Chapter 6 - Theories of Cognitive Development Flashcards
1
Q
How did Piaget decide to investigate the origins of knowledge?
A
Not as philosophers had, through discussion and debate, but by doing experiments with children
2
Q
What did Piaget believe about children?
A
- They’re naturally curious
- They constantly want to make sense of their experience and, in the process, construct their understanding of the world
- Children at all ages are like scientists in that they create theories about how the world works, but of course, children’s theories are often incomplete (nevertheless, their theories are valuable because they make the world seem more predictable)
3
Q
Summarize Piaget’s cognitive-developmental theory
A
- Children hold different concepts of the world at different ages
- Children are active constructors of these concepts
- Discontinuous; nature and nurture; active
4
Q
What are the mechanisms of cognitive change?
A
Equilibrium by assimilation and accomodation
5
Q
What is equilibrium in terms of cognitive change?
A
Responding to changes in environment in order to maintain a state of cognitive balance
6
Q
What is assimilation in terms of cognitive change?
A
Interpreting new information in terms of what you already know
7
Q
When does assimilation occur?
A
When new experiences are readily incorporated into a child’s existing theories
8
Q
What is accommodation in terms of cognitive change?
A
Changing what you do or think to adapt to something new in the environment
9
Q
When does accommodation occur?
A
When a child’s theories are modified based on experience
10
Q
What is the process of equilibration in terms of cognitive change?
A
Children reorganizing their theories to return to a state of equilibrium
11
Q
According to Piaget, when do revolutionary changes occur over the lifespan?
A
At approximately 2, 7, and 11 years of age
12
Q
What is Piaget’s first stage of cognitive development? At what age does it occur? What does it encompass?
A
- Sensorimotor
- Birth to 2
- Infancy
13
Q
What is Piaget’s second stage of cognitive development? At what age does it occur? What does it encompass?
A
- Preoperational stage
- 2 to 6
- Preschool and early elementary development
14
Q
What is Piaget’s third stage of cognitive development? At what age does it occur? What does it encompass?
A
- Concrete operational stage
- 7 to 11
- Middle and late elementary school
15
Q
What is Piaget’s fourth stage of cognitive development? At what age does it occur? What does it encompass?
A
- Formal operational stage
- 11 and up
- Adolescence and adulthood
16
Q
What are “schemes”?
A
The basic act of knowing, including physical and mental actions
- Initially schemes are separate, but through experience children coordinate them into more complex ones
- E.g., grasping, looking, shaking, etc.
17
Q
During the sensorimotor stage, how does the infant progress?
A
From simple reflex actions to symbolic processing
18
Q
What generally happens during the sensorimotor stage: 1-4 months, 4-8 months, 8 months; 12 months
A
- 1 to 4: Reflexes are modified by experience
- 4 to 8: Infant shows greater interest in the world, paying far more attention to objects
- 8: Onset of deliberate, intentional behaviour
- 12: Infants become active experiementers
19
Q
What is object permanence?
A
The understanding that objects exist independently (i.e., objects continue to exist even when you can’t see them)
20
Q
What are the ages and abilities for the sub-stages of object permanence?
A
- Before 6 months: “Out of sight, out of mind”
- 4 to 8 months: Can uncover partially-covered objects
- 8 to 12 months: “A not B Error”
- 18 months to 2 years: Can uncover displaced objects (demonstrates object permanence)
21
Q
What happens between 18 and 24 months once children can use symbols?
A
Begin to anticipate the consequences of actions mentally instead of having to perform them
22
Q
What are the abilities and limitations of the sensorimotor stage?
A
- Learn about the world through sense and motor activity and combine different reflexes and abilities to form coordinated movements
- Can’t form mental representations and object permanence develops gradually over the stages
23
Q
What is the main accomplishment of the sensorimotor stage?
A
Mental representation
- By 18 months, most infants have begun to talk and gesture which is evidence of the emerging capacity to use symbols
24
Q
What marks the preoperational stage?
A
The child’s use of symbols to represent objects and events
- Children gradually become proficient at using common symbols, such as words, gestures, graphs, maps, and models
25
What do preoperational children typically believe?
That others see the world - both literally and figuratively - exactly as they do
26
What does egocentrism refer to?
Young children's difficulty in seeing the world from another's viewpoint (no awareness that there are other perspectives)
27
What is animism?
Preoperational children who sometimes credit inanimate objects with life and lifelike properties
28
What is centration?
Focusing on one aspect of a situation to the neglect of other important features
29
What is conservation?
Understanding that a quantity or amount of something remains the same, even when there are external changes in its appearance
30
What is an example of a conservation of liquid quantity problem?
