Lecture 6 – Cognitive Development - Piaget • Cognition – the act of ...

Lecture 6 – Cognitive Development - Piaget 

  

Cognition – the act of knowing; mental processes by which knowledge is acquired, elaborated, stored, retrieved and used to solve problems o Attention o Sensation and perception o Learning, thinking, remembering Cognitive development – changes that occur in mental skills and abilities over time Structural-functional approach (Piaget): emphasizes the biological functions and environmental influences that promote developmental changes in the organization and structure of intelligence The information-processing approach: Focuses on the growth of specific cognitive processing mechanisms, such as perception, attention, memory and so on (all looked at individually) o Human mind is analogous to computer

Piaget’s Theory 



 





 

Was originally trained as a zoologist; developed strong interest in cognitive development because of work he did Alfred-Binet’s lab (intelligence test was being developed) o Binet was using specific questions to get normative data as to what age it takes children in order to get the right answer o Piaget was interested in the wrong answers: He noticed that children of the same age made the same type of errors when asked the question (errors that younger kids made were different from what older kids made) Piaget found that children of different ages have fundamentally different thought processes; so he wanted to explore the nature of how children thought o The type of clinical interviews he’d do with children: lots of probing Piaget developed a theory to understand the changes in intelligence Intelligence: A basic life force that helps one (in this case children) adapt to environment o It’s a type of equilibrium towards which all cognitive structures tend o Produce balanced relation between thought processes and environment   Cognitive equilibrium Children were thought as constructivists – actively take a role in understanding the world around them; they construct their own reality o As they get older they change the way they think Imbalance between mode of thinking and enviro prompts child to make mental adjustment  allows child to cope with new experiences so that they can understand nature of the new experiences o This is how the child’s cognitive equilibrium is balanced The things that children were acting on and changing = Schema (PIAGET NOT BECK) Schema: o Cognitive structure: Pattern of thought or action

o

o

o

Behavioural(sensorimotor) schemas: organized pattern of behaviour used to represent objects of experience  First psychological structures to appear  E.g., 9-month old doesn’t think of a ball as a formally named object but rather by what they do with it Symbolic Schemas: ability to think about objects/events without actually having them present (mental representations of things in the world)  Child can represent behaviour now Operational Schemas: cognitive operations applied to objects/events  Children can now have mental activities they can do instead of doing things physically (e.g., 5 year old says that flattened clay has more clay than ball of clay, but the 8 year old can reverse the operation and tell you that it’s the same)  Allows child to think about events; ready for formal training/education

How do Schema change? 



 

Organization o Combine existing schemas into new schema o Produces more complex intellectual structures Adaptation o Children are constantly facing novel events so they have to have a means for modifying the nature of their schemas, not simply organizing anymore o Two complementary processes: Assimilation and Accommodation o Assimilation: the process by which children attempt to interpret new experiences in relation to previous experiences;(fit new info with existing schemas)  i.e., child thinks all 4-legged animals = dogs o Accommodation: The process by which children modify their existing cognitive structures to account for new experiences (existing schemas undergo change)  i.e., child sees horse, must change 4-legged schemas to accommodate horse too Accomodation and assimilation always occur together at the same time The end result of adaptation (assim and accom) is cognitive equilibrium

Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development   

Qualitative movement through stages Properties of stage theories: stages occur in Invariant developmental sequence and hierarchical relations among stages Invariant developmental sequence: constant unchanging order, no skipping of stages, indicates strong maturational component o You don’t know when the stages occur o Enviro can change when you go through the stages, but the stages are biologically ingrained in you (because the order is fixed)



Hierarchical relations among stages: structures of earlier stages don’t get lost as you move up stages but rather those skills get incorporated into achievements of later stages o i.e., i.e., sensorimotor map of getting around as toddler, when toddler get’s older this map isn’t lost but instead it’s built upon (earlier ability is not lost)

Stage 1: Period of Sensorimotor Intelligence (contains substages)        





