Chapter 6A - Piaget's Theory of Cognitive Development

Question 1

SCHEMES

Answer 1

SCHEMES are actions or mental representations that organize knowledge. In Piaget’s theory, behavioral schemes (physical activities) characterize infancy, and mental schemes (cognitive activities) develop in childhood.

Question 2

PIAGET’s THEORY of COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

Answer 2

PIAGET’s THEORY of COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT maintains that, just as our physical bodies have structures that enable us to adapt to the world, we build mental structures that help us to adapt to the world. Piaget stressed that children actively construct their own cognitive worlds; information is not just poured into their minds from the environment.

Question 3

ASSIMILATION and ACCOMMODATION

Answer 3

ASSIMILATION occurs when children incorporate new information into their existing schemes, whereas ACCOMMODATION occurs when children adjust their schemes to fit new information and experiences.

Question 4

ORGANIZATION

Answer 4

ORGANIZATION is - in Piaget’s theory - the grouping of isolated behaviors and thoughts into a higher-order system. Continual refinement of this organization is an inherent part of development.

Question 5

EQUILIBRATION

Answer 5

EQUILIBRATION is the process through which children shift from one stage of thought to the next. The shift occurs as children experience cognitive conflict, or disequilibrium, in trying to understand the world. As the child experience inconsistencies between the world and her representation of it, ASSIMILATION and ACCOMMODATION work in concert to produce cognitive change and take the child to a higher cognitive ground.

Question 6

STAGES of DEVELOPMENT

Answer 6

Piaget argues that thanks to EQUILIBRATION, individuals go through four stages of development and in each of them cognition -or the way the world is understood - is qualitatively different. Such stages are:

1) The SENSORIMOTOR STAGE;
2) The PREOPERATIONAL STAGE;
3) The CONCRETE OPERATIONAL STAGE;
4) The FORMAL OPERATIONAL STAGE.

Question 7

The SENSORIMOTOR STAGE

Answer 7

The SENSORIMOTOR STAGE lasts from birth to about 2 years of age. In this stage, infants construct an understanding of the world by coordinating sensory information with physical actions. Piaget divided the sensorimotor stage into six substages:

1) SIMPLE REFLEXES;
2) FIRST HABITS and PRIMARY CIRCULAR REACTIONS;
3) SECONDARY CIRCULAR REACTIONS;
4) COORDINATION of SECONDARY CIRCULAR REACTIONS;
5) TERTIARY CIRCULAR REACTIONS;
6) INTERNALISATION of SCHEMES.

Question 8

1) SIMPLE REFLEXES - sensorimotor substage

Answer 8

The SIMPLE REFLEXES substage covers the first month of life.
Sensation and action are coordinated primarily through reflexive behaviors, which soon are produced even in the absence of the onsetting stimulus - initially, a newborn will suck only if their mouth is stimulated, but soon they’ll start sucking even if a nipple or a bottle is nearby. In this way, the infant is initiating action and is actively structuring experiences.

Question 9

2) FIRST HABITS and PRIMARY CIRCULAR REACTIONS - sensorimotor substage

Answer 9

The FIRST HABITS and PRIMARY CIRCULAR REACTIONS develops between 1 and 4 months after birth.
In this substage, the infant coordinates sensation and two types of schemes:
1) HABITS, or schemes based on a reflex that has become completely separated from its eliciting stimulus;
2) PRIMARY CIRCULAR REACTIONS, or schemes based on the attempt to reproduce an event that initially occurred by chance.

Habits and circular reactions are repeated the same way each time - the infant’s own body remains the infant’s center of attention, for there is no outward pull by environmental events.

Question 10

3) SECONDARY CIRCULAR REACTIONS - sensorimotor substage

Answer 10

The SECONDARY CIRCULAR REACTIONS substage develops between 4 and 8 months of age.
In this substage, the infant start to shift his focus on objects - although directed toward OBJECTS in the world, the infant’s schemes are still not intentional or goal-directed.

(By chance, an infant might shake a rattle. The infant repeats this action for the sake of its fascination).

