Piaget's Theories of Cognitive Development

Theories of Cognitive Development

• Piaget's theory focuses on cognitive development from infancy through adolescence
• Jean Piaget created the first comprehensive theory
• He started as a zoologist, studied philosophy (epistemology), shifted to psychology and studied under Carl Jung
• He developed reading tests for school-aged children and was interested in their reasoning process by looking at the mistakes they made
• Discovery: children think differently compared to adults
• Piaget systematically observed his own three kids-> their development became a basis for some his theory

Basic Theory Principles

• Child as a scientist is an active, intrinsically motivated learner
• Schemas are mental structures or concepts in a child’s mind
• Assimilation is when new experiences are readily incorporated into existing theories
• Accommodation happens when existing theories are modified based on the experience
• Equilibration occurs when the process where children recognize their schemas and move to the next stage
• Three reorganizations of theories lead to four cognitive-development stages
• Qualitative change is considered a key property of the theory, where stage 1 is different than stage 2
• Other key properties include broad applications across contexts and topics, brief transitions, and invariant sequence

Sensorimotor Stage (0-2 years)

• 0-1 months exhibit basic reflexes like moral and sucking
• 1-4 months engage in primary circular reactions, infants accidentally do something pleasant and then intentionally try to repeat it, focusing on their own body
• 4-8 months engage in secondary circular reactions, discovering objects (sounds, senses and objects produced)
• 8-12 months exhibit intentional behavior, and understand that the means isn't the ends
• 12-18 months engage in tertiary circular reactions, using old actions with new objects and learning about different outcomes
• 18-24 months use symbols through gestures and words
• Deferred imitation is behavior previously seen being reproduced and is learned at 14 months.
• Object permanence is the understanding that objects continue to exist even when hidden, starting around 8 months and fully developed by 18 months
• The A-not-B-error happens because infants cannot tell objects and actions apart, caused by inhibition, reinforcement, visual attention, and visual distinctiveness
• Infants start with reflexes and end with symbols, with key achievements including object permanence and symbol use

Preoperational Stage (2-7 years)

• Continued symbol use such as graphs, maps, models
• Egocentrism is the tendency to perceive the world solely from one's own point of view
• There is difficulty with the "Three mountains" task criticism for being too complex and unfamiliar
• It requires 2 distinct sets of skills (cognitive and social) + their interaction
• The ability to perceive another person's point of view was present starting at 3 years, with 4-5-year-olds getting most answers right
• Animism credits inanimate objects with life-like properties as a result of attributing own thoughts/feelings to others
• Centration is the tendency to focus on a perceptually striking feature of an object or event
• Children start with symbols, end with something logic-ish Key characteristics: egocentrism, animism, centration

Concrete Operational Stage (7-11 years)

• Children begin to reason logically about the world and can solve conversation problems
• Thinking is based on mental operations which are strategies and rules that make thinking more systematic and powerful
• Reversibility is knowing that an object's quality can be restored by reversing the change. Key characteristics: Decentration, conservation, classification
• Limitations: focus on the real and concrete, instead of the abstract
• They start with logic and finish with abstract thinking

Formal Operational (11+ years)

• Abstract and hypothetical thinking is the developed ability to think about ideas, principles, and scenarios not physically present
• Children apply mental operations to abstract things
• Children form hypotheses and think systematically about all possible outcomes
• Deductive reasoning involves theory -> experiment -> evidence (top-down)
• Inductive reasoning involves data -> pattern -> conclusion (bottom-up)
• Key achievements: abstract thinking, hypothesis, deductive and indicative reasoning

Contributions & Weaknesses of Piaget's Theory

• Key contributions are the study of cognitive development itself, a new constructivist view of children (active vs. passive child), and discoveries that are fascinating and often counterintuitive
• The constructivist view is that children are active participants in their own development who systematically construct more sophisticated understandings of their worlds
• Weaknesses include the stage model not accounting for variability and depicting thinking more consistent than it is
• The model underestimates cognitive competence in infants and young children but overestimates in adolescence, plus it minimizes the contribution of the social world and culture
• Other weaknesses include vagueness about cognitive processes giving rise to children's thinking, and ethical issues

Sociocultural Perspective

• Children are products of their culture, so cognitive development is inseparable from social and cultural contexts.
• The culture determines what is valuable and important, provides tools that shape thinking, and organizes children’s knowledge and its communication.
• Lev Vygotsky studied culture and arts at Moscow University: med school -> law school
• He worked with Alexander Luria, researching the psychology of art and was considered the father of the sociocultural approach to child development
• Vygotsky studied how higher cognitive functions are acquired and how social and cultural patterns shape developmental trajectories

Vygotsky's Theory

• Children are social apprentices, part of which is intersubjectivity
• Intersubjectivity is the mutual, shared understanding among participants in an activity
• Guided participation is cognitive development as a result of children involved in structured activities with others more skilled in the activity Guided participation shows children how to connect experiences & skills

