Chapter 3

Piagetian Schemes

(occurs when new info is altered to fit an existing scheme) Assimilation<-- Schemes -->Accommodation (entails changing scheme to adapt to new info)

Sensorimotor

0-2; cognitive development involves learning how to coordinate activities of senses with motor activities

Formal operations

11-15 to 20; allows adolescents to reason about more complex tasks and problems involving multiple variables; stage is pivotal in cognitive development in adolescence; involves ability to think scientifically and apply those concepts; task of pendulum problem; hypothetical-deductive reasoning is ability to arrive and defend an answer; abstract thinking

Preoperational

2-7; capable of representing world symbolically (e.g. language)

Concrete operations

7-11; become more adept at using mental operations which leads to more advanced understanding of world

Keating (2004) on Critical Thinking

Adolescence provides potential for critical thinking in several ways: wider range of knowledge available in long-term memory across variety of domains, ability to consider different kinds of knowledge simultaneously increased; more cognitive strategies available for applying or gaining knowledge

Other Conceptions of Intelligence

Alternative theories of intelligence have been proposed to present a conception of intelligence that is much broader that traditional one; one of most important alternative theories has been presented by: Howard Gardner -- Theory of Multiple Intelligence

building on Vygotsky's Legacy

Barbara Rogoff extending Vygotsky's theory with idea of Guided Participation: refers to teaching interaction between two people as they participate in culturally valued activity, guidance is "direction offered by cultural and social values, as well as social partners"

"Intelligent" Distinctions

Fluid intelligence: refers to mental abilities that involve speed of analyzing, processing, reacting to info; these are kinds of abilities tapped by Performance subtests on IQ tests; this kind of intelligence peaks in emerging adulthood;;Crystallized Intelligence: refers to accumulated knowledge and enhance judment based on experience; subtests like info comprehension, and vocab assess this kind of intelligence; this kind of intelligence tends to improve through 20s and 30s

Theory of Multiple Intelligences

Includes eight types of intelligence: linguistic(evaluated by tests); logical-mathematical (evaluated by tests); spatial; musical; bodily-kinesthetic; naturalist; interpersonal; intrapersonal

Two Aspects of Social Cognition

Perspective taking: selman's research; Adolescent egocentrism: elkind's research

maturation

Piaget portrayed maturation as an active process; children seek out info and stimulation in environment that matches maturity of their thinking

... Beyond Piaget

Piaget's research inspired theories of cognitive development beyond formal operations known as Pragmatism <-- Post-formal thinking --> Reflective Judgment

Limitations of Info Processing

Reductionism: breaking up a phenomenon into separate parts to such an extent that the meaning and coherence of phenomenon as whole becomes lost; Holistic Perspective: info-processing scholars have lost holistic perspective that characterized Piaget's work; Computer Analogy: computers have no capacity for self-reflection, no awareness of how their cognitive processes are integrated, organized, and monitored -- which leaves analogy insufficient and inadequate

Absolute vs. Relative Performance

Relative performance on IQ tests is very stable: people who score higher than avg in childhood tend to score higher than avg as adolescents and adults; Absolute performance on IQ tests is not as stable: absolute scores on Verbal subtests generally improve from age 16 to 38

Piagetian Stages

Sensorimotor; preoperational; concrete operations; formal operations

Processing Info

Speed: adolescents faster than children at processing info, increase in speed of processing from age 10 through late teens; Automaticity: how much cognitive effort the person needs to devote to processing info, adolescents show greater automaticity of processing than pre-adolescents, automaticity depends more on experience than on age alone

Brain Development

Synaptic Pruning: overproduction of synapses is whittled down considerably, between ages of 12 and 20, avg brain loses 7-10% fo gray matter; Myelination: Process of creating a myelin sheath (blanket of fat) over main part of neuron, functions to increase speed of electrical signals; Cerebellum: historically thought to be involved in only basic functions, such as movement, recent research shown also continues to grow in adolescence through to emerging adulthood and is important to higher functions (e.g. math, social skills, humor)

