2011 Cognitive Development

8/6/2019 2011 Cognitive Development

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Cognitive DevelopmentJean Piaget(1896 - 1980)



Piaget’s Theory of

Cognitive DevelopmentPiaget theorized that there were four stages of

development in the thought processes of people.

These stages were the Sensorimotor period , the

preoperational period , the concrete operational

period and the formal operational period .



Piaget's Key Ideas

AdaptationWhat it says: adapting to the

world through assimilationand accommodation



Assimilation

• The process by which a person takesmaterial into their mind from theenvironment, which may mean changing

the evidence of their senses to make it fit.

• Is the tendency to understand newexperiences in terms of existing

knowledge



Assimilation



Accommodation

•

The difference made to one's mindor concepts by the process ofassimilation.Note that assimilation andaccommodation go together: youcan't have one without the other.

• The process by which people adapt

current knowledge structures inresponse to new experiences.

http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/assimacc.htm

http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/assimacc.htm



Accommodation



• The ability to group

objects together on thebasis of common

features.



• The understanding, more advanced thansimple classification, that some classesor sets of objects are also sub-sets of a

larger class.

• E.g. there is a class of objects called dogs.There is also a class called animals. But

all dogs are also animals, so the class ofanimals includes that of dogs.



The ability to move away from one

system of classification to

another one as appropriate.Decentration involves the ability to pay

attention to multiple attributes of an object

or situation rather than being locked intoattending to only a single attribute.



The belief that you are the centre of

the universe and everything revolves

around you: the corresponding inability to see the world as

someone else does and adapt to it .

Not moral "selfishness", Just an early stage of

psychological development.

Egocentrism



Is the tendency to perceive the worldsolely from one’s own point of view



The process of working something out inchild’s head.

• Young children (in the Sensorimotor andpre-operational stages) have to act, andtry things out in the real world, to workthings out (like count on fingers)

• Older children and adults can do morein their heads.

Operation



The representation in the

mind of a set ofperceptions, ideas,and/or actions, which gotogether



• The basic building block of intelligentbehavior – a way of organizingknowledge.

• So , it is useful to think of schemas are“units” of knowledge, each relating to oneaspect of the world, including objects,

actions and abstract (i.e. theoretical)concepts.



A period in a child'sdevelopment in which he

or she is capable of understanding some

things but not others



. The Sensorimotor period prevailsfrom birth to two years of age andis divided into six substages.

Learning takes place throughadaption.

Piaget believed that adaption had

two aspects, assimilation andaccommodation



Children enter the world

equipped with a set ofinherited action patterns and

reflexes through which theyexperience their environment.



The intellectual development of the

child begins through these actions asthis is how the child acquires

knowledge about its surroundings;

this knowledge forms the basis formore complex developments further

down the track.



Infants are restricted in what they

can know as their behaviors andschemata are limited.

Adaption to their surroundings

through assimilation andaccommodation begins in thisstage.



In the second substage of Piaget’stheory, the knowledge and intelligenceof the infant now extends beyond the

innate behaviors they were born withbut these new acquisitions have onlycome about through the

accommodation of schemata



The infants show one of the first signs

learning which is modifying theirreflexes as a result of theirenvironment.

These acquisitions come about by acircular means.

Actions that are at first random andactivate a reflex are attempted again

to try and induce the experienceagain.



The signs of intentionality haveappeared. These patterns of learninghave been labelled primary circularreactions.

This is also the substage in whichobject permanence begins to develop.



Knowledge that an object continues to exist

independent of our seeing, hearing,touching, tasting or smelling it!

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

◦ 4-8 months: visual search for object( Search for

objects that have dropped from view or a partiallyhidden)

◦ 9 months: search for and retrieve hidden object



Lack ofRepresentation

Infant doesnot track the

movement ofthe train in thetunnel, ishappy to seethe train

again, but isnot surprisedthat it is now a

different coloror shape.



Secondary circular reactions are the firstacquired adaptions of behaviors that are notreflexive, as opposed to the primary circularreactions which are reflex based.

An infant in this stage may accidentally causesomething interesting to happen and thenseek to re-create the happy event.



The interesting events in this case arelocated in the external world,

In primary circular reactions theinteresting events are occurring withinthe body.



A child in this substage, however, doesstill not understand the aspects of

cause and effect . so⇒ will sift through the many

behaviors it was indulging in when the

event occurred and narrow it down tothe particular action without reallyunderstanding the underlying concepts

of why the event recurs.



As with stage four, this stage ischaracterized by a means/endsdifferentiation.

The infants are no longer restricted tothe application of previouslyestablished schemata to obtain a goal.

Th k h



They can make the necessaryalterations to their schemata to

solve problems; this reflects aprocess of active experimentation.

These differences in cognition

coincide with improvedlocomotive abilities; the childrenhave become more physically

active.



The earlier stages of the Sensorimotor periodappear to be set on a continuum but the

transition from the fifth to the sixth stage ismore of a disjointed transition.

Symbolic function and mental representationfirst appear during this stage, this runsparallel with the development of language.



Language is an expression of symbolic function and mental

representation and it is at this stagethat the children begin to stringwords together in pairs, the origins ofsentences.



The preoperational period hasbeen divided into two stages:

◦

The preconceptual stage and◦ The intuitive stage.



In the preconceptual stage of thinking,children have a certain understanding of classmembership, and can divide their internal

representations into classes.

However, they cannot differentiate between

members of the class, so if they see twodifferent members of a class at differenttimes, they believe them to be the sameobject.



In this stage children think

Transductively (Can think aboutsomething without the object being

present by use of language). "If A

causes B today, then A alwayscauses B."

Transduction, in simpler terms, is

the "reasoning" (making sense) of a stimulus.



