Cognitive Development

Jean Piaget (1896- 1980)

• Four stages of cognitive development: Sensorimotor, Preoperational, Concrete Operational, and Formal Operational.

• Cognitive development involves the active construction of understanding.

• Processes: organization (sorting and connecting ideas) and adaptation (adjusting to new demands).

• Each stage is age-related and marked by distinct ways of thinking.

• A child's stage is determined by how they think, not their knowledge.

Cognitive growth occurs through three interrelated processes: organization, adaptation, and equilibration.

• Organization: Piaget’s term for creating categories or systems of knowledge.

  • Schemes: organized patterns of thought and behavior used in particular situations.

• Adaptation: Piaget’s term for adjustment to new information about the environment, achieved through processes of assimilation and accommodation.

  • Assimilation: incorporation of new information into an existing cognitive structure.

  • Accommodation:  adjusting one’s cognitive structures to fit the new information.

• Equilibration: tendency to seek a stable balance among cognitive elements; achieved through a balance between assimilation and accommodation.

  • Disequilibrium: refers to a state of cognitive imbalance or discomfort that occurs when new information or experiences contradict existing schemas.

Example: a child knows what birds are and sees a plane for the first time. The child labels the plane a “bird” (assimilation). Over time the child notes differences between planes and birds, which makes her somewhat uneasy (disequilibrium) and motivates her to change her understanding (accommodation) and provide a new label for the plane. 

Prenatal Development:

• Gestation: Development period between conception and birth (normal gestation range is between 37 and 41 weeks).

• Gestational age: Age of an unborn baby, usually dated from the first day of an expectant mother’s last menstrual cycle. 

Prenatal development takes place in three stages: germinal, embryonic, and fetal.

During these three stages of gestation, the original single-celled zygote grows into an embryo and then a fetus. The development proceeds according to two fundamental principles: growth and motor development occur from the top down and the center of the body outward.

1. Germinal Stage (Fertilization to 2 Weeks):  characterized by rapid cell division, blastocyst formation, and implantation in the wall of the uterus. 

• Blastocyst: a fluid-filled sphere, which floats freely in the uterus until the sixth day after fertilization, when it begins to implant itself in the uterine wall. 

• Implantation:  The attachment of the blastocyst to the uterine wall, occurs at about day 6. /

Before implantation:

The blastocyst clusters on one side to form the embryonic disk, a thickened cell mass from which the embryo begins to develop:

• Ectoderm: the upper layer, will become the outer layer of skin, the nails, hair, teeth, sensory organs, and the nervous system, including the brain and spinal cord.

• Endoderm: the inner layer, will become the digestive system, liver, pancreas, salivary glands, and respiratory system.

• Mesoderm: the middle layer, will develop and differentiate into the inner layer of skin, muscles, skeleton, and excretory and circulatory systems. 

2. Embryonic Stage (2 to 8 Weeks): characterized by rapid growth and development of major body systems and organs. 

• This process involves the intricate formation and shaping of various tissues and structures that eventually give rise to the functioning organs of the body. 

• Organogenesis: The process involving the intricate formation and shaping of various tissues and structures that eventually give rise to the functioning organs of the body. 

• Any organ system or structure that is still developing at the time of exposure is most likely to be affected. Because of this, defects that occur later in pregnancy are likely to be less serious as the major organ systems and physical structures of the body are complete. 

• Brain growth and development begin during the embryonic stage and continue after birth and beyond. The most severely defective embryos usually do not survive beyond the first trimester, or 3-month period, of pregnancy. 

• Spontaneous abortion: Natural expulsion from the uterus of an embryo that cannot survive outside the womb; also called miscarriage.

  • miscarriage that occurs after 20 weeks of gestation is generally characterized as a stillbirth.

  • Most miscarriages result from abnormal pregnancies; about 50 to 70 percent involve chromosomal abnormalities

  • Smoking, drinking alcohol, and drug use increase the risks of miscarriage

  • Miscarriages are more common in African American, Native American, and Alaskan native women, in both young and older (greater than 35 years of age) mothers, and more likely to occur in pregnancies involving twins or higher order multiples

  • Males are more likely than females to be spontaneously aborted or to be stillborn (dead at or after the 20th week of gestation). 

3. Fetal Stage (8 Weeks to Birth):  Final stage of gestation, characterized by increased  differentiation of body parts and greatly enlarged body size.  

• fetus grows rapidly to about 20 times its previous length, and organs and body systems become more complex. Right up to birth, “finishing touches” such as fingernails, toenails, and eyelids continue to develop. 

• The flexible membranes of the uterine walls and amniotic sac, which surround the protective buffer of amniotic fluid, permit and stimulate limited movement. Fetuses also can feel pain, but it is highly unlikely that they do so before the third trimester

• Ultrasound: is a prenatal medical procedure using high-frequency sound waves to detect the outline of a fetus and its movements, so as to determine whether a pregnancy is progressing normally. 

