Piaget and Vygotsky • Cognition

PSYB20 Week 5 Notes Chapter 8 Cognitive Development: Piaget and Vygotsky 

Cognition: mental activity through which human beings acquire, remember, and learn to use knowledge o Perception, attention, learning, memory, and reasoning Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development  Helped Binet develop the first intelligence test which was a standardized IQ test for children o Children the same age tended to get the same answers wrong o The errors of children of a particular age differed in systematic ways from those of older or younger children  Piaget thought the errors children made revealed distinct age-related ways of thinking and understanding the world  Piaget relied on interviews and observations to study children  Piaget’s theory proposed that over development, the child acquires qualitatively new ways of thinking and understanding the world Piaget’s Main Tenet: The Child Actively Seeks Knowledge  Constructivist view: children construct their own understanding o Actively seek out information, and when they encounter new information, they actively try to fit it in with knowledge they already have  Cognitive Organization o Cognitive structure – organized group of interrelated memories, thoughts, and strategies that the child uses in trying to understand a situation o Schema: organized unit of knowledge, forms the knowledge base that a person uses to understand and interact with the environment o Organization: combination of simple mental structures into more complex systems o See turning points on pg. 300 o Operations: schemas based on internal mental activities  Cognitive Adaptation o Adaptation: children modify their schemas in relation to their own experiences o Assimilation: applying their existing schemes to the new experience o Accommodation: modifying an existing scheme to fit the characteristics of the new situation The Stages of Cognitive Development  Stages of development: comprehensive, qualitative changes over time in the way a child thinks  Stages are built through experience, so children don’t reach these stages at exactly the same age

PSYB20 Week 5 Notes 

The Sensorimotor Stage o First two years of life o Children move from purely reflexive behaviour to the beginnings of symbolic thought and goal-directed behaviours o Children begin to form mental representations of objects and events and use this information in developing new behaviours and solving problems o Development of object concept o Object permanence: realization that objects continue to exist even when they are out of sight o Substage 1: Basic Reflex Activity (Birth to 1 month)  Basic reflex activity: use of innate reflexes  Exploration of objects occurs through involuntary reflex behaviours o Substage 2: Primary Circular Reactions (1 to 4 months)  Primary circular reactions: infants produce repetitive behaviours that are focused on the infant’s own body  Repeat and modify actions that they find pleasurable  No concept that objects have an existence of its own, when a toy vanishes they do not look for it o Substage 3: Secondary Circular Reactions (4 to 8 months)  Secondary circular reactions: repetitive behaviours focused on external objects  Some awareness of the permanence of objects  Child will search visually for an object if it’s loss interrupts the child’s actions  If child watches an object being covered, he won’t attempt to look for it o Substage 4: Coordination of Secondary Schemata (8 to 12 months)  Child develops more sophisticated combinations of behaviours that are directed toward objects and that reflect intentionality  Child begins to search for hidden objects  If the object is moved from one hiding place to the other, the child will still search in the first hiding place (A-not-B error) o Substage 5: Tertiary Circular Reactions (12 to 18 months)  Child experiments with external objects  Trial-and-error methods to learn more about the properties of objects and to solve problems  Capable of producing similar but not exact behaviours  Understands object permanence o Substage 6: Inventing New Means by Mental Combination (18 to 24 months)  Symbolic thought: use of mental images to represent people, objects, and events  Think symbolically and engage in internal or mental problem solving

PSYB20 Week 5 Notes Deferred imitation: child mimics an action some time after observing it  Able to make inferences about the positions of unseen objects even when the objects have been hidden or displaced several times o New Research Directions and Explanations of Knowledge in Infancy  Many investigators have argued that because of developmental limitations (poor hand-eye coordination), some children who have acquired the object concept may be unable to reveal it in manual search activities  Baillargeon found that infants looked longer at the impossible event that at the possible event  Core knowledge systems: ways of reasoning about ecologically important objects and events (solidity and continuity)  Infants are biologically prepared to learn certain kinds of information or principles about the world The Preoperational Stage o Child’s development of the symbolic function  The ability to use symbols such as words, images, and gestures, to represent objects and events mentally o The Preconceptual Substage (2 to 4 Years)  Emergence of symbolic capabilities in children’s language, their great interest in imaginative play, and their increasing use of deferred imitation  Animistic thinking: attributing life to inanimate objects  Egocentrism: children view the world from their own perspective and have difficulty seeing things from another person’s point of view  When the task is make more comprehensible to children, they are able to perform much better that Piaget claimed o The Intuitive Substage (4 to 7 Years)  Child can solve problems with these operations but cannot explain why it was solved in that particular way  Child has difficulty understanding part-whole relations o The Main Limitations of Preoperational Thought  The child is semi-logical  Conservation: the child must recognize that even when an object’s appearance is altered, the basic attributes or properties remain the same  Children can conserve the identity or quality but not the amount or quantity of objects  Reversibility: the child cannot mentally reverse or undo a give action  Closely related to egocentrism 

