Piaget's Theory of Cognitive Development

Piaget's Theory

• Piaget's studies significantly advanced the field of cognitive development, which was barely recognized before his work in the 1920s.
• Almost a century later, Piaget's theory remains the most well known theory in cognitive development.
• Piaget's descriptions vividly convey how children think at different ages.
• The theory covers a broad range, including understanding time, space, language, problem-solving, and reasoning, from infancy through adolescence.
• It offers an intuitively plausible view of nature and nurture interaction and intellectual growth.

View of Children's Nature

• Piaget viewed children as mentally active from birth, with mental and physical activity fueling development.
• Piaget’s approach, known as constructivism, views children as building knowledge from experiences.
• Generating hypotheses, experimenting, and drawing conclusions are the three most important aspects of constructivism
• Piaget's theory uses the "child as scientist" metaphor, where children generating hypotheses, performing experiments, and drawing conclusions

Piaget's Infant Son Example

• Piaget observed his son Laurent investigating spatial relations by dropping objects from different positions.
• Children learn independently through scientific experimentation, not just from instruction.
• Children are intrinsically motivated to learn and do not need rewards.

Central Developmental Issues

• Piaget believed that children shape their own development and offered insights about nature, nurture, and continuity/discontinuity.

Nature and Nurture

• Piaget posited that cognitive development arises from the interaction of nature and nurture.
• Nurture encompasses the nurturing by caregivers and all experiences.
• Nature includes the maturing brain and the body, the ability to learn from experience and the tendency to integrate coherent knowledge

Sources of Continuity

• Development continuity comes from assimilation, accommodation, and equilibration.

Assimilation

• Assimilation is incorporating new information into existing concepts.
• A 2-year-old called a bald man with frizzy hair a "clown," fitting him into their existing clown concept.

Accommodation

• Accommodation improves understanding in response to new experiences.
• The boy accommodated his clown concept after his father explained that the man was not a clown

Equilibration

• Equilibration is balancing assimilation and accommodation for stable understanding, proceeding in three phases.
• Satisfaction with understanding leads to equilibrium where there are no discrepancies between observations and understanding.
• Disequilibrium occurs when new information reveals inadequacy in understanding
• More sophisticated understanding emerges that resolves old shortcomings, creating advanced equilibrium

Sources of Discontinuity

• Piaget's theory is known for its discontinuous stages of cognitive development.
• Piaget viewed these stages as manifestations of the human tendency to organize knowledge.
• Each stage is a unified way of understanding, with transitions representing intellectual leaps.

Qualitative Change

• Children of different ages think in qualitatively different ways.
• Morality is based on consequences in early stages versus intentions in later stages.
• A 5-year-old might see accidental damage is worse than intentionally stealing, while an 8-year-old would understand the intent

Broad Applicability

• Thinking that is characteristic of each stage influences thinking across diverse topics and contexts.

Brief Transitions

• Before a new stage, children go through a brief transitional period.

Invariant Sequence

• Everyone progresses through the stages in the same order without skipping any of them.

Piaget Hypothesized Four Stages of Cognitive Development

• Sensorimotor stage
• Preoperational stage
• Concrete operational stage
• Formal operational stage
• In each stage children exhibit new abilities to understand the world in different ways

Sensorimotor Stage (Birth to Age 2 Years)

• Infants use sensory and motor abilities to explore and understand the world.
• They learn about objects, people, time, space, and causality
• Infants live in the present with intelligence bound to immediate perceptions and actions.

Preoperational Stage (Ages 2 to 7 Years)

• Toddlers learn to express their experiences in language and mental imagery
• They form more sophisticated concepts.
• Piaget emphasized that children cannot perform certain mental operations such as considering multiple dimensions at once
• Lacking operations cause children to be unable to understand that short and tall glasses can hold the same amount of liquid

Concrete Operational Stage (Ages 7 to 12 Years)

• Children can reason logically about concrete objects and events.
• They understand that changing a glass does not change the volume of water inside.
• Children cannot think abstractly or test beliefs with systematic experiments

Formal Operational Stage (Age 12 Years and Beyond)

• Adolescents can think abstractly and hypothetically.
• They can perform systematic scientific experiments and draw conclusions.