• Fetuses respond to the mother’s voice, heartbeat, and the vibrations of her body, suggesting that they can hear and feel. Hungry infants, no matter on which side they are held, turn toward the breast in the direction from which they hear the mother’s voice.

Piagetian Approach: The Sensorimotor Stage

The first of Piaget's stages, which lasts from birth to about 2 years of age; infants construct an understanding of the world by coordinating sensory experiences with motoric actions.

Circular reactions: Piaget’s term for processes by which an infant learns to reproduce desired occurrences originally discovered by chance. 

1. Primary circular reaction: Action and response both involve infant’s own body (1 to 4 months).

2. Secondary circular reaction: Action gets a response from another person or object, leading to baby’s repeating the original action (4 to 8 months).

3. Tertiary circular reaction: Action gets one pleasing result, leading the baby to perform similar actions to get similar results (12 to 18 months).

Representational ability: the ability to mentally represent objects and actions in memory, largely through symbols such as words, numbers, and mental pictures—frees toddlers from immediate experience. They can pretend, and their representational ability affects the sophistication of their pretending.

INFORMATION PROCESSING AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF PIAGETIAN ABILITIES

Imitation is an important means of learning, and it becomes increasingly valuable late in the first year of life as babies try out new skills.

• Visible imitation: imitation that uses body parts such as hands or feet that babies can see develops first. 

• Invisible imitation: imitation that involves parts of the body that babies cannot see at 9 months. 

• Deferred imitation: reproduction of an observed behavior after the passage of time by calling up a stored symbol of it. 

• Elicited imitation: research method in which infants or toddlers are induced to imitate a specific series of actions they have seen but not necessarily done before.  

the idea that objects have their independent existence, characteristics, and locations in space is a later cognitive development fundamental to an orderly view of physical reality. The object concept is the basis for children’s awareness that they themselves exist apart from objects and other people. 

•  Object permanence is the understanding that a person or object still exists when out of sight. It gradually during the sensorimotor stage. 

Information-Processing Approach: Perceptions and Representations

• Habituation: is a type of learning in which repeated or continuous exposure to a stimulus (such as a shaft of light) reduces attention to that stimulus (such as looking away).

• Dishabituation: Increase in responsiveness after presentation of a new stimulus.

• Visual preference: tendency of infants to spend more time looking at one sight than another. 

• Novelty preference:  tendency to prefer new sights to familiar ones.

• Visual recognition memory: ability to distinguish a familiar visual stimulus from an unfamiliar one when shown both at the same time. 

• Cross-modal transfer: Ability to use information gained by one sense to guide another.  

• Joint Attention: process that occurs when individuals focus on the same object and are (1) able to track another's behavior, (2) one individual directs another's attention, and (3) reciprocal interaction takes place.

INFORMATION PROCESSING AS A PREDICTOR OF INTELLIGENCE 

• Weak correlation exists between infants' scores on developmental tests like the Bayley Scales and later IQ.

• Initial assumption: cognitive functioning of infants vastly differs from older children and adults, implying a discontinuity in cognitive development.

• Research suggests some aspects of mental development show continuity from birth.

• Efficiency in processing sensory information in infancy predicts later intelligence test performance.

• Habituations, attention-recovery abilities, and visual recognition memory in infancy moderately predict childhood IQ.

• Combination of visual recognition memory and cross-modal transfer in infancy predicts IQ at age 11 and correlates with processing speed and memory.

• Visual reaction time and anticipation measured by the visual expectation paradigm correlate with IQ at age 4.

• Sensory information processing abilities in infancy are related to cognitive abilities measured by intelligence tests.

• Caution warranted in interpreting findings due to modest predictability of childhood IQ from habituation and recognition memory measures.

BRAIN DEVELOPMENT

• Brain growth in early months and years closely tied to language development.

• Newborn cries are controlled by the brain stem and pons, the most primitive parts of the brain.

• Babbling linked with maturation of motor cortex controlling facial and larynx movements.

• Brain imaging suggests connection between phonetic perception and motor systems emerging by 6 months, strengthening by 6-12 months.

• Language development influences brain networks, directing recognition to native language sounds.

• Brain scans confirm vocabulary development sequence, with larger vocabularies correlating with focused brain activation in left temporal and parietal lobes.

• Language-associated cortical regions continue developing until late preschool years or beyond.

• Left hemisphere dominance for language in 98% of people, though the right hemisphere participates.

• Studies of babbling babies suggest early lateralization of linguistic functions, with the left hemisphere controlling right-side bodily activity.

