Week 5: cognitive development and stage theories

Question 1

What is cognition?

Answer 1

The mental process of acquiring knowledge and understanding

Question 2

How is cognition gained?

Answer 2

Gained through sensing, perceiving and thinking

Question 3

What is cognitive development?

Answer 3

The HOW and WHY of progress in cognition across age

Question 4

What are the 3 assumptions of stage theories?

Answer 4

1. Domain-general development (when you improve, you improve across all domains, not just one specific domain)
2. Stage invariance (all children go through the same stages in a specific order, can’t go forwards or backwards)
3. Universal patterns (stages aren’t dependent on anything else such as culture, they are just what everyone goes through)

Question 5

Who is Jean Piaget?

Answer 5

Observed his own children and considered whether similar patterns in each child reflected stages of cognitive development

Question 6

Piaget considered children to be…

Answer 6

Active constructors of knowledge instead of passive vessells

Question 7

What technique did Piaget come up with to assess what children know?

Answer 7

Called the clinical method
- Flexible question and answer technique

Gives children more of a chance to give their own answers

Question 8

What are the cons of the clinical method (Piaget)?

Answer 8

It might force children into saying something that they don’t necessarily believe because they don’t know how to answer and feel like they need an answer

Question 9

What are Piaget’s stages of cognitive development and at what age are they seen?

Answer 9

Sensorimotor (0-2 years)
Pre-operational (2-6 years)
Concrete operational (7-12 years)
Formal operational (12-adulthood)

Question 10

What is something Piaget’s stages of cognitive development doesn’t acknowledge?

Answer 10

It doesn’t acknowledge changes from adolescence into adulthood

Question 11

How do children progress through Piaget’s stages?

Answer 11

Direct learning
Social transmission
Physical maturation

Question 12

What is direct learning?

Answer 12

The child actively responds to new problems using schemas

Question 13

What are schemas?

Answer 13

a schema describes a pattern of thought or behavior that organizes categories of information and the relationships among them.

Question 14

What are innate schemas?

Answer 14

Simple patterns of unlearned reflexes

Question 15

What is assimilation?

Answer 15

Interpreting or responding to a new situation in terms of an existing schema

Eg. 2-month-old has been breastfed whole life so has a sucking schema - if presented with a bottle, modify their response by assimilating into breastfeeding/sucking schema

Question 16

What is accomodation?

Answer 16

Changing an existing schema when faced with new information that doesn’t fit

Question 17

How does social transmission facilitate progression through Piaget’s stages of cog dev?

Answer 17

Thinking is influenced by learning from others via contact and observation

E.g. observing other children playing with the same toys but in different ways
E.g. observing object permanence

Question 18

How does physical maturation facilitate progression through Piaget’s stages of cog dev?

Answer 18

Refers to biologically determined changes in physical and neurological development that leads to cognitive change

Question 19

What does the child learn or acquire during the sensorimotor stage?

Answer 19

Object permanence

Learns not to make the A not B error

Develops symbolic thought

Question 20

What does Piaget say marks the end of infancy?

Answer 20

Symbolic thought development

Question 21

What is the development process in the sensorimotor stage?

Answer 21

Initial reflexes

Intentionality and co-ordination increase (focus on self)

Then begin to focus on the outside objects and events

Starts to choose schemas to achieve goals

Starts to distinguish self from the outside world: deliberately varies schemas

Learns to solve problems systematically without prior thought (e.g. if a cupboard is locked, they may stop just trying to pull it open and try to manipulate the lock instead)

Question 22

What is object permanence?

Answer 22

The knowledge that an object continues to exist when out of sight

Question 23

What is the A not B search error?

Answer 23

Hide toy at A
Baby searches and finds it at A
Repeat several times 
Adult hides toy at B
Baby still searches at A 

They still look where they have been successful before, they don’t update their knowledge

Question 24

What did Diamond find with infants on the A not B task?

Answer 24

The hiding-retrieval delay necessary to cause errors increased by approx 2 seconds per month

These errors disappeared if the delay was reduced by 2-3 seconds or if the infant was allowed to stare at the correct place until reaching

He suggested that the delay allowed habitual responses to play out and overtake STM (memory not strong enough to suppress previously successful reaching)
- With age babies learn to resist or inhibit habitual responses and to use stored information

Question 25

What is an everyday example of Diamond’s claims of memory being weak in comparison to rewarded responses?

Answer 25

Forgetting to put your watch on for a day but still bringing your wrist up to check the time

You have a memory (you forgot your watch) but the rewarded response is strong and overrides

Question 26

Critiques to the sensorimotor stage?

Answer 26

Studies have found that infants show a variety of cognitive understanding earlier than Piaget predicted, including object permanence

Question 27

What is Piaget’s preoperational stage?

Answer 27

Where sensorimotor activities are superseded by symbolic representations

Get multifaceted feedback from sight, hearing and touch

It is pre-operational because they are not yet able to perform operations

Question 28

What are symbolic representations?

