Week Five - Cognitive Development I: Piaget 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)
- STAGE INVARIANCE: all children go through the same stages in a specific order, no forwards or backward)
- UNIVERSAL PATTERNS: stages aren’t dependent on anything else such as culture, they are just what everyone goes through)
What did Jean Piaget do?
Observed his own children and considered whether similar patterns were representative of all children
Piaget considered children to be?
Active constructor of knowledge as opposed to passive vessels
What are Piaget’s stages?
Sensorimotor
Pre-operational
Concrete operational
Formal operational
What occurs in the Sensorimotor stage?
0-2 years of age,
- sensory and motor
- experience and coordination
- gradually acquires object permanence
- imitates others
- symbolic thought ends infancy
- distinguish self from outside world
What occurs in the preoperational stage?
2-6 years old
- language and symbolic representation (no mental operations)
- egocentric world view
- animism
- artificialism
- magical thoughts
What occurs in the concrete stage?
7-12 years old
- solving concrete problems with logic
- organisation of objects into hierarchies
- concrete thinking
- class inclusion
- conservation
- classification
- seriation
- transitive inference
What occurs in the formal operational stage?
12-adulthood
- systematic solving of real and hypothetical problems using abstract thoughts
- hypothetico-deductive reasoning
- propositional reasoning (statements)
How do we progress through Piaget’s stages?
direct learning
social transmission
physical maturation
What is Direct learning?
Where the child actively responds to new problems using schemas
What are schemas?
A schema describes a pattern of thought or behaviour that organises categories of the info and the relationship between them
What are innate schemas?
Simple patterns of unlearned reflexes
What is assimilation?
Interpreting/responding to a new situation in terms of an existing schema
eg going from boob to bottle with sucking schema
What is accomodation?
Changing an existing schema when faced with new information that doesn’t fit
How do we use social transmission to progress through stages?
Out thinking is influenced by learning from others via observation and contact
How does physical maturation help us progress through stages?
Because there are biologically determined changes in physical and neurological development that lead to cognitive change
What is object permanence?
The knowledge that an object still exists even when out of site
What is the A not B error?
Hiding toy at A, baby searches and finds it at A
Hides at B , baby still searches at A
Diamonds conclusions on the A not B task?
Influence on memory over behaviour is not strong enough to hold back their habitual response - like checking your wrist for time when though you don’t’ have a watch on
Critiques to sensory motor stage
infants show OP earlier, and memory affects infants performance more than piaget realied
What is conservation?
The understanding that the essential properties of things are conserved, despite changes in their outward appearance - not occurring in pre-op stage
What 3 things explain why children in pre-op stage may fail to conserve?
Centration: Only focus on a single aspect of the situation
Reversibility (lack of): Can’t see that this transformation could be reversed
Identity: (lack of) awareness that an object is still the same object
CHILD IS MISLEAD BY PERCEPTUAL FEATURES
What did Piaget underestimate with children’s actual knowledge in regard to conservation?
The role of pragmatics (unwritten roles of conversation)
First answer must be wrong?
Misunderstanding of question
Pleasing experimenter
What did the naughty teddy experiment provide?
Better understanding of conservation - got rid of pragmatic concern
Preoperational stage children can however?
Acquire a real understanding of conservation
Preoperational children do not fully grasp what?
How the true conventional number system works
What does true understanding of conservation of number tasks require?
one-to-one correspondence (counting things only one)
ordinality (saying no. in the correct order)
cardinality ( last no. said = no. you have)
What thoughts do children in the pre-op stage have 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 Thought: attributing events you can’t understand to magic/fantasy
What did Piaget’s clinical method encourage?
Animistic and artificialism thinking
What is egocentrism?
Inability to understand that another person’s view or opinion may be different than their own.- preop children cannot do
referenced by the 3 mountain task - choosing the mountain they can see not doll (however, could simply just be too hard of a task - findings show simpler tasks prove ego in preop people)
What are the 3 hallmarks seen when entering concrete operational stage?
identity
reversibility
decentration: consider multiple aspects at once
Explain the differences in conservation tasks in the CO stage?
Don’t develop the ability to conserve EVERYTHING at once
- Conservation of number tasks are easier - 6 yo
- Conservation of volume tasks - 12-12yo
Both individual and cultural differences
Why are there cultural differences in conservation ability?
Some cultures have more ability to practice/rehearse (eg scarce water = no chance to play around with it)
What is class inclusion (COS)?
Ability to simultaneously consider one thing as a member of one class and its sub-class eg red flowers and total flower
What is classification (COS)?
Ability to recognise different levels of categories
- ability to reason that one person/object can belong to two categories
What is seriation?
Ability to put objects in order along a quantitative dimension eg size, length
What is transitive inference?
A is bigger than B, B is bigger than C, is A bigger than C?
- can provide false positives though due to hearing the word ‘bigger’
What does propositional reasoning involve?
Manipulation of abstract thoughts, freed from the concrete thus can be based on factually untrue premises
The transition from concrete to formal stage is?
A gradual process that takes some years
Negative outcomes of formal operations stage?
Ability to imagine alternatives
question rules
become idealistic
simple solutions for complex problems (eg war)
What are some positive outcomes that occur in the formal operations stage?
think critically
understand other better
Development of formal operations depends on?
Socio-cultural context as much as on assimilation/accommodation
What are the two different ways egocentrism may present in adolescence?
Imaginary audience: differentiating too little between own thoughts and those of hypothesised audience
Personal fable: differentiating too much on one’s own thoughts, feelings and experiences from those of others
