Week 9 (Early and Middle Childhood Cognitive Development) Flashcards
Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development: 0-2
Sensorimotor (0-2)
Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development: (2-7)
Preoperational (2-7)
Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development: (7-12)
Concrete Operational (7-12)
Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development: (12+)
Formal Operations (12+)
Cognitive Development theory in which there are proposed “Distinct, hierarchical stages, each building on the previous one”
Piaget’s theory
- Piagets View of Children’s Nature?
- Three Basic Assumptions
1. Constructivist
2.
Three Basic Assumptions
1. Active (little scientists)
2.Learning many important lessons on their own (discovery)
3. Intrinsically motivated to learn
Central Developmental Issues: Piagets Three Cognitive Processes
- Assimilation
- Accommodation
- Equilibration
Cognitive Processes: Interpret new experiences with existing knowledge structure
Assimilation
Cognitive Processes: Modify existing knowledge structure to interpret new
experiences
Accommodation
Cognitive Processes: balance assimilation and accommodation to create stable understanding
Equilibration
Equilibration example in class
It’s a bird! It’s a plane!
Equilibrium
◦ All flying objects are birds
Assimilation: call a plane a “bird”
Disequilibrium
◦ Differences between planes and birds?
Accommodation: some flying
objects are birds, some are planes.
A new level of equilibrium
A cognitive revolution that marks the transition from the sensorimotor stage to preoperational thinking
Preoperational thought
Preoperational Stage (2-7 years)
internalization of thought
“Mental representation”
Preoperational Stage (2-7 years)
Which of Piagets Stages of Development Includes:
- Preoperational Thought
- Mental Representations
Achievements
- Symbolic understanding
- Pretend and Fantasy play
Limitations (deficits)
- Egocentrism
- Animistic thinking
- Lack of the conservation
- Appearance reality
- Limited hierarchical classification
- Limited causal understanding
Preoperational Stage (2 - 7 years)
The understanding that things can
stand for other things
Symbolic understanding
** Cognitive Achievement of Preoperational Stage (2-7 years)**
- Understanding an object may simultaneously be itself and stand for another thing
- At what age of infancy does this begin (not until
3‐yr‐old)
- Dual representation
- (not until 3‐yrs‐old)
** Cognitive Achievement of Preoperational Stage (2-7 years)**
- young children must mentally represent a symbolic object (like a scale model) in two ways simultaneously: as a concrete object and as a representation of something else (dual representation)
- Investigated how well children could use a scale model of a room to locate a hidden object in the corresponding real room.
Key findings:
- 2.5-year-olds struggled to make the connection between the model and the real room because they have less dual representation.
- 3-year-olds were more successful, showing that they understood the model was both an object in its own right and a symbol for the real room
Deloache’s Model room studies (1987)
In Deloache’s Model room studies (1987):
Children younger than 3‐yr‐old were unable to locate a hidden toy in a model room, but can locate it in a shrunk room. Why?
- When the room is “shrunk”, the symbolic link between the two spaces is removed. The children no longer need to represent the model as both a concrete object and a symbolic stand-in for the real room.
- Instead, they perceive the “shrunk room” as the same physical space as the large room, just altered in size. This simplifies the task for them, as it removes the cognitive challenge of dual representation.
- Acting out imaginary stories that may involve others in created play scenarios
- What are the implications of this?
1.Pretend & Fantasy Play or Sociodramatic play
- Imaginations support skills in language, perspective taking, causal
reasoning and executive functions (Thibodeau et al., 2016).
** Cognitive Achievement of Preoperational Stage (2-7 years)**
Examples of Egocentrism
- Three-Mountain task
◦ Egocentric conversations
The tendency to think that other people view the world from their perspective
Egocentrism
Cognitive Limitation of Preoperational Stage (2-7 years)
What is the three mountain task?
