Lecture 4 - Learning About The Physical World Flashcards
What were Piaget’s 2 Main Propositions?
1) Children think qualitatively different than adults.
2) Cognition develops through ordered stages.
What are the 4 stages of Piaget’s Cognitive Development?
Sensorimotor (Birth - Age 2)
Preoperational (2 - 7)
Concrete Operational ( 7 -11)
Formal Operational (12+)
What are 4 unique traits of Piaget’s Stages?
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.
Sensorimotor Stage
Infants live in the “here and now”
Gain knowledge through movements and sensation
Sensorimotor Stage Progression
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.
Object Permanence
Understanding the objects still exists despite not being seen or heard.
Develops around 8 Months.
A not B Error
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.
Symbolic Thought
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).
What are two standout emergences from the preoperational stage?
Egocentrism
Centration
Egocentrism
Perceiving the world solely form one’s own point of view. Ei; egocentric speech.
How do we see progress away from egocentrism in children who are in the preoperational stage?
Increased verbal arguments: shows that they are acknowledging someone else’s opinion.
Centration
Tendency to fixate a single, perceptually striking feature and minimise/disregard the rest.
What is a common struggle that comes with centration?
Conservation Concept, the fact that merely changing the appearance of an object does not change its key properties.
What are 2 key traits about the Concrete Operation Stage?
Reduced Egocentrism
Logical reasoning about concrete objects and events
What are 3 key concepts that allow for logical reasoning about concrete objects in the concrete Operation stage?
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.
What is a caveat of the Concrete Operational Stage?
Cannot think abstractly/hypothetically.
What are 2 key traits about the Formal Operation Stage?
Abstract/Hypothetical Thinking
Deductive Reasoning
What is a caveat of the Formal Operation Stage?
It is not universal, thus possible that some never reach it, even as adults.
Piaget’s Pendulum Problem
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.
How do children progress through to other stages of Piaget’s theory?
By brain maturation and active exposure to concepts.
Children take active steps in learning due to intrinsic motivation and independent learning capabilities.
Strengths of Piaget’s Theory
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).
Weaknesses of Piaget’s Theory
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
How can we apply Piaget’s theory in school?
Consider how children are taught at each age (differently)
Incorporate hands on learning and encourage experimentation
Nativist View
Children possess innate, specialized Cognitive mechanisms that provide basic knowledge in evolutionarily relevant domains.
What are the 5 domains of the Nativist View
Physical Laws
Numbers
Categorisation
Language
Understanding the Minds of Others
Compare Piaget’s Object Permanence Test to Nativists one
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
Violation of Expectation Paradigm
Habituation paradigm except instead of new/familiar its impossible/possible.
Infants will stare longer at what violates their expectation.
What did the drawbridge and box floating study demonstrate, respectively?
Innate understanding of physical laws
Innate understanding of gravity
Approximate Number Sense (ANS)
Cognitive system that allows infants to estimate numbers and magnitudes.
Suggested to lay the foundation for early mathematical understanding.
What is the categorisation timeline?
3 months= distinguish cat and dog
6 Months= mammal and non-mammal
9 months= people, animals and inanimate objects
Why is categorisation important?
Allows us to make sense of the world by simplifying it.
Allows us to makes inferences and predictions.
What is an important feature to infants in category formation?
Shape (rattle experiment)
Why is an infant’s most fixated feature in category formation sometimes misleading?
Since not all similar things have similar shapes.
What is unique about categorisation around age 2-3?
Category hierarchies: Subset of categories that allows for refined specificity. Superordinate (general) Basic and Subordinate (specific).
What level of category hierarchy do children first learn?
Basic, since it has the most obvious similarities.
Superordinate is too different and Subordinate is too similar.
Limitations of Criticism View?
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.
