Cognitive Development Theories Overview

Cognitive Development Theories

• Theoretical Framework: Defines the problems or questions the research aims to address using the scientific method. Researchers use predictions to support or modify theories. Results are interpreted within the theoretical framework.

• Theories of Cognitive Development: Provide a framework for understanding important phenomena, raising questions about human nature, and leading to a better understanding of children.

• Piaget's Theory: Focuses on nature and nurture, continuity and discontinuity, and the active child. Cognitive development involves a sequence of four stages:

  • Sensorimotor
  • Preoperational
  • Concrete operational
  • Formal operational

• Observation: 7-month-old infants don't reach for hidden objects out of view. Possible explanations are lack of memory, problem-solving skills, or motivation.

Children's Nature

• Children are mentally active from birth.
• Children's mental and physical activity contribute to their development.

Constructivist Approach to Cognitive Development

• Children construct knowledge through experience.
• Constructive processes include generating hypotheses, performing experiments, and drawing conclusions.
• Nature and nurture interact to produce cognitive development.
• Nature includes maturing brain/body, ability to perceive, act, and learn, and integrating observations.

Information Processing Theories

• Focus on the structure of cognitive systems and mental activities.
• Examines how nature and nurture work together to produce development.
• Emphasizes precise descriptions of change.
• Continuous, small incremental changes occur.
• Different ages are affected differently.
• Focuses on development of memory and problem-solving.
• Children process information as a limited capacity system, gradually overcoming these limitations.
• Focuses on: Expanding amount of information processed at a time, increasing processing speeds, gaining new strategies and knowledge, and brain maturation.

Core Knowledge Theories

• Children are born with some innate knowledge in special evolutionary fields.
• These children rapidly and effortlessly acquire more information in these fields.
• Understanding causes and effect, language, differentiating between living and nonliving, are all examples of domains learned.
• Children are innately motivated to explore the environment.

Sociocultural Theories

• Emphasize the influence of other people and the surrounding culture.
• Include guided participation (someone more knowledgeable helps children) and social scaffolding.
• Humans have special abilities to teach others, and the ability to learn from others.
• Examples of development are language, spatial abilities, and numerical abilities.
• Lev Vygotsky believed that children are social learners, and connected to others.

Dynamic Systems Theories

• Emphasizes continuous change in development.
• Emphasizes the interactions of a child with their surroundings.
• Children are innately motivated to explore their environment.
• Proposes that development is a process of self-organization.
• Incorporates attention, memory, emotions, and actions to adapt to a changing environment.

Perception and Sensation

• Perception: Organizing and interpreting sensory information.
• Sensation: Processing basic information from the environment.
• Vision: Preferential looking technique, Habituation, Visual Acuity, Colour perception, Contrast Sensitivity, Visual acuity in infancy, Talking faces in infancy
• Object Perception: Visual Cues, Perceptual Constancy, Object segregation
• Auditory Perception and Localization: How newborns react to and locate sounds.
• Intermodal Perception: Combining information from different senses.
• Taste and Smell: How newborns react to and learn about taste and smell.
• Touch: Learning about environments through touch.

Motor Development

• Reflexes: Innate, fixed action patterns that occur in response to stimulation.
• Motor Milestones: Basic movement patterns, differences in development across cultures.
• Modern Views: Brain maturation and confluence of factors influence development.

Learning and Memory

• Habituation: Decreasing response to a repeated stimulus. - Statistical Learning: Picking up statistically predictable patterns from the environment.
• Classical Conditioning: Associating stimuli with reflexive responses.
• Instrumental Conditioning: Learning through the relationship between behavior and consequences. Includes positive reinforcement.
• Observational Learning/Imitation: Learning by observing others.
• Infants' attention to intention & Mirror neuron studies: How infants understand intentions and how mirror neurons are linked.

Language Development

• Symbols: Representing thoughts, feelings, and knowledge.
• Generative: Producing an infinite number of sentences from a finite set of words.
• Components: Phonemes, morphemes, syntax, pragmatics.
• Phonological Development: Basic speech sounds.
• Semantic Development: Understanding words and meanings.
• Syntactical Development: Forming grammatically correct sentences.
• Pragmatic Development: Using language in social contexts.
• Communication: Private speech, collective monologues, narratives.
• Later Development: Complex grammar, understanding multiple meanings, improved comprehension, expanding vocabularies.
• Cross-situational Word Learning and Syntactic Bootstrapping: Learning word meanings and structure.