Dev. Part 2 Piaget Theory of Cognitive Development

What is Piaget’s Concept of Epistemology

• The study of origins and development of knowledge

• Biological processes influence how people’s knowledge is acquired and their understanding of their environment

What is Constructivism?

• Individuals construct their own understanding and knowledge of the world through experiences and reflection on those experiences

How does Piaget theorize how learning occurs?

• Learning occurs through building upon prior knowledge

• Foundational skills act as a base and new knowledge is added on top of those skills as a child’s cognitive abilities develop and adapt through processes of assimilation and accommodation

According to Piaget is knowledge innate?

No:

• Knowledge is acquired through experiences and interactions with the environment

• Our minds have innate structures that allow us to learn

• Knowledge is constructed through our experiences

Can you explain Piaget’s stage theory?

• Development occurs in distinct stages, each representing a new level of cognitive understanding

• Cognitive development is discontinuous

• These stages are invariant, meaning children go through them in the same order, you cannot skip stages and they occur in the same sequence

• These stages are applied universally to children regardless of culture

How does Piaget explain how the brain is organized?

• First the brain seeks to organize knowledge, the mind works like a filing system, categorizing information into mental structures called SCHEMAS

How does Piaget explain how the brain is organized? prt 2

(Adaption)

Adaption

• Refers to the process by which children adjust their cognitive structures to fit their environment

• Through processes of assimilation and accommodation

What are the processes of Adaption?

• Assimilation: the process of integrating new information into existing schemas without changing them (more conservative, trying to maintain what’s already known)

  • Ex. A newborn who has a sucking reflex may use it to suck on a pacifier or a bottle, incorporating these new objects into existing reflex schemas

• Accommodation: the process of modifying existing schemas or creating new ones in response to new information (more progressive, adjusting to new realities)

  • Ex. A child might think "Mom" is the only woman who can take care of them, they observe their aunt or grandmother taking care of them in similar ways, they expand their understanding of caregivers to include other family members

Why does accommodation happen?

• Children crave equilibrium (a state of balance between their existing knowledge and new experiences)

• Disequilibrium: when they encounter new information that does not fit their existing schemas, it prompts them to adapt their understanding

What are Piaget’s stages of development? define them

Sensorimotor (birth-2)

• Infants learn about the world through their senses and actions

• Object permanence is a major achievement (understanding that objects continue to exist even when they cannot be seen)

Pre-operational (2-7)

• Children being using language and imagination but their thinking is still instinctive and egocentric (unable to take others’ perspectives)

Concrete operational (7-11)

• Children develop logical thinking but only about concrete objects and events

• They gain skills like conservation (understanding quantity doesn’t change with appearance)

Formal operational (11 and older)

• Adolescence develop abstract and logical thinking (problem solving skills)

What are substages?

• Substages within each main stage of cognitive development, which mark more fine changes in cognitive abilities

Can you explain Piaget’s sensorimotor period?

• Cognitive structures are primarily reflexes (eye movements, grasping)

• Object permanence

• Intentionality: Infants develop the ability to act in goal orientated ways (a child might grasp a toy or follow an object) showing purposeful behaviour

Explain substage 1 sensorimotor (0-1 month)

Objectivity (what is actual happening) infused with Subjectivity (what the infant thinks is happening)

• Babies can’t tell the difference between their own feelings and what’s happening around them

• Babies don’t realize that other people have their own thoughts and experiences they don’t yet connect their actions with external outcomes

• They focus on immediate sensations and actions, primarily reflexive responses like sucking and grasping

  • Ex. A newborn feels hunger and cries. The baby doesn't understand that the crying might lead to their caregiver coming to feed them. They only experience the feeling of hunger and respond reflexively (crying). They are unaware that their actions (crying) could influence the external environment (caregiver bringing milk)

Explain substage 2 of sensorimotor (1-4 months)

• Primary circular reactions: Infants engage in repeated actions involving their own body, such as thumb sucking, discovering that it is soothing

• Object concept: Infants are not yet actively searching for objects that disappear, but may look where objects were last seen (passively understanding object permanence)

Explain substage 3 (4-8 months)

• Secondary Circular reactions: repetitive actions focused on the external environment, such as shaking a rattle to hear the sound. Infants intentionally engage with objects, showing an emerging understanding of cause and effect. They begin to actively search for objects that they see being hidden, indicating a developing concept of object permanence

• Infants start to intentionally interact with objects

Explain substage 4 (8-12 months)

• Coordination of secondary circular reactions: Infants can coordinate multiple actions together, such as reaching for an object while looking at it

• A not B Error Infants demonstrate an understanding of object permanence by searching for hidden objects, but may still make the A not B error, where they look for an object where they first found it rather than where it was last hidden. This indicates their developing cognitive abilities and the integration of sensory experiences

