DEV Lecture 2 - Cognitive development

Jean Piaget (1896-1980)

• Piaget's work explores the psychology of children
• Some key topics include the origins of intelligence, and their conception of the world

Piaget's Cognitive Development Stages

• Learning occurs through various processes
• The Sensorimotor Stage occurs from 0-2 years
• The Preoperational Stage occurs from 2-7 years
• The Concrete Operational Stage occurs from 7-11 years
• The Formal Operational Stage occurs from 11+ years
• There are criticisms of his work

Piaget and Constructivism

• Children are active thinkers who constantly construct more advanced understandings
• Schemata are constructed as ways of understanding the world in the form of mental models, pattern of behavior and mental operations
• Learning occurs through equilibration, involving two processes that work together:
  • Assimilation is applying old schema to a new instance, like calling a cat a dog
  • Accommodation is developing a new schema, such as calling a cat a cat, even a Persian cat

Piagetian Stages

• The Sensorimotor Stage occurs from birth to 2 years
• The Preoperational Stage occurs from 2 to 7 years
• The Concrete Operational Stage occurs from 7 to 11 years
• The Formal Operational Stage occurs from 11 years and up

Sensorimotor Stage (0-2 years)

• This is the initial building block for everything else
• A child has limited skills here but they develop:
  • Sensory abilities like vision, touch, and hearing
  • Motor and Sensorimotor abilities
• Cognition develops through the understanding and representing of the surrounding world

Sensorimotor Stage, Primary, Secondary and Tertiary Circular Reactions

• Primary circular reactions are actions and responses that both involve an infant's own body, from 1-4 months
• Secondary circular reactions are when action gets a response from another person or object, leading the baby to repeat the original action. This happens from 4-8 months
• Tertiary circular reactions happen when actions gets one pleasing result, leading the baby to perform similar actions to get similar results. Happens from 12-18 months

Sensorimotor Stage and Object Permanence

• By the end of this stage, object permanence is developed
• 4 - 8 month olds - Laurent's reaction to falling objects is non-existent. There is a lack of visual tracking of dropped objects.
• 8 - 12 month olds - Children know occluded objects exist, known as basic object permanence.
• The child is still subject to the A not B error

The A-not-B Error

• By 12-18 months, children start to develop object permanence
• Object permanence needs a child be able to know:
  • That it exists when not looking at it
  • That it is where it was last acted upon, not elsewhere
• The second point, where the object was last acted upon, is where 8-12 month olds fail

End of the Sensorimotor Stage

• By 18–24 months, toddlers understand even invisible objects can move.
• This is Symbolic Representation, being knowledge even when not acting on an object

The Preoperational Stage (2-7 years)

• During the early part of this stage (pre-conceptual period 2-4 years), there is a rapid increase in language
• Symbolic thought develops
• Make-believe play and imitation arise here
• Children think symbolically, but do not use cognitive operations

Preoperational Egocentrism

• Asked what perspective a doll is seeing, preoperational children choose the one that matches theirs

Preoperational Conservation

• When shown to have the same number of counters in each row, early Preoperational children pass this task.
• Presented a row of counters spread further apart, preoperational children will fail this task

Preoperational Class Inclusion

• Preoperational children asked if there are more beads, or more brown beads, will often say brown beads
• Piaget claimed preoperational children are unable to consider both the full set and the subset at once

Concrete Operational Stage (7-11 years)

• Developed organized and rational thinking
• The ability to pass those tasks in an intuitive way is developed by the end of the preoperational period (5-7 years), but logical justification is only given in the concrete operational stage

More on Concrete Operational Stage (7-11 years)

• Children at this stage pass the egocentrism test as decentration has occurred, meaning there is an ability to consider different perspectives
• They pass the conservation test, meaning they understand:
  • Reversibility, an ability to imagine the opposite of a perceived transformation
  • Invariance, that things stay the same unless something is added or subtracted
• They pass the class inclusion test

Seriation and Transitive Inference

• Concrete operational children and up can sort sticks in order of length (seriation)
• Concrete operational children can compart two values by using their relations to an intermediate value, e.g. transitive interference occurs as A>B B>C A?C

Formal Operation Stage (11+)

• Reason logically about objects that are not currently present
• Conduct verbal reasoning, which deals with logical thought about totally hypothetical scenarios

Criticisms: Conservation

• Includes measuring equal length of sticks
• Includes measuring equal amounts of water
• Includes measuring equal masses of clay
• Includes measurement of area
• Include measurement of volume

Criticisms: Conservation

• Conservation tasks develop at different times. Number tasks are mostly achieved by 5-6 years, and volume tasks by 10-11 years
• This challenges Piaget’s stage-like view of development
• Piaget adapted his theory to include the idea that concepts acquired might not be immediately applied to all cases

Criticisms: Experimenter

• Children may think the experimenter is setting a trick
• Children have seen the experimenter make the change, so they think the experimenter is repeating the question because she wants a different answer this time.
• If naughty teddy makes the transformation children pass the test

Criticisms: Language

• Preoperational children fail the class inclusion task when asked ('Are there more brown beads or beads')
• If rephrased to emphasise the class, they pass!

Criticisms: Memory

• Memory is important in transitive inference
• Bryant and Trabasso (1971) argued the problem for children when inferring the difference between A and C was in remembering the premises (A>B and B>C)
• Children trained to remember these premises passed

Criticisms: Methods

• When looking time rather than reaching is used, children in the sensorimotor stage can exhibit object permanence (Kellman & Spelke, 1983)

Social Context and Cognitive development

• One of Piaget's fundamental ideas is that learning occurs through interaction with the environment
• Social context is sometimes ignored
• From this angle the individual constructs knowledge not through solitary interaction with the world or the environment, but in a social context.

Vygotsky (1896-1934) and Social Learning

• Vygotsky was a Russian Psychologist who wrote in the 1920's and 1930's
• His work was translated into English in the 1960's
• He believed what a child can do in co-operation today can be done alone tomorrow
• The child uses cultural tools like pens, paper, maths and language
• Children are taught by others

Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development

• The learner has a Zone of Proximal Development
• This is the distance between the actual developmental level and the level of potential development as determined when under adult guidance, or in collaboration with more capable peers.
• Teachers provide scaffolding for learning (Wood et al 1976; Bruner, 1986)

Summing Up Key Points

• Learning is a process of actively building on existent structures
• In the sensorimotor stage, reflexes become more complex actions, e.g. as the child learns to distinguish objects in the world, objects exist even if he or she cannot see them
• Initially children learn to manipulate mental representations in an intuitive way, then using logical processes
• Ideas progress to manipulating completely hypothetical concepts, as shown by progression on tasks like verbal reasoning
• Criticisms inspire asking whether a different conception of cognitive development is possible