PSYC 205 Ch 4: Theories of Cognitive Development

Sociocultural theories

(A cognitive development theory) Approaches that emphasize that other people and the surrounding culture contribute greatly to children's development. The central metaphor of sociocultural theories: children as social learners, who gradually become full participants in their culture through interactions with other people and with the broader social environment of institutions, skills, attitudes, and values.

Deferred Imitation

(Observations in Sensorimotor stage: Piaget's theory) The repetition of other people's behavior a substantial time after it originally occurred. Piaget provided the example of his daughter seeing a playmate stamp his feet during a tantrum and then doing the same thing herself, a day later, having never done anything like that previously. This is typically seen in 18 month old - 24 month old infants.

A-not-B error

(Observations in Sensorimotor stage: Piaget's theory) The tendency to reach for a hidden object where it was last found rather than in the new location where it was last hidden. This is typically seen in 8 month old - 12 month old infants.

Brief transitions

(One of the four central properties of Piaget's stage theory) Before entering a new stage, children pass through a brief transitional period in which they fluctuate between the type of thinking characteristic of the new, more advanced stage and the type of thinking characteristic of the old, less advanced one.

Invariant sequence

(One of the four central properties of Piaget's stage theory) Everyone progresses through the stages in the same order without skipping any of them.

The Child as Problem Solver

(View of children's nature: Information-processing theories) Also central to the view of human nature held by information-processing theories is the assumption that children are active problem solvers. problem solving involves strategies for overcoming obstacles and attaining goals.

Private speech

(Sociocultural theories) The second phase of Vygotsky's internalization-of-thought process, in which children develop self-regulation and problem-solving abilities by telling themselves aloud what to do, much as their parents did in the first stage

Encoding

(A basic process for memory development: Information Processing theories) The process of representing in memory information that draws attention or is considered important. If information is not encoded, it is not remembered later. For example, many people don't encode the American flag; although you have seen it many times, you most likely do not remember the number of stars in the top row.

Symbolic representation

(A cognitive acquisition under the preoperational stage: Piaget's theory) The use of one object, word, or thought to stand for another. Example: Typically, objects that toddlers and preschoolers use as personal symbols physically resemble the objects they represent. The shapes of the sticks and playing card resemble those of a gun and an iPhone. Example: Children's drawings between ages 3 and 5 make increasing use of symbolic conventions, such as representing the leaves of flowers as Vs

Information-processing theories

(A cognitive development theory) A class of theories that focus on the structure of the cognitive system and the mental activities used to deploy attention and memory to solve problems. Theorists see cognitive development as occurring continuously, in small increments that happen at different ages on different tasks.

Core Knowledge theories

(A cognitive development theory) Approaches that view children as being born with specialized systems to think about/understand: -Objects (A doll not appearing in the middle as it moves from one end to the next doesn't make sense) -Agents and their actions (A falling drawing board even with a block behind it doesn't make sense) -Number (Wynn's study of 5 month's old addition and subtraction) -Space (Two blocks supporting each other) -Social partners & social groups (Innate-face processing system)

Egocentrism

(A cognitive limitation under the preoperational stage: Piaget's theory) The tendency to perceive the world solely from one's own point of view. Example: Children can sometimes have "egocentric conversations". i.e., preschoolers often talk right past each other, focused only on what they themselves are saying, seemingly oblivious to other people's comments. ("My dad is rich.", "I hate dogs")

Centration

(A cognitive limitation under the preoperational stage: Piaget's theory) the tendency of a child to focus on a single, perceptually striking feature of an object or event. Example 1: If presented with a balance scale like that in Figure 4.5and asked which side will go down if a support were released, 5- and 6-year-olds "center" on the amount of weight on each side, ignore the distance of the weights from the fulcrum, and say that whichever side has more weight will go down

Conservation of number task

(A concept that children in the preoperational stage lack: Piaget's theory) Children are asked if there are the same number of beads in the two rows before and after they are arranged. When spread out, they look bigger but of course still conserve the number of beads. A preoportional stage child would say that the row that was spread out has more beads.

Conservation Concept

(A concept that children in the preoperational stage lack: Piaget's theory) The idea that merely changing the appearance of objects does not necessarily change the objects' other key properties. Children in the preoperational stage tend to not grasp this concept because of centration. i.e., children tend to to "center" on the height of two glasses to reason that the taller glass will always have more liquid than the shorter glass.

Internalization-of-thought process

(A process that exemplifies children as social learners: Sociocultural theories) At first, children's behavior is controlled by other people's statements (as in the example of Sadie's mother telling her "Now you need another one like this on the other side"). Then, children's behavior is controlled by their own private speech, in which they tell themselves aloud what to do, much as their parents might have done earlier. Finally, their behavior is controlled by internalized private speech (thought), in which they silently tell themselves what to do.

