3.4 - Cognitive Development Across the Lifespan

Cognition: all the mental activities associated w/ thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating

Schemas: a concept/framework that organizes and interprets info

→ Assimilation: interpreting our new experiences in terms of our existing schemas

→ Accommodation: adapting our current schemas to incorporate new info

Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development

Sensorimotor Stage:

• Object permanence: the awareness that things continue to exist even when not perceived

• Stranger anxiety: the fear of strangers infants commonly display

Preoperational Stage:

• Pretend play: using imagination to create scenarios, act out roles, and form new symbolic connections

• Egocentrism: a child’s difficulty taking another’s POV

Concrete Operational Stage:

• Conservation: the principal that properties such as mass, volume, and number remain the same despite changes in the forms of objects

• Children grasp more complex operations (spatial, mathematical, relationships)

Formal Operational Stage:

• Abstract reasoning and logic

• Formal operational thinkers have no problem answering correctly

Video Resource:

Lev Vygotsky - An Alternate Viewpoint

Scaffold: a framework that offers children temporary support as they develop higher levels of thinking

* A child’s zone of proximal development is the zone between what a child CAN & CAN’T do — what they can do with help

* Vygotsky emphasized how a child’s mind grows through interaction w/ the social-cultural environment

Other Important Terminology

Theory of Mind: people’s ideas about their own and others’ mental states — about their feelings, perceptions, and thoughts, & the behavior these might predict

Moral intuition: “quick gut feelings”

→ the mind makes moral judgements quickly and automatically

→ feelings of disgust/elation trigger moral reasoning