College notes development, learning and behavior test 2

Cognitive development
Major themes regaring development
- Nature vs nurture
- The role of the child
o Active passive
- Continuity vs discontinuity
- Mechanisms of change
- The sociocultural context
- Individual differences

Major theories of cognitive development
- Piaget: theory extremly influencial.
- Information processing
- Core-knowledge
o Whether certain knowledge is inborn or not
- Sociocultural
o Emphasize on sociocultural context
- Dynamic systems

Jean Piaget
- Developed theory by observing own children
- Groundbreaking fundamental theory
- View of children’s nature
o Children are mentally active from birth.
o Their mental and physical activity both contribute to their development
o Constructivist approach to cognitive development
o Children construct knowledge for themselves in response to their experiences
o Children’s constructive processes are:
 Generating hypotheses
 Performing experiments
 Children pour sugar on the ground to see what happens because
they’ve never did it before.
 Drawing conclusions from their observations and so they learn

Central developmental issues
- Nature and nurture interact together to produce cognitive development.
- A lot of stages that a child goes through  discontinuous
- Within each stage development is continious
- Main sources of continuity are:
o Assimilation: the process by which a child incorporates incoming information into
concepts they already know.
 For example a child thinks a black person is instantly ‘zwarte piet’
 Child tries to imply knowledge to something from own environment
o Accommodation: the process by which people improve their current understanding
based on new experiences.
o Equilibration: the process by which children balance assimilation and
accommodation to create stable understanding
 When you are in this state, your current body of knowledge is sufficient for
you to explain the events around you.

,  At a certain point you start to notice stuff that doesn’t fit with your current
knowledge base.  disequilibration
 One of the driving forces of development for children.
- 4 distinct stages of discontinuous cognitive development
o Sensorimotor stage- birth to age 2 years
o Preoperational stage- ages 2 to 7 years
o Concrete operational stage- ages 7 to 12 years
o Formal operational stage- age 12 years and beyond


Sensorimotor stage
- Sensory and motor abilities are used to explore the world
- Learn about objects and people
- Learn about rudimentary forms of concepts like time, space and causality
- Experience is largely in here and now
o What they do in the moment is what they can work with, nothing more
- Birth to 1 month: reflexes  sucking, grasping
- Beyond first few months: integrating reflexes  grasping object then bringing it to the
mouth, sucking on it
- 8 months: object permanence mental representation beyond here and now
o If you hide object, not in immediate sight of child, the child at least for a short time
seems to know that the object was there
o Younger children act as if they don’t know the object exist; out of sight out of mind
o Important cause it shows that children have rudimentary forms of representation;
know what’s around them without actually seeing or touching it.
- Beyond first year: actions based on interest of the child  squeezing a toy over and over to
hear the noise
- 1-year-old: explorers, “little scientists”
- 18 to 24 months: deferred imitation repeating behaviors of others at a later time.
o For example; children start to use mothers make-up

A not B error (sensorimotor stage)
- Children who make this error, either have no object permanence or they do have some but
its rather unstable
- Example movie: toy is located in different location but child still reaches the old location
- Object permanence not stable enough so not able to use the new information and integrate
it with the old information and then go for the new location

Preoperational stage (2-7)
- Ability to represent experiences in language and mental imagery develops
- Better memory for experiences and concepts
- Unable to perform certain mental operations
- Symbolic representation: the use of one object to stand for another.
o Use a broomstick for a horse for example
- Centration: only able to focus on a single, perceptually striking feature of an object
- Egocentrism: perceiving the world solely from one’s own point of view
- Conservation concept: the idea that changing the appearance of objects does not necessarily
change properties. (conservation tasks)
o Child focuses on only one aspect of the situation to answer the question.

Concrete operational stage

, - Logical reasoning about concrete features of the world emerges
- Thinking systematically about hypothetically things remains difficult

Pendulum task
- What determines the time it takes the pendulum to swing a full arc?
o You need to systematically vary each factor (weight, height you drop, etc.)
 You find out it is a combination of factors.
- Hypothetically thinking is difficult for children so experiment it in a systematic way

Formal operational stage
- Stage not everybody according to Piaget will reach
- Children begin to think abstractly and to reason hypothetically
- The world and events as you know or see them are only one possibility
o As soon as you start to be able to think about these sort of things, you are capable of
much more higher order operations.
o Think about hypothetical situations that involve a lot of factors.
- Piaget believed this stage was not universal (i.e., not all adolescents reach it).

Piaget’s theory remains very influential.

Weaknesses of the theory:
- The theory is vague about the mechanisms that give rise to children’s thinking and produce
cognitive growth.
- Infants and young children are more cognitively competent than piaget recognized.
o Object permanence; he thought that it was starting from 8 months when children
develop a sense of object permanence, but now it seems that if you slightly adapt
the tasks that you asses object permanence with, children have the idea or know
that the object is still there at a younger age.
- The theory understates the contribution of the social world to cognitive development.
o It doesn’t say so much about it.
- The stage model depicts children’s thinking as being more consistent than it actually is.
o Every child goes through the same stages in the same sequence within a certain
stage thinking of a child is really characterized by the achievements and the limits of
that particular stage.

Information processing theories
- This theory really wants to understand how development happened and occurred, so what
drives this.
- Piaget said development is because the child explores the world around it and simply finds
out stuff
- What makes it that the child finds out stuff?

View of children’s nature
- Cognitive development occurs continuously
- Small increments happen at different ages on different tasks
- The child is a limited-capacity processing system
o Cognitive development arises from gradually surmounting processing limitations
through:
 Expanding amount of information they can process at a time
 Says something about the amount of processers that are available
 Increasing processing speeds