1 Chapter 8 Cognitive Development: Piagetian & Vygostkian Approaches

2 Part I: Piaget

3 Cognition Development  Cognition: Higher order mental processes by which humans understand and adapt to the world  Thinking  Reasoning  Learning  Problem solving  Developmental psychology seeks to understand how the form and function of cognition changes across the life span

4 “My central aim has always been the search for the mechanisms of biological adaptation and the analysis and epistemological interpretation of that higher form of adaptation which manifests itself as scientific thought”

5 Jean Piaget ( ) First to suggest that children see the world differently to adults. First to develop methods to investigate this. First to offer a systematic theoretical account of the process of mental growth.

6 Piaget – observation and interview  Observed and recorded young children in their play. Questioned them to elicit how they understood the world  Piaget: What makes the wind?  Julia: The trees.  Piaget: How do you know?  Julia: I saw them waving their arms.  Piaget: How does that make the wind?  Julia (waving her hand in front of his face): Like this. Only they are bigger. And there are lots of trees.  Piaget: What makes the wind on the ocean?  Julia: It blows there from the land. No. It's the waves...

7 Piaget ’ s Theory  Piaget was trained as a biologist and as a philosopher  Piaget ’ s view of the intellectual development of the child reflected an interaction between biology and experience  Principles of knowledge:  Seek the organization by which the child understands the world  Identify the functional significance of knowledge (that is, knowledge allows a child to adapt to the world)

8 Piaget ’ s Theory  Cognitive adaptation reflects the actions of two complementary processes:  Assimilation allows an existing cognitive structure to adapt to the environment  Accommodation allows the cognitive structure to change in order to handle a new environmental situation  As children progress from infancy to adulthood they develop a better understanding of the world — stages of development

9 Piaget ’ s Four Periods of Development  Sensorimotor period: Birth through age 2  Infant schemes are simple reflexes and interactions with people and objects  Preoperational period: Age 2 to 6  Child begins to use mental representations but problem solving is limited  Concrete operations: Age 6 to 12  Child performs mental operations (conservation)  Formal operations: Age 12 through adulthood  Child can use formal problem solving and higher level abstract thinking

10 The Sensorimotor Period: Substages 1. Exercising reflexes (birth to one month)  Infant is limited to exercising inborn reflexes 2. Developing schemes (1 – 4 months)  Reflexes evolve into sensorimotor (adaptive) schemes  become increasingly refined & coordinated 3. Discovering procedures (4 – 8 months)  Behaviour becomes outwardly oriented  Infant develops procedures for reproducing interesting events (not producing)

11 4. Intentional behaviour (8 – 12 months)  Intentional behaviour emerges  Infant can separate means from ends in pursuit of a goal 5.Novelty and exploration (12 – 18 months)  The infant alters schemes to produce new effects  Trial and error is used to solve problems 6. Mental representation (18 – 24 months)  Capacity for mental representation emerges  Mental problem solving begins to replace overt trial and error problem solving The Sensorimotor Period: Substages

12 Object Permanence

13 The Sensorimotor Period: Substages 1. Exercising reflexes (birth to one month) 2. Developing schemes (1 – 4 months) 3. Discovering procedures (4 – 8 months) 4. Intentional behaviour (8 – 12 months) 5.Novelty and exploration (12 – 18 months) 6. Mental representation (18 – 24 months) Obj perm begins Visible displacement only A not B error

14 Object permanence  Illustrates 2 general Piagetian themes  Progressive decentering  Moving away form egocentrism  Invariants

15 Figure 7.1 The Baillargeon test of object permanence. Infants were first habituated to the event shown in (a). Response was then measured to either the possible event in (c), in which the screen rotates to point of contact with the box and stops, or the impossible event in (b), in which the screen continues to move through the area occupied by the box. The Sensorimotor Period: Object PermanenceObject Permanence  Object permanence: The knowledge that objects exist when out of sight  Habituation procedure by Baillargeon  Infants habituated to A, but showed long looking times at b  Recent research suggests the existence of brain correlates for the capacity of object permanence

16 Object Permanence and the “Impossible Event”

17 By age 6.5 months, infants spend longer time looking at the impossible event than the possible event Figure 7.3 Possible and impossible events in Baillargeon’s study of infants’ understanding of gravity and support. The Sensorimotor Period: Physical Knowledge

18 The Preoperational Period  Major feature of this stage is the appearance of representational thought (symbolic function)  Appearance of words  Deferred imitation of a model observed in the past  Symbolic play in which a child uses one thing to stand for something else  A hockey stick that becomes a guitar  Representational thought allows for problem- solving

19 The Preoperational Period  Children develop qualitative identity  Devries (1969) Cat study  Most 3 year-olds and some 4 year-olds thought cat became a dog  Most 5-6 year-olds demonstrated qualitative identity

20 Limits of Preoperational Thought  Egocentrism: Child ’ s view of the world is centred on him or herself  Child has difficulty taking the view of others  Centration: The tendency to focus on only one aspect of a problem  Centration leads to difficulty in solving conservation problems  Conservation: The knowledge that the quantitative properties of an object are not changed by a change in appearance

21 Limits of Preoperational Thought Figure 7.6 Piaget’s three- mountains problem for assessing visual perspective taking. The child’s task is to judge how the display looks to someone viewing it from a different perspective.

Figure 7.7 Examples of Piagetian conservation problems. Limits of Preoperational Thought

23 F 12.6 Conservation

24 The Concrete Operational Period  “ The older child is just more logical ”  Concrete operational child can solve conservation problems  Number is solved first  Length and weight are solved last  Concrete operational child can also solve problems of class inclusion and seriation  Transitivity (ability to combine relations and deduce necessary conclusions) is achieved during the concrete operational period

The Concrete Operational Period  Concrete operational children demonstrate decentration  Concrete operational children understand reversibility  Concrete operational children also develop perspective taking, symbolic ability and dual representation  but much younger children also show certain proficiencies in these areas

26 Operations  demo

27 The Formal Operational Period  Child now has the capacity for hypothetical-deductive reasoning  Can generate hypotheses  Can test hypotheses  Can draw logical conclusions from test results  Mental operations are clearly evident in the formal operational stage

28 Pendulum Problem  What determines the oscillation of a pendulum?

29 In cases, Piaget may have overestimated how adults think. –Garlic powder study Capon & Kuhn (1979)

30 Capon & Kuhn (1979)  Only 1/3 used a formal reasoning approach  Conclusion?

31 4 periods of Piaget’s theory PeriodApproximate Age Major Features SensorimotorBirth – 2 yrsobject permanence deferred imitation Preoperational2 - 6, 7 yrssymbolic thinking, no conservation; egocentric Concrete Operational 6, 7 – 11 yrsmasters conservation; categorization; Formal Operational 11+ yrsCan think more abstractly

32 Evaluation of Piaget ’ s Theory  Underestimated the infant ’ s ability  Methodological issue  Observations of overt motor behaviour  Issues in stage theories  Stage theory suggests that  Behaviour is qualitatively different from stage to stage  Invariant sequence  Stages are universal  Concurrent development: if a cognitive structure underlies two or more competencies, these should be evident at the same time within the same stage

33 New Directions  Building on Piaget, modern research has considered new issues in cognitive development  Research has indicated that while children organize their experiences into meaningful categories based on similarities (concepts), they also organize according to less obvious and less perceptually bound similarities

34 Gelman & Markman (1986)

35 New Directions  Research on the theory of mind has identified limitations in young children with regards to false belief and the appearance-reality distinction