Cognitive Development in Childhood Flashcards
(13 cards)
Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development
Logical, deductive reasoning
* If A is true, then B; A is true, therefore B
* Not used in everyday situations: “If you’re naughty, you will not get a treat”
- Logically: No implication about good behaviour
- Everyday Assumption: You will get a treat as long as you’re not naughty
Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development
Stages of Development
- Sensorimotor (0-2 yrs): Intelligence expressed through sensory and motor abilities
- Pre-operational (2-7 yrs): Able to represent experiences in language, mental imagery, and symbolic through
- But unable to perform mental operations
- Concrete Operational (7-12 yrs): Able to reason logically about concrete processes
- Unable to reason purely abstractly or test hypotheses
- Formal Operational (12+ yrs): Able to reason about abstractions and hypothetical situations, generalise information and form experiments to test hypotheses
Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development
Piaget’s Tasks
At certain ages, children will fail these tasks, in a particular way, and at certain ages children will pass them
Conservation
* Presenting children with two quantities, establish they look the same and then transform them and once again ask i they look the same
* 7-8 years+ get it right
* Younger children: Apperance based reasoning and cannot mentally reverse the action
Mountain
* Ability to take perspectives
* 7-8 years+ get it right
* Younger children: Describe from own perspective (unable to transfer); Egocentric when young
Heirarchical Classification
* Presented with a superset with different subsets and asked whether there are more of the superset or more of a particular subset
* Younger children: Unable to think about the superset and the subset at the same time (can only draw on one grouping) and cannot mentally reverse operations
Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development
Conclusions of Piaget’s Tasks
- 6-7 y/o make these errors in reasoning, 8 y/o do not
- Young children:
- Reasoning is appearance-based not logically-based
- Unable to consider others’ points of view
- Unable to mentally reverse steps in reasoning or focus on more than one attribute
Limitations of Piaget’s Theory
Underestimates Children’s Abilities
Gergely et al. (2002): Rational Imitation
* 14 Months: Rationally imitate adult’s behaviour
* Suggests that they can infer others perspectives
Limitations of Piaget’s Theory
Does Not Distinguish Competence vs Performance
Important to distinguish what children “know” from what they can “do” in a task
- Context affects children’s performance
- McGarrigle (Donaldson, 1978)
- “Are there more brown kittens or more kittens?”
- “Are there more brown kittens or sleeping kittens?”
Children were able to pass the task
Limitations of Piaget’s Theory
Understates Context or Interaction
Culture and schooling affect performance
* Knowledge can be culture-specific
* Schooling emphasises certain processes
- E.g. logical structures to pass Piagetian tasks
- Implies role of adults not children in guiding learning
Children develop in social networks
* Interaction with others must influence development
Limitations of Piaget’s Theory
Overestimates the Role of Logical Thinking
Mental models
* Human reasoning is based in mental models that reflect our factual understanding of the world
* Reasoning: Build up a mental picture of the situation and then infer from that
* Sometimes this looks like valid logical reasoning on the surface, and sometimes not
Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Perspective
Continuous explanation for development, as speech improves, ability to follow instructions also improves
Importance of language for development
* Thought: Internalised speech
Children are social learners
* Interaction with more expert others scaffold learning
Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Perspective
Wood & Middleton (1975)
Mothers showed toddlers how to build a wooden pyramid and intervened in differing magnitudes
* Toddlers were more successful when mothers modulated responses to their behaviour
* Any failure on the child’s part resulted in an increase in the level of help
* Any success results in decreased level of help
* Empirical evidence for the effect of scaffolding
Information-Processing Theory
Cognitive development is related to processing abilities and grows continuously
* Increased processing capacity, speed, and acqusition of strategies and knowledge
Continuous explanation of development, abilities underlie thinking and reasoning but just increase in capacity and space as we age
* Involves constructivism: Takes experiences of the world and update and learn to change knowledge state
Draws on mind as a computer analogy
Information-Processing Theory
Dimensional Change Card Sorting Task
Children are asked to switch from sorting cards based on colour to sorting based on shapes
* 3 years: Can sort cards by a single dimension but fail to switch to second dimension
* 5 years: Can switch between sorting by two different dimensions (attention ability and working memory increased)
Information-Processing Theory
Schneider & Bjorklund (1992)
7 and 9 year old’s on memory recall or football items or unrelated items
* Children who were football experts recalled more football items than non-experts
* No difference for unrelated items
Knowledge helped them organise the information better allowing for it to remain in their memory easier
