CHYS lecture 4

Cognitive development

• Development of thought

  • Usually limited to non-emotional, social, etc., dimensions of thoughts

• Cognition=thoughts

Jean Piaget

• Father of modern development psychology

• Studied biology for his PHD, then left to pursue psychology and philosophy at Sorbonne for years, where he met Theodore Simon, who worked on Binet's intelligent tests (IQ)

• Led to his big interest: How Children thoughts develop

• Originally, he was interested in how it could be used as a means of understanding the origins of human thought, soon changed to just understand children's development of thoughts

  • If you understand children's development/thoughts, you can understand how humans develop

  • How children think as a surrogate fir how our species evolved over the years

  • We didn’t have enough evidence and Piaget got interested in child development

  • Did harmless tests on his children (2 girls, 1 boy) which were crucial for the development of his theories

Structures (Schemes)

• Structures are unobservable mental systems that underly intelligence

• What change development

• Children are motivated to learn by a need to satisfy their curiosity

• Children learn through building blocks, which are called schemes (any form of knowledge e.g., What is a bicycle? How do you ride a bicycle? Shows a bicycle scheme)

  • Able to build on one another; building a knowledge on that topic

  • Scheme + knowledge change over development

• Discovery is the best way to learn

• Children build on their own representation of the world

Process of development

• Will learn new information, which causes them to re-organise the information they already had in someway

• Evolutionary idea and your brain is trying to make the best fit between what is learned and what it just took in and how it puts both ideas together

  • e.g., child seeing mom and dad putting presents under the Xmas tree, how do they weigh that out? Do they think that mom and dad are just adding extra gifts? Do they think that Santa is not real?

• Balance new information while you are seeing it

Assimilation

• Assimilation- Incorporation of new information into schemas as well as active representation of new stimuli

• Accommodation- Explaining new information. Re-arranging of previous ideas so that they incorporate the new information

  • Can involve discounting new or old information

Process of development continued

• Equilibration: The organizations attempt to keep schemas in balance with new information

  • When information is taken in, it causes disequilibriumation because it's new. Until you store the information you are in disequilibrium (imbalance in the child's mind. The child is naturally motivated to take information and restore balance. In adults this is typically called cognitive dissonance.) (Taking in knowledge that conflicts with the knowledge you previously had)

• Organization: the new information must be organized in a logical fashion that builds upon and coexists with current knowledge

• Assimilation-Disequilibrium, Equalibrium, organization,

• Piaget thought that it happened at different stages based on the child's mental state

Stage Approach

• Each stage is structured as a whole stage in equilibrium no skipping, built on each stage universally, boundary periods but then goes into years of stability

1. Sensorimotor stage 

   1. From zero to two years old

   2. Learning and interacting with the environment

   3. Learning how to use your body

   4. 6 sub stages

      1. Birth to one month: infant only shows innate biological reflexes

         1. Touch side of face and the baby will try and suck on it as a response to feeding

         2. Just using the reflexes

      2. One to four months: get outside of coloristic danger zone. Using reflexes to learn about the environment.

         1. Can reach and grab things

         2. They realize they can control their fingers and toes

      3. 4 to 8 months: chaining reactions together reflexes are building on each other

         1. Grabbing and pulling something in

         2. Gaining secondary circular reactions

         3. Object permanence: baby wants a toy they will reach for it unless it is covered because when it is covered they assume it's not there anymore

      4. 8 to 12 months: able to solve objective permanence, they have the A then B mindset. Pull blanket off then get the toy. And if you put it under a different colour blanket it will go for the original blanket the toy was under. Only processing the original piece of information even if they watch you

      5. 12 to 18 months: begin to walk, fine motor skills, now solving the A not B error

      6. 18 to 24 months: begin gaining symbolic thought they can now invent meaning through symbols such. Symbols are how they give meaning. We also see deferred imitation in children they can understand others and others thoughts and gestures

2. Preoperational stage

   1. Two to seven years old

   2. Child begins to work with the symbolic thoughts at a deeper level

   3. They begin to start playing make believe

   4. Imagining someone isn't real that is a symbolic thought (imaginary friend)

   5. They developed language

   6. Use of pre-emption not thought/perception

   7. Child begins to know whether something stays the same even if it looks or is perceived differently

      1. Lack conservation

   8. Conservation doesn't develop equally for all properties

   9. Culture can influence conversation through familiarity with tasks or that they are presented to the child

   10. Operation-something reversible

       1. Children don't see it in this way they can explain it but they don't understand it

       2. Example: chocolate milk and hot chocolate are the same thing just at different temperatures

          1. Children are unable to believe that they are the same thing because they're called different things and one is hot and 1 is cold

   11. This can result in social interactions that result in egocentrism meaning that children don't know that the other people have different views and opinions

3. Cognitive Operational

   1. 7 to 12 years old

   2. Understand operations don't know the underlying reasons behind them

      1. Example: how chocolate milk can be hot chocolate

   3. Passed the test of egocentrism and conservation

4. Formal Operational

   1. 12 years and older

   2. Children can now understand and use abstract reasoning and formal logic

   3. This requires western culture

      1. Example: explain that chocolate milk is hot chocolate just the molecules are moving faster, hot chocolate is chocolate milk but the molecules are moving slower

   4. Not all 12 year olds can use formal logic all the time

   5. They can display discounted egocentrism

      1. They think that everyone cares more than they really do, and discount everyone else's experiences

Implication for Education

• Have children guide their own education

• We use Piaget's theory to send kids to school- these stages line up with his theories

