Zusammenfassung der Ressource
Early Cognition
- Piaget
- Stages of Development
- Sensori-motor
- 0-2 years
- Intelligence is
based entirely on
actions
- Pre-operational
- Beginnings of
symbolic thought
- 2-7 years
- Concrete
Operations
- Ability to think
logically about physical
changes and relations
- 7-13 years
- Formal
Operations
- Abstract and
hypothetical
reasoning
- Cognition at
different ages
- 6 months
- Infants appreciate difference between selves and
objects but do not understand continued
existence of objects beyond their own actions
- 9-18 months
- Infants develop an imperfect
understanding of the continued
existence of objects once occluded
- Birth
- Infants have no understanding of the world
- Stage 3 error
- Babies of 6-9 months fail to search for
occluded objects but do search for partly
concealed objects. Piaget concluded that
they do not understand the covered object
still exists, and when they uncover the partly
concealed objects, they believe their own
actions reconstitute the object
- Stage 4 error
- Infants of ~9 months retrieve a covered object at
location A, but when it is hidden at location B, fail to
search for it. Piaget concluded that the child does not
understand that the object can exist elsewhere other
than the place they originally uncovered it- it becomes a
"thing of the place". They believe their own actions will
reconstitute it regardless of where they search
- Tests of infant cognition
- Preferential looking
- Preferential looking experiments
compare how long infants look at two
stimuli as a measure of surprise or
preference
- If there is a positive result, the
infant can evidently distinguish
between the stimuli and
conclusions can be drawn. If there
is a null result, it cannot be
established whether they have no
preference or simply cannot
distinguish them
- Can conclusions be drawn? Is "surprise" the correct
interpretation of the results? Could it not be to do with
increased perceptual information
- Experiments
where this is
used
- Baillargeon et al: drawbridge
experiments. Longer looking
time at impossible event
suggests surprise and
therefore understanding of
basic object properties
- Kellman and Spelke:
Infants recognised
continuity of partially
concealed rod (looked
for longer at
unexpected event)
- Habituation
- Habituation involves showing
infants a stimulus until looking
time decreases by 50%, then
showing them novel stimuli
- Again, conclusions
cannot be drawn from
null results
- Used in
Baillargeon
experiment
- A not B error
- Infants of ~9 months retrieve a
covered object at location A,
but when it is hidden at
location B, fail to search for it.
- Piaget concluded that the child does not
understand that the object can exist elsewhere
other than the place they originally uncovered
it- it becomes a "thing of the place". They
believe their own actions will reconstitute it
regardless of where they search
- Alternative suggestions for error
- Lack of motor
co-ordination to alter
response
- Memory deficits
- Although error is made
when object hidden
under transparent
cover
- Misunderstanding
of task or
confusion
- Conservation
- Piaget
- For conservation to occur, children must recognise the
reversibility of the transofrmation. This means they need to
decentre their attention from one dimension. Young children
lack reversibility because they cannot think logically about
physical changes
- Piaget concluded from the
results of conservation tasks
in young children that they
lack reversibility due to
egocentrism
- Reversibility, Egocentrism
and the Principle of
Invariance
- Reversibility is the ability to
manipulate mental representations
of objects
- Egocentrism is the inability to
consider objects or scenes from a
different spatial or temporal
perspective
- The Principle of
Invariance states that
there are relevant and
irrelevant changes
associated with an
object
(addition/subtraction
vs perceptual
transformations)
- Three Mountains Task
- Criticisms of Piaget
- Naughty teddy
- Suggests results of conservation
experiments may have been due
at least in part to demand
characteristics
- Neonate
conservation
- Newborn babies act
surprised when basic
conservation is
violated