Cognitive Development - Piaget & Vygotsky

Cognition - inner processes of the mind that lead to knowing. Including attending, remembering, symbolising, categorising, planning, reasoning, problem solving, creating and fantasising.
Piaget's cognitive-development theory
1. Constructivist approach - children construct all knowledge about their world through their own activity.
2. Piaget's stages - A general theory of development - all aspects of cognition chafe in an integrated fashion following a similar course. The stages are invariant - they occur in a fixed order and no stage can be skipped. They are universal - They characterise children everywhere.
  1. The Sensorimotor stage - (Birth to 2 years). Circular reaction - Stumbling onto a new experience caused by the baby's own motor activity. As the infant tries to repeat the event a sensorimotor response that originally occurred by chance strengthens into a new schema.
    1. Sensorimotor substages - 1) Reflexive schemes (Birth to 1 month). Newborn reflexes. 2) Primary circular reactions (1-4 months), limited anticipation of events. 3) Secondary circular reactions (4-8 months) Imitation of familiar behaviours. 4) Coordination of secondary circular reactions (8-12 months), Intentional goal directed behaviour. 5) Tertiary circular reactions (12-18 months), imitation and exploration in novel ways. 6) Mental representations (18 months - 2 yrs), Internal depiction's of objects and events, make-believe play, arrive at solutions without trial and error, deferred imitation (copying behaviour of models not present).
  2. The pre operational stage - (2 to 7 years). Increase in symbolic activity. Make-believe play - In early pretending toddlers use realistic objects. After 2 years they pretend with less realistic toys. By age 3 they understand an object may take on numerous fictional identities. Play becomes less self centred. Play includes more complex combinations of schemes. Sociodramatic play - Make-believe play with others seen at the end of the 2nd year. Children with make believe friends are advanced in understanding other's views and are more sociable. Drawings - They progress from scribbles where intended representations are contained in their drawings, to first representational forms around 3 years, to more realistic drawings around 5 and 6 years.
    1. Piaget's limits of pre operational thought. Operations - Young children are incapable of mental representations of actions that obey logical rules. Egocentrism - Their failure to distinguish other's symbolic viewpoints from one's own. Inability to conserve - Conservation is the idea that certain physical characteristics or objects stay the same even when their appearance changes. Their thinking is characterised by 'cent ration' - they focus on one aspect while ignoring other important features. Lack of Reversibility - The ability to go through a set of steps in a problem and then mentally reverse the direction to the start. Lack of hierarchical classification - The organisation of objects into classes and sub classes on the basis of similarities and differences.
  3. The Concrete Operational stage - (7 to 11 years). Thought becomes far more logical, flexible and organised. Children are now capable of conservation, explaining it by decent ration and reversibility. Children can classify the relations between one general category and two specific categories at the same time. Seriation - The ability to classify items along a quantative dimension such as length or weight, Transitive inference - The ability to seriate mentally. Improvements in spatial reasoning - Aged 8 to 10 children's maps show landmarks along an organised route of travel. 10 to 12 year olds can comprehend scale.
  4. The Formal Operational Stage - (11 years and older). Development of the capacity for abstract, systematic, scientific thinking. Hypo- Deductive reasoning - When faced with a problem people start with a hypothesis from which they deduct logical testable inferences, then they systematically isolate and combine variables to see which are confirmed in the real world. Propositional thought - The ability to evaluate the logic of propositions without referring to real world circumstances.
    1. Egocentrism reappears in two ways. Imaginary audience - Adolescent's belief that they are the focus of everyone's attention and concern, as result they become self conscious. Personal fable - Certain that others are watching them, they develop an inflated opinion of their own importance. Adolescents with high personal fable and sensation seeking scores tend to take more sexual risks, more often use drugs and commit more delinquent acts.
3. Schemas - organised ways of making sense of experience. They change with age, at first they are sensorimotor action patterns. Then they move towards the cognitive approach with mental representations - internal depictions of information that the mind can manipulate.
  1. Adaptation - Building schemas through direct interaction with the environment. It involves assimilation and accommodation. Assimilation - Current schemas are used to interpret the external world. Accommodation - Creating new schemas or adjusting old ones after noticing the current way of thinking does not capture the environment completely.
    1. Cognitive equilibrium - A comfortable state with minimal change where assimilation occurs more than accommodation. Disequilibrium - Rapid cognitive change. Equilibration - the back and forward movement between the two states.
  2. Organisation - An internal process where children form new schemas, rearrange them, linking them with other schemas to create a stronger interconnected cognitive system.
