Chapter 4 - Theories of Cognitive Development

Importance of developmental theories

* provide framework for understanding important phenomena
* raise crucial questions about human nature
* lead to a better understanding of children

Piaget’s theory

* posits that cognitive development involves a sequence of 4 stages - the sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational stages - that are constructed through the processes of assimilation, accomodation, and equilibration.

3 of the most important of children’s constructive processes according to Piaget

* generating hypotheses, performing experiments, and drawing conclusions from the experiments.

assimilation

* the process by which people translate incoming info into a form that fits concepts they already understand

accomodating

* the process by which people adapt current knowledge structures in response to new experiences.

equilibration

* the process by which people balance assimilation and accomodating to create stable understanding.

Qualitative change

* Children of different ages think in qualitatively different ways.

Broad applicability

* Children of different ages think in qualitatively different ways.

Brief transitions

* Before entering a new stage, children pass through a brief transitional period where they fluctuate from the old type of thinking and the new one.

Invariant Sequence

* Everyone progresses through the stages in order without skips.

Sensorimotor stage (0-2 years)

* Infant’s intelligence is expressed through sensory and motor abilities.
* Infant’s life is limited to the present.

A-not-B error

* tend to reach for a hidden object where it was last found , instead of where it was hidden

deffered imitation

* In the last half-year, children can repeat other people’s behaviour a significant time after it originally occurred

Preoperational stage (2-7 years)

* Toddlers and preschoolers can represent their experiences in language and mental imagery.
* They can remember information for longer periods of time.

symbolic representation

* using one object to stand for another.

ego-centrism

* the tendency to perceive the world soley from one’s own point of view) & difficulty in taking other people’s spatial perspectives and in communication.

centration

* the tendency to focus on a single, perpetually striking feature of an object or event.

conservation concept

* the idea that merely changing the appearance of objects does not necessarily change the object’s other key properties.

Concrete operational (7-12 years)

* Children can reason logically and can do mental operations.
* Children cannot think in purely abstract terms or generate systematic scientific experiments to test beliefs.

Formal operational stage (12+ years)

* Adolescents and adults can think deeply about concrete events, abstractions, and hypothetical situations.
* They can perform scientific experiments and draw appropriate conclusions even when they differ from prior beliefs.

Weakness of Piaget’s theory

1. Piaget’s theory is vague about the mechanisms that give rise to children’s thinking and produce cognitive growth.
2. Infants and young children are more cognitively comptent than Piaget recognized.
3. Piaget’s theory understates the contribution of the social world to cognitive development.
4. The stage model depicts children’s thinking as being more consistent than it is.

* Despite its weaknesses, Piaget’s theory remains one of the major intellectual accomplishments of the past century.

information-processing theories

* a class of theories that focus on the structure of the cognitive system and the mental activities used to deploy attention and memory to solve problems

task analysis

* the research technique of specifying the goals, obstacles to their realization and potential solution strategies involved in problem solving

computer stimulation

* a type of mathematical model that expresses ideas about mental processes in precise ways

working memory

memory system that involves actively attending to, maintaining, and processing info

long-term memory

information retained on an enduring basis

* It includes factual, conceptual and procedural knowledge, attitudes, and so on.
* It is the totality of one’s knowledge

3 key executive functions

* inhibition
* enhancement of working memory
* cognitive flexibility

inhibition

resisting temptation

enhancement of working memory

through use of strategies like only attending to the most important info

cognitive flexibility

imagining someone else’s perspective in an argument despite it being different from one’s own

basic processes

the simplest and most frequently uesd mental activities

examples of basic processes

* Associating events with one another
* Recognizing objects
* Recalling facts and procedures
* Generalizing from one instance to another

encoding

* Encoding is the representation in memory of specific features of objects and events.

rehearsal

* the process of repeating information multiple times to aid memory of it.

selective attention

* the process of repeating information multiple times to aid memory of it.

overlapping waves theory

* an information-processing apprach that emphasizes the variability of children’s thinking.

core-knowledge theories

* approaches that view children as having innate knowledge regarding special evolutionary importance & domain-specific learning mechanisms for getting more information in these domains

nativism

* the theory that infants have substantial innate knowledge of evolutionarily important domains.

What did Elizabeth Spelke hypothesize?

* infants begin life with 4 core-knowledge systems, each with its own principles.
* One represents inanimate objects and their mechanical interactions.
* The second represents minds of people and other animals capable of goal-directed actions.
* The third represents numbers.
* The fourth represents spatial layouts and geometric relations.

constructivism

* the theory that infants build increasingly advanced understanding by combining rudimentary innate knowledge with subsequent experiences.

what 3 important characteristics do constructivist theories share with formal scientific ones?

1. They explain many phenomena in terms of few principles (ex. animals want food and water and that underlies many behaviours).
2. They identify fundamental units for dividing relevant objects & events into basic categories (ex. all objects are divided into peopoole, animals, and nonliving things).
3. They explain events in terms of unobservable causes (preschoolers know vital activities of animals are because of internal processes, not external ones).

What do core-knowledge constructivists emphasize?

* children’s initial simple theories grow considerably more complex with age and experience.

sociocultural theories

* approaches that emphasize that other people and the surrounding culture contribute greatly to children’s development.

What do sociocultural theorists emphasize?

* much of cognitive development takes place through interactions between children and other people who want to help the children acquire the skills, knowledge, beliefs, and attitudes valued by their culture.

Guided participation

* individuals organize activities in ways that allow less knowledgeable people to learn.

Social scaffolding

* a process through which adults and others with greater expertise organize the physical and social environment to help children learn.

Private speech

* telling themselves what to do out loud

Internalized private speech

Thought

Vygotsky: 3 phases in the growth of children’s ability to regulate behaviour

1. Children’s behaviour is controlled by other people’s statements.
2. Then it’s controlled by their own **private speech** (when they tell themselves what to do out loud).
3. Behaviour is controlled by internalized private speech (thought).

intersubjectivity

* **-**the mutual understanding that people share during communication.

Joint Attention

* a process in which social partners intentionally focus on a common referrent in the external environment - is at the heart of intersubectivity.

Dynamic-systems theories

* a class of theories that focus on how change occurs over time in complex systems.
* depict development as a process of constant change
* they propose thought and action change from moment to moment in response to the current situation, immediate past history, and longer-term history.
* they depict each child as a well-integrated system with many subsystems that work together to determine behaviour.
* they also emphasize that from infancy onward, children are internally motivated to learn about the world around them
* they propose that changes occur through mechanisms of variation and selection that are similar to those that produce biological evolution

Variation

the use of different behaviours to puruse the same goal

Selection among alternative approaches which 3 influences?

1. Relative success of each approach.
2. Efficiency
3. Novelty