Explain substage 5 (12-18 months)

• Tertiary circular reactions: Infants engage in trial-and-error experimentation, exploring new ways to interact with objects, such as dropping, throwing, or pushing them to see what results they get. This stage marks a significant advancement in problem-solving skills

• Object concept: Infants can now succeed at the A not B task and understand object displacement, even when the object is moved to an unseen location

Explain substage 6 (18-24 months)

• Symbolic thought: Infants develop the ability to use symbols to represent objects or events, enabling them to engage in pretend play

  • This marks a significant leap in cognitive development, as they can now think about things that are not present

• Mental Combinations: They can combine actions mentally

  • Ex. Piaget’s daughter using her doll carriage and thinking about how to navigate around the obstacle

Explain pre-operational period (2-7 years)

• Symbolic thought: children use symbols to represent objects and events, which facilitates imaginative play and language development

  • They begin to engage in more complex thinking but still struggle with logical reasoning

Explain the conservation tasks in the pre-operational stage

Conservations Tasks:

• Conservation of liquid: children do not understand that the amount of liquid remains the same even if poured into different shaped glass

  • Children focus on appearances rather than logical thinking

What are the reasons for failing the water conservation task?

Lack of reversibility

• Children cannot mentally reverse the process

Lack of Compensation

• Children cannot understand that changes in one dimension (height of the liquid) are compensated by changes in another dimension (width of the container)

Lack of Identity

• Children don’t understand that the amount of liquid is the same regardless of the container’s shape

Can you identify more errors in pre-operational stage?

Egocentrism

• Children cannot see things from another person’s perspective

  • This is evident in tasks like the “Three Mountains Task”

  • Children cannot understand what another person sees from a different vantage point

Intuitive and Perception based thinking

• Children rely on what "feels right" or "makes sense" to them based on their immediate perceptions, rather than analyzing situations logically

• Children's judgments are heavily influenced by visible features

• Children focus on the way things appear at the moment, not on transformations or processes that change them

What does conservation mean?

• Conservation is the understanding that certain properties of objects, such as volume or mass, remain constant despite changes in form or appearance.

Explain Piaget’s concrete operations period (7-12 years)

• Children begin to use logical thinking and can understand operations such as conservation tasks

What does mastery of conservation mean?

• Children can now understand conservation of quantity, length, volume and number

• Meaning they recognize that these properties don’t change even when their appearance does

What are the two key concepts of relational logic?

Seriation

• The ability to arrange objects or elements in a sequence based on a specific property, such as size, length, or quantity

  • Ex. If you have five sticks of different lengths, a child with the ability to use seriation can arrange them from the shortest to the longest

Transitivity

• The ability to understand relationships between different objects or elements based on logical connections

  • Ex. If you know that A > B (A is greater than B) and B > C (B is greater than C), then a child with an understanding of transitivity will also know that A > C (A is greater than C) without needing to see it directly.

  • Another example: If a child understands that "John is taller than Sarah" and "Sarah is taller than Tim," then they will be able to logically deduce that "John is taller than Tim

Explain Piaget’s formal operations period (11+)

• Children can think abstractly, reason logically, and use hypothetical-deductive reasoning

• Children can now solve complex problems and think about possibilities and concepts that are not directly tied to concrete objects

What does Inductive reasoning mean?

• The process of making generalizations based on specific observations or experiences. It involves drawing conclusions from patterns or evidence

  • Pendulum Problem: In this task, children are asked to determine what influences the rate of a pendulum’s swing. Concrete operational children test only a few variables, whereas formal operational children systematically test all possible variables

What are the critiques of Piaget’s theory in the sensorimotor period?

Research by Baillargeon and Spelke, such as the carrot study, suggests that infants develop object permanence earlier than Piaget proposed, as infants as young as 3-4 months showed surprise at impossible events, indicating an understanding that objects continue to exist even when hidden

What are the critiques of Piaget’s theory in the pre-operational period?

Horizontal Decalage means that children don’t always learn different skills at the same time, even within the same stage of development. For example, children often understand number conservation (that the number of objects doesn’t change when rearranged) before they understand volume conservation (that the amount of liquid stays the same when poured into a different container). This challenges Piaget’s idea that children develop all their skills in a fixed, uniform order because it shows that they can master some tasks before others in the same stage

What are Piaget’s strengths?

• Piaget’s Theory emphasizes the active role of children in constructing their own knowledge through exploration and interaction with their environment

• Piaget’s attention to errors in thinking has provided valuable insights into cognitive development

What are Piaget’s weaknesses?

Competence vs. Performance

• Piaget often mistook a child’s inability to perform a task for an inability to understand the underlying concept. For example, infants may understand object permanence but fail to perform the task due to motor limitations

Continuity of Development

• Piaget’s stages imply a discontinuous process, but many aspects of development are more continuous than he proposed