Week 5: cognitive development and stage theories Flashcards
What is cognition?
The mental process of acquiring knowledge and understanding
How is cognition gained?
Gained through sensing, perceiving and thinking
What is cognitive development?
The HOW and WHY of progress in cognition across age
What are the 3 assumptions of stage theories?
- Domain-general development (when you improve, you improve across all domains, not just one specific domain)
- Stage invariance (all children go through the same stages in a specific order, can’t go forwards or backwards)
- Universal patterns (stages aren’t dependent on anything else such as culture, they are just what everyone goes through)
Who is Jean Piaget?
Observed his own children and considered whether similar patterns in each child reflected stages of cognitive development
Piaget considered children to be…
Active constructors of knowledge instead of passive vessells
What technique did Piaget come up with to assess what children know?
Called the clinical method
- Flexible question and answer technique
Gives children more of a chance to give their own answers
What are the cons of the clinical method (Piaget)?
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
What are Piaget’s stages of cognitive development and at what age are they seen?
Sensorimotor (0-2 years)
Pre-operational (2-6 years)
Concrete operational (7-12 years)
Formal operational (12-adulthood)
What is something Piaget’s stages of cognitive development doesn’t acknowledge?
It doesn’t acknowledge changes from adolescence into adulthood
How do children progress through Piaget’s stages?
Direct learning
Social transmission
Physical maturation
What is direct learning?
The child actively responds to new problems using schemas
What are schemas?
a schema describes a pattern of thought or behavior that organizes categories of information and the relationships among them.
What are innate schemas?
Simple patterns of unlearned reflexes
What is assimilation?
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
What is accomodation?
Changing an existing schema when faced with new information that doesn’t fit
How does social transmission facilitate progression through Piaget’s stages of cog dev?
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
How does physical maturation facilitate progression through Piaget’s stages of cog dev?
Refers to biologically determined changes in physical and neurological development that leads to cognitive change
What does the child learn or acquire during the sensorimotor stage?
Object permanence
Learns not to make the A not B error
Develops symbolic thought
What does Piaget say marks the end of infancy?
Symbolic thought development
What is the development process in the sensorimotor stage?
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)
What is object permanence?
The knowledge that an object continues to exist when out of sight
What is the A not B search error?
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
What did Diamond find with infants on the A not B task?
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
What is an everyday example of Diamond’s claims of memory being weak in comparison to rewarded responses?
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
Critiques to the sensorimotor stage?
Studies have found that infants show a variety of cognitive understanding earlier than Piaget predicted, including object permanence
What is Piaget’s preoperational stage?
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
What are symbolic representations?
Making one thing stand for another
Using symbols to represent other things - children of this age often engage in pretend play
What is conservation?
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)
What 3 things may be the cause of the failure to conserve?
- Centration (focus on a single aspect of the situation e.g. the height of the water)
- Lack of reversibility (can’t see that it could be reversed)
- Lack of identity (awareness that an object is the same object still)
What methodological aspects do critics say may lead to the conservation tasks underestimating children’s understanding?
The potential role of pragmatics (unwritten rules of conversation)
The potential role of trying to please the experimenter)
What is the naughty teddy experiment? what findings are associated with it?
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.
Why might the naughty teddy experiment lead to more conserving findings?
Gets rid of the concerns surrounding pragmatics
What other conserving tasks have done with an aim of avoiding pragmatics? what does this mean for conservation overall?
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
However, preoperational children can…
acquire a real understanding of conservation
It can be trained, so is it a stage or a matter of knowledge?
What number based concepts do preoperational children struggle with?
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)
What other thoughts to children have in the preoperational stage that they overcome as thinking becomes more logical?
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)
What makes us think that perhaps Piaget’s clinical method may have encouraged animistic or artificiality thinking?
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
What is egocentrism?
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
What is piaget’s 3 mountains task?
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
What is a critique for the 3 mountains task?
Spatial demands may be too much for such young children
Simpler tasks suggest that earlier understanding does occur (e.g. two-sided cards instead)
What is the concrete operations stage of piaget’s stages?
Major turning point
Children start to apply operations to concrete situations
What 3 hallmark features are seen in conservation tasks?
Identity - recognize thing remains as having the same identity
Reversibility - can imagine change and changing back
Decentration - can consider multiple aspects at once
Children in the concrete operational stage learn to conserve but…
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
What is an example of a cultural aspect that may affect conservation?
Opportunity for rehearsal
E.g. in water-scarce countries, they can’t play around with water so volume conservation may be slightly behind
What is class inclusion (concrete operational stage)?
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?’
What is classification (concrete operational stage)?
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
What is seriation?
- concrete operation stage
Ability to put objects in order along a quantitative dimension (e.g. size, length, weight
Important for maths
What is transitive inference?
Piaget’s transitivity task
A is bigger than B
B is bigger than C
Is A bigger than C
Logically A must be bigger
What critiques are there for Piaget’s transitive inference task?
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
In the concrete operational stage, children also overcome….
Animism
Artificialism
Magical thinking
Egocentrism
What does the formal operations stage involve?
Systematic solving of real and hypothetical problems using abstract thought and symbols
