Cognitive Development (Piaget's and Vygotsky's)

• cognition is the activity of knowing and the processes through which knowledge is acquired
• cognitive development are changes that occur in mental activities such as attending, perceiving, learning, thinking, and remembering
• genetic epistemology is the experimental study of the development of knowledge, developed by Piaget
• intelligence is in Piaget’s theory, a basic life function that enables an organism to adapt to its environment.
• cognitive equilibrium is Piaget’s term for the state of affairs in which there is a balanced, or harmonious, relationship between one’s thought processes and the environment.
• constructivist is one who gains knowledge by acting or otherwise operating on objects and events to discover their properties.
• clinical method is what Piaget used to study children. it is a question-and-answer technique he used to discover how children of different ages solved various problems and thought about everyday issues
• Piaget proposed that intelligence is “a form of equilibrium toward which all cognitive structures tend”
• scheme is an organized pattern of thought or action that one constructs to interpret some aspect of one’s experience (also called cognitive structure).
• organization is an inborn tendency to combine and integrate available schemes into coherent systems or bodies of knowledge.
• adaptation is an inborn tendency to adjust to the demands of the environment.
• assimilation is the process of interpreting new experiences by incorporating them into existing schemes.
• accommodation is the process of modifying existing schemes in order to incorporate or adapt to new experiences and information
• visually directed reaching is a complex structure that enables him to reach out and discover the characteristics of many interesting objects in the environment
• equilibrium is the harmony between one’s schemes and one’s experience
• cognitive equilibration is when the individual seeks to stabilize his or her cognitive structures. it is the state of affairs in which there is a balanced, or harmonious, relationship between one’s thought processes and the environment.
• Professor Johanson believes that children’s thinking follows an invariant developmental sequence. It is likely that Professor Johanson generally agrees with Piaget and is a stage theorist
• invariant developmental sequence is a series of developments that occur in one particular order because each development in the sequence is a prerequisite for those appearing later.
• Piaget recognized that there are tremendous individual differences in the ages at which children enter or emerge from any particular stage. In fact, his view was that cultural factors and other environmental influences may either accelerate or retard a child’s rate of intellectual growth, and he considered the age norms that accompany his stages (and substages) as only rough approximations at best
• sensorimotor period is defined as the Piaget’s first intellectual stage, from birth to 2 years. it is when infants are relying on behavioral schemes as a means of exploring and understanding the environment.
• reflex activity is the first substage of Piaget’s sensorimotor stage; infants’ actions are confined to exercising innate reflexes, assimilating new objects into these reflexive schemes, and accommodating their reflexes to these novel objects.
• primary circular reactions is the second substage of Piaget’s sensorimotor stage; a pleasurable response, centered on the infant’s own body, that is discovered by chance and performed over and over.
• secondary circular reactions is the third substage of Piaget’s sensorimotor stage; a pleasurable response, centered on an external object, that is discovered by chance and performed over and over.
• coordination of secondary circular reactions is the fourth substage of Piaget’s sensorimotor stage; infants begin to coordinate two or more actions to achieve simple objectives. This is the first sign of goal-directed behavior.
• tertiary circular reactions is the fifth substage of Piaget’s sensorimotor stage; an exploratory scheme in which the infant devises a new method of acting on objects to reproduce interesting results.
• imitation happens in the fourth substage of sensorimotor stage
• deferred imitation is the ability to reproduce a modeled activity that has been witnessed at some point in the past happened during 18 to 24 months
• object permanence is the realization that objects continue to exist when they are no longer visible or detectable through the other senses i.e. when independent of one's perception of and action on them
• A-not-B error is the tendency of 8- to 12-month olds to search for a hidden object where they previously found it even after they have seen it moved to a new location.
• neo-nativism is the idea that much cognitive knowledge, such as object concept, is innate, requiring little in the way of specific experiences to be expressed, and that there are biological constraints, in that the mind/brain is designed to process certain types of information in certain ways.
• theory theories are theories of cognitive development that combine neo-nativism and constructivism, proposing that cognitive development progresses by children generating, testing, and changing theories about the physical and social world.
• According to Piaget, imitation is the purest example of assimilation
• preoperational period is Piaget’s second stage of cognitive development, lasting from about age 2 to age 7, when children are thinking at a symbolic level but are not yet using cognitive operations.
• symbolic function—the ability to make one thing—a word or an object—stand for, or represent, something else
• representational insight the knowledge that an entity can stand for (represent) something other than itself.
• animism is attributing life and lifelike qualities to inanimate objects.
• egocentrism is the tendency to view the world from one’s own perspective while failing to recognize that others may have different points of view. it happens during preoperational stage of development. it is well established in the concrete operational stage
• appearance/reality distinction is the ability to keep the true properties or characteristics of an object in mind despite the deceptive appearance the object has assumed; notably lacking among young children during the preconceptual period.
• conservation is the recognition that the properties of an object or substance do not change when its appearance is altered in some superficial way. it happens during the concrete operational stage.
• decentration is in Piaget’s theory, the ability of concrete operational children to consider multiple aspects of a stimulus or situation; contrast with centration.