Learning about the Physical World Flashcards
Cognitive Development
- How does children’s knowledge and thinking change as they grow?
- What factors influence changes in their thinking?
3 main views:
* Piaget’s theory
* Nativist view
* Learning from the environment
Piaget’s Theory of
Cognitive Development
Jean Piaget
* Father of field of cognitive development
* In 1920, worked at the Binet Institute on
intelligence tests
- Piaget intrigued by children’s wrong answers
* Piaget proposed that:
- Children’s thinking is qualitatively different
from adults’ thinking
- Cognition grows and develops through a series of stages
Properties of Piaget’s Stage Theory
* Children at different stages think in qualitatively different ways
* Thinking at each stage influences thinking across diverse topics
* Brief transitional period at the end of each stage
* The stages are universal (not culture dependent) and the order is
always the same
Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development
1- Sensory motor stage: birth to 2 years
2- Preoperational stage: 2-7 years
3- Concrete operational stage: 7-11 years
4- Formal operational stage: 12+
Piaget: Sensory Motor Stage (0-2 years)
- Infants live in the here-and-now
- Gain knowledge about the world through movements and sensations
1 - 4 month olds: Interact with world via
reflexes and repeat pleasurable actions
- Indicates interest in own bodies
4 - 8 month olds: Repeat actions towards objects to produce a desired outcome
- Indicates interest in the world, beyond own body
- Allows for formation of connections between own actions and consequences in the world
8 - 12 month olds: Combine several actions to achieve a goal
- Indicates that actions are clearly intentional
- Emergence of object permanence
Object Permanence
* Knowing that objects continue to exist even though they can no
longer be seen or heard
- Develops around 8 months
- Tested by seeing how a baby reacts to an object being hidden
* If doesn’t look for object or gets upset = no object permanence
* If looks for object = developed object permanence
* A-not-B-error: tendency to reach for a hidden object where it was
last found rather than in the new location where it was last hidden
- Evidence that initial object permanence is fragile
- Disappears around 12 months of age
12 - 18 month olds: Trial-and-error experiments to see how outcome changes
- E.g. Varying the height from which an object is dropped
- Allows for greater understanding of cause-effect relations
18 - 24 month olds: Mental representation
- Fully developed object permanence
- Indicated by deferred imitation
- Allows for symbolic thoughts
Piaget: Preoperational stage (2-7 years)
- Symbolic thought: The ability to think about objects or events that are not within the immediate environment
- Enables language acquisition
- Ability to use symbolic representation : Evidenced through ability to engage in pretend play and drawing
- Egocentrism: Perceiving the world solely from one’s own point of view
- Examples:
- difficulties taking another person’s spatial perspective
- egocentric speech
- Sign of progress = increase in children’s verbal arguments
- Means that a child is at least paying attention to another perspective
Egocentric Speech
* Jenny: My bunny slippers are brown and red. And they have eyes and
ears and these noses that wiggle.
* Chris: I have a piece of sugar in a red piece of paper. I’m gonna eat it
but maybe it’s for a horse.
* Jenny: We bought them. My mommy did. We couldn’t find the old
ones. These are like the old ones. They were not in the trunk.
* Chris: Can’t eat the piece of sugar, not unless you take the paper off
- Centration: tendency to focus on a single, perceptually striking feature of an object or event to the exclusion of other relevant
features - difficulties with conservation concept: merely changing the appearance of an object does not change the objects’ other key properties
ex: two glasses with same amount of water, pour one of them in a taller glass. Child thinks now one glass has more water than the other.
