Functional invariants

• What did Piaget say?


  Cognitive developments is a result of biological maturation
• What are functional invariants?


  The process by which children and adults learn
• What is a schema?

  Cognitive framework that represents concepts
• What are the two ways schemas are altered?

  Assimilation

  Accommodation
• What is assimilation?


  Incorporating new information into existing schemas
• What is accommodation?


  Creating a new schema
• What is cognitive disequilibrium?


  When something doesn’t fit into a schema we are thrown into cognitive disequilibrium

  To fix this we must assimilate or accommodate our schemas
• What is evidence for innate schemas?


  Fantz (1961) - infants as young as 4 days old show a preference for faces rather than the same features all jumbled up
• How is equilibration hard to demonstrate?

  Assimilation and accommodation are unfalsifiable as they are hard to operationalise
• What are the applications of functional invariants?


  Discovery learning - allowing children to learn on their own
• What does this do to language?

  Makes it unimportant for learning
• What does this do to social processes?

  Makes them unimportant for learning