Theories of Cognitive Development (CH 4) Flashcards
What are the 3 advantages of knowing theories?
- Provide framework for understanding important phenomena
- Raise crucial questions about human nature
- Lead to a better understanding of kids
What was Piaget’s theory?
-Cognitive development involves a sequence of 4 stages that are constructed through the process of Assimilation, Accomodation & Equilibrium
What were the 4 stages that Piaget described?
- Sensorimotor (Birth- 2 yrs)
- Preoperational (2-7 yrs)
- Concrete Operational (7-12 yrs)
- Formal Operational (12 & up)
What was Piaget’s view on the child’s Nature?
- Constructivist= kids constructing knowledge for themselves in response to their experience
- Involves 3 Constructive processes
- Kids are motivated to learn
What are the 3 Constructive process that Piaget described?
- Generating Hypothesis
- Performing experiment
- Drawing conclusions from observations
What role does Nature & Nurture play in Piaget’s theory?
- Nature= maturing brain & body, ability to perceive/ act & learn via experience & to integrate observations into coherent knowledge
- Nurture= Nurturing from parents, caregivers, & every experience encountered
What is the Assimilation Process of Piaget’s theory?
-The Incorporation of incoming info into concepts that they already understand
What is the Accommodation Process of Piaget’s theory?
-The improvement of their current understanding in response to new experiences
What is the Equilibrium Process of Piaget’s theory?
- The balance of assimilation & accommodation to create a stable understanding
- Consists of 3 phases= Equilibrium, Disequilibrium, Advanced Equilibrium
What is the Equilibrium phase of the Equilibrium Process of Piaget’s Theory?
-The satisfaction with understanding of particular phenomena
What is the Disequilibrium phase of the Equilibrium Process of Piaget’s Theory?
-The realization of short comings & not being able to create a superior alternative
What is the Advanced Equilibrium phase of the Equilibrium Process of Piaget’s Theory?
- Having a more sophisticated understanding which eliminates short comings
- Broader range of observations can be understood
Why is Piaget’s Theory considered to be discontinuous
- His theory is depicted as stages
- The transition between stages is a discontinuous intellectual leap from one coherent way of understanding to higher way
What are the 4 central properties of Piaget’s Theory?
- Qualitative change
- Broad applicability
- Brief transitions
- Invariant sequence
What is the Qualitative Change property of Piaget’s Theory?
- Kids at different ages think qualitatively in different ways
- Kids in the early development of cognitive development conceive morality in terms of consequences of behavior vs kids in the latter conceive it in person’s intent
What is the Broad Applicability property of Piaget’s Theory?
-Thinking characteristics of each stage influences thinking across diverse topics & contexts
What is the Brief Transitions property of Piaget’s theory?
- Before entering a new stage is the brief transitions period
- Fluctuate between characteristics of new & old stage & the thinking characteristics of the old one
What is the Invariant Sequence Property of Piaget’s theory?
-Every kid progresses though the same order of stages (no skipping)
What is the 1st stage of Cognitive Development according to Piaget?
- Sensorimotor stage (birth-2 yrs)
- Intelligence is expressed through sensory & motor abilities to perceive & explore the world around them
- Infants construct rudimentary forms of fundamental concepts (space, time, etc)
What is the 2nd stage of Cognitive Development according to Piaget?
- Preoperational stage (2-7 yrs)
- Able to present experiences in language & mental imagery which helps them remember longer & in the formation of sophisticated concepts
- They aren’t able to perform certain mental operations that consider multiple dimensions simultaneously which hinders them to form certain ideas
What is the 3rd stage of Cognitive Development according to Piaget?
- Concrete Operational stage (7-12 yrs)
- Kids can reason logically about concrete objects & events
- BUT can’t think in purely abstract terms
- Can generate systematic scientific experiments to test beliefs
What is the 4th stage of Cognitive Development according to Piaget?
- Formal Operational (12 & up)
- Able to think deeply about concrete, abstract, & purely hypothetical situations
- Able to preform systematic scientific experiments to test beliefs
What behaviors are demonstrated during birth to the first month in the Sensorimotor stage according to Piaget?
- Flailing, sucking, grasping
- Then they start to have the ability to modify their reflexes to make them more adaptive & effective per situation
What behaviors are demonstrated during the first few months to the middle of their first year in the Sensorimotor stage according to Piaget?
- Organization of separate reflexes to larger behaviors that are mostly centered around body
- Then they’re are increasingly curious about the world & they shift to repetitions of actions that bring pleasure/ interesting results
What behaviors are demonstrated during 8 months to the end of the first year in the Sensorimotor stage according to Piaget?
- Lack object permanence
- Then they start to look for hidden objects bc they mentally represent the objects continuing presence
- May have A-not-B error which is where they reach for the place where the object was last shown rather than looking at the new location
What behaviors are demonstrated during the last 18-24 months in the Sensorimotor stage according to Piaget?
-They’re able to form enduring mental representations which is the first sign of Deferred Imitation
What behaviors are demonstrated in the Preoperational Stage according to Piaget?
- Development of symbolic representations= the use of an object, word, though to stand for another
- Kids rely more on conventional symbols
- Egocentricism
- Centration= limitation in thinking where kid focuses in on a single perceptually striking feature & ignoring the rest
What behaviors are demonstrated in the Concrete Operational stage according to Piaget?
- Kids are starting to reason logically about concrete features of the world
- Development of conservation concept
- Still can’t think in hypothetical terms which in term causes difficulty in performing unsystematic experiments & drawing incorrect conclusions
What behaviors are demonstrated in the Formal Operational stage according to Piaget?
- They’re able to think abstractly & reason hypothetically
- Able to create systematic experiments
- THIS STAGE IS NOT UNIVERSAL
What are the weaknesses of Piaget’s theory?
- It’s vague about mechs that give rise to kid’s thinking & that the mechs that produce cognitive growth
- Infant’s & younger kids are actually more cognitively competent than what Piaget thought
- It understates the contribution of the social world to cognitive development
- The stage model depicts kid’s thinking as being more consistant than it actually is
What are Information Processing Theories?
- They emphasize precise characteristics of mechs that give rise to the child’s thinking & that produce cognitive growth
- They’re a class of theories that focus on structure of the cognitive system & mental activities that are used to deploy attention & memory to solve problems