Psychology: Cognition and Development

• Cognitive development


  The study of how mental processes develop over time
• Much of the research in this unit focuses on the development of children's thinking and reasoning
• Piaget


  A Swiss psychologist writing from 1930 till the 1970's, interested in how knowledge is acquired and develops and what motivates us to learn
• How an adult is different from a child


  • Adult is taller
  • Adult uses complex language
  • Adult has better impulse control
  • Child is small
  • Child has less vocabulary
  • Child has less impulse control
• Prior to Piaget it was felt that children were just quantitatively different to adults, that a child simply knew less than an adult. However Piaget found that a child's thinking is qualitatively different, not a child knowing less, the child thinks in a completely different way
• Schema


  A cognitive structure or a mental representation, which contains information relating to one aspect of the world and or activities
• Schema development


  1. Children are born with innate (inborn) schemas

  2. Schemas integrate with each other and new ones form in response to the environment

  3. Assimilation - using the same schema to integrate new knowledge and experience into existing schemas

  4. Disequilibrium - a state of imbalance of the world (when we don't understand)

  5. Accommodation - changing and creating new schemas
• Equilibrium


  A state of balance about our knowledge about the world
• The process of learning stays the same through life
• Assimilation


  A new object or idea is understood in terms of existing schema
• Accommodation


  Schemas are modified to fit new situations or information
• Piaget's idea that children learn by actively exploring their environment and forming their own mental representations of the world has revolutionised teaching
• The role of the teacher is to set tasks which create Disequilibrium, to encourage the development of new schemas
• Discovery learning


  • Shops, sand, lego learning and discovering via play
• Flipped learning


  • Students are given the material beforehand and we can focus on activities that encourage the higher order skills needed for exam success
• Howe et al (1992) found that whilst all children had increased their knowledge about the topic they had not come to the same conclusions, supporting the concept that each child learnt and formed their own personal mental representations despite the same learning environment
• Piaget underplayed the role of other people in learning, ignoring the importance of learning from an expert and the child being a 'little apprentice' rather than a 'little scientist'
• Piaget may have overplayed the importance of equilibrium, as children will give up if the knowledge is too difficult or they are not interested
• Piaget's sample was really clever middle class children from a university which are more curious and motivated to learn
• Piaget may have underplayed the role of language, compared to Vygotsky
• Sensorimotor stage


  0-2 years approx.
• Object permanence


  The idea that an object continues to exist even when it is out of sight
• Person permanence


  The idea that a person continues to exist even when they are out of sight
• Symbolic thinking


  The understanding that one object can represent something else
• Preoperational stage


  1. 7 years approx.
• Animism


  The belief that a life like object can have human properties
• Egocentrism


  The child's tendency to only see the world in their own point of view and are unable to see it from the viewpoint of others
• Conservation


  The inability to understand that an object stays the same even if its appearance changes
• Class inclusion


  The belief that an object can belong to more than one category
• Concrete operational stage


  Applies logic to things in front of them that are physical
• Seriation


  The ability to put things in order
• Reversibility


  The ability to move backwards
• Decentration


  No longer being egocentric
• Formal operational stage


  11 years+, the development of abstract thinking and scientific thought, the ability to construct hypotheses
• Abstract thinking


  Develops after the age of 11
• Blanket and ball study


  Investigates object permanence in the sensorimotor stage
• Piaget's search task mixes up competence (underlying ability) and performance (whether someone actually does it), leading him to underestimate infants' abilities
• Bower & Wishart (1972) found that 4 month old infants could find a toy in complete darkness, suggesting they had object permanence earlier than Piaget thought
• Violation of expectation research by Baillargeon and DeVos (1991) suggests that children develop object permanence at 3-4 months, and that it may be an innate skill
• Three mountain study


  Investigates egocentrism in the preoperational stage