Question 11

4) COORDINATION of SECONDARY CIRCULAR REACTIONS - sensorimotor substage

Answer 11

The COORDINATION of SECONDARY CIRCULAR REACTIONS substage develops between 8 and 12 months of age.
In this substage, actions are even more outwardly directed than before - thanks to the coordination of vision and touch, the infant can coordinate schemes with INTENTIONALITY.

(Infants might manipulate a stick in order to bring a desired toy within reach).

Question 12

5) TERTIARY CIRCULAR REACTIONS

Answer 12

The TERTIARY CIRCULAR REACTIONS substage develops between 12 and 18 months of age.
In this substage the infant purposely explores new possibilities with objects, continually doing new things to them and exploring the results - this stage marks the starting point for human curiosity and interest in novelty.

Question 13

6) INTERNALISATION of SCHEMES

Answer 13

The INTERNALISATION of SCHEMES substage develops between 18 and 24 months of age.
In this substage, the infant develops the ability to use primitive SYMBOLS - internalised sensory images or words that represents an event.

Question 14

OBJECT PERMANENCE

Answer 14

OBJECT PERMANENCE is the understanding that objects and events continue to exist even when they cannot be seen, heard, or touched. This ability is acquired by the end of the SENSORIMOTOR PERIOD and develops gradually through its 6 substages. The principal way that object permanence is studied is by watching an infant’s reaction when an interesting object disappears - if infants search for the object, it is assumed that they believe it continues to exist.

Question 15

CRITICISM TO PIAGET’s SENSORIMOTOR STAGE

Answer 15

A major theme of infant cognitive development today is that infants are more cognitively competent than Piaget envisioned.

RENÉE BAILLARGEON studied the development of OBJECT PERMANENCE and the child’s understanding of CAUSALITY using the VIOLATION of EXPECTATIONS paradigm - infants see an event happen as it normally would. Then, the event is changed in a way that violates what the infant expects to see - when infants look longer at the event that violates their expectations, it indicates they are surprised by it. She was able to show that that infants develop object permanence and causal reasoning much earlier than Piaget proposed.

The CORE KNOWLEDGE APPROACH states that infants are born with domain-specific innate knowledge systems involving space, number sense, object permanence, and language. Such domains are prewired to allow infants to make sense of their world - proponents of this approach argue that Piaget greatly underestimated the cognitive abilities of infants.

Question 16

The PREOPERATIONAL STAGE

Answer 16

The PREOPERATIONAL STAGE which lasts from approximately 2 to 7 years of age, is the second Piagetian stage. In this stage, children begin to represent the world with words, images, and drawings. Symbolic thought goes beyond simple connections of sensory information and physical action - STABLE CONCEPTS are formed, MENTAL REASONING emerges, EGOCENTRISM and ANIMISM are present.
Preoperational thought can be divided into two substages:
1) The SYMBOLIC FUNCTION substage;
2) The INTUITIVE THOUGHT substage.

One limitation of preoperational thought is CENTRATION, which can be observed in the CONSERVATION TASK.

Question 17

SYMBOLIC FUNCTION - preoperational substage

Answer 17

The SYMBOLIC FUNCTION substage is the first substage of the PREOPERATIONAL STAGE - it develops between the ages of 2 and 4.
In this substage, the young child gains the ability to mentally represent an object that is not present - young children use scribble designs to represent people, houses, cars, clouds, and so on. But their thought still has several important limitations, two of which are:
1) EGOCENTRISM, the inability to distinguish between one’s own perspective and someone else’s perspective. Piaget studied young children’s egocentrism by devising the THREE-MOUNTAINS TASK: a doll is placed on one of four sides of a tridimensional model and children are asked to pick the image that best represents the doll’s perspective, which preoperational children cannot do.
2) ANIMISM, the belief that inanimate objects have lifelike qualities and are capable of action.

Question 18

INTUITIVE THOUGHT - preoperational substage

Answer 18

The INTUITIVE THOUGHT substage is the second substage of the PREOPERATIONAL STAGE - it develops between the ages of 4 and 7. In this substage, children begin to use primitive reasoning and want to know the answers to all sorts of questions - it is also referred to as the “why stage”. Piaget called this substage INTUITIVE because young children seem so sure about their knowledge and understanding yet are unaware of how they know what they know.