Children are shown identical glasses filled with the same amount of juice and one is then poured from one glass into a taller, thinner glass. The juice looks different but the amount is unchanged. Nevertheless, preoperational children claim that the tall, thin glass has more juice than the original glass.
31
What is an example of a conservation of number problem?
When 2 rows of 4 coins are lined up but unequally spaced apart, a preoperational child will say that the row with 4 coins more spread apart has more coins
32
What is horizontal décalage?
The gradual development of abilities throughout a stage of development
33
How was categorization used to look at the abilities of preoperational children?
Children required to group by size, colour, and image. Adding multiple classes becomes more difficult.
34
How does the three mountains test demonstrate egocentrism?
Walked around a display of three mountains to see if from different perspectives and when positioned to only be able to see one thing, they chose a picture of what they saw from their own perspective at that time
35
What are the abilities and limitations of preoperational children?
- Can think using symbols and mental images
- They are not good at using symbols and mental images - have basic mental representation
- Centration and egocentrism (pay attention to one attribute of a situation at a time and unsystematic and illogical in their thinking)
36
What is the main accomplishment at the end of the preoperational stage?
Decentration
37
During what years do concrete operational children enter a new stage of cognitive development?
During the elementary school years, they enter one that is distinctly more adultlike and much less childlike
38
In the concrete operational stage, what do children use to solve problems and to reason?
Mental operations
39
What are mental operations?
Strategies and tools that make thinking more systematic and more powerful
40
In terms of the concrete operations stage, what is reversibility?
The ability to mentally go through a series of steps and then return to the starting point
41
In terms of the concrete operations stage, what is concrete?
Done with objects that can, in principle, be physically acted upon or manipulated
42
What is seriation?
The ability to arrange items along a quantitative dimension
43
What is transitive inference?
The ability to do seriation mentally
44
What is an example to show the difference between seriation and transitive inference?
Seriation - Child sees three sticks of different lengths and would be able to arrange them by size
Transitive inference - Child hears about the three sticks and can arrange them in their head
45
What is class inclusion?
The principle that classes of objects can be included in larger classes of objects
46
What is an example of class inclusion?
If there were 10 flowers, 4 of them being blue and 6 being red, and children were asked if there are more red flowers or flowers, concrete operational children would say flowers because they understand that there are more categories than just blue and red
47
What is inductive logic?
Creating general rules based on experience; reasoning from the particular to the general
48
What is an example of inductive logic?
Concrete operation child experience seeing orange pumpkins on Halloween and conclude that all pumpkins are orange (with experience though, they would have to accommodate new rules to account for other pumpkin colours)
49
What are the abilities and limitations of the concrete operations stage?
- Can do tasks that preoperational children couldn't (conservation, seriation, etc.)
- Can think systematically, but only about concrete (reality-based) objects or activities
- Difficulty reasoning about hypothetical situations in a systematic fashion
- Can't do abstract thinking
50
What is the main accomplishment at the end of the concrete operations stage?
Being able to think abstractly
51
In the formal operations stage, what do children and adolescents apply to abstract entities?
Apply mental operations (they think hypothetically and reason seductively)
52
What do formal operational adolescents use to probe the implications of fundamental change?
Hypothetical reasoning
53
What is deductive reasoning/logic?
Taking a general rule and applying it to specific situations (reasoning from the general to the particular)
54
What is an example of deductive reasoning/logic?
All pumpkins are orange. I am holding a pumkin. Therefore, I am holding something orange.
55
What is hypothetico-deductive logic?
Using deductive logic in order to consider hypothetical possibilities
56
How did Piaget show that adolescents can solve problems by creating and testing hypotheses?
Presented several flasks with different clear liquids and told the adolescents to find the combination that would produce a blue liquid. Concrete operational children might mix liquids haphazardly, but formal operational adolescents understand that they key is setting up the problem in abstract, hypothetical terms.
57
What are the abilities and limitations of the formal operations stage?
- Can think systematically about abstract, hypothetical possibilities
- Can reason like a scientist
- None, cognitive development is over (people do acquire more knowledge as they grow older, but their fundamental way of thinking remains unchanged)
58
What are some common characteristics of Piaget's stages of development?
1) Global - Within a stage, every ability follows the principles of that stage because the way a child views the world has the same underlying structure
2) Structural changes - Unable to mentally represent some things
3) Change is gradual - Changes happen within each stage and there's a quantitative shift in how they look at the world
4) Ages are approximate - Ranges are identified but ages are approximate
5) Invariant sequence - Seuqnece is unchanged because children need the foundational skills from one stage to move to the next
59
How does Piaget's view of cognitive development have straightforward implications for teaching practices that promote cognitive growth?
