Chapter 6 – Cognitive Development: Piagetian, Core Knowledge, and Vygotskian Perspectives

Introduction • Cognition refers to the inner processes and products of the mind that lead

to “knowledge” • It includes all mental activity—attending, remembering, symbolizing,

categorizing, etc. • Chart the typical course of development, examine individual differences,

and uncover the mechanisms of cognitive development• Children move from simpler to more complex cognitive skills, becoming

more effective thinkers with age Piaget’s Cognitive-Developmental Theory

• Human infants, out of their perceptual and motor activities, build and refine psychological structures—organized ways of making sense of experience that permit them to adapt more effectively to the environment

• Children develop these structures actively using current structures to select and interpret experiences

• Piaget viewed children as discovering or constructing, virtually all knowledge about their world through their own activity, his theory is described as a constructivist approach to cognitive development

Basic Characteristics of Piaget’s Stages• Four stages—sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and

formal operational• The stages provide a general theory of development, in which all aspects

of cognition change in an integrated fashion• The stages are invariant; they always occur in a fixed order, and no stage

can be skipped • The stages are universal; they are assumed to characterize children

everywhere • Individual differences in genetic and environmental factors affect the

speed with which children move through the stages Piaget’s Ideas about Cognitive Change

• Specific psychological structures called schemes—organized ways of making sense of experience—change with age

• Mental representations—internal depictions of information that the mind can manipulate

• Most powerful representation are images—mental pictures of objects, people, and spaces—and concepts, categories in which similar objects or events are grouped together

• Adaptation • Adaptation involves building schemas through direct interaction with the

environment• During assimilation, we use our current schemes to interpret the external

world• In accommodation, we create new schemas or adjust old ones after

noticing that our current way of thinking does not capture the environment completely

• When children are not changing much, they assimilate more than they accommodate—a steady, comfortable state that Piaget called cognitive equilibrium

• During the times of rapid cognitive change, children are in a state of disequilibrium

• Piaget’s term for this back-and-forth movement between equilibrium and disequilibrium is equilibration

• Organization • A process that occurs internally, apart from direct contact with the

environment. • Once children form new schemes, they rearrange them, linking them with

other schemas to create a strongly interconnected cognitive system• Schemes truly reach equilibrium when they become part of a broad

network of structures that can be jointly applied to the surrounding worldThe Sensorimotor Stage: Birth to 2 Years

• The sensorimotor stage spans the first two years of life• Infants and toddlers “think” with their eyes, ears, hands, and other

sensorimotor equipment• They cannot yet carry out many activities mentally • The circular reaction provides a special means of adapting their first

schemes• It involves stumbling onto a new experience caused by the baby’s own

motor activity • As the infants tries to repeat the event again and again, a sensorimotor

response that originally occurred by chance strengthens into a new scheme• Immaturity in inhibition seems to be adaptive, helping to ensure that new

skills will not be interrupted before they strengthenSensorimotor Development

• Piaget saw newborn reflexes as the building blocks of sensorimotor intelligence

• Repeating Chance Behaviours • Around 1 month, as babies enter Substage 2, they start to gain voluntary

control over their actions through the primary circular reaction, by repeating chance behaviours largely motivated by basic needs

• During Substage 3, from 4 to 8 months, infants sit up and become skilled at reaching for and manipulating objects--motor achievements that strengthen the secondary circular reaction, through which they to repeat interesting events in the surrounding environment that are caused by their own actions

• Intentional Behaviour –by 8-12 month, Substage 4• Intentional, or goal-directed, behaviour, coordinating schemes deliberately

to solve simple problems• Regarded these means-end action sequences as the foundation for all

problem solving • Object permanence, the understanding that objects continue to exist when

they are out of sight—but this awareness is not yet complete • Babies still make the A-no-B search error: if they reach several times for

an object at one hiding place (A), then see it moved to another (B), they still search for it

in the first hiding place (A)• Infants in Substage 4, who can better anticipate events, sometimes use

their capacity for intentional behaviour to try to change those events• In Substage 5, the tertiary circular reaction, in which toddlers repeat

behaviours with variation, emerges• Mental Representation • In Substage 6, sensorimotor development culminates in mental

representation• One sign of this capacity is that 18- to 24-month-olds arrive at solutions to

problems suddenly rather than through trial-and-error behaviour, apparently experimenting with actions inside their heads

