Week 10 - Development Flashcards
Schema
Building blocks of knowledge
Mental structure for understanding the world
Transformed through adaptation
Assimilation
Person interprets new ideas or experiences to fit existing schema
Accommodation
Person changes existing schemas to fit new ideas or experiences
What is Equilibration?
Force which moves development along
Piaget believed cognitive development did not progress at a steady rate but rate in leaps and bounds
When does equilibrium occur?
When a child’s schema can deal with most new information through assimilation
When does unpleasant state of disequilibrium occur?
When new information cannot be fitted into existing schema
Disequilibrium
Encounter something doesn’t fit with existing schema
Accommodation
Restore balance
What is four stages of cognitive development?
Sensorimotor stage (birth to age 2)
Pre-operational stave (from age 2 to age 7)
Concrete operational stage (from age 7 to age 11)
Formal operational stage (age 11+ - adolescence and adulthood)
Sensorimotor stage
Object permanence - knowing that an object still exists, even if it is hidden
Requires the ability to form a mental representation of object
Pre-operational stage
Young children can think about things symbolically
Thinking is still egocentric - infant has difficult taking the viewpoint of others
Concrete operational stage
Major turning point in the child’s cognitive development
Beginning of logical thought
Child can work things out internally in head
Children can conserve number (age6), mass (age 7) and weight (age 9)
Children begin to organise objects by classes and subclasses
Perform mathematical operations and understand transformation
Formal operational stage
People develop ability to think about abstract concept
Logically test hypothesis
What is the sensorimotor sub stages?
Reflex Acts (0-1 1/2 months)
Primary circular reactions (1 1/2 - 4 months)
Secondary circular reactions (4-8 months)
Co-ordinating secondary schemas (8-12 months)
Tertiary circular reactions (12-18 months)
Symbolic thought (18-24 months)
What is the Reflex act?
The neonate responds to external stimulation with innate reflex actions little accommodation
What is primary circular reactions?
The baby will repeat pleasurable actions centred on its own body
Done intentionally - for the sake of pleasurable stimulation produced
What is secondary circular reactions?
Babies repeat pleasurable actions that involves objects as well as actions involving their own bodies
Lack of object permanence
Live in the here and now
What is do-ordinating secondary schemas?
Babies show ability to use acquired knowledge to reach a goal
Goal-directed action
Intentionality: means-end behaviours
What is tertiary circular reactions?
The infant who once explored an object by taking it apart now tries to put it back together
Deliberate trial and error experimentation
What is symbolic thought?
Babies can form mental representations of objects
Developed the ability to visualise things that not physically present
Substage 3
4-8 months
Lack object permanence
Substage 4
8-12 months
Active searching
A-not-B error
Substage 5
12-18 months
Fail invisible displacement
Substage 6
18-24 months
Pass invisible displacement
Blanket and Ball study (A-Not-B error)
Aim: Piaget wanted to investigate at what age children acquire object permanence
Method: Piaget hid a toy under a blanket, while the child was watching, and observed whether or not the child searched for the hidden toy
Conclusion: children around 12-24 have object permanence because they are able to form mental representation of objects in their minds
What did Paiget take the child’s failure to search to mean?
Once the object was out of sight
It was also out of the child’s mind
Since the child did not understand the toy continues to exist whilst hidden
What are challenges to Piaget account?
Failure to search might indicate that child has been:
Distracted
Lost interest
Can’t coordinate it’s muscular movements to carry out the search
Infants failure to perform: lack of competence
Underestimated children’s abilities
Bower et al (1971)
Designed a task that used a skill that infants acquire at much younger than 8 months: the ability to direct where they look
He found that infant would direct their gaze to other side of screen, where the train would expect to emerge
Baillargeons violation of expectation
See whether young infants actually have object permenance but are unable to search for them because they do not have necessary motor abilities
Violation of expectation (VOE) paradigm
It exploits the fact that infants tend to look for longer at things they have not encountered before
Found infants spent much longer looking at impossible event
The ‘core knowledge’ theory
In Piagets theory, infants acquire their knowledge of objects by interaction with world around them
It is through having experience of interacting with object that child gradually realised that things have independent existence of their own - occupy space and persist in time