- Facilitate rather than direct children's learning (teacher creates an environment where children can discover for themselves how the world works)
- Recognize individual differences when teaching (children in the same classroom have varying skill levels and instruction is most effective when tailored to an individual)
- Be sensitive to children's readiness to learn (Children only profit from experience when they can interpret it with their current cognitive structures)
- Emphasize exploration and interaction (Teachers should encourage children to look at both consistencies and inconsistencies)
60
What are some weaknesses of Piaget's theory?
- Underestimates cognitive competence in infants and young children and overestimates cognitive competence in adolescence
- Vague with respect to process and mechanisms of change
- Stage model does not account for variability in children's performance
- Undervalues the influence of the sociocultural environment on cognitive development
61
What was Kellman and Spelke's study and what were the results?
Used an object to obstruct a bar to make it look like two different pieces moving at the same time in the same direction. Infants were expected to stare at the bar in one piece to demonstrate their confusion, but rather they did that when they saw two bars - doesn't match the results Piaget would have hypothesized
62
What was Hughes's study and what were the results?
Child could only see two areas next to them, not the two areas behind that, and was told to hide their doll from the two policeman dolls. Instead of placing the doll where it would be hidden from the child (egocentric), many children at the preoperational age hid the doll from the policemen even though they could still see it.
63
How does the use of "baby talk" show that preoperational children were underestimated?
Children using baby talk towards children younger than them demonstrates that they understand their perspective
64
What is the theory of mind?
Examining other people's though processes and being able to think about somebody else's mental state
65
What is some of the evidence that contradicts Piaget's theory?
- Goal-directed action seen at 2 months
- Object permanence seen at 3 1/2 months
- Non-egocentric thoughts seen at 3 1/2 years
66
What are some of the criticisms of Piaget's formal operational stage?
- Used mostly in domain-specific areas
- Doesn't always use systematic reasoning
- Doesn't always think abstractly
67
What is the sociocultural perspective?
Children are products of their culture: Children's cognitive development is not only brought about by social interaction, it is inseparable from the cultural contexts in which children live
68
Summarize Vygotsky's sociocultural theory
- Children's concepts of the world and cognitive skills arise through social interaction
- Adults use scaffolding to help structure the child's learning experience
- Language is a key element in development
- Discontinuous; Nature and Nurture; Active
69
How does Gauvain argue that cultural contexts organize cognitive development in several ways?
1) Culture often defines which cognitive activities are valued
2) Culture provides tools that shape the way children think
3) Higher-level cultural practices help children to organize their knowledge and communicate it to others
70
Vygotsky believed that children advanced when?
They collaborate with others who are more skilled (child development is never a solitary journey)
71
For Vygotsky and other sociocultural theorists, what concept is the social nature of cognitive development captured in?
Intersubjectivity, which refers to mutual, shared understanding among participants in an activity
72
What is guided participation?
When cognitive growth results from children's involvement in structured activities with others who are more skilled than they
73
What are three of Vygotsky's most important contributions?
Concepts of:
1) Zone of proximal development
2) Scaffolding
3) Private speech
74
What is the zone of proximal development?
Refers to the difference between the level of performance a child can achieve when working independently and the higher levels of performance that is possible when working under the guidance of more skilled adults or peers
75
What basic premise of Vygotsky does the idea of a zone of proximal development follow naturally?
That cognition develops first in a social setting and only gradually comes under the child's independent control
76
What is scaffolding?
Refers to a teaching style that matches the amount of assistance to the learner's needs
77
What is the defining characteristic of scaffolding?
Giving help but not more than is needed (clearly promotes learning)
78
What is scaffolding an important technique for?
Transferring skills from others to the child, both in formal settings like schools and in informal settings like home or playground
79
How do parents in different cultures scaffold their children's learning?
- Turkish parents give the most verbal instruction and use some gestures
- U.S. parents use the same methods as Turkish parents but to slightly lesser degrees
- Turkish and U.S. parents almost never touch or gaze
- Indian parents seem to use roughly equal amounts of speech, gesture, and touch or gaze to scaffold
- Guatemalan parents also use all three techniques, and overall, use the most scaffolding of the four cultures
80
How is the zone of proximal development linked to scaffolding?
When a cognitively-advanced other is sensitive to the limitations of a child and tailors their interactions so that the child works close to the limits of their zone of proximal development
81
What is private speech?
Comments not directed to others but intended to help children regulate their own behaviour
82
What did Vygotsky view private speech as?
An intermediate step toward self-regulation of cognitive skills
83
How did Vygotsky view private speech as an intermediate step toward self-regulation of cognitive skills?