• Also enables older toddlers to solve advanced object-permanence problems involving invisible displacement—finding a toy moved while out of sight, such as into a small box under a cover

• Permits deferred imitation—the ability to remember and copy the behaviour of models who are not present

• Makes make-believe play possible, in which children act out every day and imaginary activities

Follow-up Research on Infant Cognitive Development • Violation-of-expectation method—may habituate babies to a physical

event (expose them to event until their looking declines) to familiarize them with a situation in which their knowledge will be tested. Or they may simply show babies an expected event (one that follows physical laws) and an unexpected event (a variation of the first event that violates physical laws). Heightened attention to the unexpected even suggests that the infant is “surprised” by a deviation from physical reality—and therefore, is aware of the aspect of the physical world

• Object permanence • Found evidence for object permanence in the first few months of life• Infants look longer at a wide variety of unexpected events involving

hidden objects• Violation-of-expectation tasks require only that the baby react (through

looking) to whether a post-object-hiding scene accords with ordinary experience• Around this age, toddlers also know that objects continue to exist in their

hidden locations after the babies have left the location• Searching for objects hidden in more than on location • Once 8- to 12-month-olds search for hidden objects, they make the A-not-

B search error• For example, between 6 and 12 months, infants increasingly look at the

correct location, even while reaching incorrectly• Some evidence suggests that 8- to 12-month olds search at A (where they

found the object on previous reaches) instead of B (its most recent location) because they have trouble inhibiting a previously rewarded motor response

• A more comprehensive explanation is that a complex, dynamic system of factors—having built a habit or reaching toward

• They must perceive an object’s identity by integrating feature and movement information, distinguish the object from the barrier concealing it and the

surface on which it rests , keep track of the object’s whereabouts, and use this knowledge to obtain the object

• Mental representation • 8-to 10-month-olds ability to recall the location of hidden objects after

delays of more than a minute, and 14-month olds’ recall after delays of a far or more, indicate that babies construct mental representations of objects and their whereabouts

• Deferred and inferred imitation • Under these conditions, a great deal must be known about the infants daily

life to be sure that deferred imitation—which requires infants to represent a model’s past behaviour—has occurred

• As motor capacities improve, infants copy actions with objects• Infants can form flexible mental representations that include chains of

relevant associations• Toddlers even imitate rationally, by inferring others’ intentions• They adapt their imitative acts to a model’s goals• Between 14 and 18 months, toddlers become increasingly adept at

imitating actions an adult tries to produce, even if these are not fully realized• By age 2, children mimic entire social roles—Mommy, Daddy, baby—

during make-believe play• Infants skill at engaging in goal-directed actions—reaching for objects at 3

to 4 months, pointing to objects at 9 months—predicts their awareness of an adult’s similar behaviour as goal-directed in a violation-of-expectation task

• Categorization • Even young infants can categorize, grouping similar objects and events

into a single representation—an ability that is incompatible with a strictly sensorimotor approach to the world

• Categorization reduces the enormous amount of new information infants encounter every day, helping them learn and remember

• Similar studies reveal that in the first few months, babies categorize stimuli on the basis of shape, size, and other physical properties

• Ability to categorize using clusters of features prepares babies for acquiring many complex everyday categories

• Sort people and their voices by gender and age have begun to distinguish emotional expressions, can separate people’s natural actions from other motions, and expect people to move spontaneously

• As they gain experience in comparing to-be-categorizing items in varied ways and as their store of verbal labels expands, toddlers start to categorize flexibility

• Realize that whereas animates are self-propelled and therefore have varied paths of movement, inanimates move only when acted on, in highly restricted ways

• One view holds that older infants and toddlers categorize more effectively because they become increasingly sensitive to fine-grained perceptual features and to stable relations among these features

• Alternative view is that before the end of the first year, babies undergo a fundamental shift from a perceptual to a conceptual basis for constructing categories, increasingly grouping objects by their common function or behaviour

• Variations among languages lead to cultural differences in development of

categories• Problem solving • Analogical problem solving—applying a solution strategy from one

problem to other relevant problems • Findings suggest that at the end of the first year, infants form flexible

mental representations of how to use tools to get objects• With age, children become better at reasoning by analogy, generalizing

across increasingly dissimilar situations • Symbolic understanding • Realization that words can be used to cue mental images of things not

physically present—a symbolic capacity called displaced reference that emerges around the first birthday

