Cognitive Development – Jean Piaget Outline What is cognition? Piaget’s Theory Features of the theory Sensori-motor stage Preoperational stage Concrete operations stage Formal operations stage Problems with the theory Developmental Psychology Lecture 3

What is cognition? Virtually everything we do involves thinking or cognitive functioning Recalling a phone number Remembering a list Following directions Reading your watch (How much time until…?) How do children become able to do all these things? Why are some better at some tasks? Why are some quicker to develop?

A Constructivist Approach Jean Piaget’s theory remains the standard against which all other theories are judged Often labeled constructivist because it depicts children as constructing knowledge for themselves Children are seen as: Active Learning many important lessons on their own Intrinsically motivated to learn Developmental Psychology Lecture 3

Nature and Nurture Piaget believed that nature and nurture interact to foster cognitive development He believed each stage in development occurs as a result of interaction between maturation and environment Our thinking develops, which enables us to learn (vs. we learn, and that is how our thinking develops) Adaptation: The tendency to respond to the demands of the environment to meet one’s goals Through social interaction – interacting with the reasoning of others Organization: The tendency to integrate particular observations into coherent knowledge Developmental Psychology Lecture 3

Sources of Continuity Three processes work together from birth to propel development forward: Assimilation: The process by which people translate incoming information into a form they can understand Accommodation: The process by which people adapt current knowledge structures in response to new experiences Equilibration: The process by which people balance assimilation and accommodation to create stable understanding Developmental Psychology Lecture 3

Examples When a child learns the word for dog, they start to call all four- legged animals dogs.  Babies sucking on various styles of bottles, easily adapting to different shaped nipples and bottles People around them will say, “No, that's not a dog, it's a cat.”  The schema for dog then gets modified to restrict it to only certain four-legged animals.  Try sucking scheme on a sippy cup usually bring about pretty rapid accommodation Assimilation: The process by which people translate incoming information into a form they can understand Accommodation: The process by which people adapt current knowledge structures in response to new experiences

Examples When you take in new information and try to understand it using a schema you already have, you are assimilating that information into your current way of thinking.  We don't, however, accommodate information--we accommodate TO it by changing the way we think.  That is, when your current way of thinking doesn't help, you need to accommodate your current schema, or accommodate TO the new information by developing a new schema. SCHEMA = An Organizational Structure of Knowledge used to categorize things

Discontinuities The discontinuous aspects of Piaget’s theory are distinct, hierarchical stages. Each stage represents a different ( or dis- continuous) way of acting on (or thinking about) the environment: Central properties of Piaget’s stage theory: Qualitative change (a different level of thinking) Broad applicability across topics and contexts Brief transitions Invariant sequence (always the same order) Hypothesis - that all children progress through the same four stages of cognitive development, each building on the previous one Developmental Psychology Lecture 3

Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development Sensori-motor Birth to 2 years Infants know the world through their senses and through their actions. For example, they learn what dogs look like and what petting them feels like. Preoperational 2 - 7 years Toddlers and young children acquire the ability to internally represent the world through language and mental imagery. They also begin to be able to see the world from other people’s perspectives, not just from their own. Developmental Psychology Lecture 3

Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development Concrete Operational 7 - 12 years Children become able to think logically, not just intuitively. They now can classify objects into coherent categories and understand that events are often influenced by multiple factors, not just one. Formal Operational 12+ years Adolescents can think systematically and reason about what might be as well as what is. This allows them to understand politics, ethics, and science fiction, as well as to engage in scientific reasoning. Developmental Psychology Lecture 3

Piaget’s Stages

I. Sensorimotor - Substages (called “schemes”) Description 1 Birth – 1 month Infants begin to modify the reflexes with which they are born to make them more adaptive. 2 1 – 4 months Infants begin to organize separate reflexes into larger behaviors, most of which are centered on their own bodies. Developmental Psychology Lecture 3

Sensorimotor Substages Scheme Age Description 3 4 – 8 months Infants becoming increasingly interested in the world around them. By the end of this sub-stage, object permanence, the knowledge that objects continue to exist even when they are out of view, typically emerges. 4 8 – 12 months During this sub-stage, children make the A-Not-B error, the tendency to reach to where objects have been found before, rather than to where they were last hidden. Developmental Psychology Lecture 3