Key Contributions of Vgotsky's Theory

• Zone of proximal development is the difference between what a child can do alone versus with assistance
• Scaffolding is a teaching style that matches assistance to the learner’s needs, as well as depending on the culture Turkish parents use the most verbal instruction, US parents to a lesser extent, Itina parents use equal amounts of speech, gesture touch or gaze, and Turkish/US never touch
• Private speech is a product of Other people's speech/directions
• Speech is self-directed, intended to regulate and guide behavior, the inner speech being Vygotsky’s term for "thought"

Information Processing Theories

• The view that human cognition consists of mental hardware and software
• These theories were a 1960s response to the vagueness of Piaget's theory.
• Precise specification of the processes involved in children's thinking, emphasizing problem-solving and memory
• Compared to computers that process and manipulate symbols
• Distinction between hardware (sensory, working, long-term memory coordinated by the central executive) and software (task-specific)
• Sensory memory refers to sights, sounds, and other sensations entering the cognitive system and briefly held in raw form until identified
  • It can hold a moderate amount of information for a fraction of a second, and has a large capacity that is brief
  • Capacity is relatively constant over development
• Working memory comes from sensory by encoding It is a workplace that brings together information from the environment and relevant knowledge, attending to and actively processing the information with limited capacity Capacity and speed of operation increases over time

Long-Term Memory

• Refers to information retained permanently on an enduring basis with important access and retrieval
• It can retain an unlimited amount of information with contents increasing enormously over development
• Coordinating all happens in the central executive (executive functioning)
  • Refers to the executive network of attention that resembles a computers operating system
  • Increases automatic processing, as well as directing all activity and monitoring

Development Sources

• Autonomic processing involves cognitive activities requiring virtually no effort
  • When a skill has been mastered, individual steps are no longer stored in working memories so other things can be stored there
  • Continuous change includes processing speed, the basic processes increasing throughout childhood through biological maturation and experience
• Mental strategies are new ones emerging between ages 5 and 8 (Piaget's preoperational stage) Repeating information and focusing on what's relevant
• Inhibitory processing focuses on preventing task-irrelevant information from entering working memory Better executive functioning= inhibition + cognitive flexibility + planning Processing speed connects mental strategies and executive functioning

• continuous change

• Connectionist theories are a theory BUT with a focus on the specific networks of neural processing Networks within the brain and mapping function to brain structures, with statistical learning detecting regularities in input data to predict and generalize information without explicit rules Theorists can explain issues like over-regularization in children's language

Critique of Theories

• Lacks a comprehensive theory as they ignore aspects of cognition that are not linear and logical, while over-relying on lab-based experiments
• Ignores cultural and social influences
• Core-knowledge theory is a theory which believes we also have distinctive knowledge domains, some acquired early in life
  • Some forms of knowledge are so important for survival that streamlining helps its learning.
• There are systems uniquely suited different types of information like language for which children rapidly acquire knowledge This includes Physical objects (naïve physics), People (naïve psychology), and Plants and animals (naïve biology)

Critique, and Object Studies

• Weakness lie in overreliance on innate knowledge vs experience, determining what knowledge is 'core', measuring infant cognition relying on looking-time paradigm, and underestimating cultural influences
• Object permanence can be analyzed through the “impossible event” a staged scenario where an object appears to behave in a way that violates the principle of object permanence -This causes infants showing increased surprise as it goes against their understanding of how objects should behave.
  • 3.5-month-olds looked longer at the impossible event

Living Things and People

• Children use motion to identify animate objects, and tend to attribute animal/toys movement to internal electrical/mechanical components
• Furthermore, they exhibit belief in essentialism—all living things having essence
• Children show evidence of teleological explanations and understand that there is a purpose for living things and their parts
• By age 3-4 years, naïve theories of biology include understanding of movement, growth, internal parts, inheritance, illness, and healing Understand that illness and death occur
• It is difficult accurately classifying plants as alive until 7–9 years old
• Goal-directed behavior is an important part of being alive, understanding that animals can move themselves but objects must be moved by others
• Growth: Animals increase size but objects do not.
• Internal parts: Insides of animals are different than insides of objects.
• Naive psychology = general understanding of other people and oneself
• Children apply invisible mental states to explain behavior, starting at 2 with understanding imitation, intention, and joint attention
• From ages 2 and 5, children show increasing sophistication relating to theory of mind.
• Includes well-organized mental behavior as well as mind interaction
• At age 2: Comprehension of other people's desires influencing the reactions but failure to fully understand of beliefs
• At age 3: People understand others beliefs which also shape the reactions but fail false reactions
• Age 5 is more capable of recognizing different perspectives people may have and that one may show emotion rather than others
• False- belief tasks are key to understanding naïve psychology (assessing if children understand if others hold beliefs and their effect + the experience to affect these beliefs)
• They also understand the emotional state of others may be shown vs hidden
• The theory-of-mind module (TOMM) = a hypothesized specialized brain mechanism devoted to understanding other people, localized in the medial prefrontal cortex and temporo-parietal junction
• Children with autism struggle with completing false-belief tasks
• Mental states and language affects theory of mind.
• Infant memories appear ~2-3 months as they can recall past and forgotten cues
• Development parallels brain structures such as short/long term mems
• Memory strategies help with working and long-term systems, which children start using them ~7 (Piaget's concrete stage)
• Rehearsal involves repeat info and keep in long term systems
• Organization involves grouping into meaningful categories to increase working capacity with long mem Chunking involves grouping items to increase working capacity with long mem
• Elaboration makes connections of new info/already stored data, further increasing working capacity with long mem
• Metamemory is a child's understanding dev parallel with metacognitive ability
• Cognition is about cognition strat dev Knowledge enhances memory as shown through scripts, defined as memory structure This can affect false verbatim (Fuzzy trace theory) by most events being stored by exact or basic meaning
• Test showed that performance increases and is linked with less false reactions