• The more experience toddlers have with an object and its verbal label, the more likely they are to call up a mental representation when they hear the object’s name

• The capacity to use language as a flexible symbolic tool—to modify an existing mental representation—improves from the end of the second into the third year

• Awareness of the symbolic function of pictures also emerges in the second year

• Even after coming to appreciate the symbolic nature of pictures, young children continue to have difficulty grasping the distinction between some pictures and their referents

Evaluation of the Sensorimotor Stage • Infants anticipate events, actively search for hidden objects, display an

accurate A-B search, flexibly vary their sensorimotor schemes, engage in make-believe play, and treat pictures and video images symbolically within

• Yet other capacities—including secondary circular reactions, first problem solving by analogy, and displaced reference of words-emerge earlier than Piaget expected

• Researchers now believe that young babies have some built-in cognitive equipment for making sense of experience

The Preoperational Stage: 2 to 7 Years• Spans from 2 to 7 years—most obvious change is an extraordinary

increase in representational, or symbolic, activityAdvances in Mental Representation

• Language is our most flexible means of mental representation • Sensorimotor activity leads to internal images of experience, which

children then label with words • Make-believe play • Through pretending, children practice and strengthen newly acquired

representational schemes• Development of make-believe play • Play detaches from the real-life conditions associated with it—in early

pretending, children use only realistic objects—a toy telephone to talk into• Gradually they can imagine objects and events, without any support from

the real world• By age 3, they understand that an object can take on different fictional

identities

• Play becomes less self-centered—children direct pretend actions towards people or objects

• Play includes more complex combinations of schemes• Sociodramatic play—the make-believe with others that is under way by

the end of the second year and increases rapidly in complexity during early childhood• By age 4 to 5, children build on one another’s play ideas• Benefits of make-believe:• Contributes to child cognitive and social skills • Sociodramatic play is seen as more socially competent • Strengthens mental abilities• Children with imaginary companions often display more complex and

imaginative pretend play and produce elaborate narratives • Drawings • Realization that pictures can serve as symbols, improved planning and

spatial understanding, and the emphasis that the child’s culture places on artistic expression

• From scribbles to pictures • Scribbles—children’s intended representation is contained in their gestures

rather than in the resulting marks on the page• First representational forms—around age 3, scribbles start to become

pictures• A major milestone occurs when children use lines to represent the

boundaries of objects• More realistic drawings—greater realism in drawing develops gradually, as

perception, language, memory and fine motor skills improve • Use of depth cues increases during middle childhood• Cultural variations in development of drawing • In cultures with rich artistic traditions, children create elaborate drawings

that reflect the conventions of their culture • In cultures with little interest in art, even older children and adolescents

produce only simple forms • Symbol-real-world relations • Preschoolers must realize that each symbol corresponds to something

specific in everyday life • Dual representation—viewing a symbolic object as both an object in its

own right and a symbol • Exposing young children to diverse symbols—picture books, photos,

drawings, models, make-believe, and maps—helps them appreciate that one object can stand for another

Limitations of Preoperational Thought • Operations—mental representations of actions that obey logical rules • Young children’s thinking is rigid, limited to one aspect of a situation at a

time, and strongly influenced by the way things appear at the moment • Egocentric and Animistic thinking • Egocentrism—failure to distinguish other’s symbolic viewpoints from

one’s own

• Tend to focus on their own viewpoint and assume that others think, perceive and feel the same way they do

• Animistic thinking—the belief that inanimate objects have lifelike qualities, such as thoughts, wishes, feelings

• Prevents them from accommodating, or reflecting on and revising their faulty reasoning in response to the world

• Inability to conserve • Conservation—the idea that certain physical characteristics of objects

remain the same, even when their outward appearance changes—children have an inability to conserve

• Their understanding is centered, or characterized by centration—they focus on one aspect of a situation, neglecting other important features

• They are easily distracted by the perceptual appearance of objects• The treat the initial and final states of the water as unrelated events,

ignoring the dynamic transformation between them • Reversibility—the ability to go through a series of steps in a problem and

then mentally reverse direction, returning to the starting point• Lack of hierarchical classification • Children have difficulty with hierarchical classification—the organization

of objects into classes and subclasses on the basis of similarities and differences Follow-up research on preoperational thought

