L4 Evaluating Piaget

• What are the three main challenges to Piaget?

  Children are more precocious.

  Development is more gradual.

  Development is domain-specific.
• Conservation:

  • Problems with earlier tasks - researcher asks ‘are they the same size?’ twice so the child thinks they should answer no, or perhaps they say this because they saw the experimenter manipulate the situation.
  • Study: Used 80 4-6 yr olds. A naughty teddy bear changes the lines. 72% are correct whereas in the experimenter version only 34% are correct. Hence, children may have problems interpreting adult intentions but may be better at conservation than Piaget proposed.

  
• Violation of expectancy with magic tricks:

  • Study: drawbridge goes up and down 180 degrees. An object is added meaning the drawbridge should stop at the object and then go back down. However in the impossible condition, the drawbridge goes straight through and goes the full way.
  • Infants look longer at this showing they know about solidity.
  • Hence babies know a lot more about the physical world than Piaget would ever have accredited at a much earlier age.

  
• Siegler’s microgenetic approach:

  • Development is much more chaotic and random.
  • Rather than studying development as before and after, it is better to zoom in and study change in real time.
  • There is not just one way of approaching tasks that every child uses at the same age.
  • Development is much more fragmented, and not all or nothing - they may get it right one day and wrong the next.
• Domain specificity

  • The mind is a multitude of different systems which solve different tasks (domain specific tasks)
  • Domain general approach = key changes apply across all aspects of cognition such as memory/attention
  • Domain specific: changes occur within specialised knowledge systems. There are dedicated mechanisms and internal structures.
  • Evolution prompts specification
  • Nativist approach - development is more innate - conflicts with Piaget who was constructivist
• Neuroscience approach:

  • Increasing maturation of cortical areas, especially In the prefrontal cortex may enable increasing executive control.
  • This improves executive functions such as working memory, selective attention, inhibitory control (ability to suppress thoughts, emotions)
• • Social context: Piaget’s underestimation of children’s abilities follows largely from a failure to contextualise the problem and a failure to appreciate the social influence of the adult
  • Lev Vygotsky – would they construct their world the same without adult influence? E.g. adults giving children problems just beyond their ability for them to learn
• Sally-Anne

  A-not-B error: their attention may have been brought away from the item. Or they may not be able to suppress the initial action
• • Theory-theory is when children naturally attempt to construct theories to explain their observations. These are intuitive – naïve and not taught. For example: naïve theory of gravity – give a child an imbalanced object to balance on their finger. 4 yr olds pass, but 6-year-olds fail and 8 yr olds initially fail but then pass. 6-year-olds can’t pass because they are in the grip of a theory that symmetrical objects should balance from the middle. Adults also have naïve theories of intuition. Suppressing these naïve thoughts is part of development.