Cognition and development

Question 1

Howe et al (1992) (evaluation)

Answer 1

+ of Piaget’s cognitive development
Put children aged between 9 and 12 years in groups of 4 to study and discuss movements of objects down a slope.
Understanding of topic was assessed before and after the discussion.
Following the working together and discussing of topics, the children were found to have increased their level of knowledge and understanding

Question 2

Comparison to Vygotsky (evaluation)

Answer 2

Weakness of Piaget’s cognitive development
Other theories of learning and cognitive development and a range of research findings suggest that other people are absolutely central to the processes of learning. For example, Vygotsky proposed that learning is essentially a social process, and that children are capable of much more advanced learning if this is supported by peers or an expert adult.

Question 3

Class inclusion

Answer 3

An advanced classification skill in which we recognise that classes of objects have subsets and are themselves subsets of larger classes.

Question 4

Sensorimotor

Answer 4

0-2 years

• Early focus on physical sensations and developing basic physical co-ordination.
• Children learn they can move their bodies and other objects.
• They also develop an understanding that other people are separate objects and acquires some basic language.
• At 8 months, the child is capable of understanding object permanence.

Question 5

Pre-operational

Answer 5

2-7 years

• Is mobile and can use language by 2 years old
• Lacks reasoning ability
• Lack understanding of conservation and class inclusion
• Egocentric

Question 6

Concrete operational

Answer 6

7-11 years

• Better reasoning ability (what Piaget called operations)
• These reasoning abilities however can only be applied to physical objects in the child’s presence.
• Now perform much better on tasks of egocentrism and class inclusion.
• Still struggle to reason about abstract ideas and to imagine objects or situations they cannot see

Question 7

Formal operational

Answer 7

11+
- Children become capable of formal reasoning. This means that children become able to focus on the form of an argument and not be distracted by its content.

Question 8

Smith et al (1998)

Answer 8

Formal reasoning by means of syllogisms, for example: ‘all yellow cats have two heads. I have a yellow cat called Charlie. How many heads does Charlie have?’ The correct answer is ‘two’.
Piaget found that younger children became distracted by the content and answered that cats do not really have two heads.

Question 9

Class inclusion (experiment)

Answer 9

Piaget and Inhelder (1964)
Children under the age of seven struggle with class inclusion.
When they showed 7-8- year old children pictures of five dogs and two cats and asked, 'are there more dogs or animals?' children tended to respond that there were more dogs.
He interpreted this as meaning that younger children cannot simultaneously see a dog as a member of the dog class and the animal class.

Question 10

McGarrigle and Donaldson (1972) (evaluation)

Answer 10

Weakness of Piaget’s intellectual development
James McGarrigle and Margaret Donaldson (1972) replicated the standard Piaget tasks with 4-6-year-olds and found that most children answered incorrectly. However, when a ‘naughty teddy; appeared and knocked the counters together, 72% correctly said there were the same number of counters as before.

Question 11

Sielger and Svetina (2006) (evaluation)

Answer 11

Weakness of Piaget's intellectual development
100 5-year-olds from Slovenia
3 sessions of 10 class-inclusion tasks, receiving an explanation afterwards
Condition one: told there must be more animals than dog as there were 9 animals and six dogs
Condition two: more animals as dogs are animals (class inclusion)
Score across the three sessions improved more for the latter group, suggesting a real understanding of class inclusion.

Question 12

Children with ASD (evaluation)

Answer 12

Weakness of Piaget’s intellectual development
Children with learning difficulties develop language, reasoning and egocentrism separately, though Piaget suggests that it develops in tandem.
Children with Asperger syndrome are very egocentric but develop normal reasoning and language. Children with other types of ASD typically have problems with language and egocentrism.

Question 13

Modern studies vs Piaget’s intellectual development (evaluation)

Answer 13

Weakness of Piaget's intellectual development
Studies have shown that pre-operational children are capable of understanding conservation and class inclusion. 
They have also shown that pre-op children tend to be less egocentric than suggested by Piaget.

Question 14

Differences between Piaget and Vygotsky

Answer 14

Differing from Piaget, Vygotsky saw cognitive development as a social process of learning from more experienced others (experts).
Knowledge is first intermental, between the more and less expert individual, then intramental, within the mind of the less expert individual.
He also saw language as a much more important part of cognitive development than Piaget did.