Question 19

CENTRATION and the CONSERVATION TASK

Answer 19

One limitation of preoperational thought is CENTRATION, a centering of attention on one characteristic of an object to the exclusion of all others.
Centration is evident in young children’s lack of CONSERVATION, the awareness that altering an object’s or a substance’s appearance does not change its basic properties.
In the classic conservation task, Piaget presented children with two identical beakers, each filled to the same level with liquid - if the child is asked if these beakers have the same amount of liquid, she usually says “yes.” Then the liquid from one beaker is poured into a third beaker, which is taller and thinner than the first two. The child is then asked if the amount of liquid in the tall, thin beaker is equal to that which remains in one of the original beakers - preoperational thinkers answer “no”, pointing out the different height and width of the beaker.
The preoperational child fails to show conservation not only of liquid but also of number, matter, length, volume, and area.

Question 20

The CONCRETE OPERATIONAL STAGE

Answer 20

The CONCRETE OPERATIONAL STAGE, which lasts approximately from 7 to 11 years of age, is the third Piagetian stage. In this stage, logical reasoning replaces intuitive reasoning as long as the reasoning can be applied to specific or concrete examples. Children at this stage can perform CONCRETE OPERATIONS - OPERATIONS are internalized actions that allow children to do mentally what they could formerly do only physically. In this stage, children acquire two type of abilities:

1) Children abandon CENTRATION and master CONSERVATION TASKS. Still children do not learn to conserve all quantities simultaneously, rather such abilities appear at different times in development - a concept Piaget called HORIZONTAL DÉCALAGE.
2) CLASSIFICATION, or the ability to classify things and to consider their relationships, emerges. Concrete operational children can understand SERIATION - the ordering of stimuli along a quantitative dimension - and TRANSITIVITY - which involves the ability to reason about and logically combine relationships (if A=B and B=C, then A=C).

Question 21

The FORMAL OPERATIONAL STAGE

Answer 21

The FORMAL OPERATIONAL STAGE, which appears between 11 and 15 years of age, is the fourth and final Piagetian stage. In this stage, individuals move beyond concrete experiences and think in abstract and more logical ways.
Adolescents engage in HYPOTHETICAL-DEDUCTIVE REASONING - they are able to solve a problem by developing hypothesis and evaluate the best course of action to follow.
ASSIMILATION dominates the initial development of formal operational thought - creating idealistic worlds - but then ACCOMMODATION catches up to restore balance.

This stage is characterised by ADOLESCENT EGOCENTRISM, is the heightened self-consciousness of adolescents, which is reflected in two concepts:

1) The IMAGINARY AUDIENCE refers to the aspect of adolescent egocentrism that involves feeling one is the center of everyone’s attention and sensing that one is on stage.
2) The PERSONAL FABLE is the part of adolescent egocentrism that involves an adolescent’s sense of personal uniqueness and invincibility.

Question 22

PIAGET and EDUCATION

Answer 22

Piaget provided a sound conceptual framework for viewing learning and education - some ideas in Piaget’s theory that can be applied to teaching:

1) Take a constructivist approach: children learn best when they are active and seek solutions for themselves;
2) Facilitate rather than direct learning: teachers should design situations that allow students to learn by doing and promote discovery.
3) Consider the child’s knowledge and level of thinking: teachers need to interpret what a student is saying and respond in a way that is not too far from the student’s level:
4) Promote the student’s intellectual health: children should not be pushed and pressured into achieving too much too early in their development.

Question 23

CRITICISMS to PIAGET’s THEORY of COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

Answer 23

CRITICISMS to PIAGET’s THEORY of COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT focus on:

1) ESTIMATES of COMPETENCE: recent theoretical revisions highlight more cognitive competencies of infants and young children and more cognitive shortcomings of adolescents and adults.
2) CULTURE and EDUCATION: culture and education exert stronger influences on children’s development than Piaget reasoned