Psychology paper 1: development

• Piaget: Theory of Cognitive Development

  The way a person's knowledge, thinking and intelligence changes as they get older
• Before Piaget's theory, people believed that children were the same as adults but just knew less
• Piaget's theory


  • Young children are not able to think logically about the world
  • As a child gets older, their brain develops and different kinds of thinking are possible, such as being able to use numbers and to think in a more abstract way
• Schemas


  Mental frameworks, mental representations of the world that are stored in the mind
• How children learn new information

  1. Assimilation

  2. Accommodation
• Assimilation


  A form of learning that takes place when we acquire new information or a more advanced understanding of an object, person or idea without radically changing our existing schemas
• Accommodation


  A form of learning that takes place when we acquire new information that changes our understanding of a topic to the extent that we need to form one or more new schemas
• Piaget's stages of cognitive development

  • Sensorimotor stage (0-2 years)
  • Pre-operational stage (2-7 years)
  • Concrete operational stage (7-11 years)
  • Formal operational stage (11+ years)
• Fixed mindset


  Belief that intelligence/abilities are fixed, no point in trying hard
• Growth mindset


  Belief that you can always get a little bit better through effort, enjoy being challenged
• People are not simply one or the other (fixed or growth mindset) but a mixture on a continuum
• Unexpected praise


  Praise should be unexpected, as expected praise can reduce intrinsic motivation
• Memory and forgetting


  • Forgetting is often due to lack of right cues, so learning associated cues is important
  • Practicing retrieval (memory tests) improves long-term retention
• Self-regulation


  Ability to control behaviour, emotions, attention and other cognitive processes, including delaying gratification
• Neuroscience can help identify patterns in brain function associated with learning disorders like dyslexia
• McGarrigle and Donaldson's 'naughty teddy study' (1974)


  • Aim: To investigate whether a child's reaction would be different if there was no deliberate change (i.e. the change was accidental)
  • Method: Participants were 80 children from Edinburgh, Scotland. 40 of the children were at nursery schools (mean age 4 years 10 months) and 40 were from primary school (mean age 5 years 10 months). The children were introduced to the naughty teddy who was liable to escape from his box and try to mess up the toys and spoil the game. The children were then shown two rows of counters (4 red counters and 4 white counters). The teddy jumped out of his box and pushed the counters in one row about. That row then looked smaller. Before and after the transformation each child was asked: "Is there more here or are they both the same number?"
  • Results: 41% (33 out of 80) of the children gave the correct answer ('there is the same number on each row') if the display was changed deliberately. 68% (54 out of 80) of the children gave the correct answer if the change was accidental. For the primary children both figures were higher than for the nursery school children.
• Hughes' 'policeman doll' study (1975)


  • Aim: To investigate whether children could cope better with an egocentrism task if it made social sense and was more understandable to them
  • Method: 30 children aged 3 ½ to 5 years old from Edinburgh. Each child was shown a diagram with intersecting walls. The policeman doll was placed on one side and the child on the other. Hughes then put a boy doll in each section and asked if the policeman could see the boy doll. The policeman doll was then moved to a different point and the question asked again. Finally, the child was asked to move the boy doll to hide him from the policeman if the child made any error, it was pointed out and the task repeated. Then the test started: two policeman dolls were placed on the model. The child was asked to hide the boy doll from the policeman.
  • Results: 90% of the children were able to position the boy doll where two policemen could not 'see' him. In more complex trials using five or six sections, the 3-year-olds had more trouble (60% correct). The 4-year-olds had 90% success.
  • Conclusions: Piaget had underestimated younger children's abilities - they were able to see the world from another person's perspective.
• The same even when the appearance of an object or group of objects changes
• The studies were not generalisable
• The policeman doll study increased validity
• Gibson's Direct Theory of Perception


  • Perception happens directly
  • We have sufficient information from our senses to be able to perceive
  • Gibson states that sensation is perception
  • Our eyes are highly sophisticated organs
  • We don't need to make any inferences from prior learning
• Optic flow patterns


  • When we are moving, the point we are moving towards is stationary whilst the rest of the view appears to rush away
  • The optic flow patterns detected by our eyes let our brain know that we are moving
  • If there is no flow, there is no movement
• Motion parallax

  • A monocular depth cue that helps us understand speed and movement
  • Closer objects appear to move faster than further objects
• The key feature of Gibson's theory is that we do not need to learn to perceive the world around us. Our perceptual abilities are innate and they are there in our nature.
• Gregory's Constructivist Theory of Perception


  • Perception is a construction
  • We use past experience to interpret the world around us
  • Our brain will 'fill in the gaps' using inference
  • The brain uses sensory information and visual cues to draw conclusions
• Visual cues


  Help us to perceive depth, distance, and the size and shape of objects
• Nurture


  The way we use visual cues is due to our prior learning
• McGinnies study on factors affecting perception: Emotion


  • Things that cause anxiety are less likely to be noticed than emotionally neutral things
  • It takes longer to recognise words that may cause embarrassment than neutral words
  • Offensive words produce bigger changes in galvanic skin response
• McGinnies referred to this as 'perceptual defence'. Our brains, when confronted with words that could cause embarrassment will block these out, even just for a short moment.
• Gilchrest and Nesberg study on factors affecting perception: Motivation


  • Food-deprived participants perceived food pictures as brighter than they actually were
  • Hunger is a motivating factor that affects perception, making food-related pictures appear brighter and more appealing
• Bruner and Minturn study on factors affecting perception: Expectation


  • Participants were more likely to perceive an ambiguous figure as a 'B' or '13' depending on the sequence of letters or numbers they were shown beforehand
  • Expectation plays a role in perceptual set
• Sensory memory

  Information from the five senses, very high capacity, lasts less than half a second unless attended to
• Short-term memory

  Limited capacity store, coded acoustically, lasts less than 30 seconds unless rehearsed
• Long-term memory

  Coded semantically, potentially unlimited capacity, lasts a lifetime
• Murdock's serial position curve study

  • Likelihood of recall is related to the position of the word in the list
  • Higher recall for first few words (primacy effect)
  • Highest recall for final few words (recency effect)
• Murdock's study supports the multi-store model of memory - first words are long-term memories, recent words are still in short-term memory
• Evaluation of Murdock's study

  • Generalisability: Unlikely to be a diverse, representative sample
  • Reliability: Standardised procedure, can be replicated
  • Validity: Measures what it claims to measure
  • Application: Can support theories and explain real-world phenomena
• Serial position effect

  • The position of a word affects how likely it is to be recalled
  • Recency effects are strongest
• • The first words have been rehearsed so are long-term memories
  • The most recent words are well remembered because they are still in the short-term memory
• Bartlett's War of the Ghosts study (1932)


  Investigated how memory is reconstructed when people are asked to recall something repeatedly over a period of weeks and months