Question 15

What allows children to cross the ZPD?

Answer 15

Expert assistance

Question 16

How do children develop more understanding of a situation?

Answer 16

By learning from others

Question 17

When do children develop more advanced reasoning abilities?

Answer 17

During social interaction

Question 18

Wood, Bruner and Ross (1976) - 5 aspects to scaffolding

Answer 18

5 aspects to scaffolding:
Recruitment: engaging a child’s interest in the task.
Reduction of degrees of freedom: focusing the child on the task and where to start with solving it
Direction maintenance: encouraging the child in order to help them stay motivated.
Marking critical features: highlighting the most important parts of the task
Demonstration: showing the child how to do it
They also noted particular strategies that experts use when scaffolding

Question 19

Levels of help with scaffolding

Answer 19

1. General prompts
2. Specific verbal instructions
3. Indication of materials
4. Preparation for child
5. Demonstration

Question 20

Roazzi and Bryant (1998) (evaluation)

Answer 20

Strength of Vygotsky
Gave 4-5-year-old children the task of estimating the number of sweets in a box.
Condition 1: children worked alone
Condition 2: children worker with older child
In condition 1, they failed to give a good estimate. In condition 2, the expert children were observed to offer prompts, pointing the younger children in the right direction. They successfully mastered the task.
Supports ZPD

Question 21

Van Keer and Verhaeghe (2005) (evaluation)

Answer 21

Strength of Vygotsky
Found that 7-year-olds tutored by 10y/os, in addition to their whole-class teaching, progressed further in reading than controls who just had standard whole-class teaching.

Question 22

Alborz et al (2009) (evaluation)

Answer 22

Strength of Vygotsky
Also, a review of the usefulness of teaching assistants (Alborz et al, 2009) concluded that teaching assistants are very effective at improving the rate of learning in children provided they have received appropriate training.

Question 23

Howe (evaluation)

Answer 23

Weakness of Vygotsky

what children learn varies considerably between individuals, even in group learning situations

Question 24

Baillargeon and Graber (1987) procedure

Answer 24

Showed 24 infants, aged 5-6 months, a tall and a short rabbit pass behind a screen with a window.
Possible condition: the tall rabbit can be seen passing the window, but the short one cannot.
Impossible condition: neither rabbit appeared at the window.

Question 25

Other VOE experiments

Answer 25

Have studied infant understanding of containment and support

Question 26

Support

Answer 26

An object should fall when unsupported but not when it is on a horizontal surface.

Question 27

Physical reasoning system

Answer 27

An innate system that provides a framework for reasoning about the displacements and interactions of physical objects.

Question 28

Event categories

Answer 28

Each event category corresponds to one way in which objects interact e.g. occlusion events take place when one object blocks the view of another.

Question 29

Hespos and van Marle (2012) (evaluation)

Answer 29

Strength of Baillargeon We all have a very good understanding of the basic properties of physical objects, even without experience. They use the example of dangling keys - we all know that if we let go of a key ring it will fall to the floor. This understanding is universal, which strongly suggests that this system is innate.

Question 30

Pei et al (2007) (evaluation)

Answer 30

Strength of Baillargeon Shows that infants can use crude patterns to judge distance from an early age, but that experience is required to make use of more subtle texture differences.

Question 31

Bremner (2013) (evaluation)

Answer 31

Weakness of Baillargeon Piaget distinguished between acting in accordance with a principle and understanding that principle. Just because the babies stared doesn't mean that they understand the way the world works.

Question 32

Selman's approach to understanding cognitive development

Answer 32

Domain-specific approach: physical and social-perspective-taking occur at different points

Question 33

Stage 0 - socially egocentric

Answer 33

Age 3-6 - Cannot reliably distinguish between their own emotions and those of others. - Can generally identify emotional states in others but do not understand what social behaviour might have caused them.

Question 34

Schultz, Selman and La Russo (2003) three aspects to social development

Answer 34

Three aspects to social development: - Interpersonal understanding - Interpersonal negotiation strategies - Awareness of personal meaning of relationships

Question 35

Interpersonal understanding

Answer 35

If we can take different roles, then this shows we can understand social situations.