• Egocentric, animistic, and magical thinking • 4 year olds show clear awareness of others vantage points, even 2 year

olds realize that what they see differs from what another person sees• Non-egocentric responses also appear in young children’s conversations • Piaget described preschoolers egocentrism as a tendency rather than an

inability• Preschoolers think that magic accounts for events they cannot otherwise

explain • Between ages 4 and 8, as children gain familiarity with physical events and

principles, their magical beliefs decline • Logical thought • When preschoolers are given tasks that are simplified and made relevant to

their everyday lives, they do not display the illogical characteristics that Piaget saw in the preoperational stage

• Preschoolers ability to reason about transformations is evident • In familiar contexts, preschoolers can overcome appearances and think

logically about cause and effect • Categorization • Preschoolers organize their everyday knowledge into nested categories at

an early age• By the beginning of early childhood, children’s categories include objects

that go together because of their common function, behaviour, and natural kind, despite varying widely on perceptual features

• They form basic-level categories and by the third year, go back and forth between basic-level categories and general categories.

• They then break down basic-level categories into subcategories • They devise theories about underlying characteristics shared by category

members, which help them identify new instances • Have the capacity to classify hierarchically and on the basis of non-

obvious propertiesEvaluation of the Preoperational Stage

• Overtime, children rely on increasingly effective mental approaches to solving problems

• Children pass through several steps on the way to a full understanding of relationships among variables in conservation problems

The Concrete Operational Stage: 7 to 11 Years Concrete Operational Thought

• Extending from about 7 to 11 years, marks a major turning point in cognitive development. Thought becomes far more logical, flexible, and organized

• Conservation • Ability to pass conservation tasks provides clear evidence of operations—

mental actions that obey logical rules • Capable of decentration, focusing on several aspects of a problem and

relating them, rather than centering on only one • Reversibility—the capacity to imagine the water being returned to the

original container as proof of conservation • Classification • Pass Piaget’s class inclusion problem at this age • Indicates that they are more aware of classification hierarchies and can

focus on relations between a general and two specific categories at the same time• Seriation • The ability to order items along a quantitative dimension, such as length or

weight • Spatial reasoning • Understanding of space is more accurate • Cognitive maps—mental representations of familiar large-scale spaces,

such as their neighborhood or school • Preschoolers and young children include landmarks on the maps they

draw, but their arrangement is not always accurate, by age 10 maps are more organized • By the end of middle childhood, children combine landmarks and routes

into an overall view of a large-scale spaceLimitations of Concrete Operational Thought

• Children think in an organized, logical fashion only when dealing with concrete information they can perceive directly

• Children master concrete operational tasks step by step—the continuum of acquisition of logical concepts

• Rather than coming up with general logical principles that they apply to all relevant situations, school-age children seem to work out the logic of each problem separately

Follow-up research on Concrete Operational Thought • Participating in relevant everyday activities help children master

conservation and other Piagetian problems • Certain informal, nonschool experiences can also foster operational

thought• The forms of logic required by Piagetian tasks do not emerge

spontaneously but are heavily influenced by training, context, and cultural conditions—which vary by individuals in different places

The Formal Operational Stage: 11 Years and Older • Enter stage around age 11, stage in which they develop the capacity for

abstract, systematic scientific thinking Hypothetico-deductive reasoning

• When faced with a problem, they start with a hypothesis, or prediction about variables that might affect an outcome, from which they deduce logical, testable inferences

• Then, they systematically isolate and combine variable to see which of these inferences are confirmed in the real world

Propositional thought• Adolescent’s ability to evaluate the logic of propositions (verbal

statements) without referring to real-world circumstances • Formal operations require language-based and other symbolic systems that

do not stand for real things, such as this in higher mathematics Consequences of adolescent cognitive changes

• Self-consciousness and self-focusing • Adolescents ability to reflect on their own thoughts, combined with

physical and psychological changes they are undergoing, leads them to think more about themselves

• Piaget believed that a new form of egocentrism arises, in which adolescents have difficulty distinguishing their own and others perspectives

• Imaginary audience—adolescent’s belief that they are the focus of everyone else’s attention and concern

