1. Vasta, Younger, Adler, Miller, Ellis Prepared by: Mowei Liu
CHILD PSYCHOLOGY
Second Canadian Edition
Vasta, Younger, Adler, Miller, Ellis Prepared by: Mowei Liu

2. Cognitive Development: The Piagetian Approach
Chapter 7
Cognitive Development: The Piagetian Approach

3. Learning Objectives
Learning Objective 7.1 Define the concepts from biology that Piaget used to explain cognitive development and evaluate his theory of stages.
Learning Objective 7.2 Trace the substages and benchmarks of the sensorimotor period in child development.
Learning Objective 7.3 Identify some strengths and limitations of preoperational thought in children’s cognitive development.
Learning Objective 7.4 Analyze the cognitive task masteries that characterize concrete operational thought.

4. Learning Objectives
Learning Objective 7.5 Explain the characteristics and outcomes of formal operations compared with concrete operations.
Learning Objective 7.6 Explain the general characteristics of Piaget’s theory and evaluate the theory overall.
Learning Objective 7.7 Discuss and describe more recent research of children’s cognitive development that has been influenced by Piaget’s cognitive-developmental approach.

5. 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

6. 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)

7. 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

8. 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

9. 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 adaptive schemes
3. Discovering procedures (4–8 months)
Behaviour becomes outwardly oriented
Infant develops procedures for reproducing interesting events

10. The Sensorimotor Period: Substages
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

11. The Sensorimotor Period: Object 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 C
Recent research suggests the existence of brain correlates for the capacity of object permanence
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. Adapted from “Object Permanence in 3 1/2- and 41/2-Month-Old Infants,” by R. Baillargeon, 1987, Developmental Psychology, 23, 656. Copyright © 1987 by the American Psychological Association. Adapted by permission.

12. The Sensorimotor Period: Physical Knowledge
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. From Current Directions in Psychological Science, Vol. 3 (1994), p. 134, “How Do Infants Learn about the Physical World?” Fig. 1. Reprinted with permission of Cambridge University Press.

13. 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

14. 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

15. 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. From The Child’s Conception of Space by J. Piaget and B. Inhelder, 1956, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 211. Copyright © by Routledge and Kegan Paul.

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

17. 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

18. 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

19. 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

20. 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

21. 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
Research on the theory of mind has identified limitations in young children with regards to false belief and the appearance-reality distinction

22. Copyright
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