theories of cognitive development slides Flashcards
Purpose of Theories
- Provide a framework for understanding important phenomena
- Raise crucial questions about human nature
- Lead to a better understanding of infant dev
- Influenced by history, philosophy, economics, and social structure, as well as by the dominant scientific metaphors of the times
- A good theory can both explain and predict developmental change
Theoretical Issues In Cognitive Development
– The contribution of nature vs. nurture
* Some theorists believe core concepts are innate
* Others believe that the learning mechanisms are innate
* Some a combination
– Knowledge as domain general or domain specific
– These interact:
* Those who argue infants are born with core concepts also argue initial “knowledge” is domain specific
- Those who argue all but the most basic ”knowledge” is learned argue for domain generality
– How doe understanding/knowledge grow?
* Continuous vs discontinuous
Influential Theories
- Piaget (constructivist)
- Vygotsky (Sociocultural)
- Systems & Connectionist Theories
- Information processing
- Core Knowledge
Piaget: An Overview
- Biologist turned philosopher
– Many metaphors from biology
– Use of logic in theory construction - Primary interest was Epistemology
– The nature of ‘knowing’
– What is knowledge? How is it acquired? - Theory from observations of own kids
- Jean Piaget’s theory remains the standard against which all other theories are judged.
Jean Piaget
Knowledge comes from reason
active process
- Jean Piaget (constructivist)
- Knowledge constructed; active
- Interactive of nature and nurture
* Learning mechanism assimilation/accomodation
- 4 Stages: Discontinuous
– Sensorimotor (0-2 years)
– Preoperational (2-7 years)
– Concrete Operational (7-12 years)
– Formal Operational (12 year +)
Piaget: Central Tenets
- The child is active – a constructivist theory
* Nature and nurture interact
- A stage theory:development is
discontinuous - 4 main stages
The 4 Stages: An Overview
-
Sensorimotor: Infancy
– The child understands the world in terms of the actions she can take on it
* Preoperational: 2 - 5-7 years
– Child has representations, but thought still illogical
- Concrete Operational: to about 12 years
– Thought is logical, but limited to the possible world - Formal Operational: from then on
– The child can reason logically about abstract possibilities
Schemes:
ways of acting on, and thinking about, the
world
Assimilation:
new information is acted on/understood
through existing schemes
Acommodation:
existing schemes are updated through
new information
The Sensorimotor Period
- From birth to 18-24 months
- Infant understands the world in terms of the actions that she can take on it
- Progressive ability to organize and coordinate sensation & perception with physical movements & actions representation
- Progressive differentiation of self & other
- Involves 6 sub-stages
substage 1
birth - 1 month
Reflexive schemes: Infants begin to modify inborn reflexes to make them more adaptive.
stage 2
1-4months
Primary circular reactions: begin to produce organized actions
such as reaching & grasping;
repeat them for the sensory effect
stage 3
4-8month
Secondary Circular Reactions: Infants
begins to focus on the effect of their
actions on the outside world, & repeat those actions are associate w/an effect.
Beginning to separate own actions from the objects - the foundation of what is self & what is other/object.
stage 4
8-12months
Combining Circular Reactions: Combine
two actions (reach & grasp) in the service of a goal.
Object permanence emerging,
but incomplete.
A-Not-B error: not fully
separating actions from object
a-b test error
they see someone putting an object under a blanker, have a similar one , they will reach towards where they last saw the object not where they saw it move
stage 5
12-18months
Tertiary Circular Reactions: Begin to understand that objects have properties, and that their actions have effects.
Actively use trial and error in actions to explore objects
stage 6
18-24months
Mental Representations: Hold object & its properties in mind
separate from action: Object
Permanence & Deferred
imitation. Supports learning from
others.
Substage 6
- Achievement of representational thought
- Understands that objects not only continue to exist, but have stable properties even when cant act on
them - Can represent the properties of objects
- Can plan actions on world in head
- Can use symbols to stand for absent objects
– Enables the acquisition of language - Deferred imitation in place
Strengths of Piaget
- Comprehensive
- Has face validity
- Useful
– For explaining infant behavior to parents
– And for designing toys and exploration opportunities - Is to some extent, testable/falsifiable
- Makes predictions
Weaknesses of Piaget
- Some constructs vague & poorly
operationalized - May underestimate the infant
– order correct, ages wrong
– underlying constructs incorrect - May underestimate the parent’s influence
- Process of development challenges
Vygotsky:
Socio-cultural
- Vygotsky
– Social interaction as fundamental to development
– Learn from more knowledgeable others: experience essential
– Zone of proximal development
– Gradual and** continuous change**
Strengths
– Stresses the centrality of cultural context
– Used to guide much cross-cultural work with a focus on understanding dev from w/in the culture
– Stresses the importance of adult/child interaction
– Zone of Proximal Development important for pedagogically
weakness
– Constructs vague and poorly operationalized
Information Processing
- Human mind compared to a computer
– Emphasizes memory systems and how information is taken in, processed, and stored -
Sensory register
– Visual, auditory, etc. info encoded & briefly stored -
Short-term memory
– Limited capacity memory, holds info for short time -
Long-term memory
– Limitless capacity where info permanently stored
Information Processing
- Focus on domain general processes
– But argue the learning mechanisms are built in
– They are what allow children to acquire concepts, knowledge, etc
– And can be quite sophisticated – so quite a bit of work on what learning mechanisms there are
- Knowledge acquired stored as domain general
- Experience is essential for learning mechanisms to work
- Individual differences in cognitive abilities
continous
Some of the learning mechanisms
- Associative learning
- Conditioning
– Classical and Operant - Statistical Learning
– Transitional Probabilities
– Distributional Learning - Predictive learning
Strengths and Weaknesses
- Earlier versions unable to account for how sophisticated infant behavior is
- And unable to explain & predict
- Newer versions much more powerful
- Still not clear how much learning theories can explain in comparison to Core Knowledge
- The jury is out!
