Developmental psychology
Chapter 9
Cognitive development

Piaget’s cognitive-developmental theory

Epistemology: the study of the origins of knowledge and how we know what we know.

Two important findings of Piaget:

• Children of the same age made similar errors
• These errors differed from those of older and younger children

According to Piaget, everything that we know and understand is filtered through our current frame of reference. We construct new understandings of the world based on what we already know.
Constructivist.

Underlying structures and processes

Schemes

The basic unit of understanding is a scheme.
This is a cognitive structure that forms the basis of organizing actions and mental representations so that we can understand and act upon the environment.
This makes up our frames of reference through which we filter new information. Everything we know starts with the schemes we are born with.

Three of the basic schemes we are born with are reflexive actions that can be performed on objects: sucking, looking and grasping.
As children grow older they begin to use schemes based on internal mental representations rather than using schemes based on physical activity.
These schemes are operations.

Processes: organization and adaptation

Two innate processes to explain how children modify their schemes:

• Organization
  The predisposition to group particular observations into coherent knowledge. It occurs both within and across stages of development.
• Adaptation
  Composed of two processes:
  • Assimilation: incorporating the information into existing schemes
  • Accommodation: adjusting existing concepts or generate new schemes

Through the processes of accommodation and assimilation we adjust to reality.

Piaget’s stages of cognitive development

Equilibration: in Piagetian theory, a state in which children’s schemes are in balance and undisturbed by conflict.
The processes of assimilation and accommodation comprise the equilibration process.
We are, by nature, constantly motivated to be able to fully assimilate and accommodate to objects and situations in our environment, to reach the state of cognitive equilibration.
At times, so many new levels of understanding converge that we reach a major reorganization in the structure of thinking.
These new levels of thinking are states. Qualitative shifts in a child’s way of thinking.
The ages at which they are achieved vary from one child to another. But, the order of progressing through stages is invariant.

Piaget believed his stages were universal:

• All people would develop through the same sequences of stages
• For any given stage children would be in that stage for all of their thinking and problem-solving strategies. Although there are transitional periods as children move from one stage to another.

The sensorimotor stage: birth to 2 years

All that infants know is derived from information that comes in through the senses and the motoric actions that they can perform.
For most of this stage young children are pre-verbal and have no symbol use.
Young children must live in the present dependent upon sensorimotor input and the overt actions they can perform.

Divided into six substages.

1. Reflexive schemes substage (birth- 1 month)

• Infants use their innate reflexes to explore their world.
• Many of these innate reflexive schemes are designed to keep the infant alive, and they act as the building blocks for sensorimotor intelligence.

2. Primary circular reactions (1-4 months)

• There is a shift in the infant’s voluntary control of behavior. The infant start to show a degree of coordination between the senses and their motor behavior through the primary circular reactions.
• Such repetitive behaviors are focused almost exclusively around the infant’s body ad not the external world.
• There is also some anticipation of events, although it is fairly limited.

3. Secondary circular reactions (4- 10 months)

• There is a shift in the infant’s voluntary control of behavior as they become more aware of the external world. Infants now direct their behavior to reaching and grasping objects. Although the actions are still circular as the infant engages in repetitive behavior.

4. Coordination of secondary schemes (10 -12 months).

• Infants begin to deliberately combine schemes to achieve specific goals. They begin to engage in goal-directed behavior.
• Infants in this substage solve object-pernamence tasks.

5 Teriary circular reactions (12- 18 months)

• The child begins to walk and search for novelty.
• As children consolidate their understanding of causal relations between events, they begin to systematically experiment with varying the means to test the end results. Such activities enable children to discover more about their world and new ways of solving problems.

6. Beginning of thought (18- 24 months)

• Children become able to form enduring mental representations.
• This capacity is demonstrated in toddler’s ability to engage in deferred imitation (the ability to copy or mimic the actions of others, some time after they have seen these actions).
• Enduring mental representations also mean that children no longer go through the trial and error method. They can mentally experiment by performing the actions in their minds.
• Toddler’s also engage in pretend play, which developed further in the next substage.