Piaget: Concrete Operational Stage (Ages 7-12)
- Can reason logically about concrete objects and events
- E.g., understand conservation concept
- Reversibility: the capacity to think through a series of steps and then mentally reverse direction, returning to the starting point
- Seriation: the ability to order items along a quantitative dimension, such as length or weight
- Cognitive maps: the mental representation of familiar large-scale
spaces, such as their neighbourhood and school - Cannot think in purely abstract/hypothetical terms or generate
systematic scientific experiments to test their beliefs
Piaget: Formal Operational Stage (Ages 12 and Up)
- Ability to think abstractly and to reason hypothetically
- Not universal
- Not all adolescents or adults reach it
- Can imagine realities that are different than the current one
- Allows them to be interested in politics, ethics, science fiction, and to
reason scientifically
Piaget’s Pendulum Problem
* Test of deductive reasoning
* Determine the influence of weight and string length on the time it takes for the pendulum to swing back and forth
* Unbiased experiments require varying only one variable at a time
* Children under 12 perform unsystematic
experiments and draw incorrect conclusions
Piaget summary of stages and other things
Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development
Sensorimotor (birth – 2 years old):
* Infants acquire knowledge purely through their senses and actions
* By the end of this stage, achieve object permanence
Preoperational (2-7 years old):
* Symbolic thought
* Thinking characterized by egocentrism and centration
Concrete Operational (7-12 years old):
* Begin to think logically about concrete objects
* Can see the world from other perspectives
* Understand that events are influenced by multiple factors
Formal Operational (12 years old and up):
* Can think systemically and abstractly
Piaget on How Children Learn
* Children actively shape their knowledge of the world
-Not passive
-Children have ideas about the world, perform experiments, and draw
conclusions from observations
* Children learn on their own
-Do not depend on instruction from others
* Children are intrinsically motivated to learn
-Do not require rewards from other people
Strengths of Piaget’s Theory
* Intuitively plausible depiction of children’s nature as active learners and how learning progresses
* Provides a good overview of children’s thinking at different ages
* Exceptional breadth
- Spans the lifespan
- Examines many cognitive operations and concepts
Applications of Piaget’s Theory to
Education
* Children’s distinctive ways of thinking at different ages need to be
considered in deciding how to teach them
- E.g., cannot teach kids in concrete operational state about calculus
* Children learn best by interacting with the environment
- Hands-on learning
- Experiments
Weaknesses of Piaget’s Theory
* Piaget didn’t use scientific method to develop theory
* Theory depicts children’s thinking as more consistent than it is
* Children are more cognitively competent than Piaget recognized
* Theory is vague about the mechanisms of cognitive growth
* Theory underestimates the contribution of the social world to cognitive development
Nativist view
- Children have innate, specialized cognitive mechanisms that provide
them with basic knowledge in domains of evolutionary importance - These cognitive mechanisms also allow children to rapidly acquire
additional knowledge in these important domains - Domains of evolutionary importance:
- Solid objects
- Understanding of physical laws
- Numbers
- Categorization
- Understanding the minds of people
- Language
Nativist view: understanding solid objects
Evidence for Earlier Object Permanence
* When shown an object and then the light in the room is turned off, most infants younger than 8 months old will reach for where they last saw the object
- Suggests that they still expect it to be there
* Piaget’s object permanence task may be too difficult
- Infants younger than 8 months old may fail Piaget’s object permanence
task because haven’t developed the motor capacity to manually search
* Can use looking behaviour as a better measure of object permanence
- i.e., violation-of-expectation paradigm
Violation-of-Expectation Paradigm
* Adaptation of habituation paradigm used to study infant cognition
* Infants are habituated to an event
* Test: presented with a possible and impossible event that are
variations on the habituation event
- Possible event: consistent with knowledge or expectation being
examined in the study
- Impossible event: violates knowledge or expectation being studied
* Longer looking at the impossible event indicates that the infant possesses the physical knowledge being studied
- Impossible event is viewed as more novel/ unexpected
Drawbridge Study
* Results: Infants as young as 3.5 months old looked longer at the
impossible event (drawbridge going through a box) than the possible
event
* Indicates that infants as young as 3.5 months:
- have object permanence
- understand that solid objects can’t go through another solid object
* Implications: Since 3.5 month olds haven’t learned language yet and couldn’t have been taught, suggests that understanding of solid objects is innate
Nativist view: understanding physical laws
Infant Understanding of Gravity
* Do infants understand gravity?
* Study: Violation of expectation paradigm with 3 month olds:
-a hand places a box on a platform
-a hand places a box in midair and it
remains suspended
* Which event do the infants look at longer?
* Results: 3 month olds looked longer at the box suspended in midair
* Follow-up study:
* Compared looking times at:
- a box suspended in midair (same impossible event) vs.
- a box that falls when placed in midair
* Infants looked longer at box suspended in midair
* Shows that infants expect the box to fall if there is no support
* Since infants haven’t learned language yet, suggests innate, rudimentary understanding of gravity
Nativist view: understanding numbers
Infants’ Understanding of Numbers
* Do infants have a basic concept of numbers?
* Study: Habituation paradigm with 6 month olds
* Habituation: shown a series of displays containing 16 dots
- Dots of different sizes and arrangement on each display
* Test:
- Same number: 16 dots
- New number: 8 dots
* Which display do children look at longer?
