PSYC 105 Midterm 1

Cognitive Development

The study of how and why thinking changes across the lifespan.

What is Cognitive Development interested in?

1. What is the starting point (what do infants know at birth)

2. Mechanisms of change (what causes development), and

3. Variability in these processes (why do some children acquire skills faster, slower, or in different ways than others)

Quantitative changes

Developmental continuities, where someone makes small changes, increase over time.

Qualitative changes

Discontinuous (in stages), where there is little change within a stage, but drastic changes between stages.

What did Piaget focus on?

1. Interviewing children, especially his four children, about mathematical and science topics

2. Structure of Children’s Thinking

3. Argued that children were scientific problem solvers and that development was active

Piaget’s Stages of Development Rules

1. Children experience the stage the same way and order.

2. Children use new ways of thinking to solve problems

3. Each stage builds on the previous one → cannot go back to the previous stage

Sensorimotor Stage (0-2 yrs)

• Action on the physical works

• Figuring out how the physical world operates using their senses + motor

What is innate according to Piaget?

Senses and motor reflexes

• learn cause and effect and physical properties

• learn to control body + act on the world

Object Permanence

Objects continue to exist across time and space

• You still know something exists even when you cannot experience it

Object Decentration

Awareness that the object and the self are different

• “I am different than objects”; kids have to figure this out

Object Internalization

Objects are represented mentally

• the ability to hold objects in mind

Deferred Imitation

• Toward the end, infants could be able to imitate other human beings

  • A sign that they can remember actions and do them after the fact.

A-Not-B Error

1st trial → Child sees toy, then hides it, but remembers the toy exists

• Child has an object permanence

2nd trial → Task changes, two different hiding spots, object is hidden in A,

• Child still has object permanence

3rd trial → Hidden in A again

• Able to create a mental representation

4th trial → you switch places under B

• Cannot update mental representation

Pre-operational Stage (2-7 yrs)

• Able to make static internal representations

  • Ability to hold things in their mind

  • cannot update the representation → doesn’t change often

• Where symbolic thought starts

Piaget’s Egocentrism

Part of the pre-operational Stage (2-7 yrs)

Inability to take another perspective

• Focused on their point of view

• Focuses on one dimension when categorizing or solving problems

Concrete Operation Stage (7-12 yrs)

• Ability to manipulate internal representations

  • Have a static image, but also update the image from different points of view

• Perform mental operations: reversible change, organizing things into large systems

• Solve conservation tasks, class inclusion, & multiple classification problems

Formal Operation Stage (12+)

• Abstract thought

  • “What is good or bad?”

• Reversible operations are organized into elaborate systems

• Have scientific reasoning → Control of variable

  • “Why do I spend more on gas than you do?”

  • executive functioning: planning

Piaget’s Mechanisms of Change

• Children are constructing more schemas

  • Perceptual + senses-based → Become more abstract

Equilibration

The process of balancing assimilation and accommodation to regain a stable schema.

Assimilation

Adding new information to a schema that already exists

Accommodation

Creating a new schema to accommodate new information

Disequilibrium

Occurs when children encounter new information

• Ex. child sees a cow but says it is a dog because this is the most accessible schema. Parents correct them, and this creates a disequilibrium, making kids think that everything they knew about dogs is wrong. They must make a new schema for the new concept.

Criticisms of Piaget

1. Not all adults reach the formal operational stage

2. Too dependent on Western schooling

3. Small changes to questions change the results

4. Equilibration is vague

5. Stages are not accurate

6. Not enough attention to culture and environment.

Why do we still learn about Piaget today?

1. Set the foundation of children’s thinking

2. Children actively construct new knowledge and advance their own development

3. Still widely used in many areas

   • “How do we talk and explain things to children?”

Vygotsky’s Theory of Cognitive Development

1. Focused on the child in context

2. Social world promotes development

3. Knowledge happens in different contexts, tied to experiences

4. Highlighted the importance of cultural tools

According to Vygotsky, what is innate?

Very little that is innate, mostly the environment

• What we are born into is what is going to dictate how we think and behave

According to Vygotsky, what is the mechanisms of change?

Socialization and social experience

• Social word is PART of change

• interalization of external shared processes

  • As you repeat certain things over and over, you’ve going to become better at them.

Example of Interalization

1. Guided participation in cultural activities

2. Scaffolding with Zone of Proximal Development

According to Vygotsky, what is change like?

Continuous

Microsystem

Direct, immediate relationships, interactions

Mesosystem

Interrelated microsystem

• school microsystems

• Larger policies by teachers

Exosystem

• Larger societal focuses

  • Ex. The type of media you were exposed to

Macrosystem

• Broader cultural context

• Specific culture, traditions, and language you speak

Guided Participation

Behavior guided by more experienced others.

• Typically happens for activities within a culture

Example of Guided Participation

1. Adults provide explicit instruction

2. Children observe & participate

Scaffolding

Construction scaffold is what people in their environment are using to help children develop.

• Transfer of responsibility from adult to child - slowly guided by adults

Intersubjectivity

The shared understanding between people that emerges through processes of mutual attention and communication.

• Part of scaffolding

Intersubjectivity Requirements

1. Imitative learning

2. Instructed learning

3. Collaborative learning

Zone of Proximal Development

The difference between what a child can do alone vs. with an adult or peer

• Measure of dynamic development state

• Scaffolding is involved

• Created by learning

Why did Child A do better than Child B?

The influence of context is why there was the big jump.

Cultural tools

Tools created passed down by members of a cultural group

Technical tools

tools for acting on the environment, a cultural tool

• Hammer, pencil

Psychological tool

tools for thinking, cultural tool

• Numbers, language

Language as a Cultural tool

According to Vygotsky, this is the most important tool because it is a means of social participation that helps us think

• Tool for thinking

According to Vygotsky, why is language a tool for thinking?

Conversation → private speech → verbal thought

1. The infant’s need to communicate needs

2. Conversation develops into private speech

3. Private speech scaffolds verbal thought

How did researcher study Sociocultural approaches?

1. Cross-cultural work

   • Comparing children growing up in the US to children growing up in the Philippines

2. Ethnographic studies

   • Researchers immerse themselves in a particular culture and try to understand processes

3. Analyses of learning processes + episodes

   • How a parent is reading books with their kid

Nativism

Type of theories that place heavy emphasis on innateness

• Interested in what is present from birth and how is that different for humans (vs. animals)

Domain-general Nativism

There are some learning mechanisms that are innate, and those are used for many things.

• Ex. we come to the world with the tools to acquire language

Domain-specific Nativism

People are born with specific knowledge about certain things.

• Ex. you come into the world knowing numbers, behavior, and actions

Core Knowledge

Domain-specific nativist theory

• Humans are born with specific knowledge about objects, actions, numbers, and space → the four domains

What are each domain of the Core Knowledge theory’s key principles?

1. Cohesion

   • Objects should hold together across time and space rather than disintegrating.

2. Continuity

   • Objects should move along continuous paths across time and space rather than disappearing randomly

3. Contact

   • Objects should only start to move when something else touches them

Infants expect these objects to behave according to these principles.

Approximate Number

By 6-months children are able to do tasks like approximating numbers even thought they cannot count or know what numbers are yet.

• Adults from Piraha communities, who don’t have numbers greater than 2 can also do this

• It doesn’t represent quantities precisely

• Evidence of Domain-specific Nativism