Piaget's Theory of Cognitive Development

Cognitive Development

• Piaget's stages: sensorimotor (birth to 2), preoperational (2-7), concrete operational (7-11), and formal operational (11+)
• Preoperational: improve use of mental images, no mastery of conservation, centration, irreversibility, egocentrism, and animism
• Concrete operational: ability to perform operations, masters reversibility and decentration, decline of egocentrism, and gradual mastery of conservation
• Formal operational: abstract concepts and systematic problem-solving

Neo-Piagetian Theories

• M-capacity and staircase model

Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory

• Importance of social interaction
• Role of language acquisition
• Zone of proximal development (ZPD)
• Scaffolding

Critical Periods of Development

• Sensitive or optimal period (critical period)
• Six-month threshold (in Romanian study)

What do Children Understand about the Mind?

• Before age 4, don't understand concept of false beliefs or motivations for behaviors
• Copy → interpretive theory of mind
• Autistic children: patterns of attachment

Patterns of Attachments

• Secure
• Anxious-ambivalent
• Avoidant
• Disorganized-disoriented

Effects of Secure Attachment

• Resilient, competent toddlers with high self-esteem
• Display more persistence, curiosity, self-reliance, and leadership and better peer relationships
• More advanced cognitive development

Bonding

• At birth: skin-to-skin contact ("magic moment")
• Day care: heated debate

Culture and Attachment

• Emergence of separation anxiety seems universal
• But rates of secure vs. anxious-ambivalent vs. avoidant attachments vary by culture (e.g., Germany and Japan)
• Attributed to variations in child-rearing practices (e.g., Germans encourage independence unlike Japanese)

Personality Development

• Erikson’s Stage Theory: eight stages, each based upon a psychosocial crisis
• Key is how are these crises dealt with

Cognitive Development

• Embryological parallelism: "Does ontogeny recapitulate phylogeny?"
• Suggests common ancestry and so common development

Intellectual Development

• Piaget’s Stage Theory: four major stages

Human Development

• Development is the sequence of age-related changes that occur as a person progresses from conception to death
• An orderly, cumulative process
• Two Themes: transition and continuity
• Look at how people evolve through transitions over time
• Try to understand continuity with the past

Prenatal Development

• Germinal stage
• Embryonic stage
• Fetal stage
• Environmental Factors: Maternal drug use; Maternal illness; and Maternal nutrition

Childhood

• Motor development: head-to-foot direction (cephalocaudal trend) and centre-outward direction (proximodal trend)
• Sudden burst of growth accompanies by restlessness and irritability
• Attributed mostly to maturation
• Developmental norms and benchmarks
• Individuals vary and so do cultures
• But great similarity in sequence and timing of motor development

Temperament

• Refers to characteristic mood, activity level, and emotional reactivity
• Considerable variation
• Longitudinal studies (Fels Institute followed individuals from birth to death)
• Cross-sectional studies look at differing age at a single point in time
• Three styles of temperament: 40% Easy children, 15% Slow-to-warm-up, 10% Difficult children, and 35% Mixture of these three
• Temperament at 3 Mo. fair predictor at age 10 years

Attachment

• Harlow’s substitute mothers: Wire vs. Cloth substitutes, Contact comfort
• Bowlby: Biological basis for attachment (they depend upon adults and adults are captivated by them—THEY ARE SO CUTE!)
• Evolutionary Perspectives: Bowlby assumed attachment is a product of natural selection, biologically programmed, and has survival value