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74 Cards in this Set
- Front
- Back
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Theories of Cognitive Development |
Chapter 4 |
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3 Advantages of using theories of cognitive development |
1. Provide a framework for understanding important phenomena 2. Raise crucial questions about human nature 3. Lead to better understanding of children |
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What time period does Piaget's theory extend through? |
first days of infancy through adolescence |
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3 Assumptions of Piaget |
1. From birth onward, children are active mentally as well as physically 2. Children learn many important lessons on their own, rather than depending on instruction from adults 3. Children are intrinsically motivated to learn and do not need rewards from adults to do so |
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Piaget's approach is often labeled ______________ because it depicts children as constructing knowledge for themselves in response to their experiences. |
constructivist |
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Adaptation |
respond to demands of environment in ways that meet your goals |
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Organization |
integrating particular observations into coherent knowledge |
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Sources of continuity |
1. Assimilation 2. Accommodation 3. Equilibration
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Assimilation |
process by which people incorporate incoming information into concepts they already understand |
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Accommodation |
process by which people adapt their current understandings in response to new experiences |
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Equilibration |
process by which people balance assimilation and accommodation to create stable understanding (equilibrium--> disequilibrium --> more stable equilibrium) |
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Proporties of Piaget's Stage Theory |
1. Qualitative change 2. Broad applicability 3. Brief transitions 3. Invariant sequence (pass through stages in same order, no skipping stages) |
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1. Sensorimotor stage |
-birth to 2 years old - intelligence expressed through sensory and motor abilities - rudimentary forms of time, space, and causality - infants live in here and now |
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2. Preoperational stage |
- 2 to 7 years old - represent experiences in language, mental imagery, and symbolic thought - inability to perform mental operations - do not comprehend conservation of water task |
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3. Concrete Operational |
- 7 to 12 years - Able to reason logically about concrete objects and events - understand conservation of water task - difficulty thinking in purely abstract terms and in generating scientific experiments |
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4. Formal Operational |
- 12 years and beyond - able to think about abstractions and hypothetical situations |
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Object Permanence |
- objects that continue to exist even when they are out of view - lack this until about 8 months |
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A-not-B error |
- tendency to reach for a hidden object where it was last found rather than in the new location where it was last hidden |
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Deferred imitation |
repetition of other peoples behavior a substantial time after it occurred |
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When do infants show deferred imitation? |
last half year of the sensorimotor stage |
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Symbolic representation |
use of one object to stand for another |
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True or False: Children's drawings between ages 3 and 5 make increasing use of symbolic conventions, such as representing the leaves of flowers as V's |
True |
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Egocentrism |
Perceiving the world solely from ones own point of view |
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In Piaget's three mountains task, when asking to choose the picture that shows what the doll sitting in the seat across the table would see, how would children under age 6 respond? |
They would choose the picture showing how the scene looks to them |
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Over the course of the pre operational period, egocentric speech becomes less common. What is an early sign of progress? |
Children's verbal quarrels because the disagreement indicates that the playmate is at least paying attention to the differing perspective that the other child's comment implies |
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Centration |
Focusing on a single feature of an object/event without taking into consideration other relevant features |
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When presented with a balance scale and asked "which side will go down?," 5 and 6 year olds center on the amount of weight on each side, ignore the distance of the weights from the fulcrum and say that whichever side has more weight will go down. What principle does this show? |
Centration |
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Conservation concept |
merely changing the appearance or arrangement of objects does not necessarily change the quantity of material |
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During what stage will children consider the distance on the balance scale problem, and not only the weight? |
Concrete Operational |
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During which stage will children be able to perform unsystematic experiments and draw conclusions |
Formal Operational |
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True or False: Unlike the previous three stages, the formal operational stage is not universal; not all adolescents (or adults) reach it |
True |
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Weaknesses of Piaget's theory |
1. Stage model depicts children's thinking as being more consistent than it actually is (ex. children succeed on conservation of number before they succeed on conservation of solid problem) 2. Infants more cognitively competent than Piaget recognized 3. Understates contribution of social world to cognitive development 4. Vague about cognitive processes that produce cognitive growth |
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Information Processing Theory |
emphasize processes that give rise to children's thinking and mechanisms that produce cognitive growth |
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Core-knowledge theories |
children's early understandings have innate, evolutionary basis |
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Sociocultural theories |
children's interactions guide cognitive development |
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Dynamic- systems theories |
how change occurs in complex systems saying children acquire skills at different ages and in different ways |