Piagetian Approach: The Preoperational Child

The second major stage of cognitive development, is in which symbolic thought expands but children cannot yet use logic.

Symbolic function: ability to use mental representations (words, numbers, or images) to which a child has attached meaning. 

• Deferred imitation in which children imitate an action at some point after having observed it, becomes more robust after 18 months.

• Pretend play involving imaginary people and situations; also called fantasy play, dramatic play, or imaginative play.

Egocentrism:

• inability to consider another person’s point of view; a characteristic of young children’s thought.

•  is a form of centration.

• may help explain why young children sometimes have trouble separating reality from what goes on inside their heads and why they may show confusion about what causes what. 

•  Three-mountain task Piaget found that young children could only describe the mountains from their own perspective. Piaget saw this as evidence that preoperational children cannot imagine a different point of view 

Conservation:

• awareness that two objects that are equal according to a certain measure remain equal in the face of perceptual alteration so long as nothing has been added to or taken away from either object. 

Piagetian Approach: The Concrete Operational Child

The third stage of Piagetian cognitive development (approximately ages 7 to 12), during which children develop logical but not abstract thinking. 

COGNITIVE ADVANCES:

• Spatial Relationships and Causality:

  • A better understanding of the spatial relationship

  • Ability to make judgments about cause and effect.

• Advances in Selected Cognitive Abilities during Middle Childhood:

• Categorization:

  • Seriation: the ability to arrange items along a dimension: time (earliest to latest), length (shortest to longest), or color (lightest to darkest).

  • Transitive inferences: understanding the relationship between two objects by knowing the relationship of each to a third object  (if a < b and b < c, then a  < c).

  • Class inclusion is the ability to see the relationship between a whole and its parts, and to understand the categories within a whole.

• Inductive reasoning: type of logical reasoning that moves from particular observations about members of a class to a general conclusion about that class.

• Deductive reasoning: type of logical reasoning that moves from a general premise about a class to a conclusion about a particular member or members of the class.

• Conservation: children are focused on appearances and have diffi culty with abstract concepts.

  • understand the principle of identity

  •  understand the principle of reversibility

  • can decenter. 

• Number and Mathematics:

  • age 6 or 7, many children can count in their heads.

  •  by age 9 most children can count up and down

INFLUENCES OF NEUROLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT, CULTURE, AND SCHOOLING 

Piaget maintained that the shift from the rigid, illogical thinking of younger children to the flexible, logical thinking of older children depends on both neurological development and experience in adapting to the environment. Support for a neurological influence comes from scalp measurements of brain activity during a conservation task.

MORAL REASONING:
Piaget (1932; Piaget & Inhelder, 1969) proposed that moral reasoning develops in three stages. He argued that children move gradually from one stage to another, at varying ages.

1. first stage (approximately ages 2 to 7, corresponding with the preoperational stage) is based on rigid obedience to authority:

   •  children are egocentric and tend to see things only from their point of view. 

   • They believe that rules cannot be bent or changed, that behavior is either right or wrong, and that any offense deserves punishment, regardless of intent.

2. second stage (ages 7 or 8 to 10 or 11, corresponding with the stage of concrete operations) is characterized by increasing flexibility:

   • begin to discard the idea that there is a single, absolute standard of right and wrong and develop their own sense of justice based on fairness or equal treatment for all.

3. Around age 11 or 12, when children may become capable of formal reasoning, the third stage of moral development arrives. The belief that everyone should be treated alike gives way to the ideal of equity, of taking specifi c circumstances into account.

PIAGET’S STAGE OF FORMAL OPERATIONS

Piaget’s final stage of cognitive development, characterized by the ability to think abstractly. 

• Hypothetical-deductive reasoning involves a methodical, scientific approach to problem solving, and it characterizes formal operations thinking. It involves the ability to develop, consider, and test hypotheses, and the young person can be compared to a scientist exploring a problem.

CHANGES IN INFORMATION PROCESSING

Structural Change: in adolescence include changes in working memory capacity and the increasing amount of knowledge stored in long-term memory. Information stored in long-term memory can be declarative, procedural, or conceptual . 

• Declarative knowledge acquired factual knowledge stored in long-term memory. 

• Procedural knowledge acquired skills stored in long-term memory.

• Conceptual knowledge acquired interpretive understandings stored in long-term memory. 

Functional Change: processes for obtaining, handling, and retaining information are functional aspects of cognition. Among these are learning, remembering, and reasoning, all of which improve during adolescence. 

1. the continued increase in processing speed;

2. and further development of executive function, which includes such skills as selective attention, decision making, inhibitory control of impulsive responses, and management of working memory.

Learning Theories of Development

Dwecks Theory of Mindset:

Fixed Mindset:

• Belief that abilities and intelligence are static and unchangeable.