* Results: Infants looked longer at the new number display
* Follow-up studies show that 6 month olds show the same behaviour for
other dots in a 2:1 ratio
- E.g. can detect the difference between 20 dots and 10 dots
* 9 months old: discriminate displays in a 3:2 ratio (e.g. 12 vs. 8 dots)
* Since infants haven’t learned to count yet, suggests that they have an
innate approximate number sense (ANS)
- Cognitive system that allows infants to intuitively estimate numbers and
magnitudes
Approximate Number Sense (ANS)
* Are there more black dots than white dots?
Foundations of Differences in Math Ability?
* Research shows a positive correlation between infant ANS and
preschool math ability
* Suggests that ANS lays the foundation for later math ability
Nativist view: categorization
- Categorization begins in infancy
- Habituation paradigm:
- Showed 3 month olds various pictures of cats
- Habituated to the general category of cat
- Looked at novel cat photos less and less
- Test: photo of a dog
- Results: Infants looked longer at the dog
- Suggests that infants saw all the cats as a
single category and the dog as a different
category - Infants also form more general categories than “cat”
- Study:
- Habituation: 6 month olds habituated to photos of mammals
- Then, on test trial, looked longer at non-mammals (i.e., bird or fish)
- Shows that infants had formed category of mammal by recognizing
similarities between mammals
3 Broad Categories
* 9-month-olds divide objects into 3 broad categories
* 9-month-olds distinguish between people, animals, and inanimate
objects:
* Indexed by different reactions to members of each of these categories
- E.g., in lab settings, 9 month olds pay more attention to animals than
inanimate objects, but smile less at animals than they do at people
Importance of Categorization
* Helps makes sense of the world by simplifying it
* Allows children to make inferences and predictions about objects of
the same category
- E.g., If a child learns that a giraffe is an animal, knows that it breathes,
moves, eats
Forming Categories Based on Shape
* Infants focus on similarities in shape when forming categories
* Study:
- Various objects placed in front of 12 month olds
- Experimenter picked up target object and
demonstrated that it rattles
* Infants were more likely to assume that an object of a similar shape also rattles vs. objects similar in colour or texture
* Focus on similarities in shape results in difficulties understanding exceptions
- E.g. Infants fail to categorize a snail as an animal because don’t have legs
- Fail to understand that a boat is a vehicle because lacks wheels
Object Categorization Beyond Infancy
* By 2-3 years of age, children start to form category hierarchies
* Category hierarchies: organize object categories by set-subset relations
- Allow for finer distinctions among objects within each level
-superordinate level (general, like plant), basic level (medium, like tree), subordinate level (specific, like oak)
* Children usually learn basic level first
- Objects at the basic level have obvious similarities
* Similarities at superordinate level are less obvious and differences between subordinate levels are hard to detect
Summary of Categorization
* Categorization starts in infancy
* By 9 months of age, infants differentiate people, animals, and inanimate objects
* By 2-3 years of age, form category hierarchies
* Early categories are based on perceptual similarities, especially similarities in shape
* Children learn basic categories before they learn superordinate and
subordinate categories
Summary of Nativist View
- According to nativists, children have innate, specialized cognitive
mechanisms that provide them with basic knowledge in domains of
evolutionary importance - Research shows that infants as young as 3 - 6 months old have an innate,
basic understanding of: - Object permanence and object solidity
- Physical laws, like gravity and motion through external force
- Approximate number sense
- Categorization
- Suggests that infants are a lot more cognitively capable than Piaget
thought
Criticism of Nativist View
- Over-estimate infants’ innate, cognitive understanding
- Findings of nativist studies can instead be explained by:
- Perceptual features of stimuli
- Infants may look longer at certain stimuli because they are more visually
interesting (i.e., more complex or novel), and not because they have innate
expectations about the stimuli - Learning from the environment
- 3 month olds have learned a lot about the world in about 810 hours of awake
time
How do children learn from the environment? Caregivers
- Caregivers play a role in children’s learning by determining the
quality of the home environment
Measuring the Home Environment
* Home Observation for the Measurement of the Environment (HOME)
* Gold standard
* Researchers visit a child’s home and observe the environment and
interview the caregiver
* Checklist of characteristics that reflect 2 factors:
- Parenting quality: Responsiveness, acceptance, involvement
- Stimulation of environment: variety and presence of interesting toys
* Higher scores indicate higher quality home environment
Home Environment Matters A LOT
* Higher scores on the HOME positively predict children’s cognitive
skills and development
- IQ
- Math and reading comprehension
- Language ability
* Parenting quality is most important factor