Stage 1: The use of reflexes (0-1 mo) Stage 2: Primary circular reactions (1-4 mo) Stage 3: Secondary circular reactions (4-8mo) Stage 4: Coordination of secondary schemas (8-12mo)  intentionality comes in now Stage 5: Tertiary circular reactions (12-18mo) Stage 6: Intervention of new means through mental combinations (18-24mo) Specific abilities that develop during this period (2): 1. Development of intentional behaviour (at substage 4): combining schemas into new complex ones to engage in intentional/goal-directed behaviour o Piaget’s object hiding task: infants at this stage remove cover and retrieve toy (younger infants think it’s gone) This is a means-end sequence because the child is doing something with an intentional means to reach an end  foundation for all problem solving o Object permanence: the child understands that objects still exist even if they can’t see them  (prior to this stage  out of sight out of mind; child doesn’t think object exists anymore) o The A-not-B error: take a toy and hide the toy in the A location many times then child can reach out and get it (they developed object permanence). Now take the toy and put it in location B, but now the child can’t recover the toy, they go to A.  This occurs because the child doesn’t have a complete independent object representation at this age, yet they have object permanence. 2. The development of mental representations: internal representation that the mind can act upon (we can use mental images to imitate, retrace our steps etc...); child becomes more efficient thinker o Hidden displacements: take an object, put it in location A, hide object in one cup and move it to location B; manipulation in brain allows child to figure out that it’s in the cup that you moved (rather than looking at ever cup there) o Imitation and deferred imitation: at 8-12mo the child intentionally imitate behaviour when the model is not present By the end of this sensorimotor stage, children arrive at solutions in a dramatic/sudden fashion rather than trial&error (this is because they can now act upon their mental representations and do trial&error in mind rather than physically)

Stage 2: Preoperational period   





 

 

Spans ~ 2-7 years Obvious change: increase in representational ability o Major Increase in symbolic activity that children are able to undergo Symbolic function and pretend play – the ability to make one thing stand for (represent) something else o development of language = classic form of symbolic functions (words stand for objects) o children engage in pretend play (superhero, make-believe) Piaget found that preoperational children have more rigid thinking; they don't undergo operational thinking o They focus only on one aspect of a situation, mainly the appearance, but they didn’t focus on how it was in fact; Egocentrism – children are unable o take the viewpoint of another person o an error in preoperational thought o put the doll at one angle of the mountain, asked child to say what the doll saw but the child only said what they saw, not the doll’s view o the child doesn’t understand another child’s feelings thus lack empathy Animism – tendency of children to attribute life-like characteristics to inanimate objects o i.e., why does the sun go down? Because the sun is tired Conservation tasks – certain characteristics of physical objects remain the same even when their outward appearances change (child doesn’t have the idea of conservation of number) o i.e., same amount of water but in two glasses then pour one glass’s contents into a flatter glass right infront of the child and the child says that the taller glass has more water in it (this is how kids focus on appearance) children fail conservation tasks because they don't have the mental operation of reverse ability (can’t mentally reverse the action that has occurred) children also have the problem of centration where they focus on a single aspect of the task while ignoring others; children are distracted by physical appearance

Stage 3: Operational period    



roughly between 7-11 yrs the child acquired a whole range of cognitive operations; skills that they can apply to objects, events etc.. more logical thinking; flexible and organized Conservation – children can now pass the conservation task o The child is now decentrated: they don’t focus on one dimension anymore, now they focus on many aspects o Now they can undergo mental reversing Classification – children can create hierarchies, focus on relations between categories (general and specific)

  

o Children start collecting things now Seriation – ability to order items along a dimension (i.e., place sticks in order of height) o They can do seriation mentally Children can now understand space, draw maps of enviro o By drawing large scale maps, it shows that the child has solved the egocentrism issue Children still show problems when dealing with truly abstract things (hence the stage is called concrete operations) o The child only deals with things that exist in the real world o Child doesn’t understand hypothetical situations (imagine if grandma lived in florida, what do you mean? She lives down the street)

Formal Operational Period   

Children are no longer tied to imaginable events, now they can reason about abstract ideas Now the child can imagine if a hypothetical situation exists to deal with it This is where kids can come up with creative responses

Cognitive Development – Neopiagetian research (new slides) New research on sensorimotor stage Work on object permanence 



People thought that Piaget used too difficult tasks for kids so they came up with other ways to show object permanence (even younger kids show object permanence than what piaget thought)  Baillageon and Spelke o Habituated a child to a screen on the table that rotated back and forth o For dishabituation they had a possible display (screen rotates up and comes in contact with box) and the impossible display (violates solidity because the box showed up when screen fully rotated) o Found that children showed more dishabituation when the screen appeared to rotate through the solid object than when it didn’t (this provided evidence of object permanence) o According to piaget’s theory, kids who didn’t have object permanence wouldn’t be surprised if screen went through box. But the results showed otherwise hence younger kids do have some sense of object permanence So Baillageon showed that kids younger than 5 have mental representations of objects; but why didn’t they pass piaget’s tests? o Maybe the problem was because the younger kids didn’t have the motor tasks to accomplish the piaget task (when ball is hidden under cup, pick up cup to retrieve ball)

The A-not-B error 

So look at the A-not-B error: you know it’s not due to lack of motor skills

o



Maybe the problem isn’t in the representational object, maybe infants just have poor memory (thus they can’t remember if object is in A or B) Bjork and Cummings had a 5-cup trial: if infants have a lack of knowledge of the object like how piaget said, then infant would go to A cup to find object. But if the child has bad memory then they’re more likely to search near the cups at the B location or the B cup itself (other end of 5 cups) o A-not-B error is made using motor paradigm but using the looking-time-paradigm they passed this A-not-B test