In this stage children think

Transductively as opposed toeither deductively or inductively.The latter two refer to making

generalizations from particularsand particulars fromgeneralizations.



The way in which children basetheir knowledge on what they feelor sense to be true, yet they

cannot explain the underlyingprinciples behind what they feelor sense.



A good example of this is that thechildren in this period of development

cannot yet conserve (Conservation is the realization thatquantity or amount does not change

when nothing has been added ortaken away from an object or acollection of objects, despite changesin form or spatial arrangement)

P d U d t T t C ti



Procedures Used to Test Conservation



One of the major achievements of thepreoperational child is the use ofsymbols and language.

The achievement of representationcan be seen in

Deferred imitation( Evidence of Recall)

Symbolic play and

Spoken language.



Language helps the children to

internalize their behaviorsthrough representation whichaccelerates experiences as actions

do not need to be physicallyperformed.

Children can imagine the

outcomes of their actions.



There are several outstanding

characteristics of the preoperationalperiod:

a) Egocentrism,

b) Centration,

c) Reversibility and

d) Transformation



An egocentric child cannot standin other person's shoes and seethe world as they do, they are

unable to take the view point ofothers and believe that everybodyelse thinks in the same ways they

do.



Is the tendency to perceive the world solely

from one’s own point of view



They may only pay attention to theheight of the object rather than it's

mass.Have you ever been in a situation

where your child throws a tantrum

because they believe they have lessjuice than their sibling? When in

actuality they have the sameamount, but different size cups.

This illustrates the concept ofCentration



Reversibility refers to the fact that reversiblethoughts can follow their line of reasoningback to its starting point.

Children of this age cannot think back to the

initial stage of an action to answer a questionpertaining to it.

So: “They cannot think in reverse.



Preoperational children are more focused onstates as opposed to the transformationsbetween states.

When children in this stage are asked to

arrange sticks depicting a falling motion,most have trouble filling in the steps betweenthe initial and the final states.



All of these above

characteristics are evident inthe preoperational child'sinability to solve conservationproblems.



The realization that objects orsets of objects stay the same

even when they are changedabout or made to look different.



Children in this stage can think much more systematically and

quantitatively.



The child's reasoning processesbecome logical and they acquire

Operation ; "systems of internalmental actions that underlie logicalthinking" .

The children can now conserve andclassify, they are no longer bound byegocentrism or perceptual

Centration and can follow thesuccessive movements of atransformation.



The concrete operational

child can conserve in allforms, number, area andliquid.



Not only can the children answer the

conservation question correctly, theycan give sound logical reasoning asto why the amounts of liquid are the

same in the beakers, such as that it ishigher in one glass because that oneis thin whereas the other is wide.

Multiple classifications are mastered



Multiple classifications are masteredby children in the concrete operational

stage.This is when children have the ability

to classify objects on more than one

dimension such as color and size. Class inclusion is also another

classification system that isunderstood by children in this stage.



Concrete operational children

understand that many features cometogether when age is being judged andidentified.

This ability is the Decentration of thechild's perception of the world. She nolonger focuses on one aspect.



Understanding transformations is adevelopment, which takes place in

the concrete operations stage.The child can now produce

replications of the transitions

between initial and final statesof things such as a stick fallingover.

They can also order objects in



They can also order objects inhierarchical structures called

seriation.She can rank objects in terms of

dimensions such as height.

This helps them to deal withnumbers and mathematicalproblems



The stage of formal operations isquite different from concreteoperations.

While both are logical and systematicthought functions, people in theformal operations stage can apply

these processes to more abstractproblems and hypotheses.



This is Piaget’s last stage of cognitivedevelopment, after this he proposed

“No further structuralimprovements in the

quality of reasoning”.



It is believed that not all adultsarrive at formal operations

although most have reached theirfull potential by about 14 - 15years of age.

Unfortunately

Th l t t th t



There are several structures that aredeveloped in this stage:

Hypothetical-deductive reasoning(from general to specific)

Scientific-inductive reasoning, and

Reflective abstraction.



Piaget (1981) described the capacity

for hypothetical-deductive reasoningas the ability to be able to deal withnot only objects and experiences but

with hypotheses as well, with "thepossible as well as the real".



Conclusions can now be deduced from

hypotheses rather than just physicalfacts.

This highlights the persons ability tomake conclusions by going fromgeneral to specific (deductivereasoning).

Scientific-inductive reasoning is the ability to



Scientific inductive reasoning is the ability tothink like a scientist, to make conclusions bygoing from specific observations to

generalizations.



When people in this stage havebeen confronted by a problemthey can think about it abstractlyand can think over each of thedifferent variables and how theyor combinations of them wouldaffect the situation whilesystematically testing for these.

A common problem used to study



A common problem used to studythis type of reasoning is the

pendulum problem in whichyoung people are given strings of different lengths that can be

attached to a pole, they are alsogiven objects of various weightsto hang from the string and make

pendulums.



Formal operational children will

systematically test all possibilities beforearriving at a conclusion

Example: Pendulum problem

How fast?



The underlying problem is to find out what itis that makes the pendulum swing faster, the

length of string, the weight of the pendulum,the height from which the weight is droppedor the force exerted on the weight when it isdropped.

It is not till children reach the formaloperational stage that they can systematicallygo about solving this problem and arrive atthe correct and logical conclusion.



Another structure that hasdeveloped over this period isreflective abstraction, amechanism by whichknowledge (such as logical-

mathematical) can be gained..

l d d



Analogies provide a goodexample in which to studyreflective abstraction.

Analogies are about constructingrelationships between objects,and these relationships can onlycome about through reflective

abstraction.

2011 Cognitive Development

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