Theories of Cognitive Development (Piaget) Flashcards
Who Founded the filed of Cognitive Development?
Jean Piaget
What did Jean Piaget do?
- Moving beyond Behaviorism
- Broad theory to account for the changes in children’s thinking, Piaget is an empiricism
Constructivism? 2 things
- Children ‘construct’ knowledge on the basis of their experiences with the world
“Laurent [Piaget’s infant child] is lying on his back… He grasps in succession a [number of objects], stretches out his arm, and lets them fall. He distinctly varies the position of the fall. When the object falls in a new position, for example, on his pillow, he lets it fall two or three more times on the same place, as though to study the spatial relations”
- Children proceed though stages of development, discontinuity -. Abrupt changes
Constructivist theory of building Assimilation?
A process by which children translate information into a form they can understand.
“Dog”
Accommodation?
A process by which children revise current knowledge structures in response to new experiences.
“Dog” = 4 legged creature that barks
Equilibration?
A process by which children balance assimilation and accommodation to create stable understanding.
Stages of development?
Sensorimotor
Preoperational
Concrete operational
Formal operational
Preoperational (2-7 years)?
- Toddlers begin to represent experiences in language, imagery, and symbolic thought
- Cannot perform “operations” (reversible mental activities)
- Focus on a single, perceptually-salient aspect of an event (centration)
Preoperational failure of conservation?
- Conservation of liquid quantity
- Conservation of solid quantity
- Conservation of number
Preoperational failure of transitivity
Red > Blue
Blue > Grey
Red ? Green -> Kids cannot see this logic
Preoperational failures of egocentricity
- Communications game, (Descivbe it so that your friend can pick the blue square)
- “It’s this one”
- (Pointing randomly) “This one?”
- “Yeah”
- Mountain problem
- Cannot understand people see things from different angels/perspectives.
- “What the other person sees is different from what I see.
- False belief
- “Where will Sally look for her ball?”
- Whatever knowledge the child has they think that other people share that knowledge
- Preopreational failures of appearance vs. Reality
- What is it? Sponge
- What does it look like? Rock
- What is it really? Rock
- How to refer to the gender if the person look counter stereotypical -> their perception is heavily based on what things look like
Concrete operational (7-12)?
- Children can reason logically about concrete objects and events
- However, they have difficulty thinking in purely abstract terms in combining information systematically
Concrete operational failure systematic testing?
- Swining pendalum, which works
- Test randomly vs. Systematic approach
Formal operational (12 and beyond)?
- Children (and adults) can think about abstractions and hypotheticals
- Can perform systematic ‘experiments to draw conclusions about the world
- Problems with constructivism?
- Poverty (little/few) of experience
- When there is a lack of opportunity to have an experience yet the child still understands
Problems with Piaget, Competence / Performance Distinction?
- Failure of the child just means that the child does not understand the concept
-> Competence - Not always the case
- Something you’re just not able to show what you know, maybe changing the procedure would show that the kids do understand the concept -> Performance
- Problems with Piaget’s stages?
- Inconsistency of the timeline
- Some children show abilities that they should not be able to to at their age/Piaget’s stage
Infants know A LOT about the physical world before they are capable of operating on it, provide 3 examples?
- Continuity -> Core knowledge: Object Continuity
- Coherence -> Two objects can’t pass though each other
- Contact -> One ball can push another
How can motivation make a difference when researching small children? + ways to improve the testing
Ex. Changing coins to candies
Children do not always behave egocentrically, changing the framing of the question to a yes/no question make them more likely to succeed
Measures that don’t require verbal responses, ex pointing had better success rate
False consensus effect?
Adult errors of egocentricity, thinking that everyone sees things from your perspective
Strengths of Piaget’s theory?
- A good overview of children’s thinking at different points
- Appealing due to its breath
- Fascinating observations
Weaknesses/Criticism of Piaget’s theory?
- Stage model depicts children’s thinking as being more consistent than it is
- Children are more cognitively competent than Piaget recognised
- Understates contribution of the social world
- Vague about cognitive processes/mechanisms that produce cognitive growth
