Week 2 - Reading Flashcards
What are the 3 broader advantages to knowing developmental theories?
- Provide a framework for understanding important phenomena
- Raise crucial/fundamental questions about human nature
- Lead to a better understanding of children (motivate new research)
What topics are explored in cognitive development?
Perception, attention, language, problem solving, reasoning, memory, conceptual understanding, and intelligence
What topics are explored in social development?
Emotions, personality, relationships, self-understanding, aggression, and moral behaviour
What are the 5 theories of cognitive development that are particularly influential?
- Piagetian
- Information-processing
- Core knowledge
- Sociocultural
- Dynamic systems
What main questions are addressed by Piagetian theory?
Nature and nurture, continuity/discontinuity, the active child
What main questions are addressed by information processing theory?
Nurture and nature, how change occurs
What main questions are addressed by core knowledge theory?
Nature and nurture, continuity/discontinuity
What main questions are addressed by sociocultural theory?
Nature and nurture, influence of the sociocultural context, how change occurs
What main questions are addressed by dynamic systems?
Nature and nurture, the active child, how change occurs
Why are all 5 theories important?
Together they allow for a broader appreciation of cognitive development than any one of them alone
What are 3 reasons for the longevity of Piaget’s theories?
- Vividly convey the texture of children’s thinking at different ages
- Exceptional breadth of theory
- Intuitively plausible depiction of the interaction of nature and nurture and the continuities and discontinuities that characterize intellectual growth
What is Piaget’s fundamental assumption?
Children are mentally active from birth and their mental and physical activity both contribute to their development
What is Piaget’s approach to understanding often labelled as?
Constructivist, depicts children as constructing knowledge for themselves in response to their experiences
According to Piaget what are the 3 most important of children’s constructive process?
- Generating hypothesis
- Performing experiments
- Drawing conclusions from their observations
What is Piaget’s view of nature and nurture?
They interact to produce cognitive development
A vital part of children’s nature is how they respond to nurture
How does Piaget view nurture?
Not just nurturing provided by caregivers, but also every experience the child encounters
How does Piaget view nature?
Maturing brain and body; ability to perceive act, and learn from experience; and their tendency to integrate particular observations into coherent knowledge
According to Piaget, what are the 3 processes of continuity?
Assimilation
Accommodation
Equilibrium
Define assimilation
The process by which people incorporate incoming information into concepts they already understand
Define accommodation
The process by which people improve their current understanding in response to new experiences
Define equilibration
The process by which people balance assimilation and accommodation to create stable understanding
What are the 3 stages of equilibration, according to Piaget?
- Satisfied with their understanding
- New information leads them to perceive their understanding is inadequate (disequilibrium)
- Develop a more sophisticated understanding
What are the 4 central properties of Piaget’s stage theory?
- Qualitative change
- Broad applicability
- Brief transitions
- Invariant sequence
Explain qualitative change according to Piaget
Children of different ages think qualitatively in different ways
Example:
Young kids view morality in terms of consequences of behaviour vs older kids view in terms of intent
Explain broad applicability according to Piaget
The type of thinking of each stage influences children’s thinking across diverse topics and contexts
Explain brief transitions according to Piaget
Before entering a new stage, children experience a transitional stage where they fluctuate between the old and new thinking characteristics
Explain invariant sequence according to Piaget
Everyone progresses through the stages in the same order without skipping any of them
What are Piaget’s 4 stages of cognitive development?
- Sensorimotor stage
- Pre-operational stage
- Concrete operational stage
- Formal operation stage
Describe the sensorimotor stage
Birth - 2 years
Intelligence is bound to their immediate perceptions and actions
Describe the pre-operational stage
2 - 7 years
Become able to represent experiences in language and mental imagery
Longer memory and can begin forming more sophisticated concepts
Describe the concrete operational stage
7 - 12 years
Reason logically about concrete objects and events
Cannot think purely in abstract terms or generate systematic experiments to test beliefs
Describe the formal operational stage
12 years and beyond
Can think deeply about abstractions and hypotheticals
Draw appropriate conclusions
Are infants born with reflexes?
Yes
They modify them to make them more adaptive
What age do infants begin developing object permanence?
~ 8 months to a year
Describe object permanence
The ability to recognize that even though objects are out of sight, it does not mean they are gone
Describe A-not-B error
Infants tend to do this from ~ 8 months to a year
The tendency to reach for a hidden object where it was last found rather than in the new location where it was last hidden
Describe deferred imitation
The repetition of other people’s behaviour a substantial time after it originally occurred
Describe symbolic representation
The use of one object to stand for another
E.g., hand gun or hand phone
What does Piaget propose as an important limitation of preoperational thinking?
Egocentrism
Define egocentrism
Perceiving the world solely from one’s own point of view
Define centration
The tendency to focus on a single, perceptually striking feature of an object or event
Define conservation concept
The idea that merely changing the appearance of objects does not necessarily change the objects’ other key properties
E.g., pouring the same liquid into different sized glasses
Are all of Piaget’s stages universal?
Believes the first 3 are but not necessarily the formal operational stage
What are 4 crucial weakness of Piaget’s theory?
- Vague about mechanisms that give rise to children’s thinking and that produce cognitive growth
- Children are more cognitively competent than Piaget recognized
- Understates the contribution of the social world to cognitive development
- The stage model depicts children’s thinking as being more consistent than it is
What is David Klahr’s theory?
Information processing theories
What is information processing theories?
A class of theories that focus on the structure of the cognitive system and the mental activities used to deploy attention and memory to solve problems
What are the two notable characteristics of information processing theories?
- Precise specification of the surprisingly complex processes involved in children’s thinking (task analysis)
- Emphasis on thinking as a process that occurs over time
Define task analysis
The research technique of specifying the goals, obstacles to their realization, and potential solution strategies involved in problem solving
Can also allow them to formulate computer simulation
Define computer simulation
A type of mathematical model that expresses ideas about mental processes in precise ways
What do information processing analyses identify?
What mental operations are, the order in which they are executed, and how increasing speed and accuracy of mental operations lead to cognitive growth
How does information processing theorists see cognitive development?
Continuous, in small increments that happen at different ages on different tasks
How are children viewed as limited capacity processing systems according to Klahr?
Gradually surmount their processing limitations, in particular their limited working memory capacity, processing speed, and knowledge of useful strategies and content
Through learning they can expand the amount of information they can process
How are children viewed as problem solvers according to Klahr?
Children are active problem solvers and use strategies for overcoming obstacles and attaining goals
What are the 3 types of memory processes?
- Working memory
- Long-term memory
- Executive functioning
