Cognition def
Refers to the mental processes involved in gaining knowledge and comprehension
What is Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development?
- suggests that childrens intelligence undergoes changes as they grow. They are invariant (pass through any stages in the same sequence without skipping any).
- cognitive development in children occurs through interaction of innate capacities with environmental events. They are universal (the same for everyone, irrespective of culture)
- Piaget suggested that children sort the knowledge they acquire through their experiences and interaction into groupings known as schemas. These are the basic building blocks of intelligent behaviour.
- when new information is acquired, it can either be assimilated into existing schemas or accommodated through revising an existing schemas or creating an entirely new category of information.
What are the 4 schema development stages
- Assimilation – child builds a theory e.g. this is a cat
- Equilibrium – everything seems to fit this theory e.g. this is still a cat
- Disequilibrium – something happens to cast doubt on the theory e.g. is it a cat?
4. Accommodation – new information is added into the schema e.g. there are many cats
What are the four types of schemas and give examples for each one
- Person schemas - e.g. appearance, personality, preferences, behaviour
- Social schemas – e.g. be respectful, pay for movie tickets, don’t eat garlic
- Self schemas – e.g. future doctor, hate broccoli, smart, funny
- Event schemas – e.g. professionalism, handshake, business suit, portfolio
evaluation for Piaget‘s theory
– Real world application – has been applied to education as the main principles state that children are active, not passive learners, they need to discover for themselves, there are certain concepts that are beyond their reach until they have acquired the appropriate schemas to deal with them, teachers need to recognise this and provide appropriate materials to challenge them
- Howe et al support Piaget‘s theory that children form individual representations of the world, despite having similar learning experiences – supports the idea that they are active learners. he did a task with a rolling ball and asked children about it afterwards - each child understood it, but had individual interpretations of it.
– However, the theory focuses heavily on the child being an independent learner and fails to recognise the role of learning as a social process
– places great emphasis on internal motivation as being a key driving force for children to learn. This may be true for some children, and definitely true for his own children (too small of a sample) whom he used in his studies. This is not true for all children and the role of motivation is overstated in his theory.
- the idea of schemas lacks falsifiability as cannot be tested scientifically.
What are Piaget’s stages of cognitive development and describe each
- Sensorimotor stage – first two years:
– Physical sensations and developing some basic physical coordination
– the baby also develops an understanding that people are separate objects and they acquire some basic language
– object permanence – the understanding that objects still exist when they are out of sight. - Preoperational stage – 2 to 7 years
– The toddler is mobile and can use language but still likes adult reasoning ability
– class ilusion – the basic mathematical understanding that quantity remains constant even when the appearance of objects change
– Piaget demonstrated this in his number conservation experiments. He placed two rows of eight identical counters side-by-side. Young children correctly reason that each row of counties have the same number. However, when the counters in one of the roads were pushed closer together preoperational children struggle to conserve and usually said there were fewer counters in that row
– egocentrism – to see the world only from one’s own point of view. This was demonstrated in the three mountains task, in which children were shown three model mountains each with a different feature – across, a house or snow. A door was placed at the side of the models that it faced the scene from a different angle from the child . The child was asked to choose what the door would see from a range of pictures and preoperational children tended to find this difficult and often chose a picture that match the scene from their own point of view
– plus inclusion – children begin to understand classification – the idea that objects fall into categories - Concrete operational stage – 7 to 11 years
– Children perform much better on tasks of egocentrism and class illusion
– however, these operations are strictly concrete as they can only be applied to physical objects in the child’s presence. They still struggle to reason with abstract ideas/imagine objects/situations they cannot see - Formal operational stage – ages 12 and up
– Children are able to focus on the form of an argument and not be distracted by its content
– children are able to argue abstract ideas and are capable of scientific reasoning
The sequence of stages is universal across cultures and follow the same invariant – unchanging – order. All children go to the same stages in the same order, but not all at the same rate.
Evaluation to Piaget’s stages of intellectual development
– Research was flawed – children taking part in conservation studies may have been influenced by seeing the experiment to change the appearance of the counties or liquid
- Martin Hugues contradicted Piaget’s view of egocentrism – he found that when children were tested with imaginary situations that made more sense, children were able to imagine other perspectives much earlier than Piaget proposed
Describe how Vgotsky’s approach is similar and dissimilar to Piaget’s
- he was constructivist, like Piaget: new experiences/ understandings incorporated into existing cognitive frameworks
- piagets theory is structural, but Vygosty denies the existence of any guiding framework independant of culture and context. Vygotsky also focuses on the importance of sociability in learning, whereas Piaget focuses on the individual
What are the key points of Vgotsky’s theory
Describe the zone of proximal development, as described by Vygotsky
Describe scaffolding, as described by Vygotsky
Evidence for Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory
Evaluate Vygotsky’s theory
- Connor and Cross also supported the theory. They used a longitudinal study on children, observing them in problem-solving tasks with their mothers. Distinctive changes in the help appeared over time - mothers used less direct intervention and more hints and prompts as the child gained experience. (So ‘expert’ assistance is well described by the concept of scaffolding)
- real world application: raised expectations to a growth mindset.childrens education altered to scaffold children through their ZPD
- Dasen: research support - found that spatial awareness developed earlier in aboriginal children than Swedish children. This supports Vygotsky’s idea that learning is a social process which is therefore dependant on culture.
Outline Baillargeon’s Explanation of Early Infant Abilities
Physical reasoning system def
What is violation of expectation research
Describe the conditions and findings of Baillageron’s experiment on infants
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Describe the findings of Baillageron’s experiment on infants
Explain why babies show surprise in occlusion events
Evaluation of Baillargeon’s explanation of early infant abilities
Describe the differences between Piaget’s and Selman’s research into perspective- taking
Piaget:
- physical perspective taking (egocentrism) demonstrated with the three mountains task
- believed in domain-general cognitive development, so believed that physical and social perspective-taking occur hand in hand
Selman:
- social perspective taking: what someone else is thinking or feeling (social cognition)
- believed in a domain- specific cognitive development - that the development of social perspective- taking is a separate process
Describe Selman’s research into perspective taking
Evaluation of Selman’s research into perspective taking
- research support: there is a lot of evidence from longitudinal studies showing that perspective- taking becomes more advanced with age. Such studies have followed children over a period of time and recorded improvements in their perspective taking (e.g Gurucharri and Selman 1982). Longitudinal studies have a high validity as they control for individual differences.
- research support into the importance of perspective - taking into healthy social development. Buijzen and Valkenburg: observed interactions in shops, including interactions in which parents refused to buy things the child wanted. The researchers noted any coercive behaviour from the child, which is an example of unhealthy social behaviour. The study found negative correlations between coercive behaviour, age and perspective taking ability (assessed by interview)
- Nature or Nurture? There is some evidence for cultural differences in perspective taking ability. Wu and Keysar: compared American and matched Chinese children and found that the Chinese children were significantly more advanced. However, Selman believed that his stages of perspective-taking were based primarily on cognitive maturity (i.e biologically driven) and hence universal.
What are Selman’s stages of development (concluded from his research into perspective-taking)
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Research methods106
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Memory - PAPER 131
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Learning Approaches37
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Attachment - PAPER 134
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Psychopathologies - PAPER 124
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Social Influence - PAPER 131
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Maths In Psychology3
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Biopsychology73
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Issue And Debate53
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Cognition And Development41
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Forensics54
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Schizophrenia48
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Research Methods - Key Definitions95