Object permanence Objects are tied to infant’s awareness of them “out of sight, out of mind” Hidden toy experiment: 4 months: No attempt to search for hidden object 4-9 months: Visual search for object 9 months: Search for and retrieve hidden object A-not-B task (Diamond, 1985) 9 months: A/B error after 1/2 second delay 12 months: 10 second delay needed to produce error

Piaget’s A-Not-B Task Developmental Psychology Lecture 3

Sensori-motor Sub-stages Scheme Age Description 5 12 – 18 months Toddlers begin to actively and avidly explore the potential uses to which objects can be put. 6 18 – 24 months Toddlers become able to form enduring mental representations. The first sign of this capacity is deferred imitation, the repetition of other people’s behavior a substantial time after it occurred. Developmental Psychology Lecture 3

II. Preoperational Stage A mix of impressive cognitive acquisitions and equally impressive limitations Symbolic representation, the use of one object to stand for another, which makes a variety of new behaviors possible A major limitation is egocentrism, the tendency to perceive the world solely from one’s own point of view A related limitation is centration, the tendency to focus on a single, perceptually striking feature of an object or event Preoperational children also lack of understanding of the conservation concept, the idea that merely changing the appearance of objects does not change their key properties Developmental Psychology Lecture 3

Procedures Used to Test Conservation Developmental Psychology Lecture 3

Piaget’s Three-Mountain Task The Three Mountain Task was developed by Jean Piaget and Bärbel Inhelder in the 1940s to study children's ability to coordinate spatial perspectives. In the task, a child faced a display of three model mountains while a researcher placed a doll at different viewpoints of the display. The researcher asked the child to reconstruct the display from the doll's perspective, select from a set of pictures showing the doll's view, and identify a viewpoint for the doll specified by a picture of the display. Some children around age four did not distinguish between their own view and that of the doll, a tendency interpreted by Piaget as evidence of egocentrism. Egocentrism was considered an indication of the preoperational period, a stage that preceded logical thinking. Research since the 1970s has shown young children's perspective-taking ability to be affected by a variety of situational variables. Read more: http://social.jrank.org/pages/660/Three-Mountain-Task.html#ixzz0URQoVoOJ Developmental Psychology Lecture 3

Egocentric Conversations Developmental Psychology Lecture 3

Further Research McGarrigle & Donaldson (1974) Repeated Piaget’s conservation experiment on 6-year-old children A child is shown 2 rows of equal numbers of counters, and child agrees that the 2 rows are the same If the researcher then messes one of the rows up, without altering the number of counters, only 16% believe that the number of counters is still the same.  So far just as Piaget would have predicted However, when a naughty teddy bear messes up the row of counters 62% of children in this age group are able to conserve!  This shows that children are better able to conserve than Piaget proposed.  M & D assume that in the original condition it appears to the child that the researchers are intending to alter the number of counters, or that they are asking a trick question.  In the teddy condition there is a reason for the counters just to be messed up so the situation has meaning.

III. Concrete Operational Stage Children begin to reason logically about the world They can solve conservation problems, but their successful reasoning is largely limited to concrete situations Thinking systematically remains difficult Developmental Psychology Lecture 3

Inhelder and Piaget’s Pendulum Problem The task is to compare the motions of longer and shorter strings, with lighter and heavier weights attached, in order to determine the influence of weight, string length, and dropping point on the time it takes for the pendulum to swing back and forth Children below age 12 usually perform unsystematic experiments and draw incorrect conclusions Developmental Psychology Lecture 3

IV. Formal Operational Stage Cognitive development culminates in the ability to think abstractly and to reason hypothetically Individuals can imagine alternative worlds and reason systematically about all possible outcomes of a situation Piaget believed that the attainment of the formal operations stage, in contrast to the other stages, is not universal – It would be different for everyone Developmental Psychology Lecture 3

Implications for Education Piaget’s view of children’s cognitive development suggests that children’s distinctive ways of thinking at different ages need to be considered in deciding how best to teach them In addition, because children learn by mentally and physically interacting with the environment, relevant physical activities, accompanied by questions that call attention to the lessons of the activities, are important in educational practice Developmental Psychology Lecture 3

