PSY 356 - Chapter 7: Cognitive Development

Cognition

Mental activity related to knowing, attending, remembering, symbolizing, categorizing, planning, reasoning, creating, etc.

• schemas

• Mental representations

Schemas

Organized behavioral patterns to make sense of the world

Mental representations

internal depictions of info that mind can manipulate

• Images (mental pictures)

• Concepts (categorical groups)

Adaptation

adjusting your thinking and understanding to make sense of new experiences and information.

• build schemas through environmental interaction

• Assimilation & acommodation

Cognitive Equilibrium

a state of balance in your thinking when what you know makes sense of what you experience

• child assimilates more

• produces more effective schemas

Disequilibrium

understanding does not match new information, causing confusion.

• rapid change

Organization

arranging and connecting knowledge, ideas, and experiences into a mental system that helps us understand the world.

Sensorimotor Stage

During this stage, babies learn about the world through their senses (seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling) and motor actions (moving, reaching, grasping, and crawling).

• schemas built through circular reactions

• birth - 2 years old

Circular Reactions

repeated actions that babies perform because they find the actions interesting or because the actions produce a satisfying result.

Sensorimotor stage goals

reflexes become goal directed, motor action becomes mental representation, & object permeance develops

Goal-Directed Activity

Coordinating schemas deliberately to solve simple problems

• Between 1-4 months → accidental repeats of pleasurable behaviors

• 4-8 months → intentional actions

  • Develop into motor schemas

• 8-12 months → Combine motor schemas

Motor schemas

organized patterns of physical actions that babies use to explore and interact with the world around them.

A - not - B task

• Hide an object at location A → fail to find it

• Move object to location B → infants search location A

Preoperational

During this stage, children begin to use language, symbols, and imagination to represent objects and ideas. However, they still struggle with certain types of logical thinking.

• Use symbols for fantasy play, language, and drawings

• Start developing operations (skills)

• occurs from approximately 2 to 7 years old.

Preoperational Stage Goal

accomplish symbolic thought

• be able to represent actions mentally instead of physically

operations

mental actions that follow systematic and logical rules

Intuitive Thought

• logical reasoning influenced by perceptions

  • E.g. transductive reasoning, egocentrism, and conservation

• Adult thought inductive and deductive

  • Child thought → no consistent logic

Transductive reasoning

a type of thinking in which a child connects two specific events and assumes that one caused the other, even when there is no logical connection.

Dual Representation

• Understanding a symbol can have 2 meanings/representations at the same time

• Increased concreteness

increased Concreteness

a child's tendency to focus on things that are real, visible, and physically present rather than abstract ideas

• less concrete an object, easier it is to dual represent

Egocentrism

Inability to distinguish viewpoints of others from your own viewpoint

• not egotism or selfishness

• Difficulty thinking what someone else thinks

• by 3-4 most kids can successfully understand viewpoints

Conservation

Certain characteristics of objects stay the same even when their appearance changes

• pressing a ball of clay flat = same amount of clay

• Issues caused by centration

Centration

can only focus on one aspect of a situation at the same time

• water glasses of different shapes with same liquid → only focus on shape

Decentration

Ability to think about more than one situational aspect

Concrete operational stage

During this stage, children develop the ability to think logically about real, concrete objects and situations. However, abstract and hypothetical thinking may still be difficult.

• stop making errors that were made in preoperational stage

• Children have ability of:

  • Reversibility

  • Seriation

  • Classification

• occurs from approximately 7 to 11 years old.

Reversibility

ability to imagine operations in reverse

Seriation

putting objects in order by quantitative quality

Classification

how objects fit into larger or smaller categories

Formal Operational Stage

During this stage, individuals develop the ability to think abstractly, reason logically about hypothetical situations, and solve complex problems. can think scientifically and systematically

• approximately 12 years old and continues into adulthood.

• hypothetico-deductive reasoning

• propositional thought

hypothetico-deductive reasoning

the ability to form a hypothesis (an educated guess) and then logically test it to determine whether it is correct.

propositional thought

the ability to evaluate whether statements or propositions are logically true or false, even without using real objects or direct experiences.

Idealism

the tendency of adolescents to imagine how the world should be and compare it with how the world actually is

• hypothetical thinking

Adolescent Egocentrism

the tendency of teenagers to focus heavily on their own thoughts, feelings, and experiences and to believe that other people are paying more attention to them than they actually are.

• Reemergence of egocentrism via imaginary audience & personal fable

Imaginary Audience

assumption that you are the center of attention

• increases self-consciousness

• worse with social media

Personal Fable

belief that your experiences are unique and different from other people

Core Knowledge Perspective

heory of cognitive development that suggests babies are born with basic, built-in knowledge about certain aspects of the world. This knowledge helps them learn and understand their surroundings from an early age.

• Innate abilities or “prewired”

• Each core domain allows understanding of new, related information

Appropriate number system

basic sense of “more” or “less”

• not until 6 years can kids connect counting to telling numerical differences