Criticisms of Piaget’s account

• There is now a wealth of evidence that suggest both object permanence and deferred imitation occur much earlier in development than Piaget suggested.
• Infants are capable of deferred imitation much earlier than 18 – 14 months of age.

The preoperational stage: 2 to 7 years

Characterized by an impressive increase in mental representation and accompanied by equally impressive limitations.
Two substages:

1. Symbolic function substage: 2 to 4 years

Children acquire the ability to mentally represent an object that is not physically present.
This ability to engage in symbolic thought expands the child’s mental world as they are no longer tied to the here and now and they no longer require sensory input to think of things.
Early on the child requires a high level of similarity between external prop and referent in order to symbolize the referent. Over time, children can use external props that are dissimilar to the referent. Eventually, children can just imagine the referent and event.
Other examples of children engaging in symbolic thought can be seen in their use of language and their production of drawings.

At 16 months, the average child comprehends over 150 words, but in their early language they are restricted to producing one word at a time.
Between 18 and 24 months, their productions are typically restricted to two-word utterances.
From 2 years this word-lenght restriction becomes lifted and children learn an impressive nine words a day on average.

Children understand the symbolic nature of drawings.

• Egocentrism
  The tendency to perceive the world solely form one’s own point of view.

Tree mountains task: a task used by Piaget where the child is shown a model of three mountains and asked to choose the view that would be seen by someone in a different location from themselves.

14 month-olds engage in rational imitation (where infants produce an action that they think the adult intended to do, rather than what the adult actually did).
This demonstrates that 14-month-olds can infer other’s intentions and perspectives!
This is not confined to humans!
Children of 18 months of age can sympathize with a stranger who is in a hurtful situation but showing no emotion.

• Animism

The belief that inanimate objects have lifelike qualities and are capable of independent action.
Piaget suggested that young children’s egocentric thinking prevents them form accommodating.
Recently researchers have shown that, for familiar objects, 6-12 month olds can sort pictures of objects into categories and distinguish between animate and inanimate objects.
By the age of 2,5 years, children attribute wishes and likes to people and animals but hardly ever to objects.

Intuitive thought substage: 4 to 7 years

Characterized by a shift in children’s reasoning.
Children begin to classify, order and quantify in a more systematic manner.
Although a child can carry out such mental operations, they remain largely unaware of the underlying principles and what they know. A child’s reasoning is largely based on perception and intuition, rather than rational thinking.

Seration task: putting items in a coherent or logical order.

Transitive inferences
the relation between two (or more) premises that lead to an inference that is logically necessary.
The ability to seriate mentally between entities that can be organized into an ordinal series.
4 year olds could make transitive inferences as long as they were trained to remember the premises. But his may had false positives.

Hierarchical classification tasks
Class inclusion: the ability to coordinate and reason about parts and wholes simultaneous in recognizing relations between classes and subclasses.
Piaget proposed that children have difficulty in focusing on a part of the set and, simultaneously, on the whole set. This idea is similar to Piaget’s account of young children’s failure to conserve.

More recently, researchers using simpler questions have found that children as young as 4 years of age were able to solve part-whole relations problems.
There is plenty of evidence that young children have formed a variety of global categories based on common natural kind, function and behavior. They can make categorization judgments based on non-observable properties.
Children’s skill at categorizing object across the pre-school years is supported by gains in general knowledge and a rapid expansion in vocabulary.
By 2-3 years of age, children can categorize and object according to a superordinate (higher level, like animal) category.

Conservation tasks
Certain characteristics of an object remain the same even when their appearance changes.

