Week 4: Cognitive Development Piaget Flashcards
What is myelination? What is a condition in which myelination is affected?
-Myelin is a fatty substance that insulates axons and speeds up transmission
-Myelination of axons continues until about age 20
-> Multiple sclerosis causes demyelination and this results in electrical impulses jumping -> motor difficulties
What differences would you see in an image looking at brain tissue of a neonate versus 6 months versus 2 years
You would see a lot more dendrites i.e. the tissue would get more and more dense with dendrites
Why is Piaget a constructivist?
-Children develop knowledge of the world through the child’s own activity
-Inbuilt tendency to adapt to new experiences
-Learn through active self-discovery
What 4 stages does piaget believe a child goes through in terms of cognitive development and what ages do they correspond with?
Sensorimotor: Birth – 2 years
Preoperational: 2–7 years
Concrete operational: 7–11 years
Formal operational: 11+
Is Piaget’s theory invariant ? What does this imply about discontinuity ?
Invariant: they always occur in a fixed order,
and no stage can be skipped.
Stages are discontinuous
Does piaget believe in one course of development?
Yes, he assumes that every child goes through the same stages
BUT the speed that the child moves through the stages is affected by genetic and environmental factors
Does piaget believe in nature or nurture ?
Both, says the speed which children move through the stages can be affected by both
Schemes
An organised way of making
sense of experience
* Cognitive structures:
* Organised patterns of action or
thought that people construct to interpret their experiences
Do schemes change with age? If so, how ?
Yes
-Action-based (motor patterns) at
first (e.g. grasping is a way to make sense of a toy)
-Later move to a mental (thinking) level
Adaptation… what is it? What two complementary processes does it contain?
The process of adjusting to the demands of the
environment.
- Adaptation involves building schemes through
direct interaction with the environment.
Involves two complementary processes:
* Assimilation
* Accommodation
Assimilation
The process by which children interpret new
experiences in terms of their existing schemes.
Accommodation
The process of creating new schemes
or adjusting old ones after noticing that our current way of thinking does not capture the environment completely.
Disequilibrium
The cognitive discomfort that occurs when you encounter new information that does not align with current schema
Equilibration
Piaget’s term for the back-and-forth
movement between equilibrium and disequilibrium.
Organisation
A process that occurs internally and does not
involve direct contact with the environment.
- Once children form new schemes, they rearrange
them and link them with other schemes to create
a strongly interconnected cognitive system
Equilibrium
Current understanding of the world i.e. no current challenges to it
-Exists before disequilibrium and then after assimilation/ accommodation processes that form a new equilibrium/ understanding of the world
Sensori motor stage
-Birth–2
* Building schemes through sensory and motor
exploration
-Includes 6 substages:
① Reflexive Schemes: Birth–1 month
② Primary circular reactions: 1–4 months
③ Secondary circular reactions: 4–8 months
④ Coordination of secondary circular reactions: 8–12 months
⑤ Tertiary circular reactions: 12–18 months
⑥ Mental representation: 18 months–2 years
- Reflexive Schemes: Birth–1 month
Newborn Reflexes
① Breathing reflex
② Eye blink/Blinking reflex
③ Rooting reflex
④ Sucking reflex
⑤ Swallowing reflex
⑥ Stepping reflex
⑦ Babinski reflex
⑧ Grasping reflex (or Palmer grasp)
⑨ Moro reflex
② Primary Circular Reactions: 1–4 months
- Babies engage in repetitive actions that are
centred on their own bodies - E.g. Repeatedly suck a thumb, kick legs or blow
bubbles
Usually happens by chance first and then is repeated because it’s pleasant
- Secondary Circular Reactions: 4–8 months
- Involves repetition of interesting acts on objects (i.e. focus on external things rather than on own bodies like primary circular reactions)
- E.g. Repeatedly shaking a rattle to make an interesting noise
Usually happens by chance first and then is repeated because it’s pleasant
- Coordination of Secondary Circular
Actions: 8–12 months
- Babies display intentional, goal-directed behavior and are combining schemas to solve more complex problems
- Babies begin to develop object permanence = The understanding that objects continue to exist when they are out of sight
- Babies will still make the A-not-B search error (i.e. object permanence is not yet perfect)
= According to Piaget, this error occurs because infants cannot yet separate an object from the actions that they use to find it
⑤ Tertiary Circular Reactions: 12–18 months
- Babies explore properties of objects by acting on them in novel ways.-> e.g. throwing plate on floor to investigate what will happen
-Able to engage properly with these types of toys : were you put the blocks through the different shaped holes. Can do this because has ability to repeat actions and vary the way they position the blocks
-Will start to look in multiple places for an object -> pass the A not B test
⑥ Mental Representation: 18 months–2 years
Toddlers:
* Arrive at solutions suddenly rather than through trial and error
* Are capable of deferred imitation (copying someone who is not right there)
* Begin to engage in make-believe play
Are piaget’s claims about the sensorimotor stage generally well accepted?
