Chapter 4 - Theories of Cognitive Dev't Flashcards
What are the main questions addressed by the Piagetian theories?
- nature-nurture
- continuity/discontinuity
- the active child
What are the main questions addressed by the Information-processing theory?
- nature-nurture
- how change occurs
What are the main questions addressed by the Sociocultural theory?
- nature-nurture
- influence of the sociocultural content
- how change occurs
What are the main questions addressed by the dynamic-systems theory?
- nature-nurture
- the active child
- how change occurs
How are children seen in Piaget’s theory?
seen as…
- active learners
- learning many important lessons on their own
- intrinsically motivated to learn
According to Piaget’s theory, what are children’s most important constructive processes?
- generating hypotheses
- performing experiments
- drawing conclusions
What is the difference between assimilation and accommodation?
- Assimilation: incorporation into an existing schema
- Accommodation: modification of a prior schema
What is equilibrium within Piaget’s theory?
- the constant shift between assimilation and accommodation
How do accommodation, assimilation, and equilibrium work together to propel development forward?
- assimilation: people translate incoming info into terms they can understand
- accommodation: process of people adapting their current knowledge in response to new experiences
- equilibrium: process of people balancing accommodation and assimilation to create stable understanding
What are the 4 stages of Piaget’s theory?
1) sensorimotor
2) preoperational
3) concrete operational
4) formal operational
What are the central properties of Piaget’s stage theory?
- qualitative changes between stages
- invariant sequence (for order of stage occurrence)
Describe the Piaget’s sensorimotor stage.
(Age range and key characteristics)
- birth to 2 years old
- initially, activities center on their own bodies
- later, their activities include the world around them
- later, infants are able to form mental representations
- object permanence(around 8 months)
What is object prominence?
a child’s ability to know that objects continue to exist even though they can no longer be seen or heard
Explain the A not B Task
- a toy is hidden under the same cloth several times and retrieved by a baby.
- toy is then relocated to a different location
- Babies under 8 months usually look in the original hiding spot while older infants find the toy in the new spot
Describe Piaget’s Preoperational stage.
(age and key characteristics)
- 2 to 7 years old
- toddlers and preschoolers begin to represent experiences in language and mental imagery
- symbolic representation
- egocentrism
- centration
Describe the 3 mountains task
- child asked to look at 3D modeled landscape
- child asked to describe what they see
- child then asked to describe model from researcher’s pov
- child often only describe what they see and not the other pov (egocentrism)
Describe the conservation tasks. (Preoperational stage)
- experiments on children’s understanding of conservation, which is the concept that certain properties of objects remain the same despite changes in appearance.
- conservation of liquid quantity, solid quantity, and of number
- younger children often think volume/ quantity changes when there’s an elongation to change in shape
Describe the Piaget’s concrete operational stage.
(age range and key characteristics)
- 7-12 years old
- begin to reason logically about concrete objects and events in their world
- can solve conservation problems
- cannot think in purely abstract terms or generate systematic scientific hypothesis - testing experiments
Describe Piaget’s formal operational stage (age range and key characteristics)
- 12 years old and beyond
- abstract thinking and hypothetical reasoning
- attainment of this stage is not universal `
What are some weaknesses in Piaget’s theories?
- Vague: how does change occur?
- infants and children are more competent than Piaget recognized
- understates the influence of the social world on cognitive development
- rigid (very discontinuous)
Does information processing theories view children as undergoing continuous or discontinuous cognitive change?
continuous
What are the key ideas of the information-processing theories?
- children are like computers who improve over time
- expanding information processing speeds
- expanding memory capacity
- acquisition of new strategies and knowledge
Describe the Atkinson and Shiffrin memory model.
Sensory storage to short term storage to long term storage
- sentory storage is the first stop for memory (last for seconds)
- then to short term memory (lasts 12-18 seconds)
- then transferred to longer memory and can be retrieved through rehearsal
Name the 3 components of the memory system.
- sensory memory
- working memory
- long-term memory