Processes involve in failure to conserve
Piaget proposed that the preoperational child’s inability to conserve is characterized by three main limitations:

• Centration (the tendency to focus on one attribute).
• Reversibility (the ability to imagine a series of steps in both forward and reverse directions).
• Focusing on the end state rather than on the means to the end.

The age at which children attain conservation varies across culture, and depends on the substances and concepts they are asked to conserve.
Horizontal décalage: the non-synchornous development of children on Piagetian tasks.
Different types of conservation require differing degrees of abstraction, with conservation of liquid, number, length and mass requiring the fewest abstract operations, ad volume the most.
Children attain conservation of mass prior to attaining conservation of volume. The order of progression is constant, because knowledge of the simpler concept is essential in order for the child to attain the more abstract concept.

But, children have some knowledge of conservation far earlier than Piaget suggested.
There is even a type of conservation of weight that can be found in infants.
Vertical décalage: within Piagetian terminology, the child has a level of understanding at one level that has to be reconstructed at a later age at a different stage or level of understanding.
Other researchers have found children conserving at an earlier age than Piaget’s theory suggests.
But, children do not seem to fully understand conservation until the school years.

The appearance-reality distinction
Appearance-reality tasks in which appearance and reality diverge.
3 year olds make two kinds of error:

• Phenomenism (knowledge that is limited to appearances such that children only report appearance)
• Realism (believing that things are as they appear and not what they might be. Saying that a sponge that looks like a rock is really a rock).

This might be because 3-year olds are not proficient at dual encoding.

DeLoache suggests that 3 year olds, but not 2,5 year olds do possess the ability to represent an object in more than one way at the same time.

Researchers suggested that young children’s failure on these tasks may, in part, result from a difficulty in formulating the appearance-reality distinction into words.

The concrete operations stage: 7 to 11 years

During this stage, children’s thought processes change yet again.
Children’s thought is more logical and flexible, but their reasoning is tied to concrete situations.
They have attained the processes of decentration, compensation and reversibility. They can solve conservation tasks.
They also seriate mentally, an ability named transitive inference. But in abstract is difficult.
The child can seriate mentally, but the object necessary for problem solution need to be physically present.
Between the ages 7 and 10, children gain in their ability to classify objects. They can attend to relations between a general and two specific categories at the same time.

But performance on tasks may be influenced by the context of the tasks. It has been demonstrated that culture and schooling affects children’s performance on a number of Piagetian tasks.

Overall evaluation of Piaget’s theory

Scaffolding: the process whereby adults structure and simplify a child’s environment in order to facilitate their learning.

Case’s neo-Piagetian theory

Like Piaget, Case interpret cognitive change occurring as a series of four stages or structural levels:

• Sensorimotor stage (0-2 years)
• Interrelational stage (2-8 years)
• Dimensional stage (5-11 years)
• Vectorial stage (11-19 years)

Unlike Piaget, Case adopted an information processing perspective to cognitive development in that he attributes changes within each stage and across stages to increases in central processing speed and working memory capacity.
Case attributed increases in working memory capacity to three factors:

• Brain development
• Automatisation
• The formation of central conceptual structures.

When children form a new conceptual structure they move to the next stage of development.
Once all schemes (for example, for conservation task) have become sufficiently automatic, they are integrated into a central conceptual structure (network of concepts) that enables them to efficiently process information about a range of conservation tasks.

Siegler’s overlapping waves theory

An evolutionary perspective to account for child development.
Siegler suggests that when attempting to solve tasks, children may generate a variety of strategies.
Sielger argues that children are most likely to use multiple strategies which compete with each other when they are still learning about how to solve the task.
Overlapping waves: at any given time the child has a number of strategies that can be use to solve problems. Over time less efficient strategies are replaced by more effective ones.

Vygotsky’s sociocultural perspective

Vygotsky viewed the child as an active seeker of knowledge.
Vygotsky emphasized that children’s thinking is influenced by social and cultural contexts.
We share lower mental functions such as attention and memory with other animals and these functions develop during the first two years of life.
Physiological tools are acquired through social and cultural interactions.