Systems Theories
- Development occurs within a larger context
- All parts of system mutually influential
- No “engine” – all contribute
- ** Development in one sphere influences development in another** ex: learning to seat bring other experience and learning
- ** So focus on the interaction between what
the *child brings and what they experience** - Focus on understanding the whole child - the socail and interactions context
Newer Version:
Dynamic Systems-
- Many parts within organism and within environment, all mutually influential
- Butterfly Effect
- No Engine – randomness
- Order from chaos
- Self Organization - - - Emergent Structure
- Rate Limiting Factor
Strengths and Weaknesses
*Strengths
– Face Validity
– Allows breaking down a capability into its parts
– Helps explain variability and individual differences
– As above, focus on the whole child and that child is adapting to their environment
– Allows extension across cultures
-
Weakness
– How change actually happens not addressed
Core Knowledge
- Nativism & Core knowledge
– Foundations built in
– numbers, space, objects, agents (morality)
– Development involves elaboration and integration
– Core knowledge has characteristic limitations
– Evidence: Similarities across culture
and across species
Elizabeth Spelke
Core knowledge
- Core knowledge theory posits that children are born with a small number of core systems of knowledge (often called modules – domain specific)
- “New flexible skills and belief systems build on these core
foundations” (domain general) - Core knowledge is selected by evolution
- The core foundations are the most natural, are seen across
all societies and in non-human animals, and are the ones
we rely on under information overload - However, we can move beyond them and can reconceptualize the world
- We do so by ultimately bringing all the core capacities together, and using them to reasons about things that are not core
* Core knowledge systems are:
– Innate
– Simple (characteristic limitations)
– Specific
– Separate (domain specific)
– Principled
– Cultural and Species Universal
– The foundation for later learning
* But conceptual change is possible
-continous
Spelke and Kinzler (2007) proposed four systems of
core knowledge:
–Objects
–Number
–Geometry
– *Agents
Core Knowledge Objects
- Cohesion: Objects move as connected wholes
- Continuous: Objects move on connected, unobstructed paths
- Contact: Objects do not interact at a distance
Core Knowledge Objects
-
Enables infants (& other animals) to:
-Perceive object boundaries - To represent the complete shapes of objects that move or are out of view
- To predict when objects will move and where they will come to rest
* This knowledge has limits:
- It is specific to inanimate objects
-It does not support reasoning about food or artifacts, or non-object
entities like dirt and or liquid (all of which we do learn to reason about)
-Object set size : we can track only 3 (-4) objects at once
- The same capabilities are seen in non-human primates, and across cultures
Core Knowledge Objects: Examples
box and screen example
- Often use ‘violation of
expectation procedure’ - Infants look longer to
impossible events - Reveals object
knowledge –much
younger than Piaget.
carrot experiment
3.5 infants
(1) believed that each carrot continued to exist when behind the screen,
(2) realized that each carrot could not disappear at one edge of the screen and reappear at the other edge without traveling the distance between them,
(3) recognized that the height of each carrot relative to that of the window determined whether the carrot should appear in the window, and hence
(4) expected the tall carrot to appear in the window and were surprised when it failed to do so.
Object cognition: Set size limit
- Adult humans express knowledge about objects, the 3 C’s:
- cohesive, continuous, and require contact to interact
- We can only track 3-4 objects at a time
Core Knowledge: Object Tracking
- The ability to track small
numbers of objects - Yields addition and
subtraction like
performance with small
numbers of objects - Can succeed at tasks like
this with up to** 3 objects
by age 4 1/2 months** - Is it addition and
subtraction? Not sure. - Criticisms from text.