The Three Mountain Task by Jean Piaget (1948) was designed to study egocentrism in children
- A model of three mountains of different sizes and features (e.g., snow, a house, a cross) is placed on a table.
-Child is seated on one side of the table and asked to describe what they see.
Then, the child is shown a doll positioned at a different spot around the table and asked to describe what the doll sees.
Preoperational Stage (2–7 years): Children typically describe what they see rather than what the doll sees, demonstrating egocentrism, or difficulty taking another person’s perspective.
Concrete Operational Stage (7–11 years): Older children are able to accurately describe the doll’s perspective, indicating a developing ability for decentration and perspective-taking.
A type of reasoning in which children attribute human qualities to inanimate entities
Animistic thinking
◦ Difficulties distinguishing inanimate/animate (e.g., clouds are alive!)
◦ Children sometimes do understand differences between animate vs. inanimate
Cognitive Limitation of Preoperational Stage (2-7 years)
entities in a category share an essence may not visually apparent
Essentialism
(Part of Animistic Thinking)
Cognitive Limitation of Preoperational Stage (2-7 years)
- the ability to realize that central properties of objects remain
unchanged when the objects’ forms are altered in some superficial way - Why do infants in the ________________ lack the ability?
- Conservation
- Preoperational Stage (2-7)
- Centration
- Lack of reversibility
Cognitive Limitation of Preoperational Stage (2-7 years)
The tendency to focus on a single dimension of an object or event
Centration
(Part of conservation)
Cognitive Limitation of Preoperational Stage (2-7 years)
- Cognitive Limitations:
Appearance Reality - What Stage
The ability to distinguish between the appearance of something and its reality
< 5‐6 years: focus on the appearance rather than the reality in verbal tasks (Flavell et al.,1986; De Vries, 1969)
≤ 3‐yrs understand appearance‐reality distinction in nonverbal tasks with visually deceptive objects
(Sapp et al., 2000)
Cognitive Limitation of Preoperational Stage (2-7 years)
- The ability to organize items into superordinate and subordinate categories
- ________ refers to the ability to classify objects into two or more categories simultaneously
- Hierarchical Classification
- Class inclusion problems
- (ie; children have trouble differentiating between coloured chips)
Cognitive Limitation of Preoperational Stage (2-7 years)
Infer the relation between a cause and
its effect
Casual Understanding
Cognitive Limitation of Preoperational Stage (2-7 years)
Errors of logic, such as circular thinking (Piaget, 1930):
“cold makes snow” and “snow makes cold” ; intuitive reasoning
◦ They do understand cause of an action:
e.g., dolls in muddy shoes - dirty floor
Precausal thinking
(Part of / Before Causal Understanding)
Which of Piagets Stages of Development Includes:
Thinks logically and rationally about concrete
objects and experiences
Understand conservation
Relational logic (classification, seriation)
Perspective taking
Inductive reasoning
Concrete-Operational Stage
(7-12 years)
Piagets Preoperation stage is 1. ____ in childhood, while the Concerete Operational stage is 2. ____ in childhood
Bonus: 3. The Sensorimotor stage isn’t referred to as early because it is not in childhood it is in _______
- Early / Early Stage (2-7)
- Middle / Middle Stage (7-12)
- Infancy (Toddler)
Children achieve problems of conservation at the concrete operational stage
due to:
- decentration
- reversibility
Concrete Operational Thought: Relational Logic
the ability to identify and use patterns between objects and mental representations
Better at classification problems involving taxonomic categories
- Seriation
- Transistive Inference
mentally sorting items along a dimension
Seriation
(Part of Relational Logic)
** Cognitive Achievement of Concrete Operational Stage (7-12 years)**
deductive reasoning to infer associations between objects/concepts in a serial order (a set of premises) that have not been explicitly compared before
Transitive inference
(Part of Relational Logic)
** Cognitive Achievement of Concrete Operational Stage (7-12 years)**
Concrete Operational Thought:
1. What is perspective taking
- What stage of development does Perspective Taking arise in
- Growth in perspective, taking and spatial reasoning
- Children in this stage can draw and read maps oriented in different ways and can grasp the concept of scale (Liben et al., 2013 - Concrete Operational Stage (7-12)
draw logically broader conclusions from specific observations, facts, and
knowledge. It develops over time with experience
Inductive reasoning
** Cognitive Achievement of Concrete Operational Stage (7-12 years)**
Concrete Operational Though: Inductive Reasoning
- Even in the Concrete Operational stage with Inductive reasoning, there are still limitations in ___________
Limitations in deductive reasoning:
- systematically test ideas guided by an overarching hypothesis (from general to specifics, e.g., “life on Mars”?)