Immediate and Deferred Imitation 

  





6 week olds were more likely to produce facial expressions even after he brought them back after a few more weeks o He hypothesized that these imitations weren’t due to chance 6 weeks olds have the mental representation to imitate and can do deferred imitation by producing behaviour after 24 hours or even a week later Infants failed on piaget’s task because of motor limitations; piaget used a task where they would use hands, but infants can’t use hands however they can use mouth thus Meltzoff showed this There was a study down found that the number of A trials increased A-not-B error but it wasn’t a straight-forward relationship; children were given either 1 A trial, 8 A trials or 16 A trials then a B trial was done in each condition after each A o Found that likelihood of A-not-B was greater at 8 than 1 A trial but then it dropped at 16 A trials (thus you’re not teaching the child a conditioned response) Not only do children at a younger age imitate, but they do so in a rational fashion to understand how this works o Infants were shown a display where adults hands were tied behind back and the adult hit a button with their head. (irrational action – with reason because hands were tied behind back) o Infant was habituated by seeing this, then the adult’s hand were freed then the child would either see the adult continue hitting with head or they’d hit with hand. Children dishabituated with the adult continued hitting button with head; they understood that the only reason the adult is hitting the button with head is because his hands were tied thus they had to use head o When child was given the button, the child who was habituated to see the adult with hands tied behind back would hit the button with their hand but child who were habituate with the adult who just hit button with head with hands free, they imitated it just cause it seemed like fun Flavell took Piaget’s ideas and brought it to North America o Argued that children could show much more sophisticated cognitive abilities if you simplified the task

Egocentrism 



Flavell – simplified doll/mountain task. He showed a 3-year old a card with a cat on one side, dog on other side but when asked: “What do you see? I see a dog. What do I see? You see a cat!” o If the child was egocentric, the child would say that the experimenter saw a dog Lempers et al. – show child a picture and have mom on other side of table. Ask child to show it to parent, child turns the picture around so that the parent can see it (thus child isn’t egocentric)

Animism 

Dolgin and Behrend used inanimate objects that were more familiar o When asked about stuffed animal, the child didn’t make animistic response, they knew that their teddy wasn’t alive o When asked about sun or moon then they had animistic reply o Children make life-like characteristics to life-like objects

Conservation 

Dolgin and Behrend trained children to do conservation tasks but it didnt’ work o Used identity training – teach child not to focus on just one dimension o Training helped the child solve the task and they used this knowledge and then generalize it to a task that they had not been taught (acquired ability of conservation) o Liquid conservation re-done: researchers would show the tall glass and short glass of water and just pour it back and forth to show that it’s the same amount of water o Thus preoperational children can learn to conserve many properties

New Research on Concrete Operations 



Problems with the sequencing of abilities o Horizontal decalage (conservation is taught in a certain order: from liquid to volume etc..) Do conservation skills come in the order that piaget taught? (from liquid to volume etc..) o The results are mixed – conservation abilities come roughly in order of what piaget had intended o Other researchers found much less consistency

New research on formal operations    

Is there evidence for formal operations earlier than supposed? o Piaget said no but some research says yes even elementary school kids can understand questions (i.e., positive if-then statement) E.g., Jack + dishes = happy father = toonie; “if Jack washes dishes he get’s a toonie” It’s harder to reason through negative if-then statements

o



i.e., if there is a knife then there’s a fork but what if there is no knife? Child had harder time saying that there was also no fork Not everyone reaches formal operations however.

Evaluation of Piaget’s Theory 

 

Piaget’s contributions o Humans are active in their own development o Young humans think differently than older humans o Impetus for researchers (guides research) Piaget’s general stages seem to hold across time, cultures etc.. even if the ages are a bit off, the stages occur in everyone Challenges to Piaget: o Piaget underestimated the abilities of young minds (i.e., the ages he roughly associated with the different ages are wrong  but this isn’t that big of an issue because they were meant as a rough approximation, culture and enviro affects the age but what matters is that the developmental sequence holds) o The Competence vs. Performance issue (Piaget assume that when kids failed the task it was because they lacked the underlying cognitive competence, when really it may have been the case that they just didn’t have the factor related to performance, like motor skill) o Does cognitive development occur in stages?  Stages as “holistic”structures (different domains of knowledge may develop at different levels in different time courses thus cognitive development may not be as holistic)  Horizontal decalage (sequencing problem) o Piaget’s explanation of intellectural development o Too little attention paid to social and cultural factors