1
Q
Who is Jean Piaget?
A
- father of field of cognitive development
- in 1920, worked a at the Binet Institute on intelligence tests
- he was intrigued by children’s wrong answers
- proposed that children’s thinking is qualitatively different from adults’ thinking and cognition grows and develops through a series of stages
2
Q
What are the stages in Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development?
A
- sensorimotor stage
- pre operational stage
- concrete operational stage
- formal operational stage
3
Q
What are the properties of Piaget’s theory?
A
- children at different stages think in qualitatively different ways
- thinking at each stage influences thinking across diverse topics
- brief transitional period at the end of each stage (showing both stages)
- the stages are universal (not culture dependent) and the order is always the same
4
Q
What is the sensorimotor stage?
A
- birth to 2 years
- infants live in the here and now
- gain knowledge about the world through movements and sensations
5
Q
What happens from 0 - 4 months according to Piaget?
A
- interact with world via reflexes and repeat pleasurable actions
- indicates interest in own bodies
6
Q
What happens from 4 - 8 months according to Piaget?
A
- repeat actions towards objects to produce a desired outcome
- indicates interest in the world, beyond own body
- allows for formation of connections between own actions and consequences in the world
7
Q
What happens from 8 - 12 months according to Piaget?
A
- combine several actions to achieve a goal
- indicates that actions are clearly intentional
- emergence of object permanence
8
Q
What is object permanence?
A
- understanding that objects continue to exist even through they can no longer be seen or heard
- develops around 8 months
- tested by seeing how a baby reacts to an object being hidden
9
Q
What is an A-not-B error?
A
- tendency to reach for a hidden object where it was last found rather than in the new location where it was last hidden
- evidence that initial object permanence is fragile
- disappears around 12 months
10
Q
What happens from 12 - 18 months according to Piaget?
A
- trial and error experiments to see how outcome changes
- allows for greater understanding of cause and effect relations
11
Q
What happens from 18 - 24 months according to Piaget?
A
- mental representation
- fully developed object permanence
- indicated by deferred imitation
- allows for symbolic thoughts
12
Q
What is the pre operational stage?
A
- from ages 2 - 7
- symbolic thought
- egocentrism
- centration
13
Q
What is symbolic thought?
A
- the ability to think about objects or events that are not within the immediate environment
- enables language acquisition
- ability to use symbolic representation
- ability to engage in pretend play and drawing
14
Q
What is egocentrism?
A
- perceiving the world solely from one’s own point of view
- difficulty taking another person’s spatial perspective
- egocentric speech
- sign of progress is an increase in children’s verbal arguments; means that child is at least paying attention to another perspective
15
Q
What is centration?
A
- tendency to focus on a single, perceptually striking feature of an object or event to the exclusion of other relevant features
- difficulties with conservation concept; merely changing the appearance of an object does not change the objects’ other key properties
- failure of conservation tasks
16
Q
What is the concrete operational stage?
A
- 7 - 12 years
- less egocentric so can think about others’ perspective
- can reason logically about concrete objects and events
- decentration
- reversibility
- seriation
- cannot think in purely abstract/hypothetical terms
17
Q
What is decentration?
A
- understanding that something can stay the same in quantity even though it looks different
18
Q
What is reversibility?
A
- the capacity to think through a series of steps and then mentally reverse direction, returning to the starting point
19
Q
What is seriation?
A
- the ability to order items along a quantitative dimension such as length or weight
20
Q
What is the formal operational stage?
A
- 12 years and up
- can think abstractly
- allows them to be interested in politics, ethics, science fiction, and to reason scientifically
- ability to engage deductive reasoning
- not universal (not all adolescents or adults reach it)
21
Q
What is Piaget’s pendulum problem?
A
- test of deductive reasoning
- determine the influence of weight and string length on the time it takes for the pendulum to swing back and forth
- unbiassed experiments require varying only one variable at a time
- children under 12 perform unsystematic experiments and draw incorrect conclusions
22
Q
How did Piaget think children learn?
A
- children’s progress through the stages is governed by brain maturation as well as exposure to certain concepts
- children actively shape their knowledge of the world; not passive
- children are capable of learning on their own
- children are intrinsically motivated to learn; don’t require rewards
23
Q
What are the strengths of Piaget’s theory?
A
- intuitively plausible depiction of children’s nature as active learners and how learning progresses
- provides a good overview of children’s thinking at different ages that is largely accurate
- exceptional breadth
- spans the lifespan
- examines many cognitive operations and concepts
24
Q
How do kids learn best?
A
- by interacting with the environment
- hands on learning
- experiments
25
What are the weaknesses of Piaget's theory?
- Piaget didn't use scientific method to develop theory
- theory depicts children's thinking as more consistent than it is
- theory is vague about the mechanisms of cognitive growth
- children are more cognitively competent than Piaget recognized
- theory underestimates the contribution of the social world to cognitive development
26
What is the nativist view of cognitive development?
- children have innate, specialized cognitive mechanisms that provide them with basic knowledge in domains of evolutionary importance
- these cognitive mechanisms also allow children to rapidly acquire additional knowledge in these important domains
27
What are the domains of evolutionary importance?
- understanding of physical laws
- numbers
- categorization
- understanding the minds of people
- language
28
What is understanding physical laws?
- have object permanence
- understand that solid objects can't go through another solid object
- understanding of gravity
29
When does object permanence develop according to nativists?
- before 8 months, as young as 3.5 months
- when lights are turned off, reach for object
- evidence for earlier object permanence
- Piaget's test too complex, haven't developed motor capacity to search
- use violation of expectation paradigm; drawbridge study
- innate understanding of physical properties of solid objects
30
What is the violation of expectation paradigm?
- adaption of habituation paradigm to study infant cognition
- infants are habituated to an event
- test: presented with possible and impossible event that are variations on the habituation event
- longer looking at the impossible event indicates that the infant possesses the knowledge being studied
31
Can infants understand gravity?
- 3 month olds do
- suggest innate, rudimentary understanding of gravity
32
What is understanding numbers?
- 6 months: detect difference in numbers in 2:1 ratio
- 9 months: discriminate displays in a 3:2 ratio
- since infants haven't learned to count, suggests they have an innate approximate number sense (ANS)
33
What is ANS?
- approximate number sense
- cognitive system that allows infants to intuitively estimate numbers and magnitudes
34
What is the relationship between ANS and math ability?
- positive correlation between infant ANS and preschool math ability
- suggests that ANS lays the foundation for later math ability
35
What is categorization?
- categorization begins in infancy
- 3 months: cat vs dog
- 6 months: mammal or not
- 9 months: 3 broad categories
36
What are the 3 broad categories 9 month olds use?
- people
- animals
- inanimate objects
37
Why is categorization important?
- helps make sense of the world by simplifying it
- allows children to make inferences and predictions about objects of the same category
38
What do infants concentrate on when forming categories?
- infants focus on similarities in shape when forming categories
- focus on similarities in shape results in difficulties understanding exceptions
39
How do children categorize objects beyond infancy (after a year)?
- by 2-3 years, children start to form category hierarchies
40
What are category hierarchies?
- organize object categories by set-subset relations
- allows for finer distinctions among objects within each level
- usually learn basic level first, because they have obvious similarities
41
What are the 3 levels in object categorization?
- superordinate: too general, less similar
- basic: general
- subordinate: too specific, too similar
42
What are criticisms of the nativist view?
- over estimate infants' innate, cognitive understanding
- findings of nativist studies can instead be explained by:
- perceptual features of stimuli: look longer because more interesting and not because they understand the concept
- learning from the environment: 3 months old are not newborns, have learned a lot about the world