Critique of Piaget’s Theory QUESTION: What could some of these be? Although Piaget’s theory remains highly influential, some weaknesses are now apparent The stage model depicts children’s thinking as being more consistent than it is Infants and young children are more cognitively competent than Piaget recognized Object permanence in 3-month-olds (Bower, 1974) Number conservation in 4 year olds (McGarrigle & Donaldson, 1974) Developmental Psychology Lecture 3

Critique of Piaget’s Theory Piaget’s theory understates the contribution of the social world to cognitive development Piaget’s tasks are culturally biased Schooling and literacy affect rates of development e.g. Greenfield’s study of the Wolof Formal operational thinking is not universal e.g. Gladwin’s study of the Polynesian islanders Piaget’s theory is vague about the cognitive processes that give rise to children’s thinking and about the mechanisms that produce cognitive growth Developmental Psychology Lecture 3

CRITICAL REACTIONS TO PIAGET’S THEORY Concept of “stages” (qualitative change or quantitative accumulation?) (can stages be a maturational process?) Do all individuals reach formal operations? Preoperational thought: inferior or qualitatively different? View that inner speech disappears is disputed by Vygotsky Undue emphasis on logic? (Thinking is not so orderly or organized; it is constantly in flux, restless, and contradictory) Do children really learn best on their own?

WHAT CRITICAL ELEMENTS SEEM TO BE DE-EMPHASIZED IN PIAGET’S THEORY OF COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT? 1. SOCIAL, HISTORICAL, AND CULTURAL FORCES INFLUENCE INDIVIDUALS AND THEIR LEARNING. 2. CRITICAL ROLE OF LANGUAGE 3. IMPORTANCE OF ASSISTED LEARNING

Vygotsky Piaget 1. Learning and development 2. Cognitive development is mainly the result of: 3. The role of language and private speech: 4. How do children learn best?

CONCEPTUAL DIFFERENCES BETWEEN 1. LEARNING AND DEVELOPMENT VYGOTSKY PIAGET and 1. LEARNING AND DEVELOPMENT LEARNING RESULTS IN DEVELOPMENT LEARNING AND DEVELOPMENT ARE INDEPENDENT, AND DEVELOPMENT IS A PREREQUISITE FOR LEARNING see Vygotsky’s Mind in Society

CONCEPTUAL DIFFERENCES BETWEEN VYGOTSKY PIAGET and 2. COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT IS PRIMARILY A FUNCTION OF SOCIO-CULTURAL INTERACTION Adult-child interaction INDIVIDUAL CONSTRUCTION Active agency . . . but see Cole and Wertch’s Beyond the Individual-Social Antimony in Discussions of Piaget and Vygotsky for discussion of Piaget’s acknowledgement of the critical role of social and cultural forces on cognition

CONCEPTUAL DIFFERENCES BETWEEN VYGOTSKY PIAGET and 3. ROLE OF LANGUAGE AND PRIVATE SPEECH LANGUAGE = CRITICAL EGOCENTRIC SPEECH BECOMES THOUGHT THAT IS SELF-REGULATING COGNITION CRITICAL -EGOCENTRIC SPEECH DISAPPEARS AS SOCIAL SPEECH DEVELOPS COGNITION MEDIATES LANGUAGE ONCE LANGUAGE DEVELOPS, COGNITION IS LANGUAGE “Language is a very difficult thing to put into words.” Voltaire

CONCEPTUAL DIFFERENCES BETWEEN VYGOTSKY PIAGET and 4. HOW DO CHILDREN LEARN BEST? SOCIAL INTERACTION INSTRUCTION DEPENDENT ASSISTED LEARNING (ZPD) SCAFFOLDING COGNITIVE SELF-INSTRUCTION [guided by inner speech] INDIVIDUAL CONSTRUCTION STAGE DEPENDENT SELF-DIRECTED, SELF-INITIATED** EXPERIMENTATION INDEPENDENT MASTERY EXPLORATION, DISCOVERY COGNITIVE SE LF-REGULATION

Reading Learning outcomes Siegler, Deloache & Eisenberg, Chapter 4 See .pdf handout for further reading Piaget Quiz http://psychology.about.com/library/quiz/bl_piaget_quiz.htm Developmental Psychology Lecture 3