Psychology: cognitive development

• brain development in a 3-4 week old fetus


  a long tube develop in the brain and is divided into the forebrain midbrain and hindbrain
• brain development in a 5 week old fetus

  - the fore brain splints in the anterior and posterior

  - the hind brain splits down the middle

  - midrain is unchanged
• anterior


  front
• posterior


  back
• brain development in a 6 week old fetus


  - the cerebellum is formed (after a year it grows 3 times the size
• what does the cerebellum control

  physical skills, responses such as fear, and processing sense info.
• brain development in a 20 week old fetus


  - medulla oblongata is formed between the brain and hte spinal chord
• medulla oblongata


  the continuation of the spinal cord within the skull, forming the lowest part of the brainstem and containing control centers for the heart and lungs.
• brain development of a baby from birth to 3 years

  - huge increase in neural connections (1000 each second)

  - doubles in size, 80% of its size by 3 years old
• Piaget's Theory of Cognitive Development


  jean piaget's stages of development that kids go through as they grow up. These stages are indicated by a change in thinking.
• 4 stages in Piaget's Theory of Cognitive Development

  - sensorimotor stage

  - pre-operational stage

  - concrete operational stage

  - formal operations stage
• sensorimotor stage (Piaget's)


  - 0-2 years old

  - infants use senses and movements to gather information about the world

  - living only in the present

  - at 4 months children begin to repeat actions

  - at 6 months they gain object permanence
• object permanence


  the awareness that things continue to exist even when not perceived
• how to aid children in the sensorimotor stage (piagets)


  - treat children as individuals

  - lots of stimulation for children to build schema's
• preoperational stage (piagets)


  - 2-7 year olds
• preoperational stage (piagets) symbolic function


  - 2-4 year olds

  - symbolic play

  - imitation

  - words and symbols aid the beginning of language development.

  - animism

  - children are still egocentric
• preoperational stage (piagets) intuitive thought stage


  - 4-7 year olds

  - begin to reason

  - ask a lot of questions

  - centration is not yet achieved

  - irreversability
• symbolic play


  play in which children make believe that objects and toys are other than what they are.
• Animism


  children believing that objects can act as if they are alive.
• Centration


  only being able to focus on one aspect of a problem when it is complex
• conservation


  understanding that how looks don't change volume or weight
• how to aid children in the preoperational stage (piaget)


  - encourage children to learn by discovery to develop schemas

  - individual learning
• concrete operation stage (piaget)


  - 7-12 years old

  - apply rules and strategy to thinking

  - concrete objects to aid understanding (counters for math)

  - seriation

  - classification

  - reversibility

  - conservation

  - decentration
• Seriation (Piaget)


  knowledge that things can be arranged in logical series
• Classification


  naming and identifying objects according to size and appearance
• how to aid children in the concrete operation stage


  ask children to concentrate on more than one aspect of an issue.
• formal operations stage (piaget)


  - 12+

  - controlling objects and events

  - control thoughts

  - think about more than physical things when describing a person

  - understand the effects of time

  - understand that events can have a sequence

  - understand that actions have consequences
• how to aid children in the formal operations stage (piaget)


  - discuss abstract concepts and complex questions with mental reasoning

  - study different subjects to distinguish different ways of thinking

  - understand how they partake in certain norms
• how did piaget believe that people develop

  - form ideas in the form of schemas

  - develop through adaptations to their schemas
• adaptations to schemas


  - assimilation - incorporating new experiences into exisitng schemas

  - accommodation - a schema no longer works and has to be changed to deal with a new experience

  - equilibrium - a child's chema works and it explains all they experience (a state of mental balance)
• Strengths of Piaget's Theory of Cognitive Development

  - has practical application as it focuses on how to aid child development

  - generated a lot of research
• weaknesses of Piaget's Theory of Cognitive Development

  - did not look at the influence of social interactions or social setting. (some other studies showed a different culture with faster stages)

  - used children for his observation result may have been subjective (lack of validity)
• key points of dweck's theory of mindset

  - children can develop a fixed mindset of a growth mindset affecting how they can learn

  - teachers can also develop them affecting their teaching.
• mindset


  the set of beliefs we all have about our ability to succeed in education and other areas.
• fixed mindset


  - assumes that traits such as intelligence and ability are fixed and solid.

  - effort in pointless

  give up easily,

  - lack resilience,

  - are threatened by the success of others
• growth mindset


  - believes in the potential for development and improvement

  - open to feedback

  - see the success of others ar inspiration.
• Gunderson Et al. aims


  To know wether:

  Children are affected by different types of parental praise

  Parents give girls less process praise and more person praise than boys

  Parents' use of process or person praise in early childhood predicts a child's reasoning five years later.
• Gunderson Et al. procedure

  - 29 boys, and 24 girls with their caregivers, 64% were white 17% were black 11% were Hispanic, 8% were from multicultural backgrounds.

  - Looked at parents' use of praise when children were 14, 26 and 38 months old. Neither those collecting data nor the participants knew what the study was about.

  - Caregiver-child interaction were filmed in 90-minute sessions

  - 5 years later children's ideas and behaviour were measured and related to the praise they had received.
• gunderson et al. findings


  - 3 per cent of all parental comments to the child were praise

  - Process praise was 18%, person praise was 16%

  - 24.4 per cent of praise for boys was process praise, whereas only 10.3% was process praise for girls

  - Process praise = motivation
• gunderson ett al. Conclusion

  - those who had more process praise had a batter use of incremental motivational framework

  - Boys received more process praise than girls

  - Boys had more incremental framework than girls