AP PSYCH 6.3 Cognitive Development in Childhood

Schemas

• Schemas are mental representations of what we know
• We build schemas to be a placeholder for a concept
  • We all have an idea of what a pencil is, or a dog, or even abstract concepts like friendship and love
  • We expect real life examples to resemble our schemas in some way-- after all, we built the schema around what we feel is the best broad representation of that idea
• Little children don’t have complex schemas like teens and adults to
• For example, a child may have a schema of a dog as “animal with four legs”
  • We’ll assume that at this stage in their development, it’s the only animal they’ve seen up close and frequently
  • When introduced to a cat, they see “animal with four legs,” and they put it into the dog schema
  • This is schema assimilation, when they fit new stimulus into what they already know

Accommodation

• The parent will presumably correct the child, and as they learn more, they edit their schemas to be more accurate
• They are confronted with a discrepancy in their own thinking that they need to resolve
  • A child will alter (accommodate) their existing schema for dogs and create a new one for cats (also accommodation)
• They now know that dogs have four legs and bark, whereas cats have four legs and meow

Assimilation

• The child sees a cat and hears it meow
• They can correctly identify it as a cat
• The schema has now ‘settled,’ or assimilated, into their mind
• We are constantly judging and interpreting out environment using existing schemas, which is the process of assimilation

Assimilation and Stimulus Generalization

• What is the relationship between these two phenomena?
• Let’s use the original scenario
  • A child calls a dog a “dog” and is praised by their parents
  • The child sees a cat and calls it a dog
  • That is where generalization occurs: the child saw something that fit their schema and generalized something incorrect into it
• They’ve generalized the stimulus of anything with four legs as a dog

Accommodation and Stimulus Discrimination

• When discrepancies between what we know and what we discover appear, we must accommodate our schemas
• When the child understands that the dog and cat are different, and belong to different schemas, they are now employing stimulus discrimination
• Returning to the situation, the child calls the cat a “dog” and is not reinforced
  • The child is corrected and so their schema is accommodated
  • They can now call cats “cats” and dogs “dogs”
• They know that the stimulus of a four legged animal is not always a dog, only if it barks is it one, so they are discriminating between stimuli

Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development

• There is some criticism of this theory, stating that the ages may be underestimated
• The theory is still pretty valid in terms of what stage follows which
  • Understand that the ages may be a little off but the general principles are still sound

Sensorimotor (Birth - 2 Years)

• This stage focuses on object permanence, or the understanding that things continue existing when outside of awareness

Preoperational (2 - 7 Years)

• This areas concentrates on the theory of mind and on symbolic thought

Theory of Mind

• The child starts this stage egocentric, meaning they are unable to see another person’s opinion or point of view
  • Obviously this is not intention
• This stage sees the development of empathy, or a sense of what others are thinking and feeling
  • A child is beginning to infer the emotional state of people around them and react differently
  • Previously, they had no concept of what other’s may be thinking and only acted in self-interest
  • They will now begin to consider others

Symbolic Thought

• Children are speaking but not reading or writing at the beginning of this stage
  • They start putting letters together into words
  • They are realizing that symbols can create different things when put together
• Objects also have a single idea or meaning
  • This is the time where “pretend” or symbolic play emerges
  • Objects and ideas can represent “stand-ins”
• They also begin to draw coherent pictures in this stage

Concrete Operational (7 - 12 Years)

• This stage has to do with logic
• Logic contains a couple components
• Reversibility is the idea that numbers or objects can be changed and then returned to their original condition
  • Four minus three is one, plus three is four again
  • You can freeze water into ice, but it can also melt and become water again
• Conservation is the realization that objects maintain the same properties in spite of their appearance
  • Conservation of mass, in a way, is beginning to be understood
  • Breaking a cookie in half doesn’t remove any cookie, it just separates it
  • The understanding that two glasses look different but hold the same amount of water
• Classification, the ability to group objects based on multiple properties
  • Recognizing shared qualities and being able to sort by that characteristic
• Seriation, arranging objects in an order based on a specific classification

Formal Operational (12 - Death)

• This stage focuses on abstract thought
• See more in following videos

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