Cognitive development

I. Cognition

  • It is a general term referring to aspects of higher mental processes

  • It is synonymous with thinking- but also includes mental processes such as attention, memory, forgetting, reason, decision-making, language, creativity, and problem-solving

II. Jean Piaget

  • Theorized stages of cognitive development through observing his baby

  • Popularized the notion of schema (plural; schemata)

Schema

  • Our mental representations of ideas, objects, and stimuli

  • How our cognition forms

Ex. Our schema for an elephant

Although a pink elephant does not exist in real life, because we have a schema of what an elephant is and what pink is, we can make a schema of what a pink elephant is

Formation of schema

1. Adaptation

  • The process of building mental representations of stimuli when one is exposed directly to it

  1. Assimilation – the process of fitting new information into existing mental frameworks

  2. Accommodation – the process of changing existing information to fit a new one

2. Equilibration

  • The process of changing existing information to fit a new one

  • Successful adaptation

Jean Piaget’s Stages of cognitive development

1. Sensorimotor Stage

  • Happens from birth to 2 years of age

  • Infants learn their relationship with the world; they can now sense it, and they can move it

  • They can discover that they can manipulate (move) objects in their environment

  • They still cannot form mental representations of the objects around them

Object permanence

  • Our ability to know that something exists even if it is not in sight

  • Already develop around 4-7 months of age

2. Preoperational Stage

  • Happens around 2-6 years of age

  • Children at this stage can now form mental representations

  • Language can now be communicated via words

  • Play is central to the child’s activity during this stage

Children at this stage engage in the:

  1. Make-believe plays – children take the role of others in their behavior

  2. Logical thinking – starting to develop (not that developed)

  3. Magical thinking – the belief that one’s ideas or beliefs, no matter how irrational, can influence real phenomena

  4. Egocentrism – the difficulty seeing the viewpoint of others

  5. Centration – the capacity to only focus on one salient aspect of information at a time

  6. Animism – they believe that certain things can behave like human beings

3. Concrete Operational Stage

  • Happens around 7-11 years of age

  • At this stage, children can now manipulate the information presented to them

Conservation

  • The opposite of centration

  • The ability of a child to recognize that features of a stimulus remain the same despite changing a feature of that stimulus

Seriation

  • The ability to arrange objects in an ordered sequence

4. Formal Operational Stage

  • Develops during adolescence until adulthood

  • Individuals can now think of abstract concepts and form hypotheses

Hypothetico-deductive reasoning

  • Important ability

  • The ability of a person to form theories (what-ifs) to questions posed to them

  • Adults can now experiment with certain ideas and thoughts

  • They can also evaluate and critique the validity of one’s thoughts. Can now think about thinking (metacognition)

Metacognition

  • Reflective thinking (other term)

  • If sobra = anxiety

Criticisms of Piaget’s theory

  1. Underestimates children’s abilities

  • Some say that a child can perform concrete thinking

  1. Overestimates the capacity of adolescents in formal operational thinking

  • Some adolescents stay egocentric when they get old

  1. Vague explanation of how individuals move from one stage to another

  2. Does not address cultural differences

III. Lev Vygotsky

  • In his sociocultural theory of cognitive development, he emphasized the role of cultural shaping one’s mental capacities

America (west)

Analytical thinking

  • Breaking down of ideas

Asian (east)

Holistic

  • We don’t see or think as a whole

Zone of proximal development

  • The difference between what a child can do on his own and what can be accomplished with assistance

Scaffolding

  • The process of cognitive development is best developed through this

  • Assisting or guiding in learning behaviors that we cannot do on our own

IV. Language development

1. B. F. Skinner

  • Believes that language develops when children imitate the vocabulary of their parents

  • When parents reward the language that children use, they will retain these words and use it more often

  • When parents punish children with the language they used, they will try to suppress using this language

  • Pinanganak tayong wala tayong capacity to learn language but we learn through reinforcement and punishment

2. Noam Chomsky

  • Believes that learning language is an innate skill, and is not dependent on the environment

  • Humans are born with the ability to learn language

Language Acquisition Device

  • He calls our innate ability to learn language as this

V. Cognitive development in adolescence

a. Imaginary audience

  • The tendency of adolescents to think that others are enthusiastically watching their lives

b. Personal Fable

  • The tendency of adolescents to think that their personal lives and stories are special and unique

VI. Cognitive development and aging

Raymond Cattel two types of intelligence

1. Crystallized intelligence

  • Those aspects that are previously leaned in school and other settings (facts)

  • Ability to use experience and learned knowledge in different situations

  • Generally, increases across the lifespan

  • Tumatanda = well developed (adults have wider vocabulary)

2. Fluid intelligence

  • Includes the ability to solve novel problems, use logic and reason, and generate ideas

