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Cognitive development

Major themes regarding to cognitive development

• Nature vs. nurture
• The role of the child
• Continuity vs. discontinuity
• Mechanisms of change
• The sociocultural context
• Individual differences

Major theories of cognitive development

• Piaget
• Information processing
• Core-knowledge
• Socio-cultural
• Dynamic systems

Jean Piaget

• Developed his theory by observing his own children
• His view of children’s nature:
  
  • Children are mentally active from birth (not before)
  • Their mental and physical activity both contribute to their development
• Constructivist approach to cognitive development » because the child is very active, these experiences kind of construct the knowledge and cognitive development (children construct knowledge for themselves in response to their experiences)
• The constructive processes are:
  
  • Generating hypotheses (because children are curious)
  • Performing experiments (‘see what happens’)
  • Drawing conclusions from their observations (they learn about their environment)
• Central developmental issues
  
  • Nature and nurture interact together to produce cognitive development
  • There are stages each child ‘walks through’ (discontinuous), but within each stage takes a continuous development place
  • Main sources of continuity are:
    
    • Assimilation: the process by which a child incorporates incoming information into concepts they already know (bijv. dat een kind ergens een persoon met donkere huidskleur ziet en denkt dat dat zwarte piet is)
    • Accommodation: the process by which children improve their current understanding based on new experiences
    • Equilibration: the process by which children balance assimilation and accommodation to create a stable understanding
  • Four distinct stages of discontinuous cognitive development (each of these stages is characterized by certain capabilities and limitations):
    
    • Sensorimotor stage: birth – age 2
      • Sensory and motor abilities are used to explore the world
      • Child learns about objects and people
      • Child learns about rudimentary forms of concepts like time, space and causality
      • Experience is largely in here and now
      • Birth to 1 month: reflexes (e.g. sucking, grasping)
      • Beyond first months: integrating reflexes (e.g. grasping objects, then bringing it to mouth to suck on them)
      • Around 8 months: object permanence (if the object is no longer in the immediate sight of the child, the child knows that the object was there) » mental representation beyond here and now » A-not-B-error (when object is hided in another place, the child can’t find it anymore)
      • Beyond first year: action based on interest of the child (e.g. squeezing a toy over and over to hear the noise)
      • One-year-old: explorers, ‘little scientists’
      • 18-24 months: deferred imitations » repeating behaviors of others at a later time
    • Preoperational stage: ages 2-7 years
      • Ability to represent experiences in language and mental imaginary increases/develops
      • Better memory for experiences and concepts
      • Unable to perform certain mental operations (e.g.
      • Symbolic representations: the use of one object to represent another object (develops)
      • Centration: only able to focus on a single, perceptually striking feature of an object
      • Egocentrism: perceiving world solely from one’s own point of view
      • Conservation concept: the idea that changing the appearance of objects does not necessarily the properties
    • Concrete operational stage: ages 7-12 years
      • Logical reasoning about concrete features of the world emerges/improves
      • Thinking systematically about hypothetical things remains difficult (can be tested with Pendulum Task)
    • Formal operational stage: ages 12 years and older (Piaget believed that this stage isn’t universal, i.e. not all adolescents reach it)
      • Children begin to think abstractly and reason hypothetically
      • The world and events as you know or see them are only one possibility
• Piaget’s legacy
  
  • The theory remains very influential » it’s kind of the start of cognitive development studies
  • Weaknesses of the theory:
    
    • The theory is vague about the mechanisms that give rise to children’s thinking and how cognitive growth is produced
    • Infants and young children are more cognitively competent than Piaget realized
    • The theory understates the contribution of the social world to cognitive development
    • The stage model depicts children’s thinking as being more consistent than it is » it suggests that every child goes through the same stages in the same sequence

Information processing theory

• View of children’s nature:
  • Development occurs continuously
  • Small increments happen at different ages on different tasks
  • The child is a limited-capacity processing system (like a computer) » cognitive development arises from gradually surmounting processing limitations through:
    
    • Expanding the amount of information they can process at any time
    • Increasing processing speed
    • Acquiring new strategies and knowledge
  • The child is a problem solver (problem solving = the process of attaining a goal by using a strategy to overcome an obstacle)
• Central developmental issues:
  
