Lifespan A: Development, Piaget, WEEK 3

Question 1

Piaget’s ideas concerning development

Answer 1

• Piaget believes children’s understanding of the world is qualitatively different to adults
• Cognitive dev involves progressing through a series of ordered, invariant and irreversible stages
• these stages are universal (everyone goes through it)
• Each stage is characterised by a distinct way of thinking about the world
• Motor actions (physical) develop into abstract thought through transactions with the EV

Question 2

Qualitative & quantitative differences

Answer 2

• Qualitative differences: differences in type > the way in which adults think about the world differs to the way a child thinks about the world
• Quantitative differences: differences in degree/amount > one person may know more about something than another but we are fundamentally thinking of the world in the same way.

Question 3

Piaget as a pragmatist

Answer 3

• Believes the child has to actively engage with the environment to develop whilst also having a level of innate readiness > the action is key to development

Question 4

Process of cognitive development

Answer 4

• Born with basic ideas about the world like reflexes such as grabbing or sucking > these schemes update as the child experiences new things through accommodation

Question 5

Equilibration by self-regulation

Answer 5

• New experience occurs which gets filtered through current knowledge and schemes in assimilation, if the experience is consistent w/ current schema, the child is at equilibrium > if the experience is inconsistent w/ schema, we change our scheme to broaden our knowledge > this is the process of accommodation
  (assimilation=filtering new experience by applying current scheme)
  (accommodation=changing scheme using info from new experience to learn more + apply to the world)

Question 6

Piaget’s stages of development

Answer 6

• sensorimotor stage (birth-2yrs)
• pre-operational (2-7yrs)
• concrete operations (7-11yrs)
• formal operations (12+)

Question 7

Sensorimotor stage (0-2)

Answer 7

• Lack of ‘symbolic function’ (can’t think alone) > rely on motor function and sensation (touching, looking)
• Build schema through reflexes, experiences and interpretations of perceptual info (use of senses)
• representational ability: idea of being able to hold + imagine something even if it isn’t directly in front of you begins to emerge at a basic level
• object permanence develops at 9 months

Question 8

Piaget’s test for object permanence

Answer 8

• between 5-7 months, if an object is hidden, the infant stops looking for it as if it no longer exists > between 8-9 months, the infant continues searching even if it isn’t there > shows cognitive dev
• Piaget believes the infant at 5-7mnths cannot represent the toy existing beyond their senses (visually) > infants see the world as constantly changing

Question 9

Sensorimotor stage:

A not B task > measures object permanence

Answer 9

• task where child is shown an object in location A several times, then block their vision and move the object to location B
• infants under 12 months didn’t look in location B as they associated the concept of the object itself w/ location A
• infants aged 18-24 months did look in location B as they are able to understand the object is an independent figure
• this task shows the difference in cognitive development early in the sensorimotor stage and later

Question 10

Criticisms of A not B task

Answer 10

• there are requirements of the child which may invalidate results
• Adequate motor skills are required to pick up and lift objects
• They need to be able to understand verbal language used by the researcher
• Degree of working memory is required as the researcher keeps the object out of site when swapping locations
• Amount of interest or motivation of the child > if the child is uninterested in the object they may show less effort >could be measuring the above factors, not dev

Question 11

Pre-operational (2-7)

Answer 11

• child can use language + symbols to represent objects by images + words
• is egocentric
• classifies object into certain categories using only single feature (eg: if blocks are red regardless of shapes) > lack class inclusion

Question 12

Concrete operations (7-12)

Answer 12

• can think logically about events + objects
• achieves conservation of number, mass by 7 and weight by 9
• classifies objects into categories using several features like size, colour, shape
• understands properties + relations between objects

Question 13

How do we know if a child moves from pre-operational to concrete operational?

Answer 13

• Pre-operational child has a basic representational ability > if they can pass the following tasks they moved
• conservation: change in appearance vs alteration of reality > even if appearance changes, recognise its the same object
• class inclusion: objects belong to different groups (e.g a uncle is also a brother)
• transitive inference: understanding relations between objects (e.g: John is taller than Peter, Peter is taller than Paul so John is taller than Paul

Question 14

Testing pre-operational child: conservation

Answer 14

• Conservation tasks look at conservation of number, mass, liquid and weight
• Conservation of number consists of showing for an example two rows of coins with 5 in each, asking which one has more, less or the same. Then spread out one row of coins and ask the same thing. > if they say the second row has more they have not moved to pre-operation
• Con of liquid would be shown two glasses which are tall but slim with the same amount of water & ask if the amount is the same or not, then pour one glass of water into a shorter but wider glass and ask this again.
• con of mass would be showing two balls of clay + asking if its the same amount, then rolling one ball out & ask again > weight is the same just with a scale
• Pre-op child will assume the object has changed due to changing appearance + don’t understand the nature of the object hasn’t changed > child fixates on appearance after not before