Sensorimotor Stage (Birth to Age 2 Years)

• The roots of adult intelligence are present in early behaviors.
• Early behaviors involve sensory and motor activity.
• Sensorimotor intelligence develops greatly during the first 2 years.

Reflexes

• Infants are born with many reflexes.
• Visually track what is in front of them
• Sucking when something is in their mouth
• Grasping when something touches their hands
• Turn towards noises

Modifying Reflexes

• Infants modify reflexes to be more adaptive, adjusting sucking based on what they are sucking on

Organizing Reflexes

• Infants organize separate reflexes into larger behaviors, such as combining grasping and sucking.

Interest in the World

• Infants become interested in the world, by shifting toward people, toys, animals, etc

Object Permanence

• Infants begin to search for objects that have disappeared of interest
• Hiding objects in-front of child shows that a 1 year old will be able to locate the object unlike other children

A-not-B Error

• Representations of objects are fragile, as reflected in the A-not-B error.
• 8- to 12-month-olds look for objects in previous location(location A) even if they see it hidden in a new location (location B).

Actively Exploring Objects

• Around 1 year, infants actively explore how objects can be used.
• Laurent dropped items in different positions shows this competency.

Deferred Imitation

• In the last half of the sensorimotor stage (18-24 months), enduring mental representations emerge based on a
• Deferred imitation is repeating behaviors a while after it occurred.
• Daughter's actions mirror a playmates' behavior a day after.

Trends in Cognitive Development

• Activities shift from focusing on the body to include the world.
• Goals transition from concrete to abstract.
• Mental representations evolve from "out of sight, out of mind" to remembering actions later, which is preoperational thinking.

The Preoperational Stage (Ages 2 to 7)

• This stage is notable for striking cognitive acquisitions and limitations
• Symbolic representation is the foremost acquisition
• Egocentrism and centration are some of the the most notable weaknesses

Development of Symbolic Representations

• Preschoolers use objects to represent a gun, or use card for "iPhone"

Egocentrism

• An important limitation of preoperational thinking is egocentrism.
• Egocentrism is perceiving the world from one's own point of view.
• Piaget and Inhelder (1956/1977) demonstrated this difficulty by having 4-year-olds sit at a table in front of a model of three mountains of different sizes.
• children were asked to identify which of several photographs depicted what a doll would see if it were sitting on chairs at various locations around the table.

Communication

• Preschoolers often talk past each other, focused only on what they are saying, seemingly oblivious to other people's comments and reactions.

Centration

• Young children focus on a single feature while excluding others.
• This is what Piaget called centration.
• Centration is notable within the balance-scale problems.

Conservation

• The conservation concept is that changing the appearance of objects does not necessarily change other key properties
• conservation of liquid quantity, conservation of solid quantity, and conservation of number are commonly studied in 5- to 8-year-olds are conservation of
• tasks involve a three-phase procedure

Predictions

• On conservation-of-liquid-quantity problems, they claim that the taller, narrower glass has more orange drink
• on conservation-of-solid-quantity problems, they claim that the long, thin sausage has more clay than the short, thick one
• if a child has one fewer cookie than another child, a fair solution is to break one of the short-changed child's cookies into two pieces

The Concrete Operational Stage (Ages 7 to 12)

• In this stage, children begin to reason logically.
• Children solve any of the three conservation tasks.
• Children can only problem solve if they are focusing on multiple different dimensions.
• Thinking systematically remains very difficult, as reasoning about hypothetical situations.

The Pendulum Problem

• Inhelder & Piaget tested operational children to determine the influence of weight, string length, and dropping point on the time it takes for the pendulum to swing.
• Children younger than 12 usually perform unsystematic experiments and draw incorrect conclusions.
• When the first string goes faster, they conclude that, just as they thought, heavy weights go faster.
• They fail to imagine that the faster motion might be related to the length of the string or the height from which the string was dropped, rather than the weight of the object.

