Module 5: Cognitive Development Flashcards
Cognitive Development
+ by Jean Piaget
+ viewed intelligence as a process that helps an organism adapt to its environment
+ children are not born with innate ideas of reality
+ development as the product of children’s attempts to understand and act upon their world
+ begins with an inborn ability to adapt to the environment
+ provided rough benchmarks for what to expect of children at various ages and has helped educators design curricula appropriate to varying levels of development
+ stage-oriented
+ active
Constructivism
children actively construct new understandings of the world based on their experiences
What are the processes that cognitive growth occurs in?
- Organization
- Adaptation
- Equilibration
Organization
tendency to create categories
Schemes
+ ways of organizing information about the world that govern the way the child thinks and behaves in a particular situation
+ actions or mental representations that can be performed on objects
Adaptation
how children handle new information in light of what they already know
What are two processes/ways that children process information?
- Assimilation
- Accommodation
Assimilation
incorporating it into existing cognitive structures
Accommodation
adjusting one’s cognitive structures to fit the new info
Equilibration
+ children want what they understand of the world to match what they observe around them
+ their understanding = what they observe
What was the problem with the cognitive development theory by Piaget?
underestimated Children and overestimated adults (not all people develop formal operations)
What are the stages of cognitive development?
- Sensorimotor
- Pre-operational
- Concrete operational
- Formal operational
Sensorimotor Stage
+ the first stage of Jean Piaget’s cognitive development
+ Children constantly assimilate and accommodate as
they seek equilibrium
When does the sensorimotor stage occur?
approximately from birth to 2 years old
Circular Reactions
an infant learns to reproduce events originally discovered by chance
Assimilation
occurs when children use their existing schemes to deal with new information
Accommodation
occurs when children adjust their schemes to take new information and experiences into account
Organization
grouping of isolated behaviors and thoughts into higher-order system
Disequilibrium
cognitive conflict
Equilibration
children shift from one stage of thought to the next
What are the substages of the sensorimotor stage?
- Use of Reflexes
- Primary Circular Reactions
- Secondary Circular Reactions
- Coordination of Secondary Schemes
- Tertiary Circular Reactions
- Mental Combinations
Use of Reflexes
+ Age: birth to 1 month
+ Focus: reflexes
+ Exercise their inborn reflexes and gain some control over them
+ Practice their reflexes and control them (e.g., sucking whenever they want to)
Primary Circular Reactions
+ Age: 1-4 months
+ Focus: pleasure
+ Repeat pleasurable behaviors that first occur by chance
+ Begin to coordinate sensory information and grasp objects
+ They turn towards the sounds
Secondary Circular Reactions
+ Age: 4-8 months
+ Focus: interesting results\
+ Repeat actions that brings interesting results
+ Learns about causality
Coordination of Secondary Schemes
+ Age: 8-12 months
+ Focus: usage of previously learned info
+ Coordinate previously learned schemes and use previously learned behaviors to attain their goals
+ Can anticipate events
Tertiary Circular Reactions
+ Age: 12-18 months
+ Focus: exploration
+ Purposefully vary their actions to see results
+ Actively explore the world
+ Trial and error in solving problems
Mental Combinations
+ Can think about events and anticipate consequences without always resorting action
+ Can use symbols such as gestures and words, and can pretend
+ Transition to Pre-operational stage
+ Learns about numbers
Representational Ability
+ the ability to mentally represent objects and actions in memory, largely through symbols such as words, numbers, and mental picture
+ infants develop the abilities to think and remember
What kind of imitation develops in babies?
Visible Imitation that uses body parts that babies can see develops first followed by Invisible Imitation (involves with parts of the body that babies cannot see)
Deferred Imitation
+ Piaget believed that children under 18 months could not engage in Deferred Imitation
+ Reproduction of an observed behavior after the passage of time
+ Children lacked the ability to retain mental representations
+ Children imitate an action at some point after observing it
What is the cognitive state of children aged about 8 months?
Infants under the age of about 8 months act as if an object no longer exists once it is out other line of sight
Object Permanence
the realization that something continues to exist when out of sight
What is the cognitive state of children aged until about 15 months?
Until about 15 months, infants use their hands to explore pictures as if they were objects
What is the cognitive state of children aged by 19 months?
By 19 months, children are able to point at a picture of an object while saying its name, demonstrating an understanding that a picture is a symbol of something else
Dual Representation Hypothesis
proposal that children under age of 3 have difficulty grasping spatial relationships because of the need to keep more than one mental representation in mind at the same time
Pre-operational
+ Jean Piaget’s second stage of cognitive development
+ Lasting from ages 2 to 7, characterized by the expansion in the use of symbolic thought
+ Children begin to represent the world with words, images, and drawings
+ Dominated by egocentrism and magical beliefs
+ Does not yet perform Operations (which are reversible mental actions that allow children to do mentally what before they could do only physically)
Preoperational Thought
beginning of the ability to reconstruct in thought what has been established in behavior
What are the parts that the pre-operational stage is divided into?