Joint Attenttion

(A process under intersubjectivity: Sociocultural theories) a process in which social partners intentionally focus on a common referent in the external environment. Common Example: When an adult tells a child the name of an object, the adult usually looks or points at it; children who are looking at the same object are in a better position to learn what the word means than ones who are not.

Formal Operational Stage

(A stage in Piaget theory) The period (12 years and beyond) within Piaget's theory in which people become able to think about abstractions and hypothetical situations. Piaget believed that unlike the previous three stages, the formal operational stage is not universal: not all adolescents (or adults) reach it.

Preoperational stage

(A stage in Piaget theory) The period (2 to 7 years) within Piaget's theory in which children become able to represent their experiences in language, mental imagery, and symbolic thought. They also begin to see the world from other people's perspectives, not just from their own. As suggested by the term preoperational, Piaget's theory emphasizes young children's inability to perform certain mental operations, such as considering multiple dimensions simultaneously.

Concrete operational stage

(A stage in Piaget theory) The period (7 to 12 years) within Piaget's theory in which children become able to reason logically about concrete objects and events and can focus on more than one aspect of an event. e.g., on the balance-scale problem, they consider distance from the fulcrum as well as weight on the two sides. However, children are limited to concrete situations. Thinking systematically remains very difficult, as does reasoning about hypothetical situations.

Selective Attention

(A strategy for memory development: Information-processing theories) The process of intentionally focusing on the information that is most relevant to the current goal. For example: If 7- and 8-year-olds are shown objects from two different categories (e.g., several toy animals and several tools) and are told that they later will need to remember the objects in only one category (e.g., "You'll need to remember the animals"), they focus their attention on the objects in the specified category and remember more of them. In contrast, given the same instructions, 4-year-olds pay roughly equal attention to the objects in both categories, which reduces their memory for the objects they need to remember

Rehearsal

(A strategy for memory development: Information-processing theories) The process of repeating information multiple times to aid memory of it.

Inhibition

(A type of executive function: Information-processing theories) The ability to resist an action.

Enhancement of working memory

(A type of executive function: Information-processing theories) The ability to selectively attend to the most important information

Cognitive Flexibility

(A type of executive function: Information-processing theories) The ability to switch focus as needed to complete a task

Constructivist approach

(An approach to cognitive development) Jean Piaget's approach to understanding cognitive development is often labeled as this because it depicts children as constructing knowledge for themselves in response to their experiences (sort of like active learning). Three of the most important of children's constructive processes are (1) generating hypotheses, (2) performing experiments, and (3) drawing conclusions from their observations. The "child as scientist" is the dominant metaphor in Piaget's theory.

The relation between language and thought

(Sociocultural theories) Vygotsky believed that thought is internalized speech originating in statements that other people make to children.

Pendulum Problem

(An experiment of children in the concrete operational stage showcasing a lack of systematic reasoning: Piaget's theory) The task is to determine the influence of weight, string length, and dropping point on the time it takes for the pendulum to swing back and forth. Unbiased experiments require varying one and only one variable at a time—for example, comparing a heavier weight to a lighter weight when both are attached to strings of the same length and dropped from the same point. Children younger than 12 usually perform unsystematic experiments and draw incorrect conclusions. Yet formal operational reasoners see that any of the variables—weight, string length, and dropping point—might influence the time it takes for the pendulum to swing through an arc, and that it is therefore necessary to test the effect of each variable systematically.

Piaget's three-mountains task

(An experiment of children in the preoperational stage showcasing egocentrism: Piaget's theory) When asked to choose the picture that shows what the doll sitting in the seat across the table would see, most children younger than 6 years choose the picture showing how the scene looks to them, illustrating their difficulty in separating their own perspective from that of others.

Cultural Participation

(An integral part of guided participation: Sociocultural theories) The innumerable products of human ingenuity that enhance thinking. This includes - symbol systems, spoken language, manufactured objects, skills, values, and the many other ways in which culture influences our thinking.

The roles of nature and nurture in Piaget's Cognitive Development

(Central developmental issues: Piaget's Theory) In Piaget's view, nurture includes not just the nurturing provided by parents and other caregivers but every experience children encounter. Nature includes children's maturing brain and body; their ability to perceive, act, and learn from experience; and their tendency to integrate particular observations into coherent knowledge.

Mental Adaptation

(Continuous development: Piaget's theory) The continuous developmental process whereby a child undergoes assimilation then accommodation to gain a broader understanding of certain schema.

