Cognitive Development

Pervasive Themes in Developmental Psychology 
1. Is development a continuous progression or does it occur in discontinuous stages? 
2. What are the relative contributions of nature (genes) and nurture (environment/experience)? 

 

Pervasive Themes of Developmental 
Psychology: Continuity vs. Discontinuity 

Continuous- Quantitative Changes (tree growing, getting bigger) 
Discontinuous- Qualitative Change (caterpillar to butterfly) 
Stage Theories = Discontinuous theories of development 

 

Piaget’s Theory: The Basics 

  • Children are active participants in their own cognitive development. 

  • Child = Scientist 

  •  Cognitive development is an interaction between the child’s maturational development and their 
    experiences. 

  • Throughout life children are creating and refining cognitive structures called hypotheses 

  • Schemas are formed through the processes of assimilation and accommodation. 

 

Assimilation: absorbing new information into existing mental categories (schemas) 
Accommodation: modifying existing mental categories (schemas) in response to new information 

  • You can think of schemas as mental file folders. 
    - A child may start with one schema for cars and begin to fill it. What about trucks and SUVs? 

Schema = concept  

 

Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development 

  • Piaget believed development occurs in four stages based on the complexity of the schemas that can be formed and used. 

 Stages: 
1. Sensorimotor – Birth to 2 years 
2. Preoperational – 2 to 7 years 
3. Concrete Operational – 7 to 12 years 
4. Formal Operational – 12 years and older 

  •  Stages always occur in the same order 

  •  Culturally universal 

  •  Ages are approximate 

 

Sensorimotor Stage (Birth to 2 Years) 

  •  Characterized by behavioral schemas. 

  •  Infant learns through actions: looking, touching, putting things in the mouth, sucking, grasping. 

  •  “Thinking” consists of coordinating sensory information with bodily movements. 

  • Major accomplishment: object permanence - The understanding that an object continues to exist even when you cannot see or touch it. 

 

Preoperational Stage (2 to 7 Years) 

  •  Characterized by symbolic schemas, but child cannot perform operations. 
    -An operation is a train of thought that can run both backward and forward. 

In this stage, children: 

  • are egocentric. 

  • cannot grasp concept of conservation. 

Limits on Conservation 

  • Centration - Focus on one aspect and neglect others 

  •  Irreversibility- Cannot mentally reverse a set of steps 

 
Concrete Operational Stage (7 to 12 Years) 

  •  Characterized by operational schemas. 

  • Children now understand conservation, reversibility, and cause and effect but only as these things apply to concrete experiences and concepts. 

  •  They commit errors of reasoning when asked about abstract ideas. 

For example: Patriotism, future education, following logic rules that conflict with their knowledge 

 

Formal Operational Stage (12 years & onward) 

  •  Teenagers are capable of abstract reasoning. 

  •  Can reason about situations not experienced first- hand 

  • Can think about future possibilities 

  •  Can search systematically for solutions without attempting each solution 

  •  Can use logical rules in the abstract 

 

Challenges To Piaget’s Views 

Development Appears to Be More Continuous than Piaget Proposed 

  •  Piaget collected primarily cross-sectional data. 

  • Cross-sectional approach = people of differing ages all studied at the same time. 

  •  Compare two-year-olds, four-year-olds, six-year-olds and 8-year-old. 

  •  Can create the illusion of discontinuous, qualitative changes in thinking (stages). 

  •  An alternative approach is to collect longitudinal data. 

  •  Longitudinal approach = Same participants studied repeatedly at different ages. 

  • If you collect frequent, longitudinal data from participants as they age, thinking seems to change more continuously (not stages). 

 

Children Often Can Do Things Far Earlier than Piaget Thought 

  • Egocentrism 

  •  Four-year-olds will simplify their speech when playing with two-year-olds. 

  •  Object Permanence 

  •  Violation of expectation method reveals object permanence in 2 ½ month olds. 

  •  Method takes advantage of the fact that infants look longer at surprising or unexpected events relative to expected events. 

  • Violation of Expectation Method (Object Permanence in 2.5-Month Olds?) Baillergeon & DeVoss, 1991 

 

Culture Influences Cognitive Development 

  • Piaget considered his theory of cognitive development to be species-typical 

  • But – culture can also influence learning. 
    -Children in nomadic hunting cultures are faster to develop spatial abilities. 

- Children in farming cultures are faster to develop mathematical abilities. 

  • Vygotsk – Parents, teachers and others provide scaffolding for cognitive development. 

 
Piaget: Strengths 

  •  Yes – Piaget had several strengths 
    -Fantastic descriptions of how thinking and behavior change during development. 
    -Operational definitions of stages made his theory easy to falsify. 

 

 

Brain Development Plays a Role 

  • Amygdala also matures before Frontal Lobes 

 

Socioemotional Development 

  • Socioemotional processes: Involve changes in an individual’s social relationships, emotional life, and personal qualities 

in Infancy 

  • Ingredients of emotional and social processes that are present very early in life 

  •  Temperament - Refers to an individual’s behavioral style and 
    characteristic ways of responding 
    -The easy child generally is in a positive mood 
    -The difficult child tends to be fussy and to cry frequently 
    -The slow-to-warm-up child has a low activity level 

  •  Attachment - Close emotional bond between an infant and his or her caregiver. Is Food the Driving Force? 

 

Types of Attachment 
• Secure – 65% 
• Insecure 
1. Avoidant – 20% 
2. Resistant – 10% 
3. Disorganized/ disoriented – 5% 
Based on Mary Ainsworth’s Strange Situation Test 

 

Factors that Affect Attachment Security 

  • Opportunity for attachment 

  •  Quality of caregiving: Sensitive caregiving 

  •  Infant characteristics 

  •  Family circumstances 

  •  Parents’ internal working models 

 

Attachment and Later Development 
• Secure attachment related to positive outcomes in: 
-Preschool 
-Middle childhood 

 

Parenting and Childhood Socioemotional Development 
Authoritarian parenting 

  •  Strict punitive style: Children often Lack Social Skills 

Authoritative parenting 

  • Encourages the child to be independent but still places limits and controls on behavior: Children socially competent, self-reliant, 
    socially responsible. 

Neglectful parenting 

  • Distinguished by a lack of parental involvement in the child’s life: children lack social skills, poor with independence, poor self-control. 

Permissive parenting 

  •  Places few limits on the child’s behavior. Children: problems with respect, expect to get own way, difficulty controlling behavior.