Autobiographical Data and Language/Communication

• Autobiographical memory is our memory of significant events and experiences
• The nature of these experiences may be recalled with assistance, as parent-child shapes memories like open ended requests
• Better autobiographical memory skills is affected by better language and rich details
• Infantile amnesia is a state when a person cannot recall events from their youth
• Theories about it include brain formation/ limited language or sense of self
• Eyewitness testimony refers to how questioning is done (ex can children talk about past without biased language)? - The question, if can children talk about past, has to be tested by unbiased questioning, and limiting suggestion as well the questions asked to them
• Source monitoring relates the reliability of questions and remembering the source In order to create honest responses, you would 1. Check monitoring memory, 2. Warn tricky questions 3. Give alternate explanations
• Problem solving is increased with age, with children's knowledge being inconsistent
• More complex remedies and planned action occur with age
• Children often show some complex knowledge, meaning everyday skill problems are better than math skill (less abstract/complex)
• The amount of winners also impacts some (over 1/2) adolescent problem/solving
• Adolescents are often prone to error for using a heuristic ("Rules of Thumb") for how they do problem solving
• Analtical math is more systematic

Problem and Skill Solutions

• Collaboration enhances this and sees connections (seeing peers as resources)
• Often have wrong conception of logic that impacts their solutions
• Devised experiments are prone to issues/unconfirmed bias
• Word recognition: unique patterns of letters as Андрей достал билеты на концерт show
• Comprehension- The process of extracting meaning from a sequence of word Example snore secretary green plastic sleep trucks
• Knowledge and skills are important: ex letter knowledge impacts reading/spelling
• Dev phon skills like recognizing and man phonemes impacts ability to read
• "What is mat?/cat" +Best predictor for reading skills are memorizing and recalling connections

Understanding Numeracy and Language

• Decoding means understanding how and meaning/implications (bumfuzzle) 1.Language skills

2. Skil recognizing
3. Improving short term
4. Improve knowledge
5. Cognitive help strat
6. Dev reading strat

• To write: take years to dev well and connect ideas Requires both low level and high level
• Metacognition- the ability to understand cognition
• Numerical equality- The realization that all sets of N objects have something in common.
• Understand by 5 and understand 1,2,3 and number size
• Addition with babes and older increases understanding
• How numbers should be coded: one principle/stable/card
• 1-10 is culture

IQ Scores

• Factors impacting ethnic/social aspects
• Ethnic groups affect how easy they are to testing with test being limited by "Ethnic Smarts"
• If girls were believed to be affected in math.
• Test taking: cultural bias is issue

1. Dev tests that encourage culture

• In a similar vein: students with limitations in ability had adaptation issue in environment
• A constellation of factor- factors affecting development
• Children with learning disability are normal and excel in other areas
• Some tests only target a few categories of reading/writing/ numbers (SDI)
• Language is used for social communication.
• Is rule based and generates infinite forms ex- sentence structures
• Important is to read and extract tones- phonetics
• Smallest- sounds and meanings- ex- words and sound

Sounds and Perceptions

• Understand 1. Phonetics and 2. Symatic meaning change- understanding the connection
• Most can sound in womb well and tell in age
• Adults can only speak language
• Dev to dev- 6/8 dev
• Language needs reinforcement
• Need to distinguish noise to dev word bounadries
• Testing new and old tested word impact knowledge ex- familiar words
• Frequent letters impacts it

Speech Patterns

• Emphasis is common ( strong/weak emphasis and is frequent in dev)
• 4.5 mths recognize name and 6 can label parental words in the right context
• 8 can direct and respond by sound
• Must have relation and need to be adult/refer 2 mths- coo 6/11- speechlike with no Can signal rise (inflection) First words appear in year
• Words must stand for something else and symbolize concepts
• 2-3 words weekly and explode after 50 weekly and after that is 8 a week Fast learning by hearing only once

Word Learning

• Gaze impact learning by 6-9 months is vocal label
• Joint attention+ vocal help
• New map will only be named if it nameless ( default is name)
• Word is whole only
• If has label subcategory it
• Need to understand word/ meaning: that
• Underexten is used one and over is use new with one

References and Language Styles

• Vocab range
• Most know <25>76< Is about contact and experience
• Language and vocal focus on world aspect
• Grow well but later
• In speech it mostly used word not grammar