Violation of expectation method

(Core-knowledge theories experiment) A visual preference research method that assesses infants' ability to distinguish between an expected and an unexpected event. Eventually, this experiment proved that infants were able to understand the concept of object permanence because of their puzzlement by the unexpected event. By measuring an infants' looking time, researchers were able to conclude that infants were more interested in the impossible unexpected event (where the block should have prevented the drawing board from falling flat). Baillargeon found that infants as young as 3.5 months of age (instead of Piaget's estimate of 8 months of age) understand the concept of object permanence. This experiment didn't require the use of a child's motor skills which makes more appealing.

Innate-face processing system

(Core-knowledge theories experiment) By drawing three stimuli on three different paddles (where one was a face, the next was scrambled, and the last was blank) and showing them to 1 hour old babies, the researchers found that babies spent most of their time observing the paddle with the face. This experiment concluded that babies prefer looking at stimuli representative of faces (even with an inverted triangle)

Support

(Core-knowledge theories experiment) Infants develop a more mature way of thinking of how weight, shape, and size of a box would affect the ability of it being supported by a bigger box.

Overlapping waves theory

(Development of problem solving: Information-processing theories) An information-processing approach that emphasizes the variability of children's thinking. The model proposes that, at any one age, children use multiple strategies; that with age and experience, they rely increasingly on more advanced strategies (the ones with the higher numbers); and that development involves changes in the frequency of use of existing strategies as well as discovery of new approaches. This differs from Piaget's theory which depicts children of a given age as using a particular strategy to solve a particular class of problems.

Content Knowledge

(Expertise contributes to memory: Information-processing theories) With age, children's general knowledge increases. This increased knowledge improves recall of new material by making it easier to integrate the new material with existing understanding. For example, children who know a lot about soccer learn more from reading new soccer stories than do children who are older and have higher IQs but who know less about soccer. *Moral of the story*: Prior content knowledge improves memory for new information. Expert children > novice adults. Classic example: Chess expertise

Sensorimotor stage

(First stage in Piaget's theory) The period (birth to 2 years) within Piaget's theory in which intelligence is expressed through sensory and motor abilities. According to Piaget, at the beginning of this stage, the infants have no mental representation (i.e., they lack object permanence)

Computer metaphor of children's thinking

(Information-processing theories) Hardware limitations: - Working memory capacity - Efficiency of processing *Software* limitations: - Children learning strategies - Gaining knowledge

Task anaylsis

(Information-processing theories) The research technique of specifying the goals, obstacles to their realization, and potential solution strategies involved in problem solving

Basic Processes

(Memory development: Information Processing theories) The simplest and most frequently used mental activities, including associating, recognizing, recalling, generalizing, and encoding With development, children execute basic processes more efficiently, enhancing their memory and learning for all kinds of materials.

Memory strategies

(Memory development: Information-processing theories) Information-processing theories point to the acquisition and growth of strategies as another major source of memory development.

Object permanence

(Observations in Sensorimotor stage: Piaget's theory) The knowledge that an object exists even when it is not in sight. This typically lasts from birth till a child is 8 months old. *But*: Researchers believe that this is not a valid test because it relies on an infants' use of motor skills which may not be universally developed in all infants that were tested.

Qualitative change

(One of the four central properties of Piaget's stage theory) Piaget believed that children of different ages think in qualitatively different ways. For example, he proposed that children in the early stages of cognitive development conceive of morality in terms of the consequences of behavior, whereas children in later stages conceive of it in terms of intent. Thus, a 5-year-old would judge someone who accidentally broke a whole jar of cookies as having been naughtier than someone who deliberately stole a single cookie; an 8-year-old would reach the opposite conclusion.

Broad applicability

(One of the four central properties of Piaget's stage theory) The type of thinking characteristic of each stage influences children's thinking across diverse topics and contexts.

Accommodation

(One of the three sources of continuity that propels a child's development forward: Piaget's Theory) The process by which people adapt current knowledge structures in response to new experiences

Assimilation

(One of the three sources of continuity that propels a child's development forward: Piaget's Theory) The process by which people translate incoming information into a form that fits concepts they already understand.

Equilibration

(One of the three sources of continuity that propels our development forward: Piaget's Theory) The process by which children (or other people) balance assimilation and accommodation to create stable understanding.

Social Scaffolding

(One of the three ways of how change occurs through social interaction: Sociocultural theories) A process in which more competent people provide a temporary framework that supports children's thinking at a higher level than children could manage on their own. Ideally, supplying this framework includes choosing a task that is beyond children's current level but that they might be able to do with help, explaining the goal of the task, demonstrating how the task can be done, and helping learners accomplish the most difficult parts.

intersubjectivity

(One of the three ways of how change occurs through social interaction: Sociocultural theories) The mutual understanding that people share during communication. Think of this as "perspective-taking learning" Sociocultural theorists believe that the foundation of human cognitive development is our ability to establish this.

