Theories of Cognitive Development Flashcards
What are the two points of Piaget’s Constructivism theory?
1) Children “construct” knowledge on the basis of their experience with the world (e.g. child drops object and learns that it falls)
2) Children proceed through stages of development
What are the three processes according to Piaget’s constructivism?
1) Assimilation: process by which children translate information into a form they can understand. (e.g. 4-legged creature that barks is a dog)
Accommodation: process by which children revise current knowledge structures in response to new experiences (e.g. 3 legged dog can still be a dog)
Equilibration: process by which children balance assimilation and accommodation to create stable understanding
What are the first 4 stages to Piaget’s theory?
Sensorimotor stage (birth to 2 years)
Preoperational stage (2-7 years)
Concrete Operational stage (7-12 years)
Formal Operational stage (12 and beyond)
What are three facts about the sensorimotor stage?
1) Infants live in the here-and now
2) Infants have:
basic motor systems (reflexes)
sensory/perceptual systems
learning mechanisms of assimilation, accommodation, and equilibrium
3) Examples: sensorimotor failures in object permanence (supports ‘here-and-now’)
What are three facts of preoperational stage?
1) Toddlers begin to represent experiences in language, imagery, and symbolic thought
2) Cannot perform “operations” (reversible mental activities)
3) Focus on a single, perceptually-salient aspect of an event (centration), e.g. teddy bear with Love written on it, child names it Love
What are 4 failures that occur in the preoperational stage?
1) Failure of conservation: child can’t tell that tall thin glass holds same water as round glass
2) Failure of transitivity: if A equals B and B equals C, are A and C equal? Child says no.
3) Failure of egocentricity: child forgets that their perspective is not the same as others (e.g. a wall blocks view between kid and adult, yet kid assumes the adult can see the objects they can see)
4) Failure of appearance vs. reality: Adult says an object that looks like a rock is a sponge, child only sees it as a rock
What are 4 facts about the concrete operational stage?
1) Children can reason logically about concrete objects and events
2) Difficulty thinking in purely abstract terms and combining info systematically
3) Struggle with deductive reasoning: (e.g. tell a child that in this universe, if you hit a glass with a feather it will break. the child will still answer it does not break when asked)
4) Struggle with systematic testing
What are three facts about the formal operational stage?
1) Not everyone achieves it (Piaget thinks)
2) Children (and adults) can think about abstractions and hypotheticals
3) Can perform systematic “experiments” to draw conclusions about the world
What is the poverty of experience argument against Piaget?
If you can show that a child has knowledge without a child having an experience to obtain that knowledge, there must be some innate knowledge (e.g. a child having object permanence without the experience to obtain it) (infants know more of physical world before capable of operating on it)
Why do people argue that there are inconsistencies in Piaget’s timeline?
Kids were achieving things “too early” and “too late.” Piaget claims there is a mandatory domain general (if you fail one task, you must fail all tasks), however this is not true and there can be skills in some areas and not others (e.g. tie soccer laces but not hockey laces)
What is the competence/performance distinction argument against Piaget?
Piaget claims if a child doesn’t do something, then they don’t have the ability. However, performance can simply suffer for a number of reasons, maybe child doesn’t care or is uncomfortable of the environment (such as performing poorly on a test when you know it).
Kids also test better on measures that don’t require verbal responses
What did Liz Spelke and Renee Baillargeon argue?
They claimed that Piaget’s test’s were not designed well enough and that kids had some innate knowledge.
Ex. Object permanence test was too difficult, instead of asking kid to grab hidden object, cover up object and secretly remove it and then remove cover and see if baby is surprised
A) What is object cognition?
B) What are the three types of object cognition (3 C’s)
A) Kids knowing about physical world before capable of operating on it
B)
Continuity: Piaget thought kids in sensorimotor stage could only see sensory data (box blocking middle of line, kids would think there were two lines, but kids in fact knew it was one line)
Coherence: object permanence (kids have knowledge of objects they cannot see)
Contact: innate knowledge of physical world, children are shocked when inanimate objects move on their own before they are taught
What are three strengths of Piaget?
1) A good overview of children’s thinking at different points
2) Appealing due to its breath (looks at change across the lifespan)
3) Fascinating observations
What are 4 weaknesses of Piaget?
1) Stage model depicts children’s thinking as being more consistent across all children than it is
2) Children are more cognitively competent than Piaget recognized
3) Understates contribution of the social world (how their exposure/environment impacts child’s development)
4) Vague about cognitive processes/mechanisms that produce cognitive growth