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Task Analysis |
identification of goals, relevant information in the environment, and potential processing strategies |
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Structure |
basic organization of the cognitive system |
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Processes |
vast number of specific mental activities |
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Is Information Processing Theory aligned with stage development or continuous development? |
continuous development (occurring constantly, in small increments, rather than broadly and abruptly) |
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Information Processing Thoery compares children's thought process to that of a ____________. |
computer |
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Problem Solving |
involves a goal, a perceived obstacle, and a strategy or rule for overcoming the obstacle and attaining the goal |
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Sensory Memory |
-sights, sounds, and other sensations that have just been experienced - holds small to moderate amount of information for a fraction of a second - capacity is relatively constant over time though it does increase somewhat |
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Long-Term Memory |
information retained on an enduring basis |
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Working Memory (short term memory) |
-actively process information from sensory memory and long term memory - can hold between 1 and 10 items for periods ranging from a fraction of a second to about a minute - capacity and speed of operation increases greatly over course of childhood and adolescence |
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Basic Processes |
simplest and most frequently used mental activities |
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Encoding |
getting information that draws our attention and we consider important into our memory |
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Two biological processes that contribute to faster brain processing are ... |
Myelination and Increased connectivity among brain regions |
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Rehearsal |
repeating info over and over in order to remember it |
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Selective attention |
process of intentionally focusing on info that is relevant to current goal |
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True or False: Children who know a lot about soccer learn more from reading new soccer stories than do other children who are both older and have higher IQs but who know less about soccer |
True |
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Why do child chess experts remember far more than do adult novices in terms of various positionings of chess pieces on a board? |
experts greater knowledge leads to their encoding higher-level chunks of information |
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Overlapping-waves theory |
-Children use variety of approaches to solve a problem - with age and experience they rely on more advanced strategies |
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When do children begin to form planning? |
By their 1st birthday (12 months) |
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Why is planning difficult for young children |
Because it involves inhibiting desire to solve problem immediately which is controlled by frontal lobe and is one of the last parts of the brain to mature |
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Two characteristic features of research inspired by core-knowledge theories |
1. fouces on understanding peoples goals and intentions 2. in areas of importance to human evolution, young children reason in ways more advanced than Piaget suggested |
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Piaget= _______________ Info Processing= _________________ Core- Knowledge= _________________ |
Child Scientist Child thinks like a computer Well adapted product of evolution |
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Domain specific |
limited to a particular area, such as living things or people |
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Why would children form intuitive theories of physics, biology, and psychology? |
Children have always needed to know about physical objects in order to perceive the environment accurately and to move around in it safely |
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When do children first possess core theories of physics, biology, and psychology? |
- infants begin life with a primitive theory of physics (inanimate objects) - first theory of psychology may emerge at around 18 months - first theory of biology at around 3 years |
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Guided participation |
more knowledgable people organize activities in ways that allow less knowledgable people to engage in them at a higher level than they could manage on their own |
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Vygotsky's Thoery |
- children portrayed as social beings - emphasized continuous, quantitative changes - at first child behavior controlled by parents statements, then controlled by their own private speech, then its controlled by internalized private speech |
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Private speech |
children tell themselves what to do out loud |
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True or False: The processes that produce development are the same in all societies, but the content varies greatly from culture to culture. |
True |
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True or False: Chinese culture promotes interdependence while American culture promotes independence. |
True |
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Intersubjectivity |
mutual understanding that people share during communication |
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Joint Attention |
Infants look toward objects that their social partners are looking at |
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True or False: The younger the age at which infants begin to show joint attention, the faster their subsequent language acquisiton |
True |
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Social Scaffolding |
More competent people provide a temporary framework that supports children's thinking at a higher level |
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True or False: Children whose mothers use the more elaborative style remember more about events than do children whose mothers rarely elaborate |
True |
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Dynamic Systems Theories place greater emphasis on... |
- children strongly motivated to learn about the world around them - actions contribute to development throughout life |
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Change occurs through _______________ and ________________. |
variation and selection
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Variation |
different behaviors being generated to pursue the same goal |
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Selection |
increasing choice of behaviors that are effective for meeting goals |