Evaluating Others’ Knowledge & Expertise: Reliability & Trustworthiness
◦ From 3-yr to 4-yr: ask a fixer to
fix and a labeler for the name
(direct requests to those with
relevant skills)
◦ More trust in the familiar
caregiver (Corriveau & Harris,
2009)
Evaluating Others’ Knowledge & Expertise
◦ Familiarity vs. Reliability
◦ Familiarity vs. Reliability: 3-, 4- and 5-yr olds saw:
1). Familiar caregiver names objects accurately, an unfamiliar one names incorrectly.
2). Familiar caregiver names inaccurately but the unfamiliar one names accurately.
3‐yr‐olds: Familiarity trumped accuracy (favored information provided by familiar caregivers)
4‐yr, more so 5‐yr: favored reliability, even if it meant rejecting information from a familiar caregiver
The ability to attribute mental states (e.g., knowledge,
beliefs, and desires) to oneself and others, and to
understand that others’ can differ from one’s own
Theory of Mind
- the belief that others can hold beliefs or perspectives that differ
from reality - Where would Maxi look for chocolate
when he re-entered the room?
◦ < 4-5-yr: _________
◦ > 4-5-yr: ________
- False belief
- < 4-5yr: new location
- > 4-5 yr: original location
Explaining Theory of Mind (TOM):
1. Changes in cognitive (also false beliefs) are attributed to revisions children make to their theories about the world (Gopnik & Welman, 2012):
- Theory-Theory
Explaining Theory of Mind (TOM):
- younger kids cannot hold conflicting information (where it WAS vs. where it IS) in mind
- Executive functioning
Explaining Theory of Mind (TOM):
◦ Children with autism have problems with TOM
◦ EEG responses related to False Belief performance
◦ Early brain maturation predicts later social cognitive
reasoning (Bowman et al., 2019)
Brain Development
Lying, Deception, & Persuasion
All three behaviors require children to
change another person’s thoughts
and behaviors
3‐ to 8‐yr: Children who performed
well on false‐belief tasks were better
and sustained liars (Talwar & Lee,
2008)
3‐ to 8‐yr: TOM relates to the art of
persuasion (Peterson et al., 2018)
The desire and willingness to attain a goal and the continuation of effort and interest towards that goal
Motivation
motivation/engagement heightened when an individual makes choices in the absence of external pressures
Self-determination theory
chooses to engage in an activity because he or she finds the activity pleasurable and thus persists on the task even without a reward
Intrinsic
chooses to engage in an activity because of external pressures, such as rewards or punishments, and may lose interest in the particular activity
Extrinsic
- Two types of Mindsets
- Dweck’s Research (1975):
- Attributed to ability (fixed mindset) vs. effort (growth mindset)
- Explanations for successes and failures: - ◦ A. Attribution Retraining: attribute failure of a challenging task to effort.
◦ B. Success Only: always succeed
◦ A > B in persistency on difficult tasks (tried harder and longer).
Two Views of Intelligence
- Entity theory
- Incremental theory
The view that intelligence is
innate and unchangeable
Entity theory
The view that intelligence is
changeable and may improve
with practice over time
Incremental theory
