Cognitive Development 02 25 2014 Piagetian Theory Constructivist view children construct knowledge for themselves View of children s nature o Active o Learning many important lessons on their own o Intrinsically motivated to learn o Like little scientists Schema a mental structure that is involved in the acquisition or organization of knowledge What is the Sensorimotor Stage of Cognitive Development Development is through sensory and motor activity Birth 2 years Progress from reflex responses to goal oriented behavior By the end of the stage babies are able to o Form mental representations o Hold complex pictures of past events in mind o Learn about their world though trail and error Sensorimotor Substages Birth to 1 month o Simple Reflexes Infants begin to modify the reflexes with which they are born to make them more adaptive 1 to 4 months o Primary Circular Reactions Infants begin to organize separate reflexes into larger repeated behaviors most of which are centered on their own bodies 4 to 8 months o Secondary Circular Reactions Infants becoming increasingly interested in the world around them By the end of this substage object permanence the knowledge that objects continue to exist even when they are out of view typically emerges 8 to 12 months o Coordination of Secondary Schemas Children coordinate schemas to attain specific goals they make the A Not B error the tendency to reach to where objects have been found before rather than to where they were last hidden 12 to 18 months 18 to 24 months o Tertiary Circular Reactions Toddlers begin to actively and avidly explore the potential uses to which objects can be put and show overt trail and error behaviors o Invention of New Means Through Mental Combinations Infants become able to form enduring mental representations and show the beginning of symbolic thought The first sign of this capacity is deferred imitation the repetition of other people s behavior a substantial time after it occurred Preoperational Stage 2 7 years A mix of impressive cognitive acquisitions and equally impressive limitations 1 Symbolic representation the use of one object to stand for another which makes a variety of new behaviors possible o Symbolic pretend play 12 13 months familiar activities Ex feed themselves 15 20 months focus on others Ex feed doll 30 months others take active role Ex doll feeds itself 2 A major limitation is egocentrism the tendency to perceive the world solely from one s own point of view o Three mountains test 3 A related limitation is centration the tendency to focus on a single perceptually striking feature of an object or event o Lack of understanding of the conservation concept the idea that merely changing the appearance of objects does not change their key properties Concrete Operational Stage 7 12 pears old Children begin to reason logically about the world in concrete situations their thinking They show reversibility conservation and decentration in They are able to place objects in a series according to 2 They understand class inclusion that one category of things properties called seriation includes several subclasses Still struggle with thinking systemically and hypothetically pendulum problem Formal Operational Stage Individuals can o Think abstractly o Reason hypothetically o Reason systematically about all possible outcomes of a situation o Imagine alternative worlds Not universally achieved Implications for Education Children s thinking at different ages needs to be considered in how to teach them Children learn by mentally and physically interacting with the environment use relevant physical activities accompanied by questions that call attention to the lessons of the activities Strengths and Limitations of Piaget Strengths o Comprehensive model o Confirmation from research of others o Pattern and sequence appear cross culturally Limitations o Stages are more gradual than discontinuous Familiar vs unfamiliar stimuli o Infants and young children are more cognitively competent than Piaget recognized Deferred imitation may happen sooner o Piaget s theory understates the contribution of the social world to cognitive development Three mountains test lack of people Attention Attention is essential to learning and memory Attention in infancy and toddlerhood o Gradually more efficient and self directed o Preterm and newborn infants slow at habituation and o By 4 months more flexible o Sustained attention improves in 1st year and throughout dishabituation childhood Information Processing Model LOOK AT IMAGE ON SLIDE Attention Encoding o Working Short Term Memory Limited Capacity Storage o Long Term Memory Retrieval How good are Children s Memories Working Short Term Memory Newborns show memory for previously exposed stimuli 3 months recognize a stimulus they have experienced once after 24 hours Rovee Collier 1993 study of infant memory o 2 3 months olds remember how to perform this feet after a delay of a few days with reminder their memory last 2 4 weeks A reminder or retrieval cue improves memory o Younger children rely more on cues from adults Age 1 1 1 2 remember organized sequences of events they have just experienced Age 3 children begin to form scripts which are abstract generalized accounts of familiar repeated events Age 4 children can remember events that occurred 1 years earlier Recognition and Recall Recognition test a memory task in which the individual indicates whether presented information has been experienced previously Recall test a memory task in which the individual must reproduce material from memory without any cues But what about infantile amnesia Infantile amnesia most adults remember nothing that occurred before the age of three years especially autobiographical memory Past view young children do not create any memories Current view early memories decline as we age Reasons increased verbal ability verbal encoding conversations with parents use of mental strategies and physiological maturation of hippocampus Mental Strategies Very young children use simple concrete strategies to help them remember o 18 24 month olds used looking pointing and repeating to remember a hidden object Selective attention The process of intentionally focusing on information that is most relevant to the current goal o Our ability to ignore distractions improves as we age Rehearsal the process of repeating information over and over to aid memory age 5 o Children do not spontaneously engage in silent rehearsal until o A