Language is the most important psychological tool in cognitive development. Children engage in private speech as a form of self-guidance.
As children master the use of language, they do not only use language as a means of communicating with others, but also for guiding thinking and behavior.
At first, children talk to themselves out loud. As they gain more experience with tasks, they internalize their self-directed speech. This is private speech.
Eventually private speech becomes the mediating tool for the child’s thinking and the child uses private speech to think and plan.

Children’s learning takes place within a fuzzy range along the course of development. Within the zone of proximal development (ZPD).
The zone covers three developmental levels

• Lower level: the actual level of development, reflects what the learning can do unassisted.
• Upper level of the zone: the potential level of development reflects what the learner cannot yet do.
• Everything between these levels is the proximal development.

Whether a child can successfully solve a problem or pass a task depends on many environmental factors.
While some tasks are not very challenging and the child can pass these unassisted. Other tasks are more challenging and can only be passed with assistance.
For guidance to be of benefit to the learner it must fit the child’s current level of performance. This is scaffolding.
The child internalizes the language and behaviors used in these social interactions and it becomes part of their private speech, which in turn mediates their thinking and planning.

With the development of new skills at a higher level of mastery both the actual level and the potential level increases. The entire ZPD is dynamic and moves with development. Each domain has its own dynamic zone.

Scaffolding may not be appropriate in all contexts.
Guided participation: children’s ability to learn from interaction wit others.
Play is an area in which children advance themselves as they try out new skills. When children engage in pretend play, imaginary situations are created from internal ideas, rather than outside stimuli eliciting responses from the individual. Gradually, they come to realize that a symbol can be differentiated from the referent to which it refers.
Pretend play is also rule-based. Such play helps children internalize social and cultural norms that govern people’s behavior.

Theory of core knowledge

Proposes that humans are endowed with a small number of domain-specific systems of core knowledge at birth and that this core knowledge becomes elaborated with experience.
Specific modules are responsible for a particular kind of core knowledge.
Principles governing reasoning in each domain are distinct because infants only apply them to entities within a specific domain. Each set of principles forms a specific system that is characterized by a set of signature limits: there is some debate over the number of core knowledge systems.
Five systems for core knowledge:
Knowledge of:

• Objects and their motions
• Agents and their goal-directed actions
• Number and the operations of arithmetic
• Places in the navigatable layout
• Geometric forms and their length and angular relations

These systems are at the core of mature reasoning in these domains and it is these systems that support knowledge acquisition in children.
There is cross-cultural evidence.

The system of object representation centres on the spatio-temporal principles of cohesion (objects move as connected and bounded wholes), continuity, and contact.
These principles enable infants, and adults, to perceive object boundaries, to represent the entire shape of objects that are partly out of view, and to make predictions about how an object will behave.
In the first few months of life, infants have some awareness of these basic object properties.

The system of object representation has a number of signature limits.

• Infants are only able to represent about three objects at a time. Adults also fail to track entities beyond this set size limit.
• System of object representation is universal.

Spatio-temporal principles do not govern infant’s representation of agents. Rather intentional actions of agents are directed to goals, and these goal representations guide infants’ imitations of others, and their social interactions.

Infant’s are more likely to understand other people’s intentions in reaching for objects after they themselves have learned to intentionally reach for objects. This suggests that infants have to first learn from their own intentional actions before being able to interpret the intentional actions of others.

Key principles that provide the signatures of agent representation:

• Efficiency in achieving goals
• Contingency
• Reciprocity
• Gaze direction

Infants can discriminate between visual arrays on the basis of number.
This ability persists across the lifespan and is also common in non-human species.
Infants can discriminate between a large number of object and infants even add and subtract.
But infants’ numerical discrimination shows a ration limit.

Core knowledge theory differs from other theories.
They say: Some aspects of knowledge are innate.