- Core Knowledge theorists
also no longer think this is
number –* say it is more
about object tracking.* - Still, it supports number-
like understanding.
screen comes up (one object),object added,revels 2 object(expected) or one object apears(unexpected) when screnn is droped
Limits and specificity
- Spatio-temporal properties govern infants’ representations of objects
- Objects need to be cohesive, continuous in their paths of motion, or subject to contact in their interactions with others
- Infants do not interpret the movement of inanimate objects as goal-directed
Core knowledge: Agents(people)
- Agents, unlike objects, produce actions that are:
- Goal-directed
- Efficient
- Reciprocal (agents interact contingently)
- Mirrored – infants imitate
- Follow gaze(when the agents have eyes)
- Infants and other animals are sensitive to what agents can and cannot see
Habituation: Infants interpret arm
reaching as goal directed
For example, infants were shown an actor repeatedly reaching for one of two toys placed side by side. After they became accustomed to this (habituated), the toys were switched. The infants observed two new scenarios: one where the actor reached for the same toy but through a different path, and another where the actor reached along the familiar path but for the new toy. Infants looked longer at the latter scenario, suggesting they noticed the change in the actor’s goal rather than just the movement, indicating a basic understanding of intention behind actions
6months olds
different resoning between human and inanimated objects
Infants track intentions when it’s a
hand; location when it’s a mechanical
claw
Core Knowledge Number
- Number systems
– Approximate Number System (ANS) - Imprecise
- Allows the estimation of quantity of ≥ 4 without relying on integers or symbols
- Proportional (based on Weber fraction)
- Available to young infants, all of us, and many other species
– Separate from the “Object Tracking System” which can track
only 3-4 objects
6-mo Infants detect a 1:2 ratio; 1.15- 1.3 in adults
These developmental changes occur without instruction
Conceptual change is required to learn formal mathematics
More on Number
-
Number systems
– Integer (symbolic) Number System - Precise integer representations
- Based on the counting principle
- Can determine exactly how many numbers are in an array
- Exact – not proportional
- Unique to humans
– Eventually humans map the ANS and Integer number systems together
* (e.g. give a precise number to estimate a quantity)
– And, individual differences in the ANS predict
performance in formal mathematics (the symbolic number system)
Precise Number System (PNS): Counting
- By 2-2.5 years toddlers can recite numbers in order
- They learn that people recite numbers when enumerating things
- But they don’t understand what counting really is
– 2.5 – 3 years understand “one”, but no more
– 3-3.5 years understand “two”, but only 1 and 2
– 3.5 – 4 years understand “three”, but only 1, 2, and 3
– 4 years – understand 3-4
– By 5 years really understand how numbers work.
How does the PNS(precise number system) emerge?
- Even in Core knowledge – real limitations in how humans master Numerical Counting
- How do the object tracking, ANS, and symbolic number understanding come together to support understanding how to count?
- Experience is important! But this is from Core Cognition researchers.
- Is this a false dichotomy?
Is there a false dichotomy?
- Your text criticizes the Core explanation of number
because infants benefit from experience - But the Core approach to Number actually elegantly
separates the properties of the object tracking system (not number), from the ANS, and the
properties of the ANS from the Symbolic, Integer based system, and both from Object Tracking - And states that the hardest part for the child is to
move above the domain specific (core) knowledge in
each of these systems and integrate them - Perhaps it is that part of development the systems
and information processing approaches study
Do infants understand something
about counting before they can do it?
- How do the ANS and the symbolic, integer based number systems begin to inform each other?
- Remember – infants are accustomed to listening to
and watching objects be counted - Does this give an early entry into eventually using
number words to facilitate more precise number
understanding? - An experiment asked “when children first recognize
counting as being ‘about’ number, by testing whether verbal counting would help infants represent arrays of hidden objects”.
Experiment 16 infants aged 17-20 mos
Does seeing objects counted help infants use the ANS for larger numbers than they can otherwise reason about?
- Infants watched experimenter insert 4 objects
into a box, with and without counting
Babies search longer when objects are counted!
Core knowledge: Geometry
- Geometric core knowledge uses
information about angle, distance, and sense - This is what infants and primitive
people do - Not until adulthood does it incorporate physical characteristics of landmarks
- Text disagrees and provides some
compelling counterexamples.
Strengths & Weaknesses
- Findings replicate across cultures
- Findings also replicate across many species, but many also have even more elaborate patial navigation systems
- But, many counterexamples given in text re
children, even infants, able to use landmarks - Argue is it only, however, in highly familiar spaces?
Text presents Geometry as only one
part of understanding of space
- **Distinguishes small-scale and large-scale
** -
Small scale includes
– position of objects
– Point of view of an object -
Large-scale
– the location of objects and
– the spatial layout of the environment
– Necessary for attending to the routes people take
– And for finding one’s own way around
Still considerable disagreement reunderstanding space
-
Piaget: infants egocentric – understanding tied to their own
actions (e.g. 3 mountain task) -
Core knowledge: properties (including position vis-à-vis one
another and point of view) of objects have core foundation, as
does geometry -
information processingand Systems Theories: argue enough
information in the environment to rapidly learn, and learning
mechanisms allow that to happen -
Systems and Developmental Cascades: Stress the role of
motor development and language in facilitating spatial
understanding - Also know the difference between egocentric and
allocentric wrt large scale spatial understanding