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PSYB20 Week 5 Notes Ends-over-means focus: the child focuses on the end states rather than the means by which the end states were obtained  Overlooks the process of transformation  Centration: child centres their attention on only one dimension of an object or situation  The Stage of Concrete Operations o From age 7 to 11/12 o Children understand reversibility and are able to attend to more than one dimension of a problem at a time o They can solve problems only if the objects necessary for problem solutions are physically present o Bryant showed that when memory demands of a task are limited, concrete operational children can make logical inferences without having the physical materials present o Cognitive competence is related to cultural context in which development occurs o People develop skills and concepts that are useful in the daily activities required in their eco-cultural settings o Culture alters the cognitive experiences children have and the rate at which children learn certain types of knowledge  The Stage of Formal Operations o Begins at age 11 or 12 o Changes in flexibility and complexity of the thought process, the use of mental hypothesis testing, and the ability to entertain many possible alternatives when solving problems o Ability to think abstractly and understand/solve problems that have no basis in reality o They can think about/discuss philosophical issues (truth, justice, imagining alternative lifestyles/universes) o Attainment of formal operations is strongly influenced by culture  Cultures that do not emphasize symbolic skills or in which education is limited, formal development will occur later in life Piagetian Concepts and Social Cognition  The Self as a Distinction from Others o Central component of social cognition is the differentiation of the self from the environment, including other human beings o Young babies seem to expect certain behaviours from people o In the first few months, infants learn to differentiate their own movements from the movements of another person o An understanding of object permanence may be a prerequisite for self-recognition  Role Taking: Understanding Others’ Perspectives o With development, children become less egocentric and more able to understand the thoughts and perspectives of others  Improved communication skills and moral standards 

PSYB20 Week 5 Notes o See table on pg. 319 for stages of cognitive & social  Theory of Mind o Theory of mind: focuses on when and how children come to understand the mind o False-belief task – telling a child a story and then asking him what a character in the story thinks  Do Sociocultural Experiences Influence the Development of Social Cognition? o From early to middle childhood, children’s self-constructs become increasingly aligned values of their cultural community o Young children who have more siblings perform better on false-belief tasks, but the age of the sibling is a factor An Evaluation of Piaget’s Theory  Strengths of the Theory o Piaget integrated a broad spectrum of concepts of the physical world into a single theory o His theory stimulated a large amount of research  Limitations of the Theory o Did Piaget Judge the Child’s Abilities Accurately?  Piaget may have underestimated the timing or onset of children’s cognitive abilities o Does Cognitive Development Proceed in Stages?  Recent evident suggests that cognitive development may not occur in stage-like steps  Children in the concrete operation stage do not acquire the ability to conserve all types of substances at the same age  Horizontal décalage: unevenness in development  In developing an understanding of conservation, children conserve different objects or substances at different ages  If a task is simplified or made more comprehensible, children can conserve at earlier ages than Piaget suspected o How Does the Socio-emotional and Cultural Context of Cognitive Development Fit with Piaget’s Theory?  Active intervention (training in problem-solving strategies) can accelerate cognitive development  An understanding of the capabilities and limitation associated with the different stages of thinking could help guide an educator or therapist as they work with children in need  Overall Assessment o Piaget asked and answered important question in innovative ways, and his ideas stimulated a vast amount of research/theorizing by other behavioural scientists

PSYB20 Week 5 Notes Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory of Cognitive Development  Focuses on the influence of the social and cultural world on cognitive development  Cognitive development is largely the result of children’s interaction with more experienced members of their culture (parents, teachers, and older children)  Mediators: changes in the ways that children interact with other people as well as with the psychological tools and symbol systems of a culture that can be used to support and extend cognition o Language, counting, mnemonic devices, etc.  Elementary and Higher Mental Functions o Elementary mental functions: basic attention, perception, and involuntary memory, and biological and emerge spontaneously o Higher mental functions: voluntary attention and intentional remembering o Elementary form of memory is constructed of images and impressions of events o The higher form of memory involves the use of signs to mediate memory functions  The Zone of Proximal Development o The difference between a child’s actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving, and his potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers o Children’s understanding and cognitive skills can be improved when adults or more skilled peers provide support o Scaffolding: the teacher adjusts the amount and type of support he offers to fit with the child’s learning needs over the course of an interaction o Reciprocal instruction: tutoring approach that helps children in reading comprehension by having the learner collaborate with tutors o Community of learners: classroom application, children work together on sustained or long-range class projects, and the teacher serves as an expert guide who facilitates the process o Guided participation: adults regularly support learning in the context of everyday activities by directing children’s attention to, and involvement in these activities o Intent community participation: how children seek out ways to participate in authentic activities of their community alongside more experienced cultural members  The Role of Culture o Culture provides the institutions and social settings that support and direct cognitive development o If we ignore culture, we may underestimate children’s intellectual capabilities

PSYB20 Week 5 Notes 

The Role of Language o Language provides children with access to the ideas and understandings of other people, and also enables them to convey their own ideas and thoughts to others o Egocentric Speech as a Cognitive Aid  Thought and speech and independent in early development  Egocentric speech: self-directed monologue by which the child instructs herself in solving problems  Inner speech: internal monologue that guides intelligent functioning o Using the Zone of Proximal Development in Teaching Language  The KEEP teacher uses modeling, questioning, and feedback, which are part of the methods of scaffolding and reciprocal instruction An Evaluation of Vygotsky’s Theory  Strengths of the Theory o Helped to make developmental psychologists more aware of the importance of the immediate social contexts of learning and cognition o Points the new ways of assessing children’s cognitive potential  Does Vygotsky’s Theory Describe Developmental Change? o Limitations pertaining to his explanation of development o Microgenetic change: change over time in a specific learning experience o Ontogenetic change – age-related change