L9 - Children's Early Conceptions of the Physical World Flashcards
What is Piaget’s Constructivist theory?
1954
Chaotic perceptual input in infancy
Action is necessary for the child’s construction of knowledge
Late development of conceptual understanding about the world of objects
What is nativism - Spelke, Baillargeon
Core knowledge hypothesis
Infants possess innate knowledge of object concepts
Core principles
What are the core principles of nativism?
Solidity - No two objects can occupy the same space at one time
Cohesion - Objects are connected masses of stuff that move as a whole
Contact - Objects move through contact
Continuity - Objects move in continuous paths
What does developmental change involve?
Refinement of core concepts (rather than their radical change) and further changes in additional abilities
E.g. experience fine-tunes knowledge about support
What is Karmiloff-Smith’s theory of physical knowledge?
Genes specify initial constraints / predispositions that channel attention to relevant environmental inputs
Provide the infant with a non-chaotic system from the outset
Lead to implicit understanding
Developmental change is necessary - change from implicit to explicit knowledge within the domain of physical understanding (representational redescription)
What is Piaget’s account of object permanence?
Object permanence happens late 8-9 months old
Infants have to learn through interaction with the world
When a toy was hidden under the cloth they didn’t know where it was or show interest with the cloth
What is the A not B error ?
Infant searches for a hidden object where they last found it rather than its current location
Occurs 8-12 months
They believe the action of them removing the cloth makes the object appear
What does new research tell us about object permanence?
Studies that don’t require manual reaching suggest much earlier competencies
Manual search vs looking time
What was Baillargeon 1985 drawbridge study?
6 months
a) habituation event
b) possible event
c) impossible event
Infants looked longer at the impossible event
Event though the impossible event was more similar to habituation - less novel as they look more at novel things
According to Baillargeon, findings show infants understand abject continues to exist when hidden
Data challenges Piaget
What are the alternative interpretations for permanence and solidity?
Perceptual persistence (Haith, 1998) - still had the perception of the block being there
Preference for events that display more motion (Rivera, 1999) - longer looking time at the one that’s moving the most because it is interesting
Even without hidden object they still looked longer at the 180 degree rotation
What are search errors?
Discrepancy between early looking data and later search errors
Infants 2 and older have knowledge but unable to use it to guide their actions
Suggests early cognitive development involves constructing knowledge-action links rather than constructing knowledge itself
What are the possible reasons for search errors?
Limited problem solving abilities
Frontal cortex immaturity
Weaker representations that are sufficient to perform in looking tasks, but not in manual retrieval
Early representations are implicit
What is representational re-description?
Model of cognitive development by Karmiloff-Smith 1992
Implicit, procedural knowledge
Representational re-description - can’t manipulate it
Explicit, declarative knowledge - available to the mind
How does support develop?
Gradual mastery over firs year
Increased sophistication
Role of experience of playing with and placing objects
What is the children’s naive theory?
Conceptual frameworks children spontaneously generate to make explanations and predictions about the world
- Simplifications e.g. adding ED to the end of a word to make it past tense
- Misunderstandings
Resistant to counter-evidence