1) Children's behaviour is regulated by speech from other people that is directed toward them
2) When youngsters first try to control their own behaviour and thoughts without others present, they instruct themselves by speaking aloud
3) As children gain even greater skill, private speech becomes inner speech (thought)
84
What are Vygotsky's stages of development?
1) Primitive stage - share cognitive processes with animals
2) Naïve psychology stage (2) - Lean language but not its symbolism
3) Egocentric speech stage (3) - Understand language symbolically and use language to work through problems
4) Ingrowth stage (6/7) - Language is internalized as an inner voice and used as logic to solve problems
85
What does the information-processing theory propose?
That human cognition consists of mental hardware and mental software just as computers consist of both hardware and software that the computer runs
86
Summarize the information processing theory
- Computer-like model of cognitive processing
- Encoding and storing information in memory is key to development
- Varies between continuous and discontinuous but mostly continuous
- Nature and nurture
- Active
87
What components does mental hardware have?
- Sensory memory
- Working memory
- Long-term memory
88
What are the components of the "Store Model?"
- Sensory information --> Sensory memory --> Information selected for processing --> Short term memory --> information to be store permanently --> long-term memory
- Long-term memory --> information needed to comprehend new information of techniques for processing new information --> short-term memory
89
What is sensory memory?
Where information is held in raw, unanalyzed form very briefly (no longer than a few seconds)
90
What is working memory?
The site of ongoing cognitive activity
91
What is long-term memory?
A limitless, permanent storehouse of knowledge of the world
- Information is rarely forgotten though it is sometimes hard to access
92
What is the central executive?
Coordinating all these activities by moving information from one stage to the next
93
How can memory be lost?
Decay or displacement
94
How do children learn more effective strategies?
- Parents and teachers help youngsters learn new strategies
- By structuring children's actions and providing hints, adults demonstrate new strategies and how best to use them
- Youngsters can also learn new strategies by watching and working with more-skilled children
95
Why do irrelevant unwanted ideas not intrude on your thinking?
Inhibitory processes prevent task-irrelevant information from entering working memory
96
Why is thinking in older children and adolescents more sophisticated?
Inhibitory processes improve steadily during childhood
- Better inhibition means fewer disruptions from irrelevant stimulation, and therefore, more efficient working memory
97
What defines executive functioning
Inhibitory processes, along with planning and cognitive flexibility
98
What does good problem-solving usually involve?
A plan, flexibility to respond when old responses no longer work, and the ability to inhibit relevant responses
99
What are automatic processes?
Cognitive activities that require virtually no effort
100
Types of developmental change in information processes: Better strategies
Older children use faster, more accurate, and easier strategies
- E.g., Younger children may "sound out" a word's spelling but older children simply retrieve it
101
Types of developmental change in information processes: Increased capacity of working memory
Older children have a larger mental workspace for cognitive processes
- E.g., An older child could simultaneously watch TV and converse with a friend but a young child could do one but not both
102
Types of developmental change in information processes: Greater inhibitory control and executive functioning
Older children are less prone to interference from irrelevant stimulation and are more flexible in their thinking
- E.g., Asked by a teacher to format assignments in a new way, older children are more successful in adapting to the new format
103
Types of developmental change in information processes: Increased automatic processing
Older children execute more processes automatically (without using working memory)
- E,g, Asked to get ready for bed, an older child goes through all the tasks thinking about other things, but a younger child focuses on each task as well as what to do next
104
Types of developmental change in information processes: Increased speed of processing
Older children can execute mental processes more rapidly than younger children
- Shown a picture of a dog, older children can retrieve the name "dog" from memory more rapidly
105
What is iconic memory and what is it responsible for?
Persistent visual trace
- A double-take
106
What is echoic memory and what is it responsible for?
Persistent auditory trace
- Answering a repeated question before it's said the second time
107
What was Craik and Tulving's experiment?
- Provided support for model of memory
- Showed participants a list of 48 words and made judgements about what it looked like (lower case or upper case), what it sounded like (rhyme), and the meaning of it (use it in a sentence)
- More likely to recall if it was used in a sentence, then how it sounded, then what it looked like
- Meaning of word was the best because elaboration can be connected to your own experience
108
What does the core-knowledge propose?
Distinctive domains of knowledge, some of which are acquired very early in life
- Children don't start theories from scratch but by a few innate principles
109
What does naïve physics allow?
For children to predict where and how objects will move in the environment
110
What is naïve psychology?
Our informal beliefs about other people and their behaviour
111
How were actions interpreted as goal-directed?
When 12-month-olds looked at a simple sequence of events they seem to interpret it as goal-directed action: The adult is pulling the cloth so she can play with the toy
112
What is the theory of mind?
A naïve understanding of the relations between mind and behaviour that develops between the ages of 2 and 5