The Formal Operational Stage (Age 12 and Beyond)

• Ability to think abstractly and reason hypothetically.
• This is also the pinnacle of Piaget's stage progression.
• Difference between the difference between reasoning in both stages is clearly illustrated by formal operational reasoners' approach to the pendulum problem.
• Each of the variables weight, string length, and dropping point might influence the time it takes for the pendulum to swing through an arc.
• Piaget theorized that they are not universal in reaching.
• They are able to ponder deep wuestions like justice and morality.

Educational Applications of Piaget's Theory

• Piaget's view of children's cognitive development holds a number of general implications for how children should be educated
• children learn best by interacting with the environment, both mentally and physically
• One way to involve them is through promoting children's understanding of the concept of speed.

Piaget's Legacy

• Remains a very influential approach to understanding cognitive development.
• Has shown cruicial weaknesses.

Vagueness

• Piaget's theory is vague about the mechanisms that give rise to children's thinking and that produce cognitive growth.
• Provides excellent decriptions children's thinking and not how the processes happen.

Cognisance

• Piaget employed fairly difficult tests to assess most of the concepts he studied
• it has made some infant skills appear more difficult than they may be

Social World

• Piaget's theory understates the contribution of the social world to cognitive development.
• Reflects the contributions of the people and the broader culture theory acknowledges.

Consistency

• The stage model depicts children's thinking as being more consistent than it is.
• Suggests the characteristics of that stage across diverse concepts.

Approximation of Knowing

• Sensorimotor: Infants know the world through their senses and through their actions.
• Preoperational: Toddlers and young children acquire the ability to internally represent the world through language and mental imagery.
• Concrete Knowers: Children become able to think logically, not just intuitively.
• Formal Thinkers: Adolescents can think systematically and reason about what might be, as well as what is. They can science about alternative political and

Information-Processing Theories

• Information-processing theories emphasize precise characterizations of the mechanisms that give rise to children's thinking and that produce cognitive growth.
• Core-knowledge theories focus on the surprisingly early knowledge and skills that infants and young children show in areas thought to be of evolutionary importance.
• Sociocultural theories emphasize the ways in which children's interactions with other people and with the products of their culture guide cognitive development.
• Dynamic-systems theories highlight the variability of children's thinking, even from moment to moment.

Task Analysis

• Help specify complex processes involved in children's thinking.
• Help identify of goals needed to perform the task, obstacles that prevent immediate realization of the goals, prior knowledge relevant to achieving the goals, and potential strategies for overcoming obstacles and reaching the desired outcome.

Computer Simulation

• Help formulate a mathematical model that expresses ideas about mental processes in precise ways.
• For example, Simon and Klahr (1995) created computer simulations of the knowledge and mental processes that led young children to fail on conservation problems

Cognitive Growth

• Often, a single simple behavior reflects an extended sequence of brief, unconscious mental operations like daughter opening basement door.
• Analyses identify what those mental operations are, the order in which they are executed, and how increasing speed and accuracy of mental operations lead to cognitive growth.

Information-Processing Theorists

• See cognitive development as occurring continuously, in small increments that happen at different ages on different tasks
• Depiction differs from Piaget because progress through qualitatively distinct stages at similar ages

Limited-Capacity Processing System

• It is the information-processing view.
• Cognitive development arises from children gradually surmounting their processing limitations
• it is in particular their limited working memory capacity, processing speed, and knowledge of useful strategies and content
• Expand the amounts of information they can process at one time process information faster, and acquire new strategies and knowledge.
• Yield improvement in problem solving, memory, and other cognitive functions.

Child as Problem Solver

• Human nature is active problem solvers.
• In solving problems one needs strategies for overcoming obstacles and attaining goals, goal, obstacle, and strategy
• Georgie brings in some green peaches that he had been playing

Developmental Issues

• Children's cognitive flexibility helps them attain their goals
• Great ingenuity in surmounting the obstacles imposed by their parents, the physical environment, and their own lack of knowledge.

The Development of Memory

• Crucial to everything we do
• Skills we use on everyday tasks
• Language we employ when writing or speaking
• Emotions we feel on a given occasion, all depend on our memories of past experiences and the knowledge acquired through them
• Working, long-term, and executive

Working Memory

• Involves actively attending to, maintaining, and processing information
• Limited in the amount of information that can be maintained.
• Increases greatly in duration and speed during the earliest moments of life.

