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