Guided Participation

(One of the three ways of how change occurs through social interaction: Sociocultural theories) a process in which more knowledgeable individuals organize activities in ways that allow less knowledgeable people to learn. Example: Parents helping children with lego assembly. Through guided participation, parents can help children not only accomplish immediate goals but also learn skills, such as how to use written instructions and diagrams to assemble objects.

Working memory

(One of three memory processes: Information-processing theories) A short-term memory system that involves actively attending to, maintaining, and processing information. For example, if a child was asked to read a story about birds and told that they would be asked questions about the story afterward, the child would use working memory processes to attend to and maintain information from the story, draw inferences from that information, etc... *Note*: Working memory is limited in both its capacity (the amount of information that can be actively attended to at one time) and in the length of time for which it can maintain information in an active state without updating. *But*: The capacity and speed of working memory increase greatly during infancy, childhood, and adolescence due to brain maturation.

Long-term memory

(One of three memory processes: Information-processing theories) Information retained on an enduring basis. It includes factual knowledge (e.g., knowing the capitals of different countries or the team that won the Super Bowl last year), conceptual knowledge (e.g., the concepts of justice and equality), procedural knowledge (e.g., knowing how to shoot a basketball or play a specific video game), attitudes (e.g., likes and dislikes regarding politicians or foods), and so on.

Executive Functioning

(One of three memory processes: Information-processing theories) The cognitive abilities and processes that allow humans to plan or inhibit their actions. Executive functions control behavior and thought processes. The prefrontal cortex (Figure 4.8) plays a particularly important role in this cognitive control.

Piagetion Assumptions

(Piaget's Theory) Assumption 1: children learn many important lessons on their own, rather than depending on instruction from others. Assumption 2: children are intrinsically motivated to learn and do not need rewards from other people to do so.

Piaget's theory understates the contribution of the social world to cognitive development.

(Shortcomings of Piaget's theory) A child's cognitive development reflects the contributions of other people, and of the broader culture, to a far greater degree than Piaget's theory acknowledges.

The stage model depicts children's thinking as being more consistent than it is.

(Shortcomings of Piaget's theory) According to Piaget, once children enter a given stage, their thinking consistently shows the characteristics of that stage across diverse concepts. Subsequent research, however, has shown that children's thinking is far more variable than this depiction suggests.

Infants and young children are more cognitively competent than Piaget recognized.

(Shortcomings of Piaget's theory) Piaget employed fairly difficult tests to assess most of the concepts he studied. For example, in the object permanence experiment, it turns out that infants as young as 3 months old suspect that objects continue to exist immediately after the object has disappeared.

Piaget's theory is vague about the mechanisms that give rise to children's thinking and that produce cognitive growth.

(Shortcomings of Piaget's theory) Piaget's theory is less revealing about the processes that lead children to think in a particular way and that produce changes in their thinking. Assimilation, accommodation, and equilibration have an air of plausibility, but how they operate is unclear. Information-processing does a better job proposing less vague cognitive development.

The impact of culturally specific content

(Socio-cultural theories) The *content* that children learn—the particular symbol systems, artifacts, skills, and values—vary greatly from culture to culture and shape thinking accordingly.

The Child as a Limited-Capacity Processing System

(View of children's nature: Information-processing theories) In the information-processing view, cognitive development arises from children gradually surmounting their processing limitations, in particular their limited working memory capacity, processing speed, and knowledge of useful strategies and content. So, through learning and maturation of brain structures, children expand the amounts of information they can process at one time, process information faster, and acquire new strategies and knowledge.

Michael Tomasello

A contemporary sociocultural theorist. He proposed that the human species has two unique characteristics that are crucial to our individual and cultural development for contributions to "We-ness": One is the inclination to teach others of our species The other is the inclination to attend to and learn from such teaching

Piaget's stage theory

The most famous part of Piaget's theory concerns discontinuous aspects, which he depicted as distinct stages of cognitive development. Piaget's idea: each stage is a more mature, reorganized way of thinking.

Piaget's Theory of Cognitive Development

The theory of Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, which posits that cognitive development involves a sequence of four stages—the sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational stages—that are constructed through the processes of assimilation, accommodation, and equilibration.

Increase with age in speed of processing

Two biological processes that contribute to faster speed of processing are myelination and increased connectivity among brain regions.

Planning

children often fail to plan in situations in which it would help their problem solving. One reason planning is difficult for children is that it requires inhibiting the desire to solve the problem immediately in favor of first trying to choose the best strategy. A second reason why planning is difficult for young children is that they tend to be overly optimistic about their abilities and believe they can solve problems without planning. *Moral of the story*: Improvements in the planning process take a long time to become routine, however; in dangerous situations, 12-year-olds remain more likely than adults not to plan and to take risks.