• Tend to focus on proving their abilities, seeking validation, and comparing themselves to others for self-esteem.

• Characteristics of a Fixed Mindset:

  • believe in the superiority of certain people and focus on proving their abilities rather than fostering growth.

  • may avoid learning from failures and instead seek to repair their self-esteem through comparison with those worse off than them.

  • Prefer effortless success to validate their talent and may seek constant validation of their abilities.

  • may display intolerance towards mistakes, criticism, or setbacks, feeling that their talent makes them superior to others.

  • may display intolerance towards mistakes, criticism, or setbacks, feeling that their talent makes them superior to others.

  • They tend to prioritize proving their abilities over personal development and may sacrifice the well-being of their companies to feed their need for validation and superiority.

Growth Mindset:

• Belief that abilities and intelligence can be developed through effort and learning.

• Prioritize learning from failures, seeking improvement, and embracing challenges as opportunities for growth.

• may still desire achievements like a Nobel Prize or wealth, but they do not see these as measures of their worth or superiority over others.

• Characteristics of Growth Mindset:

  • prioritize learning and development over proving their abilities, viewing challenges as opportunities for growth and improvement.

  • They embrace failures as learning experiences, seek feedback and constructive criticism to enhance their skills, and believe in the power of effort and perseverance in achieving success.

  • are open to new experiences, challenges, and feedback, seeing setbacks as temporary and opportunities to learn and grow.

  • They exhibit resilience in the face of obstacles, maintain a positive attitude towards learning and self-improvement, and are more likely to achieve their full potential by continuously seeking opportunities for growth and development.

Dweck's Ideas on Praise for Effort

• the importance of praising effort and achievements rather than personality attributes, as it fosters a growth mindset and encourages individuals to focus on their progress and development.

• praising effort should not be used as a consolation prize when children are not learning effectively. Instead, it should be accompanied by guidance on identifying ineffective strategies and exploring alternative resources to support continued learning and growth.

Willingham’s Learning Theory 

Focuses on cognitive development and how children can be encouraged to think and progress in their development. The theory emphasizes the importance of prior knowledge in developing certain skills, such as problem-solving and logical reasoning.

The myth of learning styles 

• Learning styles are a myth.

• Willingham's theory is that children can learn in different ways, and that prior knowledge is important for understanding and processing skills. He also emphasizes the importance of rehearsal and constant engagement with a skill to make it automatic. 

The  importance of meaning for learning

• Meaning and context are much more important than trying to determine what a child’s learning style is e.g. getting to grips with multiplication cannot come after a learning style has been determined as the child has to understand the mechanics of what’s involved i.e. knowledge must come first

• Transferring short-term memory into long-term memory is an essential component of learning via rehearsal and cues e.g. a teacher using weekly tests to ensure that students use retrieval strategies to access necessary information

• Practice must be consistent and regular to turn skills which require effort and concentration into automatic processes e.g. playing the piano or skating; practice is not dependent on learning styles

• Children who can delay gratification have better outcomes than those who cannot: this is known as self-regulation and is a predictor of future academic (and life) success rather than learning styles

• Neuropsychology can be used to guide and determine learning (see Willingham’s research described below) rather than learning styles

Factual knowledge precedes skill 

For  children to make sense of some information, it is important that they have knowledge of what the information is referring to, which is why having existing knowledge can be useful.

• Working memory which has a limited capacity for information, and so freeing up some of the space in working memory enables us, according to Willingham, to solve problems and further understand things.

The importance of practice and effort 

Practice and effort are vital in enabling us to master skills and obtain greater knowledge.

• Short-term memory able to rehearse information enough times so that it is eventually transferred to long-term memory 

• Long-term memory where it ‘sticks’ and is stored until we need to use it again.

The Strategies to help children Learn: 

Strategies to support cognitive development

• Teachers should be aware of developmental milestones when they are planning lessons and activities.

• Ensure children understand exactly what they are being asked to do so that this does not become a reason for them being unable to complete it.

Strategies to support physical development

• Focus on the order in which movements need to be carried out for optimum effect

• Movements should be practiced enough times for the body to remember them

Strategies to support social development

• Help children, from very young ages, to see things from the point of view of others.

• Be a good role model and demonstrate appropriate social behaviour – children learn by observing and imitating others (known as social learning)

• Encourage self-regulation, where children are responsible for their own actions.

• Help children to control impulsive behaviour that may mean that they make an inappropriate decision.

Strengths of Willingham’s theory

• Practical applications: can be used to promote positive child development.

• Egocentrism: children can understand others' viewpoints earlier.

• Conducted in controlled environments, helps identify specific causes of behavior changes.

Weaknesses of Willingham’s theory

• Lacks ecological validity, it may not be the same in real life situations.

• Failed to acknowledge the difference in learning.

• Based on different theories.