativist View

Answer 24

Children possess innate, specialized Cognitive mechanisms that provide basic knowledge in evolutionarily relevant domains.

Question 25

What are the 5 domains of the Nativist View

Answer 25

Physical Laws
Numbers
Categorisation
Language
Understanding the Minds of Others

Question 26

Compare Piaget’s Object Permanence Test to Nativists one

Answer 26

Nativist version is more simple thus can explain why Piaget’s test can be failed due to being too difficult as opposed to an absence of object permanence

Question 27

Violation of Expectation Paradigm

Answer 27

Habituation paradigm except instead of new/familiar its impossible/possible.
Infants will stare longer at what violates their expectation.

Question 28

What did the drawbridge and box floating study demonstrate, respectively?

Answer 28

Innate understanding of physical laws
Innate understanding of gravity

Question 29

Approximate Number Sense (ANS)

Answer 29

Cognitive system that allows infants to estimate numbers and magnitudes.
Suggested to lay the foundation for early mathematical understanding.

Question 30

What is the categorisation timeline?

Answer 30

3 months= distinguish cat and dog
6 Months= mammal and non-mammal
9 months= people, animals and inanimate objects

Question 31

Why is categorisation important?

Answer 31

Allows us to make sense of the world by simplifying it.
Allows us to makes inferences and predictions.

Question 32

What is an important feature to infants in category formation?

Answer 32

Shape (rattle experiment)

Question 33

Why is an infant’s most fixated feature in category formation sometimes misleading?

Answer 33

Since not all similar things have similar shapes.

Question 34

What is unique about categorisation around age 2-3?

Answer 34

Category hierarchies: Subset of categories that allows for refined specificity. Superordinate (general) Basic and Subordinate (specific).

Question 35

What level of category hierarchy do children first learn?

Answer 35

Basic, since it has the most obvious similarities.
Superordinate is too different and Subordinate is too similar.

Question 36

Limitations of Criticism View?

Answer 36

Overestimates innate cognitive understanding + Findings can be explained by Perceptual Features of stimuli & Learning from the Environment: since children tend to look longer at complex and novel stimuli as well as despite only being three months old, they still have over 800 hours awake.