L6 Cognitive Development Theories

Piaget’s Theory, Case’s Neo-Piagetian Theory, and Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Viewpoint

Cognition vs. Cognitive Development

• Cognition – Activity of knowing and the mental processes used to acquire knowledge and solve problems

• Cognitive development – Changes that occur in mental skills and abilities over the course of life

Piaget: genetic epistemology & constructivism

• Genetic epistemology: experimental study of the origin of knowledge

• Intelligence: adaptation to environment – Achieving cognitive equilibrium (Child’s state of balance between their internal knowledge and the external experiences they face) – Child as a constructivist (actively create their understanding by interacting with the world around them through Schemes)

Organization, adaptation, assimilation, accommodation

• Cognitive processes

• (from conflict/disequilibrium)

• Organization

  • Rearranging existing schemes into more complex ones

• Adaptation: Occurs through assimilation and accommodation

  • Assimilation: Interpret new experiences with existing schemes

  • Accommodation: Modify existing schemes to interpret new experiences

• (to balance/equilibrium)

Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development

• Overview of Piaget’s invariant developmental sequence (stages of cognitive development)

• 1. Sensorimotor (birth to 2 years)

• 2. Preoperational (2 to 7 years)

• 3. Concrete-operational (7 to 11 years)

• 4. Formal-operational (11 to 12 years and beyond)

Sensorimotor Substages

What changes across these substages is intentionality?

• Children explore the world through sensory input and motor actions.

• Six substages to reflect gradual cognitive growth:

1. Reflex activity (birth-1 month): Infants rely on innate reflexes like sucking and grasping to interact with their environment.

2. Primary circular reactions (1-4 months): Babies begin to repeat actions centered on their own bodies, such as thumb sucking, which they find pleasurable.

3. Secondary circular reactions (4-8 months): Infants discover actions that affect their external environment, like shaking a rattle to make noise.

4. Coordination of secondary schemes (8-12 months): Infants start combining different actions to achieve goals, such as pulling a cloth to get a hidden toy.

5. Tertiary circular reactions (12-18 months): Babies become little scientists, experimenting with objects to see what happens, such as dropping items from different heights.

6. Mental representations (18-24 months): The crowning achievement of this stage where infants begin to form mental images, enabling them to solve problems through thinking rather than through trial and error.

Imitation & object permanence

Milestones in sensorimotor stage

• Development of imitation

  • Imitation of novel objects emerges between (8 and 12 months)

  • Deferred imitation is thought to emerge between (18 and 24 months)

• Development of object permanence

  • Understanding that objects continue to exist when out of sight.

  • A-not-B error and Invisible displacement as challenges

    • The child looks for a hidden object in the first place it was hidden (location A), even when they watched it being hidden in a second location (B).

    • The child can understand that objects continue to exist and move, even when out of sight, and they can infer the object's new location based on logic.

Challenges to Piaget: Infants Know More Than He Thought

Piaget underestimated infants’ abilities

• His tasks relied heavily on motor responses (searching)

• Young infants may know more than they can do

Neo-nativism (Object Knowledge) – Baillargeon

• Infants show early understanding of object permanence

• Evidence from looking-time (“violation-of-expectation”) methods

• Infants look longer at impossible events (e.g., solid objects passing through each other)

Karen Wynn’s Numerical Reasoning Study

• to test if infants have any understanding of number, infants watched objects placed behind a screen + object slid behind the screen → outcome either possible (1+1=2) or impossible (1+1=1)

• findings: infants looking longer at impossible outcomes = violation of expectation

• interpretation: Wynn argued infants show early sensitivity to number

• ongoing debate: Longer looking may reflect sensitivity to amount, perceptual features, or change, not true arithmetic

• takeaway: Infant cognition appears more sophisticated than Piaget originally proposed

Preoperational Stage (2-7 years): Symbolic Function & DeLoache

Use of symbols increases during the preoperational stage (2 –7 years).

• Preconceptual period (early preoperational stage; (2-4 years)

  • Symbolic function (the ability to make one thing; a word or an object, stand for, or represent, something else)

  • Symbolic/pretend play (e.g., using a shoe box as a crib or a rock as a car)

• Representational insight (Deloache’s): understanding that an object can stand for something else and be an object itself

  • Dual representation - add notes here

  • Pretend/symbolic play

Preoperational Deficits in Reasoning

• Primarily evident during the later preoperational period (4-7 years)

• Limits of intuitive reasoning (Piaget)

  • Animism (attributing life to inanimate objects)

  • Egocentrism, as in three mountains problem

    • Preoperational children are egocentric; they struggle to understand that others may see things differently and assume that everyone views the world as they do.

  • Appearance/reality distinction (difficulty distinguishing appearance from reality)

  • Incapable of Conservation (they don’t understand that quantity remains the same despite changes in shape)

    • Lack of Decentration & Reversibility (Piaget)

      • Focus on one perceptual feature (centration)

      • Inability to mentally reverse actions

      • Leads to failure on conservation tasks

Conservation Tests

• Failure to recognize that quantity remains the same despite changes in shape.

• Preoperational children focus on how things look, not on logical transformations.

• Some common tests of the child’s ability to understand the idea of conservation