Topic 3: Piaget and Cognitive Development Flashcards
Who is the father of cognitive developmental studies?
Jean Piaget
What type of theory is Piaget’s theory?
Qualitative, Stage-like
What are Piaget’s four stages of cognitive development?
Sensorimotor (birth - 2 yrs)
Preoperational (2-6 yrs)
Concrete operational (6-11 yrs)
Formal operational (11 yrs and up)
Is Piaget’s theory domain general or domain specific?
Domain general - the stages extends across all areas of cognitive development.
What makes up the sensorimotor stage?
Infant experiences world through movement and senses, develops schemas, begins to act intentionally, and shows evidence of understanding object permanence.
What is assimilation?
When infants apply their schemas in novel situations.
E.g. ‘things come closer if i pull them’
What is accomodation?
When infants revise their schemas in light of new information.
E.g. ‘inanimate things come closer when i pull them’
What is object permanence?
The idea that objects continue to exist even when they are not visible.
How did Piaget indicate that an infant does not have a mature sense of object permanence?
through the ‘A not B’ error
What is the A not B error?
An infant successfully retrieves an object from hiding location A but will frequently return to search there even when they have seen the object hidden at a new location B.
What is limited competence?
An inability to understand what needs to be done to solve the task
What is limited performance?
An inability to execute the necessary actions to solve the task.
What are one of the main problems of Piaget’s theory?
It was mainly based on the child’s inability to pass tasks that were set up in a specific way - but there is more than one way to fail a task; have to consider limited competence and performance.
What is the violation of expectancy (VOE) paradigm?
Where the anticipated outcome is deliberately contravened.
Why did Piaget think that young children had difficulty in taking multiple perspectives?
He thought that in the preoperational stage (2-6 years), young children are egocentric.
