Chapter 8 (cognitive development)

• Cognition: acquiring knowledge and mental processes
• Cognitive development: changes that occure in mental skills and abilities over a lifetime
• Piaget's theory of Cognitive development: studied the origins of knowledge, intelligence, and using schemes
• Intelligence is adaptation to the environment
• Assimilation is when the new details are added to the existing schema
• Accommodation: creating a separate schema based on new traits in a schema
• Organization: rearranging schemes into more complex ones
• Adaption: occurs in Assimilation and Accommodation
• Sensory Motor stage: experiencing the world via the senses and motor skills
• The pre-operational phase: learning to speak and that gesture mean things, play pretend, and understand simple concepts
• The Formal operation stage: understanding morality, compationite, ability to make assumptions or generalization, thinking
• Concrete-operational stage - having logical thought
• Six substages in the Sensorimotor stage:

  1. Reflex
  2. primary circular (repeat pleasurable activities)
  3. Secondary Circular (involves objects)
  4. Coordination of Secondary Schemes (ability to try to reach a goal)
  5. Tertiary Circular Reactions (intentional adaptation)
  6. Mental Representation (
• Deferred imitation: imitating someone after a period of time
• a not b error - looking for an object where it has been seen before, when a child has seen where it actually is
• Pre-operational stage: the child is symbol-based in their knowledge. They animate objects, are egocentric, can't understand changes in objects, do not understand conservation, and can not understand that things can be reversed
• Dual representation: a small model and a large model is shown, the 2-year-old can't find something in the small model even when shown where it is, while a 3 year old can
• Theory of Mind: The ability to understand that other people have their own thoughts and feelings, and our own feeling are inaccessible to others.
• Shared attention mechanism (SAM): verbal or nonverbal cues that allow us to connect with others
• Theory-of-mind module (ToMM) understanding another perspective and desires
• Concrete operational stage: the hallmark of this stage is being able to mentally order a set of things along a line
• Formal Operational stage: thinking abstractly about concepts. Being able to reason broad ideas to more specific ones
• Lev Vygotsky argued that children learn from people above them
• Tool of intellectual adaptation:

  zone of proximal development - difference between what a learner can accomplished alone verse what they can do with help
• Scaffolding: adjusting what is needed for the child by the caregiver
• Private speech: self directed monologe that helps with processing
• Ontogenic Development: Development of an organism in its own lifetime
• Microgenetic development: Very small development happening over an extremely short time
• Phylogenetic development: The evolutionary history of a species is recorded in the DNA of its descendants
• Sociohistorical development: The development of society and culture in relation to historical events and processes