Topic 4: Evaluating Piaget Flashcards
What does precocious mean?
having developed certain abilities at a younger age than expected.
Do infants have a better understanding of object permenance than Piaget suggested? Hood study
Hood & Willats (1986). Working with 5 mth olds who Piaget would claim qould struggle to look for an occluded object. Infant is shown a toy to their side, lights are turned out. Infant reaches for correct side 62% of the time. This indicates that infants at this age have a better unerstanding of object permenance than Piaget concluded.
If Piaget’s findings were robust and repeatable why have subsequent studies found that younger infants have a better understanding of object permenance than he would have claimed?
Perhaps the tasks that Piaget created required too complex of an action that infants weren’t capable of.
Baillargeon (1987) drawbridge experiment
Experimenter’s modelled a drawbridge coming down on to a solid object to 4 month olds. In the experimental condition they modelled an ‘impossible’ event where the drawbridge appeared to pass through a solid object. Increased looking time at impossible event suggests an earlier understanding of object permenance than Piaget proposed.
What study tested egocentrism on 3 year olds? (Hughes, 1978)
Children were asked to place a pretend boy into a 2D scene that had seperating walls and two policemen. When asked to put him where the police couldn’t see him (only being one such spot) 90% of 3 yr olds were able to do this. This suggests they are able to take multiple perspectives and are potentially less egocentric than Piaget made out.
How did Piaget neglect the significance of the social influence of adults?
Children look up to, listen to and generally expect to learn frpm adults. So when they are questioned in a task their answer may be more due to their interpretation of what the adult wants them to do rather than their interpretation of the task at hand. Piaget failed to recognise this.
What is Vygotsky’s theory of proximal development?
Vygotsky believed that the best way for children to improve was to socialise them with a peer who is in the zone of proximal develpment (slightly more developed). He emphasised the importance of the social influence of parents/carers much more than Piaget ever suggested.
What is the overlapping waves theory?
Children wll adapt and change their strategy depending on the task and its complexity. The overlapping waves refer to the amount of use these strategies get as the child matures and argues for more fluidity and adaptation on part of the child. This is conflicting with Piaget’s sequential theory of development where previous inefficient strategies would be replaced by more sophisticated ones.
Bickerton (1984) study of Pidgins and Creoles
Studied the langauge development of Hawaii, a mix of different nationalities started living together and formed a Pidgin language, where they developed shared names for things. The second generation observe and process this basic language and then advance it with more grammatical additions to make the language more cohesive and fluent. This suggests we are born with an innate ability to acquire language.
How do developmental language disorder and Williams syndrome support domain specificity?
Respectively these cognitively impairing conditions affect language development (but not intelligence) and intelligence (but not language acquisistion. This strongly indicates that language is far more domain specific than Piaget made out.
What is the nativist argument for domain specificity?
‘The mind is a system of organs of computation, designed by natural
selection to solve the kinds of problems our ancestors faced’. (Pinker,1997)