• Inclining teaching

• Teachers should guide the children to the truth instead of telling them

• Encourage the child to be a creator slash inventor rather than a pupil

• Materials slash curriculum should be made to fit the child's age/stage

• 1st four in five stages are based on monastery schools which Piaget loved

• Montessori schools came up at the same time as this theory

Piaget's Problem

• Some tests were more performance skills and not mental competence

• He severely overestimated adult performance

• Other developmental mechanisms are thought to exist in bracket including teaching concepts)

• Concepts of homogeneous stages do not appear in most/all of his stages

Lev Vygotsky

• What about child development in the 1920 to the 1930s

• Communism prevented his work from getting out until much later

• Believed that cognitive development was the result of innate/evolved mechanisms interacting with extended social inputs

Vygotsky/Sociocultural perspective

• Cognitive development is based on your sociocultural level

  • How you are raised and interacted with other individuals

• You learn to think through conversations

• Children learn to think by interacting with:

  • Their own thoughts

  • Their peers

  • With their parents

• The ability to speak is a paramount part of his cognitive development theory

• Children's development post talking

• No stages, moment by moment, involving specific skills, attributes and physiological capacities

• Domain strategies(looking into each "side" of development)

Tools of intellectual development

• Individual culture provides the tools and input that shaped the way you think

• Language is the prime example where the world can influence how one thinks

• Interactions with others

• Environment capacities

• Ancient Greeks use of logic would be another example

• Or a new it's in there multiple words for snow

• Language to a shape the way that you view the world

• The boundaries of what the environment/culture will allow the child to learn

Zone of proximal development

• This is the gap of what an individual can do on their own, and how it can be improved by a professional/ inofomrned teacher

• The best learning happens here

• If you go to early it will be too easy and you will get bored

• If you go beyond it is easy to get frustrated

• Learning is done more efficiently and quickly in the zone of proximal development

Scaffolding

• Level of support

• Reference to the architectural world, if you want to build you need scaffolding

• When the experience partner reworks the new knowledge into a manageable way for the student

  • Instead of 4 - 2, a teacher might say to a younger student if you have 4 apples and you take 2 away how many are left?

• Relat to how hard/easy the task is and how much the individual can take in at once

• One must be careful not to use too much scaffolding or too little

  • Child will either not have to put in any effort or will not be able to succeed

• Scaffolding is to be withdrawn allowing the child to take on a greater and greater share of the learning responsibility as they gain mastery of the subject

Cultural differences and guided participation

• Changes with different cultures

  • Different quantitatively amount of guided participation

• In North America guided participation is intense and relies on verbal communication

  • Other cultures rely on more nonverbal forms of communication example rural culturals

Implications for education

• Guided learning when aimed at the proximal development may be more effective than traditional. North America methods of letting students workout problems on their own

• Teachers should be prepared to scaffold different levels of achievements with a single class what works best for the top end may not work best for the bottom end

• Having qualified teachers

• Maximize the zone of proximal development

• If students can teach each other peer learning is effective the one who is teaching develops their skills through teaching and the other is learning from someone closer to their own level

• Young kids typically say things such as " I taught myself," not the teacher, they tend to make self bias attributional errors

  • This delusion helps give them more confidence and motivation it can be very important to their development

Meta attention

• The knowledge of ones attentional /concentration /focus ability

• Reaches around near adult capacity when a person is around 8 years old

• Helpful maintaining selective attention focusing on what's important

• Younger children overestimate their focusing availability

Memory

• Storing things

• Conscious slash attention brings the information to sensory memory

• Memory is making strong connections

• Works by linking existing moments with words

  • Process of retrieval strengthens the keyword memory link making it possible to create false memories

• Strength of connections

• Without strong connections you can't recall anything

• Attention is important

• More words you are able to tie in the easier it will be able to find it in your memory

• Understanding the meaning

  • Asking questions and finding the meeting

  • Elaboration is understanding

False memory

• Children are more likely to create false memories (it is still important to trust their memories)

• Connecting links incorrectly

• Kids do not have the base that adults have

• NICHD says that the best way for not getting false memories is to make sure you don't ask leading questions

  • " do you recognize these?" Instead of " who attacked you?

  • Because the second question is implying

Implicit versus explicit memory

• Implicit

  • Develops earlier, more robust in terms of resisting brain injury

  • Unconscious memory of how to do things

  • Evolutionary older than explicit memory

    • Dogs remember to sit stand lie etc

  • Implicit equals old memory develops early adult levels when you are an infant

• Explicit memory

  • Thought to be dependent on hippocampus development

    • Hippocampus matures at 18 months

    • Serves as an index for long term memory

  • You can explain learning it in bracket explaining implicit memory

  • Develop slower and more susceptible to brain injury

  • Depends on language

    • Girls have better explicit memories than boys

    • Younger children tend to encode routine versus unique events

    • Recall facility and frequency

    • More often it occurs the more likely you remember it

Meta memory

• Knowledge of one's memory in terms of size speed and accuracy

  • How many times you need to review lecture notes for a test knowing what your brain needs

• Preschoolers tend to overestimate their memory performance (positive success bias)

• Relationship between meta memory and cognitive performance is bidirectional

• Better your meta memory is the better your brain functions

Fetal learning

• Earliest learning is what's in the uterus

  • Newborns who are stimulated through sounds in the womb. The baby will prefer those sounds and stories

  • Mother's voice if that's what they heard, Cat in the hat if that's what they heard. Smells that they were exposed to any amniotic fluid

  • Can last for months after they're born

• Why don't we have memories of when we were young

  • Freud would say because of repression

  • Cognitive psychologist would say that they were encoding

  • Remember you have the memories of when you were young; we have the implicit memory but we don't remember remembering (implicit versus explicit memory)