Week 3 Cognitive Development Flashcards
What is cognitive development?
how thinking processes/mental activities change with age and experience
as adolescents, gain better understanding and control of this!
What is Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development?
- discontinous (b/c it has stages)
- everyone had these cognitive stages at a particular age and specific system of logic
What cognitive processes did Piaget talk about in his theory?
Adaptation!
- occured through:
1. assimilation –> interpreting new experiences with existing themes
2 accommodation –> taking new info and creating a new scheme (doesn’t fit into another scheme)
You see a cow and you know what a dog looks like but you are able to understand that a cow is not a dog so you make a new scheme in your mind. Is this accommodation or assimilation?
accommodation
When a person sees a cow but says dog, what does this mean?
using Assimilation
What is the most relevant stage of Piaget’s theory for our class?
Formal-operational period
What skills develop during the Formal-operational period?
- hypthetico-deductive reasoning
-become more proficient at inductive reasoning
What is hypthetico-deductive reasoning?
when you can reason from a hypothesis to deduce a conclusion
reasoning by making a logical prediction based on some supposition and then checks the prediction against reality
What is inductive reasoning?
Making assumptions and inferences
ex: when we are younger we don’t understand death but as an adolescent we are able to understand it’s the end of consciousness
What two things did David Elkind come up with in relation to adolescent egocentrism?
- imaginary audience (ex: everyone is staring at your pimple)
- personal fable (ex: no one understands me!)
What is adolescent egocentrism?
assume that other people’s points of view are the same as one’s own
in formal operation, it becomes more INTERNAL
What is Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory?
social interactions are much more improtant to development
cognitive development is driven by interactions with other people who are more knowledgable
consists of zone of proximal development (zone of what a learner can learn on their own and with guidance from a more skilled person)
How is cognition analyzed in the “information-processing theory”?
take info –> pay attention to it –> compare and combine it with other info –> generate a response
- hardware = specific part of brain
- software = executive fxn
- see slide 47
What elements of “processing” develop in adolescence (x4)?
- better selective attention
-better divided attention - improved processing speed
- use less “fuzzy traces”
What are “fuzzy traces”?
where we store info in memory in inexact traces that preserve only the gist of the info
- ex: you are lost and you remember certain buildings of the route to retrace your steps
