PSYCH109 - COGNITIVE 30 KEY POINTS

What is cognitive development?

The study of how thinking, reasoning, perception, memory, and other mental abilities change across development.

What does it mean to describe the mind as adaptive and flexible?

Cognitive abilities can change and adapt to different environmental demands, allowing people to learn from experience and adjust their behaviour.

What did Schachar and Logan (1990) investigate?

They investigated the development of inhibitory control, showing that the ability to suppress a dominant or inappropriate response improves with age.

What is inhibitory control?

The ability to suppress or stop a dominant, automatic, or inappropriate response when another response is required.

What did Zelazo et al. (2003) investigate?

They examined cognitive flexibility and task switching, showing developmental improvements in children's ability to switch between different rules or dimensions.

What is cognitive flexibility?

The ability to change one's thinking, strategy, or behaviour when circumstances or rules change.

What did Mischel et al. (1972) investigate?

They investigated delay of gratification, examining children's ability to wait for a larger reward instead of immediately taking a smaller reward.

What is delay of gratification?

The ability to resist an immediate reward in order to obtain a more desirable reward later.

What is Piaget's central idea about cognitive development?

Children actively construct knowledge through interactions with their environment, progressing through qualitatively different stages of cognitive development.

What are Piaget's four stages of cognitive development?

Sensorimotor (0–2), preoperational (2–7), concrete operational (7–11), and formal operational (11+).

What characterises the sensorimotor stage?

Infants learn primarily through sensory experiences and physical actions, and gradually develop object permanence.

What is object permanence?

The understanding that an object continues to exist even when it cannot currently be seen or perceived.

What characterises the preoperational stage?

Children develop symbolic thought and language, but their reasoning is still limited by difficulties such as egocentrism and focusing on one aspect of a situation.

What is egocentrism in Piaget's theory?

The difficulty of understanding a situation from another person's perspective.

What is centration?

The tendency to focus on one salient feature of a situation while ignoring other relevant features.

What characterises the concrete operational stage?

Children become capable of logical reasoning about concrete, observable situations, including understanding conservation and reversibility.

What is conservation?

Understanding that a quantity remains the same despite changes in its appearance or arrangement, as long as nothing has been added or removed.

What characterises the formal operational stage?

The development of abstract, hypothetical, and systematic reasoning, allowing people to think beyond concrete situations.

What is assimilation in Piaget's theory?

Incorporating new information into an existing cognitive schema.

What is accommodation in Piaget's theory?

Modifying an existing schema or creating a new one when new information cannot be incorporated into existing knowledge.

What is a schema?

A mental framework or organised structure of knowledge used to understand and interact with the world.

What is a major criticism of Piaget's theory?

Piaget may have underestimated young children's abilities, partly because some tasks were too difficult or relied on language and other demands unrelated to the underlying cognitive ability.

What is the nativist view of cognitive development?

The view that some important cognitive abilities are present from birth or strongly constrained by innate mechanisms, rather than developing entirely through learning and experience.

What is the empiricist/learning-based view of development?

The view that cognitive abilities develop substantially through experience, learning, and interaction with the environment.

What are looking-time methods used for in infant research?

Researchers measure how long infants look at different events or displays to infer what infants perceive, expect, or understand.

Why are infant looking-time methods useful?

Infants cannot explain their thoughts verbally, so looking behaviour provides a non-verbal measure of their responses to different events.

What is the habituation method?

An infant is repeatedly exposed to a stimulus until their response, such as looking time, decreases, then their response to a new stimulus is measured.

What does dishabituation to a novel stimulus suggest?

If an infant's attention increases when a new stimulus appears, it suggests the infant detects a difference between the familiar and novel stimuli.

What did DeCasper and Spence (1986) demonstrate?

They found evidence that newborns could recognise and prefer a story that had been repeatedly read to them before birth, suggesting prenatal experience can influence later memory/preferences.

What does the DeCasper and Spence study suggest about cognitive development?

It suggests that some forms of learning and memory begin before birth, challenging the idea that meaningful cognitive abilities only emerge after birth.