Chapter 6 Flashcards
(37 cards)
Describe the processes of developmental change in Piaget’s theory and give an example of each process.
Jean Piaget developed a theory of how children come to know their world by constructing their own schemes or cognitive structures through active exploration.
Discuss the strengths of Piaget’s theory, noting features that remain fairly well supported by the research in this field.
Its considered a good theory since:
1. It stimulated much research
2. They are still relevant to understanding cognitive development
3. He showed how children are active in their own development by seeking experience (unlike passivity assumed before)
4. Showed how young people think differently from older people.
5. Many scholars believe he was right in his description of cognitive development - including the 4 stages.
Explain the challenges to Piaget’s theory that have emerged as scientists have conducted research to test hypotheses generated from the theory.
- He has been criticized for underestimating the capacities of infants and young children by assuming lack of performance equals lack of competence and it is all/nothing
- He failed to demonstrate that his stages have coherence - aka they are not gradual shifts with individual differences
- He offered vague explanations of development when specific changes are warranted in development
- He underestimated the role of language and social interaction in cognitive development.
Indicate how culture and social interaction affect thought in Vygotsky’s theory.
They influence the mental tools, such as language, which are used in cognition.
Explain how tools, especially language, influence thought.
Through guided participation in culturally important activities, children learn problem-solving techniques from knowledgeable partners sensitive to their zone of proximal development. Language is the most important tool that adults use to pass culturally valued thinking and problem solving to their children. Language shapes their thought and moves from social speech to private speech and later to inner speech.
Describe the main tenets of the neuroconstructivism theory.
Neuroconstructivists apply a modern spin on Piaget’s constructivist theory by proposing that observed differences in cognitive skills result from experience-induced changes in the underlying neural structures supporting these skills.
Explain Fischer’s perspective on context and performance.
Fischer’s dynamic skill framework states that development results from changes in skill levels. Skills reflect what a person can do on a particular task in a specific context; in this view, people operate within a developmental range, with higher levels of performance demonstrated within a supportive context and after more experience with a task.
Compare Fischer’s model of cognitive development to Piaget’s theory.
It is similar in regards to the fact that it describes new concepts to account for the variability observed in actual performance for Piaget’s stages. But it also includes more on how context influences skills.
Summarize Bjorklund’s evolutionary developmental theory.
Evolutionary developmental theorists argue that infants are equipped with basic cognitive abilities and behaviors that allow them to develop an understanding of their worlds. Such as playing with objects to understand them and imitating what they see to experience them; all through play - allowing them to acquire new skills.
Explain the importance of object permanence and describe the path from lack of object permanence to full understanding of object permanence.
Infants progress through six substages of the sensorimotor period by perceiving and acting on the world; they progress from using their reflexes to adapt to their environment to using symbolic or representational thought to solve problems in their heads. Piaget thought that in the sensorimotor stage, children learn through action and the senses - but they therefore become reliant on them, making them not understand object permanence at first.
Note the major cognitive achievements emerging from the period of infancy.
Major accomplishments of the sensorimotor stage include the development of object permanence and the symbolic capacity. The emergence of the symbolic capacity paves the way for language and pretend play.
Describe the typical preschool-age child’s pattern of thinking.
At this age, symbolic capacity emerges and is rampant. Preschool-age children are in Piaget’s preoperational stage and do not yet reason logically; instead, they rely on perceptually salient features (such as the tall glass video) of a task or object and intuition. Their prelogical set of cognitive structures leads them to have trouble with conservation and classification tasks.
Outline the characteristics of thought that enable (or inhibit) a child’s ability to solve conservation tasks.
Preoperational children lack the abilities to:
1. Decenter (the ability to focus on two or more dimensions of a problem at once; instead focusing on height alone)
2. Reverse thought (the process of mentally undoing or reversing an action - seeing the container with “more” water pour back and not overflow being suprising),
3. Understand transformations (the ability to conceptualize transformations, or processes of change from one state to another, as when water is poured from one glass to another).
4. They tend to be egocentric (viewing the world from their own perspective and not recognizing others’ points of view) however this can also be mitigated with easier tasks.
This may all be due to the fact that these functions come from development of the frontal cortex.
Compare the elementary school child’s thinking to that of a preschool child.
School-age children are in Piaget’s concrete-operational stage and can reason logically about concrete information, which allows them to solve conservation and classification tasks.
Name three ways that preoperational thought is limited relative to concrete-operational thought.
Concrete-operational children have acquired the abilities of decentration, reversibility of thought, and transformational thought. They can think about relations, grasping seriation (enables them to arrange items mentally along a quantifiable dimension such as length or weight) and transitivity (describes the necessary relations among elements in a series. If, for example, John is taller than Mark, and Mark is taller than Sam, who is taller -John or Sam?), and they understand the concept of class inclusion taking into account subclasses.
Explain how adolescent thinking differs from the child’s typical pattern of thinking.
Adolescents may advance to Piaget’s last stage of cognitive development—formal-operational thought, in which they can think about abstract concepts and apply their logical reasoning to hypothetical problems. Formal-operational thinkers can simultaneously consider multiple task components.
Describe the sorts of tasks that adolescents might be able to solve with their newly emerged reasoning skills.
Formal operations permit systematic/scientific reasoning such as the pendulum task. While before they may address the pendulum task through trial-and-error, they can now plan and carry out a hypothesis before forming a conclusion. However, these are gradual changes and not concrete - its not like you wake up one day and gain these abilities.
Assess Piaget’s description of the adolescent as a formal-operational thinker who systematically considers hypothetical and abstract concepts.
Piaget considers intuition to be replaced by pre-operational thinkers with scientific thinking - but its more that they now coexist. Formal-operational thought may give rise to special forms of adolescent egocentrism (difficulty differentiating one’s own thoughts and feelings from those of other people), namely, the imaginary audience (confusing your own thoughts with those of a hypothesized audience for your behavior) and personal fable (a tendency to think that you and your thoughts and feelings are unique).
Outline the characteristic features of adult cognition.
Many adults seem to function at the concrete-operational level, rather than at Piaget’s highest level of formal-operational thought. Cognition here is defined by standardised intelligence. Formal-operational thought appears to be highly dependent on formal education. It is also influenced by culture and area of expertise.
Discuss ways that adult thought is the most advanced level of thinking and ways that adult thought is limited.
Formal reasoning involves applying logic to a closed set of variables and not open sets of ideas.
Evaluate whether a stage beyond Piaget’s formal operations is warranted and outline what this stage might look like.
Some adults may acquire advanced levels of thought not considered by Piaget, such as relativistic thinking (understanding that knowledge is dependent on the knower’s subjective perspective) and dialectical thinking (detecting and reconciling contradictory ideas). This might warrant another stage, called postformal thought.
Describe changes to cognitive skills in later adulthood
Older adults sometimes perform poorly on cognitive tasks, but the causes may not be declining abilities as much as limited education, task familiarity, and motivation. Many still do well on tasks of accumulative knowledge.
How did Piaget come to his Constructivist theory?
Through the clinical method, a flexible question- and-answer technique, Piaget believed in 4 stages of cognitive development. With each stage, children construct increasingly complex “schemes” through maturation and experience.
What is a scheme?
Schemes are cognitive structures - organized patterns of action or thought that people construct to interpret their experiences. The more sophisticated their schemes, the more they are able to adapt to their environment.