- More recent research suggests that infants display a variety of understanding earlier than Piaget believed.
i.e.
Deferred imitation could be present earlier than 18-2 years
8-11 months rarely make A not B errors
Preoperational Stage: 2 to 7 Years
Symbolic or Mental Representation
The cognitive capacity to:
* Use one object to stand for another
* Use symbols, such as words, images or actions to represent or stand in for objects and experiences
Make-Believe Play
Piaget maintained that make-believe play
provided an opportunity for children to
practice their representational schemes.
With age, make-believe play gradually
becomes:
* More detached from real-life conditions
* Less self-centered
* More complex combinations of schemes
* Sociodramatic play or make believe with others
It is now understood that make-believe play:
* Not only reflects but also contributes to
children’s cognitive and social skills,
* Strengthens a variety of mental abilities
What is a limitation of the pre-operational stage of thought?
Conservation: The idea that certain physical characteristics of objects remain
the same even when their outward appearance changes
e.g. video of toddler not understanding same amount of liquid in two different shaped glasses is still the SAME
or conservation of mass in different shapes
Unable to do this at the pre-operational stage because of centration (only being able to focus on one thing at a time)
Centration
The process of only being able to focus on
one aspect of a problem at a time, and ignoring other relevant parts of the problem
Reversibility
The ability to imagine what would happen
if an observed sequence of events was reversed
Egocentrism
The failure to distinguish others’ symbolic
viewpoints from one’s own or assuming that the view point of others is same as your own
Piaget’s three mountain problem
A-symmetrical model of three mountains which is presented to children
Children are asked which one of 4 views (pictures to represent) the experimenter can see
Piaget said that when children are in the pre-operational stage (2-7) they will chose their own view as opposed to the experimenters demonstrating ego-centrism (a fundamental deficiency of pre-operational thinking).
What has followed up research on piaget’s three mountain problem revealed about pre-operational thought?
- Researchers have since challenged some of Piaget’s claims about the capabilities of children in the 2–7 year age band (his preoperational stage).
- Questions have been asked about whether a number of his classic tests actually measured the conceptual ability that they were intended
to assess. - Studies have shown that when pre-schoolers are given simplified tasks that are made relevant to their own lives, they do not display the illogical characteristics that Piaget saw in the preoperational stage.
- E.g. The adapted “Three Mountains Problem where use shapes known to the child (bowls) they are able to do it
What are some key features of Piaget’s concrete operational stage (7-11 years)
Overall thought becomes more logically flexible and organised than in the pre-operational stage
- Conservation
-Decentration (focus on several aspects of a problem at own and relate them to each other)
-Reversibility (think of the water glass example, being able to picture the process in reverse and recognise that it must be the same amount of water in both glasses even if they are different shapes) - Classification
-Pass Piaget’s Class Inclusion Test
-Collections become common - Seriation
-Transitive inference
*Spatial reasoning
-Cognitive maps
-Map skills
What is Piaget’s class inclusion test - what do children show when they are in the pre-operational stage versus operational stage when it comes to this test?
Image shown of a number of dogs and cats
-Child is asked is there are more dogs or animals in the picture?
A child in the pre-operational stage will reply that there are more dogs because they will fail to realize that both the dogs and the cats are included in the category animals.
A child in the concrete operational stage will not make that mistake.
What is transfer inference?
The ability to seriate mentally
example = If John is taller than Mark, and Mark is taller than Sam, who is taller?
A. John
B. Sam
-> most of us would be able to think this through and say that A. John is the tallest. At the concrete operational stage is where piaget say children become capable of this. Pre-operational children might have to physically line the people up to determine answer (i.e. cannot perform the task mentally)
What is seriation?
ordering along a quantative measure e.g. by height or weight
What is a limitation of concrete operational thought?
Operations work best with concrete objects
* While the child can apply logical thought to concrete, tangible objects and events they may have problems applying the same thinking to abstract ideas
Continuum of acquisition
* Master concrete operational tasks gradually rather than all at once
How does the environment effect concrete operational thought?
Culture and teaching practices affect performance on tasks
* Conservation often delayed in tribal societies
* Going to school gives experience on Piagetian tasks
* Relevant non-school experiences can assist with certain forms of tasks i.e. school is not the only thing that can aid concrete operational thought
Evaluation of Piaget’s theory
- Piaget’s contributions to the field of child development are greater than those of any other theorist….BUT
- Although his theory offers a useful “roadmap” of cognitive development it contains inaccuracies
- Cognition is not as broadly stage-like as Piaget believed
- Piaget’s theory still inspires research.
What are cognitive maps ? At what stage do children start using them
A cognitive map is a mental representation of familiar spaces, such as their home, school, or neighborhood.
Piaget’s Concrete operations = Around this stage, children can mentally picture and navigate places they know, even without physically being there.