4. Piaget's educational principles - 1) Discovery learning - Children are encouraged to discover for themselves through spontaneous interaction with the environment. 2) Sensitivity to children's readiness to learn - Teachers introduce activities that build on children's current thinking. 3) Acceptance of individual differences - Children go through the same sequence of development but at different rates, therefore teachers must plan different activities for small groups and judge progress in relation to previous development not on the basis of normative standards.
5. Challenges to Piaget's Theory - 1) His account of cognitive change is not clear and accurate. Overemphasis on child initiative. 2) Does cognitive development take place in stages? - Periods of cognitive equilibrium are rare and progress takes place slowly.
Object permanence - The understanding that objects continue to exist when they are out of sight. A-not-B search error - If they reach several times for an object in a certain hiding place (A), then see it moved to another (B), the still search for it in the first hiding place (A).
Violation-of-expectation method - Habituate babies to a particular event or show babies an expected event. Then show them an unexpected event and heightened attention to the unexpected event shows the child's awareness.
Analogical problem solving - Applying a solution strategy from one problem to other relevant problems. Evident in infants from 10-12 months.
Displaced reference - words can be used to cue mental images of thins not physically present. Occurs around 12months.
Video defect effect - Poorer performance after attaching a video than a live demonstration. Declines around 2 1/2 years. Amount of tv viewing is negatively related to 8-18 month olds language progress.
Dual representation - viewing a symbolic object as both an object in its own right and a symbol.
The Core Knowledge Perspective
1. Infants begin life with innate special purpose knowledge systems referred to as core domains of thought. Each prewired understanding permits a ready grasp of new, related information and supports early rapid development of certain aspects of cognition.
2. Physical knowledge - understanding of objects and their effects on one another. Numerical knowledge - the capacity to keep track of multiple objects and to add and subtract small quantities.
  1. Physical - 21/2 month olds realise that solid objects cannot move through one another. In the first half year infants are sensitive to basic principles of object support.
  2. Numerical - Babies can discriminate quantities up to three and use that knowledge to perform addition or subtraction. 6 month olds can distinguish between large sets of items when the difference is great, at least by a factor of 2. 6 month olds can also discriminate ratios.
3. Development is seen as domain-specific and uneven. Children are viewed as naive theorists building on core knowledge concepts to explain their everyday experiences in the psychological, biological and physical worlds.
4. Theory theory - The theory of children as theorists. After children observe an event, they draw on innate concepts to theorise about it. Then they test their naive theory against experience and revise it when it cannot adequately account for new information.
  1. Theory of mind - The psychological knowledge of oneself and others that forms rapidly during the first few years.
  2. Children also have naive biological and physical theories. The biological theories are the slowest to develop.
Vygotsky's Sociocultural Theory
1. Emphasises the profound effects or rich social and cultural contexts on children's thinking.
2. Speech - Language is the foundation for all higher cognitive processes. Children speak to themselves for self-guidance and as they get older and tasks get easier their speech in internalised as inner speech.
  1. Private speech - Children use it more when tasks are appropriately challenging, after they make errors or when they are confused.
3. Zone of Proximal Development - A range of tasks too difficult for the child to do alone but possible with the help of more skilled people.
4. Intersubjectivity - To promote cognitive development social interaction must have two participants who begin a task with different understandings and arrive at a shared understanding.
5. Scaffolding - Adjusting the support offered during a teaching session to fit the child's current level of performance. In contexts outside schooling 'guided participation' may be more effective. It refers to shared endeavours without specifying the precise features of communication.
6. Make believe play - Vygotsky viewed it as a broadly influential zone of proximal development in which children advance themselves as they try out a wide variety of challenging skills.
7. Education - Vygotksy's classrooms promote assisted discovery. Teacher's guide children's learning with explanations, demonstrations and verbal prompts. Assissted discovery is aided by 'peer collaboration'. An emphasis on literary activities.
  1. Reciprocal Teaching - A teacher and 2 to 4 students form a collaborative group and take in turns leading dialogues on the content of the text passage. Group members question, summaise, clarify and predict.
  2. Cooperative Learning - Peer collaboration promotes development only under certain conditions. A crucial factor is cooperative learning where small groups of classmates work towards common goals.
8. Cultural variation - It helps us understand wide cultural variation in cognitive skills. In some cultures verbal dialogues are not the most important means in which children learn.

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Cognitive Development - Piaget & Vygotsky

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