Question 15

Criticisms of conservation task

Answer 15

• requires linguistic skills which child may not understand nor possess which blocks the child from expressing what they truly mean
• working memory required as child must remember how the object looked before changing the look of it
  ^ these factors skew what Piaget is trying to measure

Question 16

Why do pre-operational children make mistakes in the conservation task? (conservation errors)

Answer 16

• make conservation errors due to
  1. egocentrism: child cannot see object from other perspectives
  2. centration: fixates on one point of the event and cannot shift back from it
  3. reversibility: inability to mentally reverse a series of actions or events
• in order to move to concrete ops, these limitations must be overcome

Question 17

Formal operations (12+)

Answer 17

• Individual shows abstract thinking about things which may not even exist or have not seen > Also develop logic, reasoning and problem solving skills
• Piaget says they should be able to have scientific reasoning + think like a scientist at the end of cognitive dev

Question 18

Formal operations:

pendulum task

Answer 18

• child is asked how can we make the pendulum swing faster? would have to vary weight, length of string, height of drop + initial force.
• Younger kids are more haphazard + try random lengths, push things etc. > whereas older kids think systematically + test things to get an answer

Question 19

Criticisms of the pendulum task

Answer 19

• Lacks ecological validity: Piaget + Inhelder are highly educated Europeans + middle class > this experiment is culturally bound + expects too much making it difficult to generalise > not everyone will develop like this
• Performance on the task will vary depending on schooling + culture
• these limitations suggest this is not a universal stage of development, rather a product of education

Question 20

Challenges to Piaget’s conception of what develops?

Answer 20

• Piaget’s theory is domain general (acquired concepts applies to all areas) but some researchers argue it is domain specific with dev occurring in clusters relating to a specific domain of cognition
• Goldschmid (1967) found that if children had the idea that when appearance of an object changes, the nature doesn’t, we expect them to pass conservation tasks > yet children performed at different levels across tasks even though it measures the same underlying idea
• Piaget responds saying it is horizontal décalage (uneven performance)> within one stage, children have different levels of mastery but this is temporary
• Still challenges Piaget as if a concept it mastered, it should apply to all domains

Question 21

A not B task re-visited

Marcovitch & Zelazo (1999)

Answer 21

• Did a meta analysis of 118 studies on infants aged 7-47mnths
• Found older children do better in this task (age eff)
• things like length of delay between showing location impact performance (long delay=poor performance), when there were more A trials, performance dropped and when there was a small distance between locations, they also performed more poorly
• the task isn’t measuring just cognitive ability but other things like working memory or executive function

Question 22

Conservation re-visited

McGariggle & Donaldson (1974)

Answer 22

• argue the experimenters non-linguistic behaviour (moving counters) clashes with linguistic behaviour (repeating question) > deviates from normal conversation
• conducted a naughty teddy exp > naughty teddy accidentally moves counters (exp group) > found 65% of kids passes in the experimental condition while only 16% pass in the standard condition

Question 23

Object permanence re-visited

Baillargeon (1987)

Answer 23

• argues the A not B task if too difficult as the infant needs a lot of physical coordination they don’t yet inhabit
• Baillargeon got 4 month old infants to learn about a drawbridge + watched it for a few secs > half of the group then watch the possible event where the drawbridge gets stuck on an object (knowledge consistent) > other half watch the impossible event where the drawbridge goes through the object (knowledge violation)
• Found children were looking longer in the KV condition than in the KC condition > shows infants have a basic understanding earlier than Piaget says

Question 24

Challenges: if infants do have object permanence, why do they fail Piaget’s A not B task
Diamond (1990)

Answer 24

• Diamond argues modifying aspects of the task like delay impacts performance > longer delay means younger kids perform worse than older kids as they can tolerate longer delay > thus Diamond argues A not B measures working memory
• Diamond also studied human infants + primates who show developmental progression in length of delay tolerated (the older the more you tolerate) > primate studies show lesions to the PFC hindered A not B performance. (part of brain associated to memory)
• Also argues children are better at A placement indicating they were better at inhibition (executive function) correlates to primate study > task tests ability to overcome tendency to do something + WM

Question 25

What do Piagetian tasks measure?

Answer 25

• Some argue that they measure the growth of executive function like inhibition + working memory in addition to other logical concepts

Question 26

Piaget’s contribution to developmental psychology

Answer 26

• Piaget has been significant in mapping the field of cognitive development > he identified what dev psych is concerned with which allowed other people to research too
• Researchers are still expanding on Piaget’s research many years later
• Made child friendly tasks which are still relied on now
• Despite the criticisms, the underlying logic + approach is helpful for current research