- Symbolic Function
- Intuitive Thought
Symbolic Function
+ being able to think about something in the absence of sensory or motor cues
+ can use symbols, or mental representations such as words, numbers, or images to which a person has attached meaning
What concepts are under Symbolic Function?
- Deferred Imitation
- Pretend Play
Pretend Play
fantasy play, dramatic play, or imaginary play; children use an object to represent something else
What is the most extensive use of symbolic function?
The most extensive use of symbolic function is language
When does symbolic function occur? (what age)
Occurs between ages of 2 and 4
Intuitive Thought
+ begin to use primitive reasoning and want to know the answers to all sorts of questions
+ occurs approx. 4-7 yrs of age
+ children also begin to able to understand the symbols that describe physical spaces
+ Piaget believed that children cannot yet reason logically about causality
What are the concepts under intuitive thought?
- Transduction
- Identities
- Animism
- Centration
- Egocentrism
- Conservation
- Theory of Mind
Transduction
they mentally link two events, especially events close in time, whether or not here is logically a causal relationship
Identities
the concept that people and many things are basically the same even if they change in outward form, size, or appearance
Animism
tendency to attribute life to objects that are not alive
Centration
+ the tendency to focus on one aspect of a situation and neglect others
+ involves on focusing on one dimension while ignoring the other
Decentration
+ think about several aspects of a situation at one time
+ children cannot do this
Irreversibility
+ failure to understand that an action can go in two or more directions
+ type of centration
Egocentrism
young children center so much on their own point of view that they cannot take in another’s
Conservation
the fact that two things are equal remain so if their appearance is altered, as long as nothing is added or taken away
Theory of Mind
+ the awareness of the broad range of human mental states – beliefs, intents, desires, dreams, and so forth – and the understanding that others have their own
+ allows us to understand and predict the behavior of others and makes the social world understandable
Concrete Operational
+ At about 7 years of age, children enter the stage of Concrete Operations according to Jean Piaget
+ Children can now think logically because they can take multiple aspects of situations into account
+ However, their thinking is still limited to real situations in the here and now
In the concrete operational, there is a better understanding in what factors?
- Spatial concepts
- Causality
- Categorization
- Inductive and Deductive reasoning
- Conservation
- Numbers
Spatial Concepts
allows to interpret maps and navigate environment
Causality
makes judgement about cause and effects
What are the concepts under categorization?
- Seriation
- Transitive Inferences/Transivity
- Class Inclusion
Seriation
arranging objects in a series according to one or more dimensions
Transitive Inferences/ Transivity
the process of inferring the relation between two items based on their shared relation with a third item
e.g. A < B < C
Class Inclusion
ability to see the relationship between a whole and its parts, and to understand categories within a whole
What are the concepts under class inclusion?
- Inductive Reasoning
- Deductive Reasoning
Inductive Reasoning
involves making observations about particular members of a class of people, animals, objects, or events, and then drawing conclusions about the class as a whole {specific > general conclusion}
Deductive Reasoning
starts with a general statement about a class and applies it to particular members of the class {general conclusions application}
What kind of reasoning process do children only use in the concrete operations stage?
Piaget believed that children in the concrete operations stage only used inductive reasoning
What are the concepts under conservation?
- Principle of Identity
- Principle of Reversibility
- Decenter
Principle of Identity
still same object even tho it has different appearance
Principle of Reversibility
can picture what would happen if he tried to roll back the clay of snake
Decenter
ability to look at more than one aspect of the two objects at once
Formal Operational Stage
+ Adolescents enter what Piaget called the highest level of cognitive development – Formal Operations
+ Adolescents move away from their reliance on concrete, real-world stimuli, and develop the capacity for abstract thought
+ They can now use symbols to represent other symbols, hidden messages, imagine possibilities, create hypotheses
When does the formal operational stage occur?
Usually around 11 yrs old
Hypothetical-Deductive Reasoning
+ methodical, scientific approach to problem solving, and it characterizes formal operations thinking
+ Piaget attributed it to a combination of brain maturation and expanding environmental opportunities
What does hypothetical-deductive reasoning involve?
Involves ability to develop, consider, and test hypotheses
According to David Elkind, how do adolescents think?
According to David Elkind, the new way of thinking of adolescents, the way they look at themselves and their world, is as unfamiliar to them as their reshaped bodies, and they sometimes feel just awkward in its use
How do adolescents make decisions?
Adolescents can keep many alternatives in mind at the same time yet may lack effective strategies for choosing them
Self-Consciousness
adolescents can think about thinking – their own and the other people’s thoughts
Imaginary Audience
+ a conceptualized “observer” who is concerned with a young person’s thoughts and behavior as he or she is
+ adolescents often assume everyone is thinking about the same thing they are thinking about: themselves
Personal Fable
+ belief that they are special, their experience is unique, and they are not subject to the rules that govern the rest of the world
+ underlies much risky, self-destructive behavior
+ Brain immaturity biases adolescent toward risky decision making
What do adolescents become more skilled in?
Adolescents also become more skilled in social perspective-taking, the ability to tailor their speech to another person’s POV
Fuzzy-Trace Theory Dual-Process Model
decision making is influenced by two cognitive systems: verbatim analytical and gist-intuitional, which operate in parallel
