Social and cognitive development

• Psychological development = refers to the changes in an individual's social, emotional and cognitive abilities, from infancy through to old age
• Attachment refers to the close emotional bond or relationship between an infant and the mother or primary caregiver
• If attachment never occurs this is called privation. Privation can cause permanent emotional damage.
• Social development involves changes in a person's ability to interact with other people and function as a member of society
• Observational learning - The acquisition of new behaviours as a result of observing the actions of others and the consequences of those actions
• Bandura's classic experiments demonstrated the influence of observational learning on aggression in children
• Cognitive development: changes in an individual's mental abilities throughout the lifespan
• In the sensorimotor stage, infants construct their understanding of the world by coordinating their sensory experiences with motor abilities
• Key cognitive accomplishments during the preoperational stage:

   

  • Goal-directed behaviour: ability to perform a series of action for a specific purpose

   

  • Object permanence: understanding that objects exist, even when they can't be seen
• Pre-operational stage (2-7 years)

   

  Children can mentally represent objects and experiences and can also communicate more effectively
• Key cognitive accomplishments during the pre-operational stage: 

  
  

  • Animism: A belief that everything which exists is alive

  
  

  • Egocentrism: An inability to perceive something from someone else's point of view
• Concrete operational stage ( 7-12 years)

   

  Children are now capable of true logical thought, however, It is limited to objects and events that are present and can be experienced in some way
• Key cognitive accomplishments during the concrete-operational stage

  • Conservation: Understanding that properties of an object (e.g. mass, volume, number etc) remain the same even if its appearance changes

   

  • Classification: ability to organise objects or event into categories based on common features
• Formal operational stage (12+ years)

   

  More complex thought processes are evident and their thinking becomes increasingly sophisticated through the combined effects of brain maturation and life experience
• Key cognitive accomplishments during the formal-operational stage:

  • Abstract thinking: A way of thinking that does not rely on being able to see, experience or manipulate in order to understand something

   

  • Hypothetical deductive reasoning: a way of thinking that involves developing a hypothesis based on what might logically occur
• Criticisms of Piaget's theory

  
  

  1. Key accomplishments for each of the stages are often achieved by children much younger than what Piaget proposed

  2. Piaget may have overestimated children's language ability, leading him to assume that wrong answers came from faulty thinking

  
  

   3. Used a small number of participants (i.e. his own children), therefore the sample was unlikely to be representative of the wider population