• Personal fable—they are certain that others are observing and thinking about them, teenagers develop an inflated opinion of their own importance—a feeling that they are special and unique

• Imaginary audience and personal fable are an outgrowth of advances in perspective taking, causing them to be more concerned about what others think

• Others evaluations have important real consequences—for self-esteem, peer acceptance and social support

• High levels of personal fable can have positive effects, as well as negative ones

• Idealism and criticism • Teenagers can imagine alternative family, religious, political, and moral

systems, and they want to explore them • Once adolescents come to see other people as having both strengths and

weaknesses, they are better able to work for social change and to form positive, lasting relationships

• Decision making • Teenagers perform less well than adults in planning and decision making,

where they must inhibit emotion and impulses in favour of thinking rationally • Adolescents are more willing than adults to be take risks and less likely to

avoid potential harm • Over time, young people learn from their successes and failures, gather

information from others about factors that affect decision making, and reflect on the decision making process

Follow-up research on formal operational thought • Are children capable of hypothetico-deductive and propositional thinking?• In simplified situations involving no more than two possible causal

variables, 6 year olds understand that hypotheses must be confirmed by appropriate evidence

• Realize that once a hypothesis is supported, it shapes predicted about what might happen in the future

• School-age children cannot sort out evidence that bears on three or more variables at once

• Logical necessity of propositional thought—that the accuracy of conclusions drawn from premises rests on the rules of logic, not on real-world confirmation

• Do all individuals reach the formal operational stage?• People are most likely to think abstractly and systematically on tasks in

which they have had extensive guidance and practice in using such reasoning • Like concrete reasoning in children, formal operations do not emerge in all

contexts at once, but are specific to situation and task • Piaget acknowledged that without the opportunity to solve hypothetical

problems, people in some societies might not display formal operationsPiaget and Education

• Discovery learning –children are encouraged to discover for themselves through interactions with the environment

• Sensitivity to children’s readiness to learn—teachers introduce activities that build on children’s current thinking

• Acceptance of individual differences – theory assumes that all children go through the same sequences of development, but at different rates—teacher must plan activities for individual children and small groups, not just for the whole class

Overall Evaluation of Piaget’s Theory • Is Piaget’s account of cognitive changes clear and accurate?• Piaget’s explanation for cognitive changes focuses on broad

transformations in thinking through equilibrium and its attendant processes of adaptation and organization, but exactly what the child does to equilibrate is vague

• Infants and young appear more component, and adolescents and adults less competent than Piaget assumed

• Piaget’s belief that infants and young children must act on the environment to revise their thinking is too narrow a notion of how learning takes place

• Without explicit teaching, including verbal explanations, children may not always notice or come to understand aspects of a situation necessary for building more effective schemas

• Does cognitive development take place in stages?

• Today, virtually all experts agree that children’s cognition is less broadly stage-like than Piaget believed

• Contemporary researchers disagree on how general or specific cognitive development actually is

• Some theorists agree with Piaget that development is a general process, following a similar course across the diverse cognitive domains of physical, numerical, and social knowledge, but reject the existence of stages believing instead that thought processes are alike at all ages—just present to a greater or lesser extent

• Other researchers think that the stage notion is valid but that it must be modified

• Others deny his belief that the human mind is made up of general reasoning abilities that can be applied to any cognitive task—they believe that cognitive development begins with far more than sensorimotor reflexes

Piaget’s Legacy • Some blend Piaget’s emphasis on the child as an active agent, with a

stronger role for context• Findings have served as the starting point for virtually every major

contemporary line of research on cognitive development The Core Knowledge Perspective

• Infants begin life with innate, special purpose knowledge systems referred to as core domains of thoughts

• Each of these prewired understandings permits a ready grasp of new, related information and therefore supports early, rapid development of certain aspects of cognition

• Physical knowledge—in particular, understanding of objects and their effects on one other

• Numerical knowledge—the capacity to keep track of multiple objects and to add and subtract small quantities

• Psychological knowledge—in particular, understanding of people as agents who have mental states that influences their behaviour, which is vital for surviving in human groups

• Biological knowledge—including ideas about inheritance of characteristics and about bodily processes, such as birth, illness, and death

• Domain-specific and uneven process rather than a general one—each domain develops independently

• Children are viewed as naïve theorists, building on core knowledge concepts to explain their everyday experiences in the physical, psychological, and biological realms