Answer 28

Making one thing stand for another

Using symbols to represent other things - children of this age often engage in pretend play

Question 29

What is conservation?

Answer 29

The understanding that the essential properties of things are conserved, despite changes in their outward appearance

Older children know they stay the same
Children in the pre-operational stage think they are different because they look different (they don’t conserve)

Question 30

What 3 things may be the cause of the failure to conserve?

Answer 30

1. Centration (focus on a single aspect of the situation e.g. the height of the water)
2. Lack of reversibility (can’t see that it could be reversed)
3. Lack of identity (awareness that an object is the same object still)

Question 31

What methodological aspects do critics say may lead to the conservation tasks underestimating children’s understanding?

Answer 31

The potential role of pragmatics (unwritten rules of conversation)

The potential role of trying to please the experimenter)

Question 32

What is the naughty teddy experiment? what findings are associated with it?

Answer 32

Where you have two equal rows of objects, and the ‘teddy’ moves the top row closer together to see if the child can recognize that the same amount of the object remains.

Found more conserving responses than Piaget’s standard procedure.

Question 33

Why might the naughty teddy experiment lead to more conserving findings?

Answer 33

Gets rid of the concerns surrounding pragmatics

Question 34

What other conserving tasks have done with an aim of avoiding pragmatics? what does this mean for conservation overall?

Answer 34

Doing an experiment - ‘yours has a chip’
Changing it to a different cup that looks like they have less pieces
70% of children still said the game was fair - a conserving response

Children do better if it is not a deliberate task that is confounded by pragmatics

Question 35

However, preoperational children can…

Answer 35

acquire a real understanding of conservation

It can be trained, so is it a stage or a matter of knowledge?

Question 36

What number based concepts do preoperational children struggle with?

Answer 36

One-one correspondence (counting things only once)

Ordinality (saying numbers in the correct order)

Cardinality (the last number you say, is the number of things you have)

Question 37

What other thoughts to children have in the preoperational stage that they overcome as thinking becomes more logical?

Answer 37

Animism: applying the attributes of living things to inanimate objects

Artificialism: believing that naturally occurring events are caused by people

Magical though: attributing events that you can’t understand to magical/fantasy figures (e.g. Santa, tooth fairy, germs)

Question 38

What makes us think that perhaps Piaget’s clinical method may have encouraged animistic or artificiality thinking?

Answer 38

When asked whether familiar inanimate objects were alive or when asked directly whether people made the sun etc, preoperational children did respond in a more mature manner

Question 39

What is egocentrism?

Answer 39

A tendency to confuse your own point of view with that of other people
- in the preoperational stage children can’t imagine someone else’s point of view, overcome in the concrete operations stage

Question 40

What is piaget’s 3 mountains task?

Answer 40

Looks at egocentrism

Child asked to select a picture of how a doll would see the view from the other point

Preoperational children usually choose the view they can see, regardless of the dolls position
Concrete operational children do choose the correct view

Question 41

What is a critique for the 3 mountains task?

Answer 41

Spatial demands may be too much for such young children

Simpler tasks suggest that earlier understanding does occur (e.g. two-sided cards instead)

Question 42

What is the concrete operations stage of piaget’s stages?

Answer 42

Major turning point

Children start to apply operations to concrete situations

Question 43

What 3 hallmark features are seen in conservation tasks?

Answer 43

Identity - recognize thing remains as having the same identity
Reversibility - can imagine change and changing back
Decentration - can consider multiple aspects at once

Question 44

Children in the concrete operational stage learn to conserve but…

Answer 44

not everything at the same time

Conservation of number - 6 years
conservation of volume 11-12 years

There are individual differences between children as well as cultural differences

Question 45

What is an example of a cultural aspect that may affect conservation?

Answer 45

Opportunity for rehearsal

E.g. in water-scarce countries, they can’t play around with water so volume conservation may be slightly behind

Question 46

What is class inclusion (concrete operational stage)?

Answer 46

The ability to simultaneously consider one thing as a member of one class and its sub-class

E.g. ‘are there more red flowers or flowers in this bunch?’

Question 47

What is classification (concrete operational stage)?

Answer 47

Ability to recognise different levels of categories

Also recognising that one person/object/event can belong to two categories
E.g. teacher can also be someones mum

Question 48

What is seriation?

Answer 48

• concrete operation stage

Ability to put objects in order along a quantitative dimension (e.g. size, length, weight

Important for maths

Question 49

What is transitive inference?

Answer 49

Piaget’s transitivity task

A is bigger than B
B is bigger than C

Is A bigger than C

Logically A must be bigger

Question 50

What critiques are there for Piaget’s transitive inference task?

Answer 50

Does it produce false positives…

‘A is bigger’ - ‘Is A bigger?’

I have heard it before so yes it must be

With training, even 4 year olds could provide an accurate understanding of this task

Question 51

In the concrete operational stage, children also overcome….

Answer 51

Animism
Artificialism
Magical thinking
Egocentrism

Question 52

What does the formal operations stage involve?

Answer 52

Systematic solving of real and hypothetical problems using abstract thought and symbols