Vygotsky's Most Influential Ideas

Zone of Proximal Development: the gap between what adolescents can accomplish alone and what they are capable of doing if guided by an adult or more competent peer; Scaffolding: refers to degree of assistance provided to adolescent in zone of proximal development, should gradually decrease as children become more competent at a task

Perspective taking

ability to understand thoughts and feelings of others; selman's theory of perspective taking based on stage approach that children and adolescents go through; egocentirsm of childhood gradually develops into mature perspective-taking ability of adolescence; early adolescence children become capable for first time of mutual perspective taking; late adolescence children become capable of social and conventional perspective taking

Vygotsky's Sociocultural Theory

according to theory, cognitive development is inherently both social and cultural process: social because children learn through interactions with others and require assistance from others in order to learn what they need to know, cultural because what children need to know is determined by culture they live in

About Intelligence Testing

attempting to understand human cognition by evaluating cognitive ability with intelligence tests known as the psychometric approach; first intelligence test was developed in 1905 by French psychologist named Alfred Binet: just 30 items and assessed performance in areas such as memory and abstract thinking; louis terman of Stanford University made some of most important revisions to original test and test known as Stanford-Binet: test results in overall score called IQ; other widely used tests include: 1) Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC-IV), and 2) Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS-IV)

Facts about Brain Development

by age 6, brain is 95% of adult size; use of PET and fMRI scans; thickening of synaptic connections occurs during two timeframes: Prenatal through 18 months of age, when puberty begins(10-12); thickening known as overproduction or exuberance

Reflective Judgement

capacity to evaluate accuracy and logical coherence of evidence and arguments; perry (1970; 1999) investigated reflection in adolescence and emerging adulthood which included: Dualistic thinking, multiple thinking, relativism, commitment

Jean Piaget's Theory

children of different ages think differently; changes in cognitive development proceed in distinct stages (e.g. discontinuous); each person's cognitive abilities are organized into one coherent mental structure; approach known as cognitive-developmental approach; driving forces behind development from one stage to the next is maturation

Optimistic Bias

concept related to personal fable; comes from health psychology research; tendency to assume accidents, diseases, other misfortunes more likely to happen to others than ourselves; both adolescents and adults have an optimistic bias with regard to health risk behaviour; adolescents tend to have a stronger optimistic bias than adults

Limitations- Individual Differences

great range of individual differences exist in extent to which people use formal operations; even in emerging adulthood and beyond, large proportion of people use formal operations either inconsistently or not at all; adolescents who have had courses in math and science tend to exhibit formal operational thought; concrete operations are sufficient for most daily tasks and problems

Adolescent egocentrism

having difficulty distinguishing your own thinking about yourself from thoughts of others; Imaginary Audience: results from adolescents' limited capacity to distinguish between their thinking about themselves and their thinking about the thoughts of others; Personal fable: belief in an imaginary audience that is highly conscious of how you look and act leads to the belief that there must be something special, something unique about you

Pragmatism

involves adapting logical thinking to practical constraints of real-life situations; cognitive development in early 20s is distinguished from adolescent development by a greater recognition and incorporation of practical limitations to logical thinking

Adolescents and competent decisions

political and legal implications; in US adolescents under 18 prohibited from making decisions about medical care; legal contracts under 18; behavioral decision theory

Theory of Mind

recent concept related to perspective taking is concept of theory of mind: ability to attribute mental states to one's self and others, including beliefs, thoughts, and feelings; most research has been on young children, looking at how they first develop an understanding that others have mental life independent from their own; researchers beginning to address adolescence

Limitations of Piaget's Theory

stage formal operations has been most critiqued; limitations of Piaget's Theory of formal operations fall into two categories: individual differences in attainment of formal operations, cultural basis of adolescent cognitive development

Social Cognition

used to describe way we think about other people, social relationships, social institutions

Information-Processing Approach

views cognitive change as continuous--gradual and steady; focus is on the thinking processes that exist at all ages; original model for this approach was the computer; computer analogy was to try to break down human thinking into separate capacities of attention, processing, and memory

Limitations -- Cultural Basis

while formal operations may be universal potential, form it takes in each culture is derived from kinds of cognition requirements people face; there is likely to be considerable variation in extent to which adolescents and adults display formal operational thought