Infancy: Physical and Numerical Knowledge • Young infants are aware of basic object properties and they build on this

knowledge quickly, acquiring more detailed understandings as they are exposed to relevant outcomes in their everyday experiences

• Young infants have basic number concepts• Babies can discriminate quantities up to three and use that knowledge to

perform simple arithmetic • Not until the preschool years do children answer correctly when asked to

add and subtract small sets of items Children as Naïve Theorists

• According to this theory of children as theorists, after children observe an event, they draw on innate concepts to explain, or theorize about, its cause

• Then they test their naïve theory against experience, revising it when it cannot adequately account for new information

• Because children start with innate knowledge, their reasoning advances quickly, with sophisticated cause-and-effect explanations evident much earlier than Piaget proposed

• Children’s theory of mind—the psychological knowledge of self and others that forms rapidly during the first few years

• In everyday conversation, preschoolers typically offer psychological, physical and biological explanations that are linked appropriately to the behaviours of humans, animals and objects

Evaluation of the core knowledge perspective • Debate about just what babies start out with—domain-specific

understandings or minimal perceptual biases that combine with powerful, general learning strategies to permit rapid discovery of various types of knowledge

• Does not offer clarity about how heredity and environment jointly produce cognitive change

• Pays little attention to children’s learning in interaction with othersVygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory

• While also viewing children as active seekers of knowledge, emphasized the profound effects of rich social and cultural contexts on their thinking

• Rejection of an individualistic view of the developing child in favor of a socially formed mind

• Infants are endowed with basic perceptual, attention, and memory capacities that they share with other animals during the first two years, through direct contact with the environment

Children’s Private Speech • Disagreed with Piaget’s idea of egocentric speech• Believed that because language helps children think about mental activities

and behaviour and select courses of action, this is the foundation for all higher cognitive processes

• Children speak to themselves for self-guidance, as they get older and find tasks easier, this self-directed speech is internalized as silent, inner speech—the internal verbal dialogues we carry on while thinking and acting

• Children’s self-directed speech is now called private speech

Social origins of Cognitive Development• Zone of proximal development—a range of tasks too difficult for the child

to do alone but possible with the help of adults and more skilled peers • Social interaction must have certain features to promote cognitive

development:• Intersubjectivity, the process whereby two participants who begin a task

with different understandings arrive at a shared understanding

• Adults try to promote it when they translate their own insights in ways that are within the child’s grasp

• As conversational skills improve, preschoolers increasingly seek others’ help and direct that assistance to ensure that it is beneficial

• Scaffolding—adjusting the support offered during a teaching session to fit the child’s current level of performance

• Children take the language of dialogues, make it part of their private speech, and use this speech to organize their independent efforts

• Guided participation—a broader concept than scaffolding—refers to shared endeavors between more expert and less expert participants, without specifying the precise features of communication

Vygotsky’s view of make-believe play • Make-believe play is a unique, broadly influential zone of proximal

development in which children advance themselves as they try out a wide variety of challenging skills

• Make-believe play is the central source of development during the preschool years

• As children create imaginary situations, they learn to act in accord with internal ideas, not just in response to external stimuli

• The rule based nature of make-believe strengthens children’s capacity to think before they act

Vygotsky and Education • Emphasizes the importance of social context and collaboration • Classrooms accept individual differences and provide opportunities for

children’s active participation • Assisted discovery is aided by peer collaboration, as children work in

groups, teaching, and helping one another • Reciprocal teaching • In reciprocal teaching, a teacher and two to four students for a

collaborative group and take turns leading dialogue on the content of a text passage • Within the dialogues, group members apply four cognitive strategies:

questioning, summarizing, clarifying, and predicting • Cooperative learning • Cooperative learning, in which small groups of classmates work toward

common goal

Evaluation of Vygotsky’s Theory • Helps us understand the wide cultural variation in cognitive skills• Leads us to expect highly diverse paths of development • Theory underscores the vital role of teaching in cognitive diverse symbol

systems (such as pictures, maps, and mathematical expressions) in the development of higher cognitive processes, he elevated language to highest importance

• Said little about biological contributions to children’s cognition • Does not address how basic motor, perceptual, memory, and problem-

solving capacities spark changes in children’s social experiences, from which more advanced cognition springs