Question 36

Awareness of personal meaning of relationships

Answer 36

As well as understanding social situations and how to manage them, social development requires the ability to reflect on social behaviour in the context of life history and the full range of relationships.

Question 37

Gurucharri and Selman (1982) (evaluation)

Answer 37

Strength of Selman Did longitudinal follow-up studies, which have shown that perspective-taking develops with age in each individual child. This shows that his earlier cross-sectional research was not simply the result of individual differences in social-cognitive ability in children in different groups.

Question 38

Marton et al (2009) (evaluation)

Answer 38

Strength of Selman Compared 50 8-12-year-old children with a diagnosis of ADHD with a control group on performance on perspective-taking tasks like those used by Selman. Those with ADHD did worse on understanding the scenarios, identifying the feelings of each person involved and evaluation the consequences of different actions.

Question 39

Gasser and Kelly (2009) (evaluation)

Answer 39

Weakness of Selman Found that bullies displayed no difficulties in perspective-taking, which shows that perspective-taking may not be an important factor in the development of socially desirable behaviour.

Question 40

Autism

Answer 40

An umbrella term for a wide range of symptoms. All disorders on the spectrum share impairments to three main areas: empathy, social communication and social imagination.

Question 41

Baron-Cohen et al (1985) participants

Answer 41

20 high-functioning children diagnosed as being ASD and control groups of 14 children with Down's syndrome and 27 without a diagnosis were individually administered the Sally-Anne test.

Question 42

Baron-Cohen et al (1985) findings

Answer 42

85% of children in the control groups correctly identified where Sally would look for her marble. Only 20% of the ASD children were able to answer this. This difference demonstrates that ASD involves a ToM deficit.

Question 43

Perner et al (1994) (evaluation)

Answer 43

Strength of ToM ToM appears earlier in children from large families. Having a large family and older siblings means that a child is challenged to think about the feelings of others when resolving conflicts.

Question 44

Liu et al (2004) (evaluation)

Answer 44

Strength of ToM Compared over 300 Chinese and North American children in terms of ToM. They found a similar sequence of development in both groups, but the timing differed by as much as two years in different communities, supporting the role of both biological and experiential factors.

Question 45

Sampling issues with ASD and TOM (evaluation)

Answer 45

Weakness of ToM Baron-Cohen's sample was entirely British, and this approach to understanding autism has a very Western perspective. Maguire (2013) has suggested that the higher rates diagnosed in the West might be explained by the idea that symptoms associated with autism are not considered abnormal by some cultures. Therefore, our view that the lack of social interaction is a problem to be solved is not a universal perspective.

Question 46

Gallese and Goldman

Answer 46

- Suggested that mirror neurons respond not just to observed actions but to intentions behind behaviour. - Rather than the common-sense view that we interpret people's actions with reference to our memory, they suggested that we simulate other's actions in our motor system and experience their intentions using our motor neurons.

Question 47

Haker et al (2012) (evaluation)

Answer 47

Strength of ToM Demonstrated that an area of the brain believed to be rich in mirror neurons is involved in contagious yawning. fMRIs found that when people watched others yawn, they yawned in response, which showed considerable activity in Brodmann's area, an area in the right frontal lobe believed to be rich in mirror neurons.

Question 48

Mouras et al (2008) (evaluation)

Answer 48

``` Strength of ToM Male participants watch either fishing documentaries, Mr. Bean or heterosexual pornography. Brain activity was measured by fMRI and arousal by a pressure sensitive penis ring. Pars opercularis (an area in the Brodmann's area) activity was seen immediately before sexual arousal. ```

Question 49

Hadjikhani (2007) (evaluation)

Answer 49

Strength of ToM Found using structural brain scans that people with ASD have shown a smaller average thickness for the pars opercularis in participants on the autistic spectrum.

Question 50

Mixed findings (evaluation of ToM)

Answer 50

Weakness of ToM However, not all findings like Hadjikhani's have been replicated consistently and evidence linking ASD to mirror neurons is mixed.

Question 51

Hickok (2009) (evaluation)

Answer 51

Weakness of ToM Questioned whether or not mirror neurons even do. He proposed that we only know mirror neurons by what they do and that we cannot actually identify individual cells and point to their differences from other neurons.