Long-Term Memory

• Long-term memory consists of the knowledge that accumulate over their lifetime.
• Including factual, conceptual, procedural knowledge.
• Contain an unlimited amount of information for periods of time.

Executive Functioning

• Control behavior and thought processes.
• Frontal cortex that important.
• Includes the ability to inhibit behavior as well as working memory and cognitive flexibility.

The Ability to Function

• The ability to function happens around elemtary school years.
• Increased flexibility in shifting goals.
• The ability to inhibit habitual responses becomes apparent slightly later and is evident in Simon Says.
• Functioning are correlated to high academic achievement, college enrollment, and adult income and occupational prestige

Basic Types of Memory

• Explanations of Memory Development - theorists try to explain processes and limitations.

Types of Capabilities

• Basic Processes - activities are the simplest and frequent. Associating events, recalling information and generalizing
• Encoding - Key with all others, is the representations of memory.
• Strategies

Balance Scale

• Studies of how children learn to solve balance-scale problems illustrate the importance of encoding for learning, memory, and problem solving.
• Most 5 year olds generally predict the side of the scale with more weight will go down.
• Encoding of balance-scale configurations, children are shown a balance scale with varying arrangements of weights on and they are asked to reproduce the arrangement on an identical but empty balance scale.

Increase to Speed

• As shown in Figure 4.9, processing speed increases most rapidly at young ages but increases for many years thereafter

Contributing Neural Changes

• Two types of neural changes that information processing are:
• Myelination
• And connectivity, among brain regions.

Strategies

• Information-processing is key to the acquisition and growth of strategies as other major source are memory development
• Children begin to use broadly useful memory strategies at the ages of 5-8.

Rehearsal

• Rehearsal, is the repeating of information multiple times in order to remember it

Selective Attention

• Selective Attention is intentional focusing on the information that is most relevant to the current goal
• Preschoolers pay roughly equal attention to the objects in both categories

Content Knowledge

• Children's knowledge about most things will
• With experience and age, children's have know knowledge on most stuff
• Increases recall of new material by making easier

Content

• Children will know more than adults about a topic, they can remember more infornmation from the topic.
• Similar children learn more from reading new soccer stories than do children who are older

Prior Content

• Improves memory for new information in different ways.
• Encoding and chess expertise causes children to encode relative to another (pieces) than seperate (Encoding
• Improves memory by providing associations.

Baseball

• Content knowledge indicates what is and is not possible from the game.

Active Problem Solving

• Children as having strategies that allows them to overcome limitations of knowledge and processing capacity

Overlapping Waves

• Piaget the children a given age as using a particular strategy .
• Solver strategy.
• Reveals that most children use at least three different strategies
• Strategy 1 are the simplest to strategy 5, and the most advanced.
• And experience that produces more successful performances for a bit

Memory Recall

• Has been shown to accurately characterize children's problem solving in a wide range of contexts
• Tool use and recall from memory and improve

Number Problems

• Single-digit addition during the children's yeara to year two
• Is faster and more accurate execution strategies.

Learning Strategies

• Retrieval memory, counting and using.
• They do so to be successful or better

More Education

• Analyses can improve education.

Number-Board

• Task of name indicating have
• As made cues knowledge the magnitudes a type

The Game

• Task as suggested that experiences may prove numerical

Planning

• Can help more if people plan before hand
• Children benefit planning the fastest routes than their friend's.
• Children fail to plan in situations in which it would help their problem solving (Berg et al., 1997). The question is why.

Reason for Overwhelming

• Require people should work problem solve.
• Second children are that.

Core-Knowledge Theories

• They can't solve the issues

Deception

• Show reasoning and not responsibility.
• Is at a situation the percentage and be able to avoid

The Realness

• Better truth help they knew that do

The Studies

• Show features researcher and knowledge
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Thoughts for Evolution

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Core Knowledge

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Sociocultural Theories

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Dynamic-Systems Theories

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