  • Information processing theories:
    
    • Examine how nature and nurture work together to produce development
    • Emphasize precise descriptions of how change occurs
    • Focus on development of memory and problem solving
• • Three types of memory:
    
    • Working memory: actively attending to, gathering, maintaining, storing and processing information is limited in both capacity (amount of information that can be stored) and length of time information can be retained
    • Long-term memory: knowledge that people accumulate over their lifetime (this memory is infinite, you can always store information)
    • Executive functioning: the controls of cognition
  • Development of memory:
    
    • The three memory ‘systems’ gradually develop overtime because the processing speed increases
    • Encoding: storing and the ability to work with information becomes much more efficient
    • Basic processes: association, recognition, recalling and generalizing
    • Strategies: rehearsal and selective attention (if you don’t focus your attention on the right pieces of information in your environment, you give less adaptive responses than when you are able to focus on just the things that are important at that time)
    • Content knowledge » the more knowledge you have, the easier it is to fit in new knowledge (it’s easier to understand new knowledge, het is als een kapstok)
  • Development of problem solving:
    
    • Overlapping wave theory (see chapter 4 of book)
    • Discover new strategies and more effective execution of strategies
    • More flexible/adaptive choice of strategies
    • Improved planning abilities » problem solving is used more and the quality increases
      • Improved inhibition
      • Less overoptimism about own abilities (the more experience, the more precise the estimation of what they can/cannot do)

Core knowledge theories

• View of children’s nature:    
  • Children enter the world equipped with specialized learning mechanisms » children can acquire knowledge so quickly, that there must be something biologically to prepare them to be able to acquire the knowledge so quickly (these areas are for evolutionary importance)
  • Domain specific:
    
    • Understanding and manipulating other people’s thinking
    • Differentiating between living and non-living things
    • Identifying human faces, finding one’s way through space
    • Understanding cause-effects and language
• Central development issues:
  
  • Nativism vs. constructivism:
    
    • Nativism: infants have substantial innate knowledge of evolutionary important domains » they’re born with ‘inborn’ knowledge
      • Inanimate objects and their mechanical interactions
      • Minds of people and animals are capable of goal-directed actions (it seems that children understand that this is the case)
      • Numbers
      • Spatial layouts
    • Constructivism: infants build increasingly advanced ‘theories’ (about the world around them) by combining rudimentary innate knowledge with subsequent experiences » evidence for child theories (children are little scientists):
      • Children identify fundamental units for dividing relevant objects and events into a few basic categories
      • Children explain many phenomena in terms of a few fundamental principles
      • Children explain events in terms of unobservable causes

Sociocultural theories

• View of children’s nature:
  • Childrens development is heavily dependent on the culture and the people surrounding them
  • Vygotsky: children are social learners connected with others who help them gain skills and understanding. How they’re helped:
    
    • Understanding and problem solving by instructions
    • The child uses private speech to instruct him/herself (out loud)
    • Private speech goes underground and becomes internalized (thoughts)
• Central development issues:
  
  • Change occurs through social interaction
    
    • Intersubjectivity: the mutual understanding that people share during communication (‘meeting of minds’) » you learn when you understand each other
    • Joint attention: social partners focus on the same external objects
    • Social scaffolding: more competent person provide temporary framework to support thinking at a higher level » zone of proximal development
    • Autobiographical memories: parents stimulate AM formation » creates a narrative of one’s life

Dynamic systems theories

• View of children’s nature:
  • Children are innately motivated to explore the environment
  • Children learn/develop by problem solving
  • Other people are important in influencing development
  • Childrens actions shape their (cognitive) development
• Central developmental issues:
  
  • Self-organization:
    
    • Development is a process of self-organization
    • It involves integrating attention, memory, emotions and actions to adapt to the changing environment
    • Called ‘soft assembly’ » as components are ever changing » continuously the system is reorganizing and trying to find the best solution for the given circumstances (the only constant in development is change)
  • Mechanisms of change:
    
    • Changes occur through mechanisms of variation
    • Variation: the use of different behaviors pursue the same goal
    • Selection: increasing frequent choice of behaviors that are relatively successful in reaching goals
    • Children also use efficient and novel behaviors