  • Ability to think abstractly

  • Increases in the early 20s but gradually declines

  • people in 20s and 30s outperform individuals in the middle and old age in terms of problem solving skills

other culture gives more importance in wisdom or creativity

a. Wisdom

  • The capacity to have insight and proper judgement on many practical matters about life and its problems

  • Tumatanda = tumataas

b. Creativity

  • The capacity of a person to produce novel works, thoughts, or objects

  • The central element of strategizing in problem solving

Two types of strategies when solving problems

1. Algorithm – step-by-step problem-solving strategy that gives a guaranteed solution to a problem

2. Heuristic – a rule-of-thumb method of generating solutions to testing problems

  • Used in real life situation

Barriers to problem solving

Mental set

  • a tendency to solve problems and respond to it in a given way

  • We think inside the box

  • Intelligence ≠ creativity

  1. Functional fixedness – individual cannot find new use for an object

Creative problem solving

1. Divergent thinking – thinking of unique and innovative solutions to problems

  • More related to creativity

2. Convergent thinking – requires the use of one’s existing knowledge and trimming down the options to arrive at the best possible solution

VII. Intelligence

  • Capacity to learn from experience

  • The ability to adapt to the surrounding environment

  • There is no definite meaning of this

Intelligence according to psychologists

David Wechsler - “Intelligence is the global capacity of a person to act purposefully, to think rationally, and to deal effectively with his environment”

Robert Stenberg - “Intelligence is the mental activity directed toward purposive adaptation, selection, and shaping of real-world environments relevant to one’s life”

James Flynn - “The ability to think abstractly, and to learn readily from experience”

Theories of intelligence

1. Charles Spearman

  • One of the first to study intelligence

Two-factor theory of intelligence

  • he claimed that intelligence can be presented by a score

  • The first factor as g, referring to our overall intellectual capacities

  • He called domain-specific intelligence as s.

  • Became the basis of IQ test (most influential theory because of this)

2. L. L. Thurstone

  • Claimed the intelligence is made up of many separate abilities

  • Identified seven primary mental abilities (measures the cognitive processes): verbal comprehension, word fluency, number calculation, spatial reasoning, associative memory, perceptual speed, and general reasoning

  • Believes that there is no ”g”

3. Raymond Cattel

  • Crystallized and fluid intelligence

4. Robert Stenberg

  • Claimed that there exist three intelligences that are distinct but also coexist with each other

Triarchic theory of intelligence

Based on information processing models

1. Analytical/componential intelligence

  • Book smart

  • People think critically and usually excel in academic tasks

2. Creative/experiential intelligence

  • Ability to synthesize information and provide novel insights and new ideas

  • They are the inventors and creative minds

3. Practical/contextual intelligence

  • Street smart, and are able to solve real life problems with solutions that take into account the demands of the environment

VIII. Psychological Test

Is an objective, standardized measure of a sample of a behavior

a. Reliability – it is to measure the consistently measure what is supposed to measure

b. Validity – it is the ability of a test to accurately measure what it is supposed to measure

History of Psychological Test

Alfred Binet

  • A French psychologist

  • Developed the first standardized IQ test (1905) termed it as the Binet-Simon Scale

Binet-Simon Scale

  • The scale, developed together with Theodore Simon, contained 56 items

  • The test was used to separate normal children from those needing special assistance

Lewis Terman

  • A psychologist from Stanford University

  • Popularized IQ test

  • Revised and improved Binet’s scale in 1916, he called this version as Stanford-Binet Test

Stanford-Binet Test

  • The most famous IQ tests in the history of psychology

  • It measures g, represented by IQ

David Wechsler

  • Provides one of the most comprehensive definitions of intelligence

  • He developed the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, one of the most widely used and one of the most comprehensive IQ tests today.

Giftedness

  • A condition in which an individual typically demonstrates high achievement and aptitude in areas of functioning such as intellectual thinking, creative thinking, performing arts, etc.

Savant syndrome – a condition in which a person suffers from general decline in intellectual functioning but is excessively excellent in one area. this is called having Splinter Skills (obsessive preoccupation with flags, numbers, trivia, maps, historical figures, etc.)

Intellectual disability

  • It was formerly called as mental retardation

  • intellectual disability ≠ learning disability

A condition that is marked by

1. Deficits in intellectual functioning

2. Impairments in adaptive functioning (being able to carry out everyday skills such as eating; taking a bath, purring clothes)

  • IQ 70-50 mild

  • IQ 49-35 moderate

  • IQ 34-21 severe

  • IQ below 20 profound

Howard Gardner

  • Believed that each of us has different strengths and weaknesses

  • Listed different forms of intelligence

  • Each of us has a preferable mode of showing our intelligence, which he called as multiple intelligences