What are sources of Continuity to Piaget
Assimilation
- Incorporate incoming information into concepts they already understand
Accommodation
- Improve their current understanding in response to new experiences
Equilibration
- Balance assimilation and accommodation to create stable understanding.
Central properties of piaget stage theory
- Qualitative change
- Broad applicability
- Generasibility
- Brief transitions
- Brief transitional period between old,less advanced and new, advanced thinking
- Invariant sequence
- Cannot skip
What are the 4 criticisms of Piaget
- Stage model depicts children’s thinking as being more consistent than it is
- Infants and young children are more cognitively competent than Piaget recognized
- Piaget’s theory understates the contribution of the social world to cognitive development.
- Piaget’s theory is vague about the cognitive processes that give rise to children’s thinking and about the mechanisms that produce cognitive growth
Elaborate criticism 1: Stage model depicts children’s thinking as being more consistent than it is.
- Piaget
- Enter stage = Shows characteristics of stage over diverse concepts
- Reality:
- Far more variable
- Most children succeed on conservation-of-number problems by age 6, whereas most do not succeed on conservation-of-solid-quantity problems until age 8 or 9 (Field, 1987)
- Piaget recognized variability exists but underestimated its extent
- Far more variable
Elaborate criticism 2: Infants and young children are more cognitively competent than Piaget recognized
- Piaget
- Difficult test = Miss earliest knowledge of concept
- Object permanence = hidden object after a delay (Claim until 8/9months)
- Difficult test = Miss earliest knowledge of concept
- Baillargeon (1987)
- Alternative tests of object permanence = hidden object without delay
- (Claim until 3 months)
- Alternative tests of object permanence = hidden object without delay
Elaborate criticism 3: Piaget’s theory understates the contribution of the social world to cognitive development.
Cognitive development reflects contributions of other people, as well as of the broader culture, to a far greater degree than Piaget’s theory acknowledges
Elaborate criticism 4: Piaget’s theory is vague about the cognitive processes that give rise to children’s thinking and about the mechanisms that produce cognitive growth
- Unclear about the processes that (a) lead children to think in a particular way and (b) produce changes in their thinking.
- E.g. Assimilation, accommodation, and equilibration have an air of plausibility, but how they operate is unclear.
What are 3 alternative theories to Piaget
- Information-processing
- Sociocultural
- Dynamic-systems
1.) Information-Processing. What is it. What are some compnents?
- Focus on specific mental processes underlying children’s thinking
- Working Memory
- LTM
- EF
- Development of memory and learning reflects improving in basic processess, strategies nad knowledge
1.) Information-Processing. Key Features
- Precise specification of the processes involved in children’s thinking
- e.g. Identification of goals, mental processes
- Quantitative change with age
1.) Information-Processing: What do they see the child as
- Limited processing system: Limited
- Processing capacity
- Speed of thought processes
- Availability of useful strategies and knowledge
- Children slowly surmount limits by
- Expansion of the amount of information they can process at one time
- Increases in the speed with which they execute thought processes
- Acquisition of new strategies and knowledge.
2.) Social-cultural. What is it. Who is the founder
- Focused on the way the social world moulds development
- Vgotsky
- Children as social learners/teachers
2.) Social-cultural. Key features
- Intersubjectivity
- The mutual understanding people share in communication
- (Joint attention)
- The mutual understanding people share in communication
- Social Scaffolding
- More competent people provide a temporary framework that supports children’s thinking at a higher level than children could manage on their own
- Guided Participation
- More knowledgeable individuals organize activities in ways that allow less knowledgeable people to engage in them at a higher level than they can manage alone
3.) Dyanamic Systems: What do they view change as
- Change as the one constant in development
- Rather than depicting development as being organized into long periods of stability and brief periods of dramatic change
3.) Dynamic Systems: Key Features
- Integrating components as needed to adapt to a continuously changing environment.
- Attaining goals requires action as well as thought. Thought shapes action, but action also shapes thought.
Main Themes Addressed by Theories of Cognitive Development
Piagetian: Continuity/discontinuity, The active child
Information-processing: Mechanisms for Change
Sociocultural: influence of the sociocultural context, Mechanisms for Change
Core Knowledge Theory: Mechanisms for Change, Nature
Vision in Infancy
Relatively immature
- Poor acuity (20/600)
- 6 months
- Low contrast sensitivity
- Minimal colour vision
- 1 Month
- Depth Perception
- Binocolour and Object Segregation: 4 Months
- Pictorial: 7 months
Audition in Infacy
Relatively well-developed
Auditory Localistion
- Newborns turn head to localise a sound
Music Perception
- Newborns perceive patterns in auditory stimulation
Smell in Infancy
Learn to identify mother by scent
Touch in Infancy
Active exploration
Motor Devlepment in Infancy
“Motor Milestones”
- Starts with Reflexes
- Reflects development of strength, posture control, balance, perceptual skills
- 2 Months: Head
- 2.5 Months: Rolling
- 3 Months: Sits propped up
- 6 Months: Sits without support
- 6.5 Months: Stands holding up
- 9 Months: Walk Hollding
- 10 Month: Stand momentarily
- 11 Month: Stand alone
- 12 Month: Walk alone
- 14 Month: Walk Backward
- 17 Months: Upstairs
- 20 Months: Kick Ball
How do infants learn
- Habituation
- Active exploration
- Perceptual learning
- Conditioning (Classical and instrumental)
- 6 Months: Observational Learning
How do we assess infant’s cognition? (New methods). What did they reveal?
Violation-of-expectancy
- Infants can mentally represent insivible objects
- 3.5 mo displayed surprised at impossible event
- Infants display understanding of gravity
- 7 mo (but not 5 mo) looked longer
when the ball moved up the slope than when it moved down, indicating that they had expected the ball to go down
- 7 mo (but not 5 mo) looked longer
