Cognitive Developmental Psych

Schemes

Any organized, meaningful groupings of interrelated actions, images, ideas, and feelings.

Schemes

Mental representations or frameworks of understanding the world.

Assimilation

Interpreting the environment in a way that is consistent with existing schemes.

Accommodation

Modifying a schema or creating a new one to fit new knowledge.

Equilibration

The process of moving from equilibrium to disequilibrium and back, essential for learning.

Equilibrium

State in which children can comfortably respond to new events using existing schemes.

Disequilibrium

A state of mental discomfort that involves making sense of different events.

Sensorimotor Stage

The stage where behaviors are mostly reflexes and thinking is restricted to observable phenomena.

Sensorimotor Stage

Stage which children aged 0-2 are undergoing.

Second Month of Life

At this point, children exhibit voluntary purposeful behavior, reflecting a development of perception and behavior-based schemes.

Late First Year of Life

At this point, children begin to engage in goal directed behavior. In other words, children act in ways that will bring desired results.

Late First Year of Life

At this point, children develop object permanence, an understanding that objects exist even when these are out of sight.

Late First Year of Life

At this point, there is an acquisition of cause and effect relationships.

Late Second Year of Life

This point is characterized by a development of symbolic thought. Children have the ability to represent and think about objects in symbols or internal mental entities which is crucial for language development.

Late Second Year of Life

This point marks the beginning of true thought.

Sensorimotor Stage

The skills learned during this stage include object permanence and goal-directed behavior.

Pre-operational Stage

The stage characterized by improvement in language, allowing for labels and communication.

Pre-operational Stage

The stage children of the age of 2 until 6 or 7 experience.

Pre-operational Stage

Cognitive Level: Symbolic Thinking

Pre-operational Stage

The skills learned during this stage include language, drawing, and pretend play.

Pre-operational Stage

This stage includes different limitations of egocentrism, animism, class inclusion, and fantastical thinking. Children in this stage believe their perspective is the same as everyone else’s. Children in this stage also have difficulty with conservation problems.

Four to Five Years of Age

At this point, children show signs of logic, but the reasoning is based on hunches and intuition rather than logical principles.

Concrete Operational Stage

The stage when children can develop logical operations that feature integration of various qualities and perspectives. At this point, children begin to seek external validation of ideas.

Concrete Operational Stage

At this stage, children are able to show class inclusion and conservation with being able to explain their reasoning. Nonetheless, children can only apply logical operations to concrete objects. Children are unable to distinguish between logic and reality.

Formal Operational Stage

The stage where abstract thinking and metacognition develop.

Formal Operational Stage

Children enter this stage at age 11 or 12 and remain there until adulthood.

Metacognition

It is thinking about the process of one’s own thinking.

Animism

Confusing psychological phenomena with reality, common in the preoperational stage.

Egocentrism

Inability to view the world from others' perspectives, prevalent in the preoperational stage.

Class Inclusion

The ability to classify an object as belonging to both a category and subcategory.

Refers to the comprehension of the nature of proportion, prevalent in the formal operational stage.

Proportional Thinking

It is the testing of one factor at a time while holding others constant, prevalent in the formal operational stage.

Separation and Control of Variables

The inability to separate own logical abstractions from the perspectives of others and from practical considerations. This can be helped by experience and is prevalent in the formal operational stage.

Adolescent Idealism

Neo-Piagetian Theories

Focus on how cognitive development is constrained by maturation of information processing mechanisms in the brain.

Neo-Piagetian Theories

These suggest that children acquire new knowledge both intentionally and unintentionally.

Neo-Piagetian Theories

This suggest children acquire cognitive structures that can affect thinking in particular content domains.

Neo-Piagetian Theories

Suggests that development can be characterized as multiple series of stages.

Neo-Piagetian Theories

Believes that formal schooling has a greater influence on development.

Case’s Theory

Proposes the notion of central conceptual structures.

Central Conceptual Structures

Integrated networks of concepts and cognitive processes that form the basis of thinking. These include the domains of number, spatial relationships, and social thought. These develop into a wide variety of cultural and educational contexts.

Cognitive Structure

Conglomeration of different related schemas.

Operations

Cognitive structures that govern logical reasoning.

Criticisms of Piaget's Theory

Piaget underestimated children's abilities, overestimated adults, and did not account for cultural influences.